a near relation) during their attempt to transform their own murder of rancher Johnny Ussher into a full-scale Indian uprising. Because of the boundary treaty partitioning Okanagan territory, Okanagans south of the line became organized under a new chieftaincy founded by Tonasket, who was not of chiefly lineage but rose to prominence because of his campaigns against the miners travelling the Okanagan Trail. Most American Okanogan people reside at Omak, Washington, or on the Colville Indian Reservation, where they are intermingled with other Salishan peoples of the region. Other uses The region of his reign became known as Nicola's Country, with the river that ran through it named for him, and the largest lake and the valley it flows through named for the river, still called in regional English today "the Nicola Country". The ongoing alliance of Thompson and Okanagan peoples in the Nicola Valley today are colloquially also called "the Nicolas". Their Nlaka'pamux component call themselves the Scw'exmx, while the Okanagan component are the Spa7omin (older spelling use Spahomin where the 'h' represents the glottal stop for what is now commonly rendered as the '7'). The name Nicola people is also used in ethnology and linguistics to refer to a now-extinct Athapaskan group who once lived amid the Scw'exmx and Spaxomin, and also in the Upper Similkameen before being driven out by the Similkameen Okanagan; they are also called the Stuwix or Stuwix'emux - "the strangers", "strange people", because they were recent arrivals in the territory and spoke an unrelated language). They are also called the Nicola Athapaskans. Although they got along with their immediate neighbours, who had given them refuge a couple of centuries or so before after fleeing hostile neighbours in the north, they were wiped out by the late 19th Century by raids by Thompson and Shuswap, intermarriage with the Scw'exmx and Spaxomin, and also by attrition. Only a handful of placenames from their language remain in the area, and are all that is known of their language, other than it was Athapaskan, although outside of official ethnology an account by Okanagan Mourning Dove says that they were Chinookan. See also Nicola people Nicola Tribal Association (Nicola Tribal Council) Mount Nkwala (not named for Chief Nicola, but for a novel by Edith L. Sharp in which the young protagonist is named Nkwala.) Notes References Salishan Tribes of the Plateau, pp. 263-275 (Genealogy of the Okanagan Chiefs),