trailer camps and prefab houses in the Portage. Following the end of that project, the non-native population has dwindled to 400, cresting to 500 in summer with seasonal residents and visitors. Band population in total, including Shalath and the Portage together, is about 500. History The area was traversed by two Hudson's Bay Company employees in 1828, a journey which was later followed in 1846 by Scottish explorer Alexander Caulfield Anderson, who had been assigned to chart it and for whom Anderson Lake is named. Certain placenames along the route were conferred by Anderson later on, at the request of colonial Governor James Douglas. Seton Lake, and hence Seton Portage, was named for a friend of Anderson's who had perished in the sinking of . Farther along Anderson's route to the Coast to the southwest, which later was to become the Douglas Road, there is a Mount Birkenhead, the Birkenhead River and Birkenhead Lake, and also the rural community of Birken and a lake of the same name. Birken Lake is the summit lake of Seton Portage's big twin, the Long Portage, aka Pemberton Pass, which separates the Birken and Seton drainages. In 1858, gold was discovered in British Columbia. Steamships started running on both Seton Lake and Anderson Lake, and Seton Portage became a transportation bottleneck, as prospectors would need to portage for between the lakes. In 1861, Carl Dozier constructed British Columbia's first railway here to transport passengers and freight across Seton Portage (then called Short Portage). Most likely the "railway" - known as Dozier's Way - was drawn by horses and mules in one direction, and run on gravity in the other - was not used much after the colonial government built the Cariboo Road through the Fraser River canyon, in 1864, via Ashcroft, which bypassed Seton Portage and Lillooet, and was abandoned shortly thereafter (c. 1870) although its roadgrade survives today as the main local thoroughfare, Portage Road. Following the Fraser Gold Rush, the Seton valley lapsed into obscurity until the 1890s, when gold exploration scoured the region in the wake of the Cayoosh Gold Rush of the 1880s. Alienation of native land by white settlers at the outset of the 20th century led to the Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe, an assertion of native ownership and sovereignty by the chiefs of the St'at'imc in 1916. In 1914, the Pacific Great Eastern Railway was built through