History of Castlegar: Up to 1873

The region of the lower Arrow Lakes, including Castlegar, was inhabited by the Lakes Indian people, a branch of the Interior Salishan linguistic and cultural group, with close language ties to the Okanagan and Colville bands. "Quepitles" was a site on the north side of the Kootenay River, just above the junction with the Columbia River. The site was popular as a trading place, and especially in the autumn and winter, for spear and line fishing for salmon, which were dried nearby. Alexander Ross observed a major stone fish trap located near the site in 1825. The Lakes people continued to inhabit the site during the fur trading period, which began with the establishment of Spokane House in 1810, and further developed with the removal of fur transport to the Columbia River and Arrow Lakes. Fort Colville was established in 1828.

Lakes people would seasonally congregate to Fort Colville to trade for arms and ammunition, traps and other necessities. In 1846, the Oregon Boundary settlement
placed the Canadian/United States boundary at the 49th Parallel. This numbered the days of British fur traders along the lower Columbia. By 1852 the Hudson's Bay
Company were avoiding the lower Columbia where the levy of duties was being threatened against furs passing downstream. A trail existed from Fort Shepherd, on the Border at Waneta south of Trail, to Hope. This was the predecessor to the Dewdney Trail. Lakes people, faced with Customs Officials at the 49th Parallel, and accustomed to obtaining what had become necessities from the Hudson's Bay Company store,
gravitated permanently, in increasing numbers, to Kettle Falls. The American Government preceded Canada, in 1872, in affording a "reserve" at Fort Colville,one of the largest in the United States. Many bands, not just the Lakes people, after two decades of harassment by white settlers and two state-wide wars, chose, in increasing numbers,to make their temporary habitation on the reserve into a permanent home. An exception was a small mixed band, which numbered eleven in 1909, (ten Lakes and one Thompson), who remained at the mouth of the Kootenay.

Discovery of gold, in 1855, at the mouth of the Pend D'Oreille River, ten miles south of Trail, signaled a new era for the region. When Gold Commissioner W. G. Cox arrived in
1851 to resolve disputes between Lakes Indians and an influx of gold miners, he found Chief Gregoire of the Lakes, living at Quepitles, cultivating a small patch of potatoes and hunting deer and beaver to the north. He had also cultivated a herd of many fine horses. Kootenay Indians arrived and requested of Cox a reserve "at the north point of the mouth of Kootenay's River". In 1865, Edgar Dewdney, while constructing the nearby Dewdney Trail to the Wild Horse gold fields, found a number of Indian families
over-wintering at the site. Dewdney also reserved the land at the mouth of the Kootenay but as a town site, posting notices one mile up the Columbia and one mile up the Kootenay as boundaries. Gold Commissioner Haynes, who succeeded Cox, found that "a number of Chinese had been stopped by Indians near the mouth of the Kootenay River" and informed the Chief that "his people must not interfere with the miners".

Construction of the Dewdney Trail, and especially the Big Bend gold excitement in 1865, led to the arrival of a number of small craft that moved up the Columbia River and through the Arrow Lakes. In December, 1865, the "Forty nine", the first steamer, made its way through Tin cup Rapids at Castlegar before being barred by ice at the
narrows of the Arrow Lakes. In 1867, gold strikes were made along Forty-Nine Creek, between Castlegar and Nelson. No record survives from this time of a trail being built
from the juncture of the Kootenay and Columbia to Forty-Nine Creek. By 1873, the steamer "Forty Nine" had been dismantled and removed to the Snake River, and the
mouth of the Kootenay River was left to a family of Lake Indians, the Christians, until another mining boom developed 15 years later