The walls of Xelhálh

Put yourself in the shoes of a military commander considering how to take an army up the Fraser Canyon against a hostile opponent.

You wouldn’t be the first to look up at the canyon’s cliffs, its swirling waters, and dark forests and consider turning back.

On its own, the Fraser Canyon would seem to offer some of the most defensible natural terrain anywhere in the world. Whether by foot or by boat, an invading party would be immensely vulnerable to a sudden ambush. An experienced commander would know this. But it didn’t stop people from attempting to invade the canyon anyways.

Centuries ago, raiders once paddled up the Stó:lō and into the Fraser Canyon to steal supplies and take slaves. But the raiders faced an opponent that had prepared for the attack, creating a network of stone walls and defences specifically designed to increase their odds of repelling invaders.

You can still see the traces today, if you know where to look.

The walls tell a story of a community’s ingenuity and quest for self-defence. But they also provide a vital look at important political dynamics that settlers and academics have often failed to appreciate.

Most of the information in this story comes from a 2006 paper in American Archaeology by David Schaepe, the director and senior archaeologist of the Stó:lō Research and Resource Management Centre. The photos also come, with permission, from that paper. Schaepe’s work was supported by Ernie Crey and Steven Point, and Stó:lō Grand Chiefs Archie Charles and Clarence Pennier. The paper was also produced with insight and contributions from Schaepe’s frequent collaborators: Albert (Sonny) McHalsie and Keith Carlson.

You can read the entire paper here | You can also read a 2003 British Columbia Magazine story about the Fraser Canyon walls and the research into them

A place worth protecting

Today, only a few hundred people live in the area between the historic town of Yale and the confluence of the Fraser and Sawmill Creek, seven kilometres to the north. But what today might look like a beautiful but uninhabitable stretch of rocky canyon was nothing of the sort.

Before the deadly smallpox epidemic in 1782, and the subsequent arrival of Europeans, the canyon was a bustling centre of activity.

The narrowing of the river and warm climate allowed locals to catch and process large amounts of salmon. The wind, weather, and fat content of the salmon in that part of the canyon made the area ideal for wind-drying salmon, preserving it for winter months.

The seven-kilometre stretch of river was home to as many as seven permanent villages, where residents produced, consumed, and traded an array of resources. Families from downriver would travel up to the area during the salmon season. Oral histories suggest the area could have functioned as a local capital of sorts for Stó:lō people at the northern end of their territory. (Further north is the territory of the Nlaka'pamux, who speak a different language.)

In 1830, a Hudson’s Bay Company census estimated the area to be home to as many as 2,500 people. Given that the census took place just 50 years after a smallpox epidemic that wiped out huge numbers of Indigenous people across BC, archaeologist Dave Schaepe estimated that as many as 6,400 people could have lived in the area before Europeans arrived in North America.

But pre-contact North America was not a harmonious paradise. Humans are humans. And many wanted, and sought to take, what they didn’t have.

Into the 1800s, bands of Lekwiltok raiders from what today we know as Vancouver Island would paddle canoes up the Stó:lō. Some would travel all the way to the canyon in pursuit of salmon and people.

The locals fought back. Communities built walls and forts to defend themselves, and created alliances with nearby villages. Early explorers observed fortified wooden villages all around the Coast Salish area. Some were so well-fortified, visitors couldn’t figure out how to even approach their entrances.

At one village near Desolation Sound, George Vancouver’s men found a palisade built atop a high rock, where wooden plants connecting the rock to a nearby tree formed the only entrance.

A similar fort-like structure was once located near the mouth of the Vedder River, according to Chad Reimer’s Before We Lost The Lake.

It’s easy to think that the wooden remnants of the defensive palisades and fortifications are now long gone, trampled by both geologic time, human progress, and colonization. And that’s true in many places—but not in the Fraser Canyon, where a keen eye can still see how residents used their unique location to their own defensive advantage by creating defensive rock fortifications designed to ward off raiders.

Canyon walls

In the late 1990s, Stó:lō Grand Chief Archie Charles directed Schaepe and his colleagues to a rock fortification at an abandoned village site north of Yale. That first discovery led to more research and more discoveries of walls near other old village locations around the canyon. Centuries after their construction, some of the walls are crumbling or are obscured by trees that may have not existed years earlier. But analysis has shown how the fortifications offered critical lines of defense against intruders.

The inhabitants of the canyon recognized that in warfare, height tends to be a major advantage for both attackers and defenders. To fully take advantage of one’s elevation advantage, protective cover is needed. (Hence the use of mountaintop walls throughout the world.)

A simple slope—like that found along the banks of the river—offers much less protection than a wall or other obstacle that a defender can hide behind while surveying an enemy or raining down projectiles. Walls can also block the progress of attackers, funnel them toward more-exposed locations, or force them to lower their defences in order to scale a fortification.

(The food reserves of the canyon’s communities would have been particularly attractive to raiders. And communities further down the Stó:lō also weren’t easily defeated. Inhabitants of those communities also had their own unique defences. Reimer cites elder Hugh Kelly, who talks about how his community’s warriors, when being attacked, would retreat to the marshy ground around Sumas Lake. The defenders knew that if they stopped moving, they would sink into the ground. They would lure their attackers onto the marshy ground, then lie down, spread-eagled among the tall grass. When the attackers paused to look for their quarry, they would sink into the ground, becoming sitting ducks for a counterattack. Other local communities developed their own strategies to defend themselves against invaders.)

The rock walls along the Fraser were created in several different ways, but generally composed of rocks stacked atop one another. Some walls were made of massive stones. Others were made with huge numbers of smaller rocks. Sometimes the two were combined, and a wall-builder would use a smaller stone to prop up a massive boulder to create a vertical wall.

The builders also used smaller boulders to build a retaining wall and massive stone platform overlooking canoe-landing spots near Lady Franklin Rock, just upriver from what is today Yale. Elders recalled that the site, Xelhálh, was a regular location of battles. The large platform represented “a monumental scale of construction,” Schaepe writes. That stone platform would have taken considerable effort to build, and used as a fortified stronghold that projected power and authority while allowing for the continued occupation of a large nearby settlement.

Schaepe and his colleagues have also discovered the remnants of homes in the area. They are estimated to date from between 1500 and 1800.

At Xelhálh and elsewhere, fortifications were found in locations that allowed defenders to protect approach routes to villages. They were also built to take advantage of one of the defenders’ key armaments: slingshots that could hurl large projectiles with deadly speed and accuracy.

One story has a warrior splitting canoes with stones as large as four inches in diameter. The slingshots were widely used around the region. Schaepe quotes a settler woman in Fort Langley who, at the turn of the 20th Century, wrote that villagers harvested huge numbers of orange-sized stones from local mountains to be used as ammunition against raiding canoes.

The fortifications were also located in places that would have provided a line of sight either to another fortification or to a lookout location. That would have allowed defenders at one location to receive warning of incoming attackers and to prepare accordingly.

A matter of politics

The fortifications might be arrangements of rocks, but they provide clues about the fundamental structure of society before the arrival of explorers.

The fortifications, their composition, and their locations, all speak to the political dynamics, and sophistication, of pre-colonization Stó:lō societies, Schaepe says. They also help dispel stereotypes and previous understandings of history that might seem well-meaning, but which were often used to dispossess land from its previous occupants.

The idea that pre-contact peoples were a passive presence can risk swerving into “noble savage” stereotypes that flatten cultures and people, Schaepe writes. He says those stereotypes were used to dismiss the right of First Nations to their territories and provide a rationale for its expropriation by settlers.

Pre-colonial conflicts reveal the efforts communities took to protect their land from interlopers. If early settlers encountered something differently, it was partly the result of the depopulation of entire communities by the smallpox epidemic (which arrived in many places before Europeans themselves showed up).

Europeans found Stó:lō societies largely organized along family and village lines. And while that perception wasn’t entirely wrong, Schaepe writes, it missed the important relationships that existed between families and villages.

The fortifications, along with more comprehensive study of oral histories, help illustrate those ties.

Community defence was one of many matters linking villages together, creating a society that functioned beyond the village level. The threat of raider attacks intensified the importance for communities to create relationships and political structures that would enable and strengthen the canyon’s collective defense.

Communicating between canyon fortification and observation sites would have both created, and required, co-operation between villages. Similarly, the massive walls built at Xelhálh would have required large workforces from around the surrounding area.

“The effective administration of a canyon-wide defensive network would have required a level of authority and collective governance beyond that commonly accepted among Northwest Coast societies,” Schaepe writes.

That view was supported by oral histories that talk about chiefs leading groups of villages. In old interviews, multiple elders and community members spoke about an old chief who lived near present-day Yale in a village that was the “headquarters” for a region extending as far as Seabird Island near Agassiz.

Two decades after publishing his paper, Schaepe says more discoveries have confirmed and expanded our knowledge of the complexity of pre-contact Stó:lō organizations.

“The building of fortifications is something that goes against the common perception of Indigenous peoples and Sto:lo/Coast Salish people not building with stone,” Schaepe recently told The Current. “Building with stone is typically thought of as more of a European basis of construction.”

The erection of stone fortifications not only need significant levels of technical knowledge and co-ordination, but they also require an investment of time and resources that only makes sense if you’re planning on inhabiting and possessing a land for years to come.

Increasing scholarship shows how communities throughout the region protected themselves through diplomatic means—i.e. by allying with other Stó:lō villages against a common enemy.

Schaepe points to the Battle of Maple Bay, in which an alliance of Coast Salish people fought Lekwiltok enemies in a clash that involved thousands of fighters.

A recent academic article noted the battle “concerns a moment of extensive Coast Salish unity,” which previous scholars had suggested was generally absent among the people they studied.

“These were not small-scale raids,” Schaepe said. “These were significant issues between nations.”

The conflicts may clash with idealized versions of pre-conflict society. But that’s what makes our knowledge of them important, Schaepe said. They provide evidence “beyond the characterized perception and view of First Nations as only living in harmony with nature and… really not having civilization.”

Instead, Schaepe told The Current, “the evidence and clear support for aspects of defence, systems of warfare [show] highly organized people with a strong sense of place and land title.

“That’s what Europeans here saw in their own societies, but not in Indigenous societies.”