How Shuswap Indians Came to Kootenay 200 Years Ago
From The Province, Vancouver, British Columbia, Sunday, November 27, 1927
How Shuswap Indians Came to Kootenays 100 Years Ago
By B.R. Atkins
To anyone casually familiar with, or interested in the native races of this province, it is puzzling to find a tribe of Shuswaps settled “in the land of the Kootenai,” near the source of Columbia River. Moses Kinbasket, a grandson of the first Shuswap there, explained the situation in an interview.
“Chief Charles Kinbakset died on July 17, 1920. He was twin brother to Pierre Kinbasket, who was 94 when he died the same year. I don’t know just when our people first came here. My old grandfather, Peter Kinbasket, was the first to arrive. I was only 4 when he died. I am now about 61. I remember hearing how that he came across the mountains hunting, as far as Golden, in the summer. And returning said this country was a good winter hunting country.
COME FROM NEAR KAMPLOOPS
“He came back that fall, and his woman was with him. Her name was Marianne. When they got to Brisco, a child was born. They named him Cassimir Kinbasket. He was the first child; and my grandfather was the first Shuswap to come in here, coming, both he and Marianne, from near Kamloops. Cassimir was my father.
“After Cassimie came two bous, twins, Charles and Pierrre. Then came Frank, who is father to Alex, now on the reserve. Then three girls came – Collette, who married Baptiste Morigeau; Marianne, who married Louis Paul, and Shusette who married Charlie Mountain. Kinbasket Lake is called after my grandfather, Peter. He came into the Columbia River Valley by way of Canoe River. I was born in 18589, and married Mary Augusta of Colville, who was born near Waneta, B.C.”
HAVE RESERVE OF 2700 ACRES
From this narrative it can be deduced that, if Pierre was 94 when he died in 1820, he was born in 1826. And supposing that Cassimir came but one year before, or fall of 1825, it makes that the year of arrival in Columbia valley of Grandfather Peter Kinbasket, the first Shuswap there. A century’s residence of a family in one spot should surely entitle them to reserve rights from Canada. Granted 1883, it comprises some 2700 acres, and is a model of industrial progress. They have the best-kept farms in the Kootenay agency, are splendid horsemen and raise fine stock and crops. The tribe now numbers about seventy.
Their right to land at Columbia source is older that Canada’s giving’ older than the claim of the Kootenay’s A branch of the great Salish nation of Western Montana, whose tribes moved westward to the Cascades above and below the line; the Shuswaps, by the Columbia and Okanagan rivers, spread in times remote over the banks of almost every salmon stream in Southern British Columbia; from Columbia’s watershed, by the Thompson basin to Fraser above Yale, and above Ashcroft northwards to Quesnel Lake. And on the Island to the Cowichan and from Thurlow to Sooke Bay.
The Kootenai disputed these racial rights in the southeastern mainland; and David Douglas, in his “Journal,” tells when the quarrel began and ended between them and the Shuswap kin, the Senijextee, or Arrow Lake tribe, who controlled Columbia from Colville to Big Bend, while the Shuswaps ruled from its source up the Canoe Rover and by Tete Jaune Cache to Jasper.
FEUD OF SHUSWAPS
David Douglas was delayed at Colville, 1826, by the arrival of parties of Kootenai and Senijextee Indians, who came there to fish. He explained that an old quarrel of nine years’ standing in 1817 on fishing rights on Columbia, broke out at sight of each other.
“The parties met stark naked, painted some red, black , white and yellow, and war caps of calumet eagle feathers were the only particle of dress they had on.”
At a critical moment in the melee, the fort garrison interfered, and by the factor’s (Mr. Dease) persuasion. A council was called. Finally, it wound up late at night by the signing of peace, and feasting followed for some days.
Douglas left his guide, “Little Wolf” behind; being a chief of an Okanagan tribe and Salish, he could not pass up the fight or the “eats.”
By the treaty of 1826, Columbia River fishing belonged to the Salish tribes, and the Kooteny-River-Lake basin to the Kootenai. And it was about that year too that Chief Peter Kinbasket laid claim to settle near the salmon beds at Athalmer, B.C.
But the Shuswaps, through keen fishermen, were hunters also; and the pass taken by Sir George Simpson in 1841 across the Rockies was the “Shuswap” pass to the plains, while the Kootenais used the Vermillion, making of the ochre beds there their Rocky Mountain rouge.
Father de Smet met the Morigeau who married Collette Kinbasket at Columbia’s source in 1845, and his ‘companions of the chase, the Sioushwaps.” Captain Palliser noted them as “occupying the Upper Columbia and east to Jasper House,” and adds this interesting fact; With then the dog is used only for hunting, and never as a best of burden, as with other tribes.”
Viscount Milton and Dr. Cheadle met them at Jasper and Tete Jaune Cache in 1863. Of those they met only one had ever seen Kamloops, the centre of their people and of which these are the branch.
In 1866, Walter Moberly was guided down the Columbia around Big Bend from its headwaters by Chief Peter Kinbasket, “and I called the lake on the run Kinbasket Lake, after the old chief; he was a Shuswap.”
MAJOR ROGERS GUIDED BY INDIAN
In 1869, Mr. Ball, S.M. describing interior Indians to the colonial secretary said: “The Columbia River Indians differ in features and habits from the Kootenai, resembling the Shuswap tribe; and their lodges are scattered along the banks of the river from its headquarters to the 49th parallel during the salmon season.”
In 1882, after Major Rogers found the Selkirk pass of his name, and saw the Beaver Valley opening towards the Columbia in the east, it was the Kinbasket tribe chief who showed him over the Kicking Horse pass to its Bow Valley connection; and no longer was the swearing major doubtful as to “the C.P.R. mainline across the Rockies to the Coast.