In pre-contact times, Kwakwawala speaking First Nations referred to their terraced village as on banks of the Nimpkish River as Whulk. Whulk was a significant winter village for the Nimpkish or ‘Namgis peoples, whose territory included the large Nimpkish watershed, throughout which the Nimpkish traveled both on foot and by canoe.
The ethnographer Franz Boas reported that Whulk, or Xulku as he spelled it phonetically, meant “interlocking foundation” after the construction method used to secure the houses to the steep slope.
Captain
George Vancouver noted visiting this village on July 8, 1792. The Chief, Cheslakees, presented him with
presents of copper.
The
British noted that Cheslakees was familiar with the Nuu chul nulth chiefs
Maquinna and Wicananish on the West side of Vancouver Island, and they
attributed this in part to the trade route that ran by land over Vancouver
Island through the Nimpkish Valley. The Nimpkish peoples told the explorers
that there was a way to visit Nootka over land which involved four days of
travel.
Vancouver
was impressed with this Chief and referred to the village on his maps as
Cheslakees.
The
village at the time of first contact with Europeans was noted to have been very
large. There were 34 big houses, each
with many families. Estimates of the
population around the time of first contact vary between 400 and 900.
By
1860 most of the houses at Whulk had disappeared, and the population had moved
to Alert Bay at Cormorant Island, where a cannery had opened to take advantage
of the plentiful Nimpkish salmon stocks.
The
lower Nimpkish was also a favourite of Vancouver Island naturalist Roderick
Haig-Brown, who noted in his 1959 book Fisherman’s Summer:
“The Nimpkish was the one
first North American river that I felt I had in some measure made my own. I fished it a lot in the late twenties and
early thirties, trapped and hunted and camped along its banks, traveled it by
canoe and skiff and once even in a homemade scow. I had been upset in it, half-drowned in it
and considerably scared by it more than once.
I had watched its great salmon runs with ever-increasing wonder. In it I had caught cutthroats and steelheads
and, by fair means and foul, all five species of Pacific salmon. Above all, I had first learned there to catch
the big king salmon, sachems as the Indians called them, tyees to the
sportsman.”
Today
Cheslakees Elementary School in Port McNeill is named after the ‘Namgis
chief.
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