Lax Kw'alaams
Lax Kw'alaams, known previously as Fort Simpson and Port Simpson, is a port community
on the Tsimpsean Peninsula, on the
British Columbia coast, roughly 25 km north of Prince Rupert.
1The name Lax Kw'alaams derives from the Tsimshian First Nation term Laxlgu'alaams,
or “island of wild roses”; originally, the Gispaxlo'ots tribe used the area as a campsite.2
From the 1830s onward, the settlement was an important HBC trading post and roughly
2,000 members of the Tsimshian First Nation settled there in the 1840s.3
Prince Rupert came to be the regional trade centre by the early 1900s, but for many
years Lax Kw'alaams was, as Scott argues, the most important outpost of the British Empire on the N[orth] Pacific coast.
4
- 1. Andrew Scott, The Encyclopedia of Raincoast Placenames (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2009), 331.
- 2. About Us, Lax Kw'alaams Band.
- 3. Scott, Raincoast Placenames, 474.
- 4. Ibid.