Seton Lake
| Seton Lake Seton Dam |
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| Coordinates | 50 ° 42 ′ 0 ″ N , 122 ° 10 ′ 0 ″ W | ||||||||
| Data on the structure | |||||||||
| Construction time: | -1956 | ||||||||
| Height of the barrier structure : | 7.6 m | ||||||||
| Crown length: | 130 m | ||||||||
| Power plant output: | 42 MW | ||||||||
| Operator: | BC Hydro | ||||||||
| Data on the reservoir | |||||||||
| Altitude (at congestion destination ) | 243 m | ||||||||
| Water surface | 26.2 km² | ||||||||
| Reservoir length | 22 km | ||||||||
| Lake level raised by 2 m; Feeding water from Carpenter Lake | |||||||||
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The Seton Lake is a lake west of Lillooet in the Canadian province of British Columbia is located.
It lies at an altitude of 243 m , is 22 km long and covers an area of 26.2 km². The main inflow is the Seton River (formerly Portage Creek ), the main outflow is the Seton River, which flows into the Fraser River . At the upper end of the lake, Seton Portage lies at the mouth of the short Seton Portage River, which connects Anderson Lake with Seton Lake. The Seton Portage Historic Provincial Park is located on this small piece of land, which was created by a landslide .
On the north side of the lake runs a railway line that is now part of Canadian National Railways . The Tsal'álh First Nation lives by the lake, which is officially called the Seton Lake Band.
history
In the local inland Salish language , the original inhabitants are called Tsal'álh. The responsible Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development calls them the Seton Lake Band . In March 2011, 642 people were recognized as members of the tribe, 251 of whom lived in the reservation , and another 102 in other reservations. Their own reserves are at the west end of the lake and west of the lake, including Seton Lake 5A with an area of 350.4 hectares, and Slosh 1 and Slosh 1A with 691.1 and 649.1 hectares. There are also five other very small areas , one of which is at the east end of Lake Anderson. This is a total of 1,878.9 ha.
Seton and Anderson Lakes were originally a contiguous lake, but were divided by a landslide at least 8,000 years ago. This created the Seton Portage, which was of great importance for Douglas Road , the main immigration route during the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush of 1858 to 1859. If the area was inhabited at the time of the landslide, the tsunami that the landslide must have triggered may have destroyed every settlement.
The culture of the local Indians was strongly influenced by that of the coast, i.e. by the numerous groups of the coastal Salish . The lake was particularly important for the salmon fishery, so it depended on fish that migrated up the Fraser River each year . A human-shaped (anthropomorphic) object was found east of the lake, which could be dated to an age of 1220 ± 85 years and which probably played a role in initiation rituals. The Seton Lake site (EeRl 21), on which numerous, difficult-to-date pictograms can be found, is also strongly influenced by the coastal Salish and is one of the largest sites of its kind in western Canada. The Bridge River site is of similar importance , the most important being the Keatley Creek site further east . The villages Slha7äs and Tsal'álh of the later Tsal'álh First Nation lay on Seton Lake. The Lh7us (Slosh, read: Slaoosh) and Nquayt (Nkiat) at Seton Portage now also belong to this group, also known as Seton Lake First Nation, as do the Skeil and the Ohin.
The first European in the region was Francis Ermatinger of the Hudson's Bay Company . In 1827 he went from Fort Kamloops over the Peseline or Pasilico Lake (today Seton and Anderson Lakes) and over the Li-Li-What, also called Lillooet River .
Alexander Caulfield Anderson (1814-1884), also of the Hudson's Bay Company, surveyed the area in 1846 to find a path for the fur traders from Fort Kamloops to the lower Fraser Valley. You could have bypassed Fraser Canyon with it. In 1858 he was commissioned by Governor James Douglas to find a route from Harrison Lake over the lakes of the region to Lillooet , which were the main access to the gold fields on the Upper Fraser and in the Cariboo area ( Cariboo gold rush ). On that occasion, he named Lake Seton after his late cousin Colonel Alexander Seton. The connecting road was named Birkenhead Strait after the sunk ship HMS Birkenhead , on which the troops had embarked and commanded Seton . Douglas Road was built from 1858, but it quickly fell out of use, although it was frequently repaired and rebuilt. At the end of this lake you were already close to the first gold digging sites.
In the course of the railroad construction that was to connect the Atlantic with the Pacific coast of Canada, the Pacific Great Eastern Railway, which also passed Seton Lake on its north side, was created to open up branch lines. It connected Howe Sound north of Vancouver on the Pacific with Prince George, where the train should arrive after around 750 km. Below the lake, the first major landslide caused by the track construction work in 1885 caused the river to narrow. Other large landslides, like those in 1913 and 1914, prevented salmon migrations for the first time. The number of salmon was already declining with the fishing industry that started in the province in 1863 and peaked in the 1890s. Up until 1915, Seton Lake had its own fishing industry, which, however, had to be abandoned due to the lack of migrating salmon, although protection and relief measures began as early as 1911. Another landslide in 1941 caused the International Pacific Salmon Fisheries Commission to build fish ladders and passages on both sides of the river.
The water level of the natural lake was raised by the Bridge River Power Project - power generators are located on the north bank at the upper end of the lake at Shalalth. As a result of the diversion of the Bridge River , which originally flowed into the Fraser at Lillooet, the Seton Lake changed color from blue to gray-green. The La Joie and Terzaghi dams serve to divert the river. The Mission Dam, begun in 1946, was completed in 1948, and in the same year construction began on the La Joie Dam on the northwest section of the Bridge River. Mission Dam north of Seton Lake became part of the new Terzaghi Dam in 1960, which was named in 1965. Despite warnings, no salmon stairs have been provided for the salmon. This in turn deprived the bears living above the dam of one of their most important foods.
Below Seton Lake, another dam was built on the Seton River, which was completed in 1956. This dam raised the water level of Seton Lake another two meters. The Seton Dam has a crown length of 130 m and a height of 7.6 m. A 3700 m long power station canal , the Seton Canal , feeds a maximum of 143 m³ / s to the power station on a daily basis. This has a single Francis turbine with an output of 42 MW.
In 1913 the Pacific Great Eastern Railway was built right through the area. Where Shalalth and Seton Portage are today, the best land was confiscated; at the same time, salmon and game stocks declined. Chief Peters complained in 1914 that all fish and all game had disappeared outside the reserves, so that even the Salish were hardly able to survive. Their traditional territory served to supply the railway and the newly emerging places. The local Indians , who continued to farm until the 1950s, were deprived of their cultural bases and their language was destroyed by the Canadian school system, which forced children to attend boarding-type schools, the residential schools . It was only with the dissolution of these schools, in which numerous children suffered brutal assaults that still deal with the courts, that a school of its own, the Seton Lake Band School, came into being. For several years, lost agriculture has also been reintroduced into the community of Seton Portage with the help of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee at the request of the elderly. In 2007, the Seton-Lake-Salish reached an agreement with the British Columbia government to return land that had been confiscated from them by the McKenna-McBride Commission between 1913 and 1914. The Seton Lake residents have been fighting against further deforestation since the 1980s. So in 1998 they blocked the Ainsworth Lumber Company lumberjacks .
literature
- Irene Edwards: Short Portage to Lillooet , reprinted by Cold Spring Books, 1985.
Web links
- Seton Lake Recreation Area , BC Hydro project site
Remarks
- ↑ Seton Lake ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
- ^ Roy L. Carlson: Indian Art Traditions of the Northwest Coast , Simon Fraser University 1983, p. 175.
- ^ Wilson Duff: Images, Stone, BC Thirty Centuries of Northwest Coast Indian Sculpture , Hancock House, 1975, p. 172.
- ^ Name after the Borden system going back to Charles Edward Borden .
- ↑ a b c Seton River Instream Flow Study (PDF, 6.7 MB) Triton Environmental Consultants Ltd. for BC Hydro. January 1996. Retrieved February 23, 2018.
- ↑ Seton Lake Indian Band Community Farm ( Memento of the original from May 22, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
- ↑ Press release of November 16, 2007 ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
