One of oldest neighbourhoods in Kamloops is not where you think it is. It’s not the west end, filled with homes from the early 1900s. It’s not the north shore, where the fur trade fort drew people in the early 1800s. It’s at the mouth of the Tranquille River, under the decaying remains of a tuberculosis hospital, and it’s Secwepemc through and through.
The mouth of the Tranquille River has been a residential centre in this valley “since time out of mind”--archaeological remains there date from around 7,500 years ago right up into the contact period, but it is very likely people lived there much earlier, to around the end of the last Ice Age.
The sites suggest a nearly continuous occupation over these 8 millennia, during which time its residents witnessed massive environmental changes to the valley, the river, the lake, and the climate itself.
Eventually, they saw colonialists come too, and settle, and reshape the place.
But let’s back up.
The archaeological evidence tells us that for countless generations the river mouth was home, first as a basecamp for hunting and gathering activities, and eventually, a thriving village.
What was that life like for them? A preliminary study undertaken in the 2000s documented an impressive density and diversity of remains there that give us a glimpse into the developing Secwepemc lifeway.
The remains of pithomes, the cozy semi-subterranean dwellings that are a hallmark of Secwepemc architecture, point to a settled, semi-sedentary lifestyle to which people returned year after year. Numerous ancestral burials in the area mark a cultural landscape of some significance.
The plant, animal and stone artifacts describe a year-round occupation that thrived on resources available locally, and brought to the area by trade.
Residents enjoyed a diet that centered on deer, but included hare, muskrat, elk, moose, loon, grouse, coot, all harvested from the surrounding hills and wetlands. Salmon, suckers, freshwater mussel and snail were also eaten. Later, chicken, cows and pigs were adopted into the food system.
The remains of fisher suggest trapping for the luxurious fur, and burnt seeds point to processing of locally abundant cherries.
The Secwepemc name for the place, “Pellqweqwile”, derives from the work for biscuitroot (also known as desert parsley, lomatium macrocarpum), an important and valued food that was harvested, potentially even cultivated here.
And dogs were present too, enjoying, then as now, the company of humans--and their warm hearths and table scraps.
The tools found here were used for hunting, fishing, and plant preparation, of course, but also for a variety of other domestic uses, including art and design and construction.
Raw materials for these tools include many types not available locally—like obsidian—that indicate long-distance trade networks going back thousands of years.
It was this well-developed inter-regional trading economy that drew fur traders to the region in the early 1800s, effecting a seismic shift that would change everything.
At Tranquille, the traders found a man called Piqwemús (Pacamoos) heading one of main villages in the Thompson valley, and nicknamed him Chief Tranquille, for his friendly nature. A map drawn by Archibald MacDonald in 1827 shows the river named after him.
Sometime around 1840, Piqwemús died, mysteriously, following an altercation with Hudson’s Bay chief trader Samuel Black (whose subsequent murder is a whole other story). After that, change and dispossession came rapidly: within a year or two the entire Tranquille area—already crossed by the HBC brigade trail between Fort Alexandria and Kamloops—was converted to hayfields to support the traders’ livestock.
By 1858, the Tranquille River valley became a centre of frenzied placer mining, where gold rushers tore up the landscape, unseating fragile salmon habitat that has never entirely recovered.
In the fall of 1862 smallpox ripped through local Indigenous populations, killing up to two-thirds of Secwepemc by winter’s end. The land, never having been sold, surrendered, or treatied, was “opened” for settlement, and the first homesteaders moved in.
By the time the King Edward VII Tuberculosis Sanatorium opened on the site in 1907, the descendants of the Stk’emlupsemc who had occupied it for millennia were relegated to Indian reserves at Kamloops and Skeetchestn, though they continued to hunt and fish there throughout 20th century.
The sanitorium closed in 1958, and reopened the following year as an institution for the mentally disabled. It closed permanently in 1983, and leaving behind about 100 buildings and structures connected by a network of underground service tunnels.
Around and under those buildings and hayfields, the archaeological legacy of the area’s Secwepemc origins still lies. In some ways, the abandonment of the institutions has protected the site, those buildings standing guard over nearly 8,000 years of history.
Over the years, developers have eyed the location, and today, one is pushing ahead with a plan to re-establish a neighbourhood here. To move forward, the developers, the city, and the province must reconcile these thousands of years of well-documented occupation with a century and a half of unlawful dispossession, and work to rebalance relationships that recognize Stk’emlups history.