Whonnock is a rural, naturally treed, and hilly community on the north side of the Fraser River in the eastern part of the City of Maple Ridge, British Columbia, Canada. It is approximately 56 kilometres east of Downtown Vancouver on the Lougheed Highway Whonnock shares borders with three other Maple Ridge communities. To the west the borders are 256th Street with Albion and upper Kanaka Creek with Webster's Corners. To the east Whonnock Creek forms the border with Ruskin. To the north is the municipal border and to the south the Fraser River. The name Whonnock is derived from a Halkomelem word for humpback salmon or pink salmon, the only kind of salmon to ascend Whonnock Creek. Whonnock Creek flows from the north, above Dewdney Trunk Road, south to the Fraser River passing Whonnock Lake or from Xwô:leqw / Wõ:leqw. Whonnock First Nation Whonnock Indian Reserve No. 1 is located at the confluence of Whonnock Creek and the Fraser River. This Reserve is under the jurisdiction of the Kwantlen First Nation, headquartered on McMillan Island at Fort Langley. First Nations have been living continuously in the area for more than 10,000 years. About 25 years before Simon Fraser came downriver in 1808 a wave of smallpox wiped out, or nearly so, the villages in this area, including the one at Whonnock Creek. Those villages were connected to a First Nations tribe of the Boundary Bay area that was also destroyed by the epidemic. Around the time of settlement of Fort Langley (ca. 1827) First Nations people started to repopulate the deserted places. In historical times the Whonnock Tribe of the Kwantlen First Nation lived here. They had their own Chief. The last member of the Whonnocks tribe living on the reserve died in 1951. Settlement and history The first permanent white settler and landowner in Whonnock was a man from Shetland, Robert Robertson, who settled in Whonnock with his First Nations wife in 1861 and in the following 25 years raised a family next to the village of the Whonnocks without any white settlers close by. The selection of Whonnock for a railroad station on the transcontinental railroad (Just because the place happened to be 10 miles from the next station, Hammond) initiated the community of today. After the trains started running regularly in 1885 the railroad brought a stream of new settlers. From 1885 onward Whonnock rapidly became the