Stikine: The Great River (excerpts + an update)

by photographer Gary Fiegehen

An Introduction

SPECTRUM RANGE – looking north to Mount Edziza. The mountain has a 7,500,000-year history of volcanic activity and is part of the circum-Pacific Rim of Fire, which continues almost uninterrupted from southern Chile northward around to New Zealand.

The modern history of the Stikine watershed is shaped by a belief in material riches. Russian fur traders in the 1790s were the first Europeans to see and identify the Stikine’s estuary. In the mid-1800s fur traders were joined by gold prospectors, who followed the Stikine towards the interior in the hope of sudden wealth. This first gold rush came to nothing. At the end of the nineteenth century the Hudson’s Bay Company set up its first permanent Stikine trading post 12 miles below Telegraph Creek. At about the same time, the gold rush of 1897-98 brought a flood of people to the Stikine. Photographs from the period show tough men at a wild frontier.

Soon steamboats were moving up and down the Stikine, bringing supplies to Telegraph Creek and other staging points. This flurry of activity lasted a very short time. The last steamer travelled the Stikine in 1916. The gold rush faded into romanticized history. The fur trade settled into a routine and minor activity. Dreams of agricultural expansion, railways, new towns left a thin trail of incomplete developments.

SPECTRUM RANGE Billy goats are solitary by nature. The first winter usually claims half of the young males and females; the survivors mature sexually at two and a half years and reach full size at age four. A full-grown billy weighs 90-plus kg. The horn grows in length each year, making the goat progressively more attractive to big-game hunters.

But developers vaunted other developments: coal, roads, more gold, hydroelectric dams. Telegraph Creek again became a supply depot, this time for the construction of the Alaska Highway in the early 1940s. In 1972, the Stewart-Cassiar Highway was opened, linking Kitwanga on the Skeena River with Watson Lake on the Alaska Highway. BC Rail attempted to bring a railhead to mining possibilities in the Stikine headwaters.

The watershed is vast, and developments thus far have come and gone or touched only its edges. But the very wildness of the place excites the frontier mentality. No one who works in or with the land can be unaware of ideas that encourage a sense that all real wilderness is doomed.

In another sense, Gary Fiegehen’s photographs [shown in this post, as published in the book Stikine: The Great River] have a place in the struggle for Indian rights. They portray the land of the Tahltan, the people whose hunting, fishing and trapping territories announce that this is not a nature beyond culture.

TWIN GLACIER, STIKINE ICECAP Part of the Coast Mountains, granite peaks 2,600 metres high poke through the 1,200-km ice field. Hoodoo Glacier and Twin Glacier feed the Iskut River to the south; Porcupine Glacier feeds the lower Stikine to the west.

The Tahltan are now centred at the villages of Iskut and Dease Lake, on the Stewart-Cassiar Highway, and Telegraph Creek, below the Grand Canyon of the Stikine River. They are Athabascan-speaking peoples whose economy is a mix of hunting across vast areas and salmon fishing concentrated at specific locations. Their goats, bear, caribou, moose, deer, beaver and groundhog, as well as their berries and furs, come from the lands that Fiegehen’s photographs reveal. Their salmon come from the lower stem of the river. Timber for houses and carvings comes from the forest edge. The obsidian from which they once made knives came from Mount Edziza.

The Tahltan homeland is dramatically defined, but theirs has probably never been a culture of isolation. Trading links connect them with neighbours on all sides – with Tlingit to the west and north, Nisga’a and Gitskan to the south, and interior Athabascan peoples to the east of them, on the other side of the Continental Divide. Exchange of oolican oil, dried salmon, obsidian and berries was part of an intricate regional intercultural economy that depended as much on inland trails as on river and coast travel. Exchange, travel and, at times, warfare are strong elements in Tahltan oral history. In this history the people’s use and knowledge of the Stikine is recorded and celebrated. The names of mountains, creeks and village sites, along with the histories of family names and titles, give life – cultural, human life – to every part of this landscape.

–Hugh Brody, Stikine

A Call to Action

Stikine River Country is raw wilderness. Its headwaters region, the wildlife-rich Spatsizi Plateau, is North America’s equivalent to Africa’s Serengeti Plain. In its mid-region, the mighty river continues to deepen the spectacular 100-km-long Grand Canyon, which has only once permitted the passage of humans. The Stikine’s estuary, with its broad-fanned delta of layered silt, is a vital and irreplaceable migratory bird stopover along the Pacific flyway.

SPATSIZI MOUNTAIN Spatsizi is a Tahltan word meaning "Land of the red goat." Goats roll around and bed down in the iron oxide dust, changing their normally white coats to red.

But this beautiful country will remain wild only if there is massive effort by the citizens of Canada and the U.S. to keep it that way. Mount Edziza and Spatsizi Plateau Wilderness provincial parks and the United States’ Stikine-LeConte Wilderness Area currently protect portions of the Stikine, but saving the rest of the watershed will not be easy because of the enormous push by industry and government to develop its resources. Unless public pressure to preserve the Stikine grows, the earthmovers will go to work, destroying the wilderness bit by bit as economic conditions permit.
The gravest threat is the system of dams proposed by the BC. Hydro and Power Authority – two on the Stikine and three on the Iskut River – and the construction of reservoirs, roads and transmission lines that will accompany the project. According to B.C. Hydro, the need for power from the Stikine is inevitable as the province’s population grows. The company has already spent $40 million in engineering studies on this megaproject. Conservationists know, however, that encouraging private and corporate citizens to become “power smart” would be a much better solution.

The region is also threatened by mining. Thousands of claims exist at present, some of which could become viable as soon as road access is available. In the summer of 1991, without public review or adequate environmental analysis, construction commenced on a major road into the heart of the Golden Triangle area of the Iskut – the Stikine’s major tributary. Conservationists would like the Stikine to contain only small, air-accessed underground mines that concentrate on the highest grade of ore and operate according to strict pollution abatement regulations.

Logging is another serious problem in the Stikine. In 1989, the B.C. government proposed the establishment of a “recreation corridor” that would hide logging from river viewpoints but do nothing to curtail it. The short-term profits to be made from logging the watershed are far outweighed by the long-term costs of destroying the wilderness.

courtesy Gary Fiegehen

Over the past decade, tens of thousands of supporters have joined forces to fight for protection of the Stikine. In 1988 we proposed that a National Park Reserve be set up, a move that would stop industrial development while safeguarding native land claims in the area. But our efforts have not been enough. We need you to join us.

Stikine country is too previous to squander. It is a place for wildlife to flourish – and a place for you to make a stand.

–Paul George, founding director, Western Canada Wilderness Committee, Stikine

Fast forward to 2010

Twenty eight years after first experiencing the Stikine I continue to return whenever I am able. I watch with trepidation as new mines are developed, some with access roads that have a habit of turning into logging roads, as our government pushes a new power corridor up Hwy. 37 to facilitate them.  And I watch with hope when the Tahltan with public support were able to repel Dutch Royal Shell out of the Sacred Headwaters and – at least for now – stopped methane gas extraction from the headwaters of the Stikine, Spatsizi, Klappan and Skeena rivers. I hope that 28 from now and 128 years from now there will still be a free-flowing river with an intact watershed and people are still able to know the wild. I also hope folks will inform themselves by googling Cassiar Watch and Pembina Institute, then vote for whomever represents their values.

The photographer  >>Photographer Gary Fiegehen first encountered the Stikine in the early 1980s, then spent five years consumed with photographing it. He travelled on horseback, by canoe and on foot. He went in all seasons, searching for images that would convey the power and majesty of this ancient land as well as his own intense responses to it.

The book   >>Stikine: The Great River, by Gary Fiegehen (1991, Douglas & McIntyre; $25). Available at gfiegehen@uniserve.com

Related Reading >> Northern B.C.: The Last Wild River >> Northern B.C.: Swim the Skeena

All photographs: Gary Fiegehen