The New York and Austrian Companies met no resistance on the journey north, and sent messages forward to Camchin, the ancient Nlaka'pamux "capital" at the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers (today's town of Lytton, that they were coming to parley peace, not make war.
•
The war was precipitated when the Nlaka'pamux retaliated for the rape of one of their young women, allegedly by French miners, in the area of Kanaka Bar.
Nicola was the presiding chief at Kamloops, and also jointly Grand Chief of the Okanagan people, during the Fraser Canyon War and the associated troubles of the Okanagan Trail, and was made a magistrate enforcing British law by Governor James Douglas.
The Lytton First Nation figure prominently in the history of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush (1858-1860) and of the associated Fraser Canyon War (1858).
It was in this area that the first major gold finds of what would become the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush were found, and the first quarrels between First Nations miners and American miners began, which would culminate in the Fraser Canyon War of the fall of 1858.
The chief of the Spuzzum in 1858, Kowpelst ("White Hat") was one of the first to work Hill's Bar at the onset of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush and was considered a "friendly Indian" during the Fraser Canyon War of that fall between the American miners and the upstream Nlaka'pamux of Camchin.
•
During the Fraser Canyon War, a few thousand miners from bars farther up the canyon thronged at Spuzzum in terror of the upstream Nlaka'pamux, and some villages and food caches of the Spuzzum people were destroyed by armed parties of miners coming up from Yale, even though relations with the Spuzzum were considered friendlier than with their Nlaka'pamux kin farther upriver.
American Civil War | Vietnam War | American Revolutionary War | Cold War | Iraq War | War of 1812 | Spanish Civil War | Korean War | Allies of World War II | English Civil War | Gulf War | Franco-Prussian War | Pacific War | war | Second Boer War | Peninsular War | United States Department of War | Second Sino-Japanese War | Crimean War | Thirty Years' War | Spanish-American War | Trojan War | Union (American Civil War) | Grand Canyon | French and Indian War | War Office | Falklands War | Seven Years' War | First Balkan War | Hundred Years' War |