Dairy Fields

The summer grasslands at Dairy Fields, in Williams Lake, are lush and plentiful.

In 2019, a female resident of Williams Lake, named Frances, emailed me to ask whether or not I knew anything of Dairy Fields. This is what she said:

Do you have any information about the area in Williams Lake, BC, known as the Dairy Fields? I found one bit of info which said that it is possibly the site of an ancient Shuswap village and burial ground, but I can find nothing about this online or in the BC Archives website. It is a great mystery to me, and I’d appreciate any info you might have, including books on the history of Williams Lake, which seem to be in short supply. Thanks!

Well, this piqued my interest, but I found almost nothing about it myself. The local newspaper had published an article in July, 2014, telling us that “Naturalist Ordelle [sic] Steen recently led a tour of the Diary Fields in Williams Lake, sharing evidence of the area’s history.” The Williams Lake Tribune published an article in November 202 that told of families with young children flocking to view hundreds of thousands of tadpoles hatching in the ponds in the area known as Dairy Fields (more on this, below). Later, on October 16, 2022, he led another tour through the meadowland that was Dairy Fields. 

From the newspaper article mentioned above, I learned that Dairy Fields was where the town of Williams Lake began. On this piece of property there was once a cemetery, a courthouse, school, and a jail. Settlers lived here: there were agricultural buildings that were built on the ranch (later called Mission Ranch), that was on land preempted in April 1860 by John Telfer, with Thomas Davidson as his agent. Then in August of the same year, the first gold commissioner for the region, Phillip Henry Nind, arrived at Davidson’s ranch with his constable, William Pinchbeck. Nind selected an area of land near Missioner Creek (the creek that runs through Dairy Fields), where he constructed the government house and the courthouse; in 1861 he built the jail. Also in 1861, Pinchbeck built his first “stopping house” on the northern section of today’s Dairy Fields: this stopping house also included a saloon and it stood close by the brigade trail that was now heavily used by the packers from the California goldfields — men with names like Jean Caux (Cataline), Rafael Carranza, Jesus Garcia, and Jose Marie Tressiera. It is likely that Frank Laumeister’s double-humped camels also plodded through the Dairy Fields. In July of 1861 John Telfer purchased land on the north side of his previous pre-emption, expanding the Mission Ranch; his now-320-acres of land were later sold to Davidson.

Unfortunately, there is another history here that cannot be ignored. This piece of land was the Secwepemc Chief Williams’s village site. The land that forms today’s Dairy Fields was a longtime Secwepemc settlement and burial ground that had been here for more than 500 years. According to the Museum of the Cariboo Chilcotin, there is archaeological evidence of an ancient deer tanning site, with its necessary fires, and there was probably already a village. In 1842, Chief William claimed that his community occupied this site for 500 years, and he was probably right. By the mid-1800s the community contained both log houses and pit houses, as house depressions are present at Dairy Fields. Pit houses, sometimes called “quiggly holes,” or kukuli, were the winter semi-underground houses of the First Nations people who lived on the high lands of the plateaus from the Columbia River to the Fraser. Generally, these pit houses housed some fifteen to thirty people each, and were built in clusters of three or four houses or more. Interestingly, The Canadian Encyclopedia says these pit houses were “typically located at the eastern flanks of river valleys where mountain slopes offered protection from winds. (Is this true of the location of the Dairy Fields? I think it is.) These buildings represented a distinctive and highly effective building form that was widely used through this region for at least 3,500 years.” 

The major Indigenous village in the region was at Williams Lake itself, and was called Yucwi: the Missioner Creek portion at Dairy Fields carried the name of Pelkekeki. Williams Lake itself was called SkolatEn in the Secwepemc language, but the HBC men always knew it as Fish Lake. The territory was often marked by petroglyphs; and young people who underwent intensive training to find their guardian spirits drew pictographs. The difference between these two types of markers is this: petroglyphs are rock carvings, with designs scratched into the surface of the rock, while pictographs are paintings on stone using natural ingredients. Pictographs are of course more fragile than petroglyphs, and so are generally painted or drawn on rocks in places where they are protected from the sun and weather. 

In the mid-1800s Columneetza (K’ulemnit’se) and William (Wesemey7est, or Gwesemiyst) lived here or at Williams Lake, and both these men appear regularly in the Fort Alexandria post journals, as well as in other historic journals of the time. (Columneetza was likely the father of the man the HBC men called “William the Atnah.”) William does appear to be the younger man, and he was employed as a trusted messenger for the HBC. I wrote about these two men a few years ago in this blogpost https://nancymargueriteanderson.com/chief-william/ and as you can see, I had some difficulty in deciding what the exact relationship was. 

Do you wonder why the creek that runs through Dairy Fields is called Missioner’s Creek? It is actually named for the missionaries that served New Caledonia in these early years. The first missionary, Modeste Demers, arrived at Fort Alexandria in 1842, having come in with the New Caledonia Brigade. His story is this: He had worked under Bishop Joseph-Norbert Provencher at the Red River Settlement, and the following year he was selected to accompany Reverend Francois-Norbert Blanchet to the west side of the Rocky Mountains, to attend to the many Roman Catholic residents of Oregon Territory. They came into the territory with the incoming York Factory Express, and found plenty of work to keep them busy at Fort Vancouver. Their primary duty, however, was to attend to the needs of the Indigenous people they found here. Demers had a natural ability to learn Native languages, and after twelve months on the Pacific coast he had already compiled a dictionary, a catechism, a prayer book, and hymns in Chinook Jargon, and had also acquired an elementary knowledge of several Indian languages.  His work was characterized by arduous travel and large scale baptisms, and he was the first missionary to reach the mainland of British Columbia in 1841, when he visited Fort Langley and celebrated an enormous baptismal ceremony (when in 1843 another missionary named Jean-Baptiste Bolduc, reached Vancouver Island, the local First Nations, some of whom had attended Demers baptismal ceremony at Fort Langley, welcomed him.) The following year, Demers extended his mission north, via the brigade trails, to the Dakelh people in New Caledonia, and spent the winter of 1842-43 at Fort Alexandria, with A.C. Anderson, who had just arrived in the territory in November, 1842. There Demers built a small chapel: it seems, however, that he built two chapels — one at Fort Alexandria among the Dakelh, and one among the Secwepemc people at Williams Lake. This second chapel was a log house that stood close by Chief William’s house or lodge on Missioner Creek, in Dairy Fields. Modeste Demers left New Caledonia in 1843 with the outgoing brigades, and spent the rest of his time in Oregon Territory and on Vancouver Island, where he became bishop. He died at Victoria in July, 1871.  

The next missionary to visit Fort Alexandria and New Caledonia was John Nobili, or more properly, Giovanni Pietro Antonio Nobili. He was a Roman Catholic priest, a Jesuit, and a missionary. He had arrived in the district via the ship, Indefatigable, in August 1844. I wrote about this many years ago, and the blogpost is in my old-old-old-ancient blog, Fur Trade Family History: https://furtradefamilyhistory.blogspot.com/2010/06/pere-john-nobili-james-birnie-and.html    

Nobili arrived in New Caledonia when A.C. Anderson was at Fort Alexandria, and the two men got on particularly well, it seems. Nobili also spent a lot of time in the Summerland area, not at Talles d’Epinettes, as I say in this post, but at Priest’s Camp, on the benchlands above the modern-day town. See: https://nancymargueriteanderson.com/priests-camp/  I want to do some research on Nobili, because he did a lot of travelling around, and I find he was not always where he was said to be. When I write about him in full, I will post his story here: https://nancymargueriteanderson.com/john-nobili/ 

I did however learn of one Pere Nobili story I had not known before. When Governor Simpson explored the Fraser River in 1828, he sent a man out from Kamloops to search for the Okanagan Chief, N’Kuala, and bring him back to Kamloops. Unfortunately, N’Kuala was out hunting and was not located before Simpson left, so Simpson gifted N’Kuala a capote that would be given to him the next time he visited Kamloops. N’Kuala did receive that capote, and he kept it safe — and we know this because he apparently showed this capote to Pere Nobili almost twenty years later!  

So why am I talking about Dairy Fields? I decided this year that I wanted to go up to the Williams Lake area. I had a lot of things to look at, and I hadn’t been there for years! I wanted to know about the Deep Creek trail that is shown in The HBC Brigades, on page 18. This trail is marked on A.C. Anderson’s 1867 Map of the Colony of British Columbia, and it may or may not be a brigade trail (I think it likely is). I also wanted to figure out why the west side of the Mountain seemed to be called the “Mountain,” and not the east. I wanted to see the Watson Creek Valley and Exeter Lake. And Sam, who accompanied me to Williams Lake, wanted to see the location of the first Fort Alexandria, where his ancestor, and mine, had worked. And he always wanted to find the old brigade trail up the Mountain from Little Fort. Between us, we bit off more than we could chew, I think, but we did get a lot of this sight-seeing done. The big drawback for us was the gravel roads, something I did not even think of, but also something it’s probably not a good idea to drive rental cars on.

And I wanted to see Ordell Steen’s Dairy Fields, if he was willing to show us.

I couldn’t find him, of course. So I emailed the local Natural History Society, and had them pass on a message to him if they could, and they came through! In a few days he emailed me back, and we set up a date and met up. He had gathered together a group of interested local historians and we set off together to explore Dairy Fields. The day was warm and sunny with enough wind to blow off my hat on occasion, but it kept us cool. We walked over the rough land that was Dairy Fields and explored Missioner Creek, where I learned that the white barked trees that I thought were clusters of small birch were actually Interior Alder (perhaps Sitka Alder?). We talked about blue birds and bears and the history of Dairy Fields and Fort Alexandria (which is some forty miles to the north), alongside stories of the missionaries and their missions. And for me, who grew up on a farm much like this, I needed only a few dozen sheep and a cow or two to feel at home. Oh, and chickens, of course, and the occasional cougar prowling around…  

So that was my visit to Dairy Fields, and we spent a good three hours there. While we did not see a brigade trail as such, I saw the old landscape that they almost certainly ran through. The story continues, of course, but I will not tell the rest of it here: or at least, not yet. 

So, Frances, if you are still out there: This one is for you! And I hope that in the five years since you emailed me, you have also been able to visit Dairy Fields.

Copyright, Nancy Marguerite Anderson, 2024. All rights reserved.

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