Port Essington fluctuated with the seasons. Salmon fishing was a summer activity and the river was closed for freighting in the winter so many of the residents would migrate south each fall. According to Harris (see below), in the early twentieth century Port Essington's population fluctuated between around 1,000 and, in the winter months, about a quarter of that. The town was almost wiped out by fire in 1899, with only one building remaining. Port Essington's importance as a town began to wane when the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway along the Skeena was completed in 1914, on the opposite bank from Port Essington. Rail supplanted the riverboat commerce that had been the community's lifeblood. By the 1940s, all of Port Essington's canneries were inactive. Through the 1950s the population plummeted. Port Essington burned down in a series of fires in 1961 and 1965 and is now a ghost town (despite its continuing to appear as a populated settlement in many maps and atlases). It sits today on an Indian reserve jointly administered by the Kitselas and Kitsumkalum bands. Currently, there are attempts to shape what remains of Port Essington into a tourist attraction. Captain Vancouver named it for Sir William Essington. Prominent residents Robert Cunningham, entrepreneur Odille Morison, Native linguist William Henry Pierce, missionary, author Walter Wright, hereditary chief, oral historian Bibliography Bowman, Phylis (1982) Klondike of the Skeena! Chilliwack, B.C.: Sunrise Printing. Harris, E. A. (1990) Spokeshute: Skeena River Memory. Victoria, B.C.: Orca Book Publishers. Large, R. Geddes (1957; reprinted, 1981) The Skeena: River of Destiny. Sidney, B.C.: Gray's Publishing. Pedelty, Donovan (1997) "Constance Cox." In Pioneer Legacy: Chronicles of the Lower Skeena River, Volume 1, ed. by Norma V. Bennett, pp. 227–230. Terrace, B.C.: Dr. R. E. M. Lee Hospital Foundation. Rohner, Ronald P. (1969) The Ethnography of Franz Boas: Letters and Diaries of Franz Boas Written on the North-West Coast from 1886 to 1931. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Notes Ghost towns in British Columbia North Coast of British Columbia Populated places in the North Coast Regional District Tsimshian