Terrace, a community at the confluence of the Skeena and Kitsumkalum Rivers, lies about 71 miles (114 km) east-northeast of Prince Rupert and 64 miles (103 km) southwest of Hazelton, British Columbia. Its name comes from the natural terraces rising from the Skeena’s banks. The settlement nestles amid the rugged Coast Mountains, underlain by the massive granitic and gneissic rocks of the Coast Mountains Batholith. Glacial advance and retreat during the Last Glacial Maximum rank among British Columbia’s most significant landscape-forming processes. Pleistocene and Holocene glaciation, post-glacial rebound, and tectonic uplift have left their mark on every major watershed. Glacial scour and sediment deposition helped shape the topography and drainage patterns of the Skeena River watershed. The floodplain forms as the river’s gradient declines and its bedrock confinement loosens near the estuary. Slowing water deposits the sediment bedload onto a floodplain of islands within the channel and adjacent mainland. These sediments—up to 66 feet (20 m) deep—overlie glacial, marine, or deltaic deposits laid when the Skeena valley was a fjord. As the estuary and floodplain migrated westward in postglacial times and the land rebounded, these deposits were uplifted, creating terraced landforms that provided rare flat expanses for settlement and agriculture. Historically, the Skeena River served as a crucial transportation artery linking the Tsimshian people (‘inside the Skeena’) and the Gitxsan people (‘people of the Skeena’). The Tsimshian migrated to the Lower Skeena and established a settlement called Kitsumkalum on a terrace at the confluence.

The Tsimshian originally inhabited the upper Skeena. Their oral history recounts that after a series of disasters a chief led a migration from a cursed interior to the coast, founding Kitkatla on present-day Dolphin Island at the river’s mouth. The Gitxsan, meanwhile, remained near the Skeena forks at present-day Hazelton. Subsequently, other chiefs migrated downstream to occupy the lower Skeena valley. They developed a new dialect and regarded themselves as a distinct coastal population while retaining Gitxsan rights and customs. In late precontact times the Tsimshian shifted to winter island villages and returned to summer settlements along the lower Skeena when the salmon ran. Archaeological evidence indicates 5,000 years of continuous habitation at the river’s mouth near Prince Rupert. Kitkatla was likely the first Tsimshian village contacted by Europeans when Captains Charles Duncan and James Colnett arrived in 1787. In 1834 the Hudson’s Bay Company established Fort Simpson (now Lax Kw’alaams), prompting nine Tsimshian villages to relocate nearby for improved trade. In 1865 the Western Union Telegraph Company attempted to lay a line from San Francisco to Moscow—the Russian-American Telegraph, or Collins Overland Telegraph. It chartered the sternwheel steamer Union, under Captain Tom Coffin, to deliver supplies up the Skeena. After advancing 90 miles (140 km) upstream, the Union stalled. The company then built its own sternwheeler, the Mumford, which left Victoria under Coffin’s command in July 1866. This time he traveled 110 miles (180 km) upstream—a feat repeated three times—to deliver 150 miles (240 km) of telegraph material and 12,000 rations. The line passed Fort Fraser and reached Hazelton, but a transatlantic cable rendered the project obsolete. Nevertheless, a steamboat route up the Skeena opened the territory to miners, prospectors and settlers.

In 1869 the Omineca Gold Rush revived interest in navigating the Skeena. Although the diggings were accessible from Hazelton, no one had yet ventured upriver beyond the Kitsumkalum’s mouth. Contracted by the Hudson’s Bay Company, Captain William Moore built the schooner Minnie in spring 1871, loaded it with supplies for the Omineca district, and—accompanied by 30 men and a herd of mules—pioneered a route up the Skeena. In spring 1872 he built two barges and two large canoes at Port Essington and hired 24 men from the Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshian tribes. The work was grueling, perilous, slow and expensive. In 1889 the Hudson’s Bay Company launched the sternwheel steamer Caledonia under Captain George Odin. The Caledonia negotiated Kitselas Canyon above Kitsumkalum and reached Hazelton in nine days. By the turn of the century additional steamers—spurred by the growing salmon fishery and Klondike Gold Rush—cut the journey from Port Essington to Hazelton to an average of three days. In 1905 a pioneer named George Little staked a claim on the left bank of the Skeena at the Kitsumkalum’s mouth and purchased land on the north bank for the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway to build a station. He platted a townsite he first called Littleton but postal authorities rejected that name, so it became Terrace. Only 22 years later the Inlander made its final riverboat trip in September 1912, after which the railway assumed the hauling of passengers, freight and timber. Built between 1907 and 1914 and nationalized in 1919, the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway provided local employment, telegraph service and transport. For most of the 20th century Terrace was a sawmill town—once the cedar pole capital, manufacturing over 50,000 poles annually. During the 1950s, it prospered as a supply center for the construction of Kitimat, 37 miles (60 km) south at the head of Douglas Channel. Read more here and here. Explore more of Terrace and the Skeena River here: