Kamloops


Kamloops is a city in south-central British Columbia, Canada, at the confluence of the North and South Thompson Rivers, which join to become the Thompson River in Kamloops, and east of Kamloops Lake. The city is the administrative centre for, and largest city in, the Thompson-Nicola Regional District, a region of the British Columbia Interior.
The city was incorporated in 1893 with about 500 residents. The Canadian Pacific Railway was completed through downtown in 1886, and the Canadian National arrived in 1912, making Kamloops an important transportation hub. Kamloops North station is the first stop on VIA Rail's eastbound transcontinental service, The Canadian, while the Rocky Mountaineer and the Kamloops Heritage Railway both use Kamloops station.
With a 2021 population of 97,902, it is the twelfth largest municipality in the province. The Kamloops census agglomeration is ranked 36th among census metropolitan areas and agglomerations in Canada with a 2021 population of 114,142.
A college town, Kamloops is home to Thompson Rivers University as well as the Royal Inland Hospital and the British Columbia Lottery Corporation, all of which significantly shape the city's economy. Kamloops is promoted as the Tournament Capital of Canada. It hosts more than 100 sporting tournaments each year at facilities such as the Tournament Capital Centre, Sandman Centre, and Tournament Capital Ranch. More recently, Kamloops has become a mountain biking destination; home to Canada's largest municipal bike park, the 26-hectare Kamloops Bike Ranch, the city is often described as the birthplace of freeride mountain biking.

History

The first European explorers arrived in 1811. David Stuart, a trader sent from Fort Astoria, then still a Pacific Fur Company post, spent a winter with the Secwépemc people. In May of the following year, trader Alexander Ross established a post, which was known as "Fort Cumcloups".
The rival North West Company established Fort Shuswap nearby in the same year. The two businesses merged in 1813 when the North West Company bought the operations of the Pacific Fur Company. In 1821, the Hudson's Bay Company merged with the North West Company, and the post became known commonly as Thompson's River Post, or Fort Thompson. Later it was known as Fort Kamloops. The post's Chief Traders kept journals, which document a series of inter-Indian wars and personalities for the period, in addition to the daily business of the fur companies and their personnel along the entire Pacific Slope.
Soon after the forts were founded, Kwa'lila, chief of the main local village of the Secwépemc, moved his people closer to the trading post, so they could control access and gain in prestige and security. After Kwa'lila died, his nephew and foster son Nicola became chief. He later led an alliance of Syilx and Nlaka'pamux peoples in the plateau country to the south around Stump, Nicola and Douglas lakes.
Relations between Nicola and the fur traders were often tense, but Chief Nicola was recognized for his aid to European settlers during the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush of 1858. He did try to control those who had been in parties waging violence and looting on the Okanagan Trail, which led from American territory to the Fraser goldfields. Throughout, Kamloops was an important way station on the route of the Hudson's Bay Brigade Trail, which connected Fort Vancouver with Fort Alexandria and the other forts in New Caledonia to the north. It was integral during the onset of the Cariboo Gold Rush as the main route to the new goldfields around what was to become Barkerville.
The 1862 Pacific Northwest smallpox epidemic swept through the Kamloops area during the summer of that year, decimating the Secwepemc, Nlaka'pamux, and other indigenous peoples. They had no acquired immunity. The epidemic had started in Victoria and quickly spread throughout British Columbia, especially among First Nations. In June 1862, indigenous people went to Fort Kamloops seeking smallpox vaccine, William Manson, chief clerk at the fort, vaccinated numerous persons, but fatalities were extremely high. In late September he reported "smallpox still raging amongst the Indians".
In October a newspaper in Victoria reported an eyewitness account from Fort Kamloops, saying
The Indians have been nearly exterminated at : only sixteen have escaped out of a large settlement. Their bodies are strewing the ground in all directions.

About two-thirds of the Secwepemc died during the epidemic. In the aftermath, colonists took over traditional lands of the Secwepemc and many other indigenous groups throughout British Columbia.
The gold rush of the 1860s and the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which reached Kamloops from the West in 1885, brought further growth. The City of Kamloops was incorporated in 1893 with a population of about 500, mostly concentrated in the West End.
In 1908 due to the Tuberculosis Pandemic a sanatorium was opened west of the city named King Edward Memorial Sanatorium, the sanatorium was later acquired by the provincial government in 1921, being renamed to Tranquille Sanatorium, it later closed in 1958. The Tranquille Institution reopened in 1959 to treat people with mental problems, although it later closed in 1983.
In 1967, Kamloops amalgamated with the Town of North Kamloops.
In 1973, Kamloops amalgamated with the Districts of Brocklehurst, Dufferin, the Town of Valleyview, and the Kamloops Indian Band, and the communities of Dallas, Campbell Creek, Barnhart Vale, Heffley Creek, Rayleigh, Westsyde and Knutsford. In 1976, the Kamloops Indian Band split from the City of Kamloops.
In May 2021, an anthropologist announced she had used ground-penetrating radar to find "probable" graves containing the remains of 215 children found at a former Kamloops Indian residential school, part of the Canadian Indian residential school system. The story was reported around the world, and five Catholic churches in Western Canada were burned down in the weeks following, since the school was operated by a Catholic order.

Etymology

"Kamloops" is the anglicized version of the Shuswap word "Tk'əmlúps", meaning "meeting of the waters". Shuswap is still spoken in the area by members of the Tk'emlúps Indian Band.
An alternate origin sometimes given for the name may have come from the native name's accidental similarity to the French "Camp des loups", meaning "Camp of Wolves"; many early fur traders were ethnic French. There are folk stories about an attack on a traders' camp by a pack of wolves. Other legendary versions recount a huge white wolf, or a pack of wolves and other animals, that were moving overland from the Nicola Country and were repelled by a single shot by John Tod, then chief trader. This prevented the wolves from attacking the fort and earned Tod a great degree of respect locally.

Geography

Kamloops is in the Thompson Valley and the Montane Cordillera Ecozone. The city's centre is in the valley near the confluence of the Thompson River's north and south branches. Suburbs stretch for more than a dozen kilometres along the north and south branches, as well as to the steep hillsides along the south portion of the city and lower northeast hillsides. The area surrounding the city is sometimes referred to as the Thompson Country.
Robert W. Service in 1904 described Kamloops as his delightful life and wrote "Life was pleasant, and the work was light. At four o'clock we were on our horses, riding over the rolling ridges, or into spectral gulches that rose to ghostlier mountains. It was like the scenery of Mexico, weirdly desolate and aridly morose. A discouraging land, forbidding in its weariness and resigned to ruin."
Kamloops Indian Band areas begin just to the northeast of the downtown core but are not within the city limits. As a result of this placement, it is necessary to leave Kamloops' city limits and pass through the band lands before re-entering the city limits to access the northernmost communities of Rayleigh and Heffley Creek. Kamloops is surrounded by the smaller communities of Cherry Creek, Pritchard, Savona, Scotch Creek, Adams Lake, Chase, Paul Lake, Pinantan and various others.

Neighbourhoods

The following are the officially recognized neighbourhoods within the city of Kamloops. Informally recognized sub-areas are listed beneath the neighbourhoods to which they belong:
  • Aberdeen
  • *Pacific Way
  • Barnhartvale
  • Batchelor Heights
  • *Batchelor Hills
  • *Lac Du Bois
  • Brocklehurst
  • *Airport Entry Corridor
  • *Brock Centre
  • *North Kamloops West
  • *Ord Road
  • Campbell Creek
  • Dallas
  • Downtown
  • *Columbia Precinct
  • *Downtown Core
  • *East End
  • *East Entry Corridor
  • *Waterfront District
  • *West Entry Corridor
  • Dufferin
  • Heffley Creek
  • Juniper Ridge
  • Knutsford
  • Lower Sahali
  • Mission Flats
  • Noble Creek
  • North Kamloops
  • *8th St Corridor
  • *Halston Corridor
  • *John Tod
  • *McDonald Park
  • *North Kamloops West
  • *North Shore Town Centre
  • *Schubert Drive
  • *Tranquille Market
  • *Tranquille South
  • Pineview
  • Rayleigh
  • Rose Hill
  • Sagebrush
  • Southgate
  • Thompson Rivers University
  • Tranquille
  • Upper Sahali
  • Valleyview
  • *Orchard's Walk
  • West End
  • *College Heights
  • *Guerin Creek
  • *Hudson's Ridge
  • *McIntosh Heights
  • *Powers Addition
  • Westsyde
  • * Westmount
  • * Oak Hills

    Climate

The climate of Kamloops is semi-arid due to its rain shadow location. Kamloops gets short winter cold snaps where temperatures can drop to around or below when Arctic air manages to cross the Rockies and Columbia Mountains into the Interior.
Kamloops has the third mildest winter of any non-coastal city in Canada, after Penticton and Kelowna. The coldest months are December and January, when the mean temperatures are and. That average sharply increases with an average maximum temperature of in February. Between November and January the area experiences abundant cloud cover due to a continual series of Pacific coastal Low Pressure systems crossing British Columbia, reducing the annual sunshine output, despite very sunny summers.
The average number of days where the minimum temperatures drops below per year is 19 as recorded by Environment Canada.The average number of days where the Maximum temperature goes above is 36, above is 8 days.
Although Kamloops is above 50° north latitude, growing seasons are long, with hot periods every summer under dry and sunny weather. Daytime humidity often drops below 20% during dry periods, which allows for substantial nighttime cooling. Occasional summer thunderstorms can create dry-lightning conditions, sometimes igniting forest fires which the area is prone to.
Kamloops lies in the rain shadow leeward of the Coast Mountains and is biogeographically connected to similar semi-desert areas in the Okanagan region, and a much larger area covering the central/eastern portions of Washington, Oregon and intermontane areas of Nevada, Utah and Idaho in the US.
These areas of relatively similar climate have many distinctive native plants and animals in common, such as ponderosa pine, big sagebrush, prickly pear cactus, rattlesnakes, black widow spiders and Lewis's woodpecker.
The highest temperature ever recorded in Kamloops was on 29 June 2021, which was the fifth-highest reading recorded in Canada, and the highest recorded in any city of over 10,000 people, during the infamous 2021 Western North America heat wave. The lowest temperature ever recorded was on 16 and 18 January 1950.