page_title: Seton Portage
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Seton Portage / History
caption_attribution_description: A view of Seton Lake, taken by the poster (dtaw2001) in 1990. Released to public domain.
context_page_description: Seton Portage is a historic rural community in British Columbia, Canada, that is about 25 km west of Lillooet, located between Seton Lake and Anderson Lake. "The Portage" was formed about 10,000 years ago when the flank of the Cayoosh Range, which is the south flank of the valley, let go and slid into the middle of what had been a single lake. The result is a location similar to Interlaken, Switzerland, with two fjord-style lakes flanking a narrow and very short strip of land between them.
  There are two First Nations communities, comprising several individual Indian reserves of the Seton Lake First Nation, at either end of the Portage, with the intervening area and some of the Anderson Lake shoreline taken up by a small non-native recreational community, including a couple of orchards and small farms. There are two motels, a store, a provincial park campground and heritage site, and a pub.
context_section_description: The area was traversed by two Hudson's Bay Company employees in 1828, a journey which was later followed in 1846 by Scottish explorer Alexander Caulfield Anderson, who had been assigned to chart it and for whom Anderson Lake is named.  Certain placenames along the route were conferred by Anderson later on, at the request of colonial Governor James Douglas.  Seton Lake, and hence Seton Portage, was named for a friend of Anderson's who had perished in the sinking of HMS Birkenhead.  Farther along Anderson's route to the Coast to the southwest, which later was to become the Douglas Road, there is a Mount Birkenhead, the Birkenhead River and Birkenhead Lake, and also the rural community of Birken and a lake of the same name.  Birken Lake is the summit lake of Seton Portage's big twin, the Long Portage, aka Pemberton Pass, which separates the Birken and Seton drainages.
  In 1858, gold was discovered in British Columbia.  Steamships started running on both Seton Lake and Anderson Lake, and Seton Portage became a transportation bottleneck, as prospectors would need to portage for two kilometres (1.2 mi) between the lakes.  In 1861, Carl Dozier constructed British Columbia's first railway here to transport passengers and freight across Seton Portage (then called Short Portage).  Most likely the "railway" - known as Dozier's Way - was drawn by horses and mules in one direction, and run on gravity in the other - was not used much after the colonial government built the Cariboo Road through the Fraser River canyon, in 1864, via Ashcroft, which bypassed Seton Portage and Lillooet, and was abandoned shortly thereafter (c. 1870) although its roadgrade survives today as the main local thoroughfare, Portage Road.
  Following the Fraser Gold Rush, the Seton valley lapsed into obscurity until the 1890s, when gold exploration scoured the region in the wake of the Cayoosh Gold Rush of the 1880s.  Alienation of native land by white settlers at the outset of the 20th century led to the Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe, an assertion of native ownership and sovereignty by the chiefs of the St'at'imc in 1916.  In 1914, the Pacific Great Eastern Railway was built through Seton Portage and its twin community Shalalth, which is farther east along Seton Lake.
  The valley became an important food supply for the booming goldfields in the Bridge River from the 1920s to the 1950s because of its lower elevation (255 metres or 837 feet) and hence warmer climate and long growing season (favorable enough for bigleaf maple at the northeast corner of its natural range).  The locality is known for its fine fruit-growing weather - McIntosh apples grown here are considered some of the best in the world, but there is only one commercial orchard today.  During the construction of the Bridge River Power Project, the population of the Portage boomed and hundreds of temporary houses and barracks were brought in to house workers and their families.  It was during this period that festivities surrounding the 1958 Centennial of the Province of British Columbia saw Short Portage renamed Seton Portage.  Local parlance already referred to the valley simply as "Seton", a term still in use today that collectively describes Seton Portage, Shalalth and the remaining hydro company townsite at South Shalalth (formerly known as Bridge River after the name of the project, not because it was on that river).
caption: View of Seton Lake from the hills above Seton Portage.
exif: {"Image SubfileType": "Full-resolution Image", "Image ImageWidth": "1167", "Image ImageLength": "775", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "6", "Image Model": "FlatbedScanner_13", "Image StripOffsets": "8", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image RowsPerStrip": "775", "Image StripByteCounts": "155692", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image Software": "Microsoft Office Document Scanning  11.0.1897.00", "Image DateTime": "2005:10:29 19:31:06", "Image Artist": "David Wesley", "Image Tag 0x014A": "159658", "Image ReferenceBlackWhite": "[0, 255, 128, 255, 128, 255]", "Image Tag 0x932F": "[1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]", "Image Tag 0x9330": "[]", "Image Tag 0x9331": "[2, 0, 0, 0, 174, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 255, 255, 255, 255, 0, 0, 0, 0, ... ]"}