Luxor Creek Outfitters - British Columbia Big Game Hunts & Guide Outfitting

An excerpt from "The Eastern Kootenay - A History of Exploration & Adventure," by Ken Tyson.

The Eastern Kootenay has been a travel route of Native populations for thousands of years, who were later followed by the first European Voyageurs in search of furs, and eventually the Canadian Pacific Railway, which opened the path to the Canadian West for settlement, industry, and ultimately tourism. The history of the Canadian Rockies is as colorful as the scenery, ranging from ancient buffalo hunters and French fur traders, to early adventurers, and even a romance between a mountain guide and a Philadelphia socialite. On the lighter side of history, there is also the tale of a particularly famous, but eccentric, guide outfitter who took a live lynx into a local Banff tavern because he wasn't particularly fond of crowds.

The Kootenays themselves were named after the native Kutenai tribe, the First Nations people who

are known to have been the original inhabitants of this area; indeed, it was the Natives who were the first to view the Canadian Rockies. To them, the Rockies were a sacred place to be admired and protected. They were also a rich source of raw materials, game, and fish. The famous Paint Pots of Kootenay National Park are known to have been used by the Indians to gather iron-based minerals known as ochre, which was baked, ground, and mixed with animal grease to form a paint that was used in pictographs and to adorn tipis.

Archaeological evidence from the vicinity of Banff's Vermilion Lakes suggests the that Natives traveled, hunted, and settled in this area at least 11,000 years ago. In Banff National Park alone there are over 450 archaeological sites which have been identified as being Pre-Columbian, one of the most important being a small occupation site at Lake Minnewanka. In addition, there are 97 known archaeological sites in the Kootenay National Park area. Over time, various tribes such as the Stoneys, Cree, Shuswap, Shoshoni, Ktunaxa and Plains Blackfoot peoples, passed through this area, leaving telltale signs of their presence, although none settled for very long.

With the arrival of the Europeans, many Natives worked as guides, and led most of the early European explorations. Early travel was accomplished by snowshoes and dog sleds during

the winter months, while in the summer pack horses were used. As the newly-arrived Europeans were introduced to these new lands, they ignored the original Native names, and re-named the landscape as they made their way through. . . "Great Beaver Lake" became Maligue Lake, and "Lake of Little Fishes" became Emerald Lake, and later, Lake Louise.

The fur trade created the incentive for the Europeans to push into the wilds of central and western Canada. In 1670, Hudson's Bay Company was given the monopoly over all the fur-trading lands in British North America that flowed into Hudson Bay. As a result, fur traders and trappers were the first to explore the wilds of Canada, as well as to establish the initial contacts with Native populations. The fur trade was so lucrative that at its height 300,000 beaver pelts, 50,000 bear pelts, and 30,000 wolf pelts were shipped back to Europe each year.

The first European to view the Rockies was Anthonay Henday, a scout for the Hudson's Bay Company, who first discovered the area in 1754, and called astonishing alpine panorama that he saw "The Shining Mountains." In 1792, Peter Fidler, again of Hudson's Bay Company, accomplished the first preliminary surveying in the area of the Canadian Rockies. The early 1800s brought the Voyageurs who followed in the explorers' footsteps, and established a few

precarious routes through the Rockies to support the growing fur trade with Europe. The ultimate goal was to establish a route through to the Pacific, which would open the fur trade into Oriental markets.

The most common means of travel were birch-bark canoes. The Voyageurs paddled through the complex network of rivers of central and western Canada spanning thousands of miles, bringing out furs to ship back to Europe, taking back needed supplies, and laying the foundations for the


	first European settlements. A few of these men are known to have penetrated as far into the region as the Selkirk Mountains. David Thompson and Simon Fraser were two such fur traders who were successful in mapping over a million square miles of western Canada at the beginning of the 1800s, with the immediate goal of identifying new trading routes to the Pacific. In 1811, Thompson was the first white man to explore the Howse and Athabasca Passes with the aid of "Thomas," his Iroquois guide, and established the Kootenay House. Fraser laid the groundwork for many trading posts in the area, such as Fort St. James, and later made his way down the river which today bears his name; the Fraser River. The extreme ruggedness of the Rockies made any sort of travel extremely difficult at best, and many areas were simply impassable. In 1846, Lt. Henry James Warre of the 14th Regiment was ordered by the Governor General to disguise himself and his companions as "private adventurers" in order to find a path through the Canadian Rockies to determine whether they were passable from a military standpoint. The documentation Warre made through the course of the journey was later published under the title of "Sketches in North America and the Oregon Territory." His description is very graphic and revealing as to the hazards they faced: "Our

			passage over the magnificent range of the lofty mountains was not accomplished without much difficulty, and a fearful sacrifice of the noble animals that aided us in the transport. We left Edmonton with sixty horses; on our arrival at Fort Colville [south of Luxor Creek Outfitters], on the Columbia River, we had only twenty-seven, and several of these so exhausted they could not have continued many more days. The steepness of the mountain passes, the want of proper nourishment, the fearful falls that some of the animals sustained, rolling in some instances many hundred feet into the foaming


	torrent beneath, combined to cause this great loss. The scenery was grand in the extreme; similar in form to the Alps of Switzerland, you felt that you were in the midst of desolation. . ." In the final analysis, Lt. Warre determined that moving troops through such an "uncultivated country and over such impractable mountains" would have been quite impossible. In the area of Luxor Creek Outfitters, the Ktunaxa people frequently crossed the Rockies through what are now known as White Man Pass,		Simpson Pass, and Vermilion Pass, in order to hunt buffalo on the plains. Trappers and fur traders are known to have worked this region as well, but the first recorded visit by a non-native person was by Sir George Simpson in 1841, which occurred during his famous "Overland" expedition around the world in which he crossed Canada, the Pacific, and Siberia through to St. Petersburg. Simpson, in 1820, had been sent to take charge of the Athabasca fur district by the Hudson's Bay Company, traveling the breadth of Canada twice in his lifetime, and encouraging further exploration by his contemporaries. Queen Victoria later knighted Simpson in 1841, in recognition of his contributions to the Hudson's Bay Company.