Kamloops
Kamloops is located at the confluence of the north and south
Thompson River branches. In his memoirs,
John Tod writes that
the Shuswap name for the area was Kahm-o-loops,
meaning the meeting of the waters.
1In 1811, the first Europeans in the area were members of the Pacific Fur Company,
who established a fur-trading post on the
Thompson River.
2 The names Fort Kamloops, Fort Thompson, and Thompson River Post were used interchangeably
during the fur-trading period.
3 After the fort was founded, the main Shuswap village was moved closer to the fort
in order to control access to trade.
4In
this 1858 letter,
John Miles writes of his west-coast El Dorado, an active volcano allegedly crammed with gold,
just outside of Kamloops:
the mountain had exploded and...one braver than the rest of his tribe entered it,
and discovered the extinct crater seamed with yellow metal.
Miles mentions an unnamed Shuswap chief who called for secrecy of the mountain, claiming
that
the evils that had beset the natives of those [other] regions...proved that their
wars and gradual extinction, were caused by the white man's thirst for gold.
The gold rush of the 1860s and the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway in
the 1880s brought further growth to Fort Kamloops.5 Kamloops incorporated in 1893 as a city with a population of 500.6 Today, the city has a population of roughly 84,000.7
- 1. G. P. V. Akrigg and H. B. Akrigg, British Columbia Place Names (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), 131.
- 2. Kamloops, VancouverIsland.com.
- 3. Akrigg, British Columbia Place Names, 131.
- 4. Kamloops, VancouverIsland.com.
- 5. Akrigg, British Columbia Place Names, 131.
- 6. Ibid.
- 7. Kamloops Population Report, City of Kamloops.