13.2 Aboriginal Societies in the 18th Century
Simon Fraser’s arrival at Camchin (Lytton), at the confluence of the Thompson and Fraser Rivers was foretold. Among the Nlaka’pamux around the end of the 18th century there was a prophecy that foreigners would arrive from the east — although in some respects, they had already arrived.
The Proto-Contact Years
The fur trade on the Plains and the intrusion of Spanish goods — including horses — impacted Aboriginal peoples in the northern reaches of the Columbia basin (the Okanagan and Thompson Valleys) and in the Kootenay valleys. Knowing this, it is possible — indeed, probable — that smallpox arrived in the Cordillera long before the first European appeared. Epidemics in the 1730s and 1760s could have been passed along trade or raid routes, especially once so many of the neighbours to the south and east were able to travel on horseback. The 1780s smallpox epidemic definitely made an appearance. And when Fraser arrived in 1808 he found evidence of European trade commodities among the Nlaka’pamux, proof that there was no such thing as total isolation in this region. It remains uncertain as to when the proto-contact period precisely began in the Interior of what is now British Columbia, but we can be confident that the world encountered by Euro-North Americans from the 1770s on was one undergoing great change.
Notwithstanding the proto-contact experience, Aboriginal societies in the Pacific Northwest enjoyed prolonged isolation from the European invasion taking place in Mexico, the Mississippi, the parklands of the North, and the eastern woodlands. From 1500 to the 1740s, indigenous cultures and populations continued to thrive. There is nothing in the written, oral, archaeological, or geological record to suggest any catastophes to rival the volcanic explosions of about 2,000 and 1,000 years earlier; nothing that would force a massive migration wave. (It is the case, to be sure, that seismic issues are a fact of life in the region. One local traditional understanding of their cause conveys a very usable image of what contemporary science believes occurs: “According to the Nuxalk … a giant supernatural being held the earth in ropes. When he adjusted his grip, or when the rope slipped in his hands, the Nuxalk could feel the tremors and performed a ceremonial earthquake dance.”)[1] The southward movement of Athabaskan speakers appears to have been complete by 1400. After this time the pattern of culture groups seems to have coalesced into the form that enters the European record from the 1740s on.
There are three culture areas in what is now British Columbia: Subarctic, Northwest Coast, and Interior Plateau. Each of these extends beyond the province’s boundaries to, respectively, the East and North, the Columbia Basin, and from California to Alaska. Each group made use of winter villages, which tended to be larger concentrations of population that combined food and fuel resources to make it through the season.