Template:Wp-Seton Portage, British Columbia-History

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Population estimates of the pre-Contact populations of the Lakes Lillooet people widely vary, with some traditions into the thousands on the Lakes alone. No one knows for sure, and the archaeological record here would be impossible to explore, as the land where the evidence would be has been stampeded and dug up and plowed under many times over, even on the rancheries.

As concerns the Gold Rush-era population, there is no figure for how many men were on the Portage at any one time, only an oft-repeated number of 30,000 as to the number of men that traversed the Lakes Route in the heat of the Gold Rush. The beaches of the Portage were so busy with men coming and going that they were given the names Wapping and Flushing, after the busy London Tube stations of the same names. Within a few years that traffic had disappeared (see Douglas Road) and the non-First Nations population of the Portage from then until the arrival of the Oblates in the 1880s was few, if any at all, although travellers still occasionally used the route of which the location was intrinsically a part.

The first non-native settlers since the Gold Rush occupied lands at the Portage in the early 1900s, which provoked the Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe (May 10, 1911) protesting the land alienations at "the Short Portage". Further settlement came with the building of the Pacific Great Eastern Railway, which was open through the Lakes by 1914 and which required the housing and feeding of hundreds of men, and with that the beginnings of the Bridge River Power Project.

During the late 1940s and 1950s, the construction boom caused by the renewal of that project after World War II brought thousands of long-term temporary residents into the valley, with many of these living in temporary 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.