Douglas Lake Cattle Company

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Douglas Lake Cattle Company is Canada's largest working cattle ranch, usually known as the Douglas Lake Ranch. Founded June 30, 1886, it has been operating continuously since. This date is also shared with the last leg of the first transcontinental train trip of the Canadian Pacific Railway from Montreal to Vancouver.

In response to booming demand for beef in rapidly-growing Vancouver, the Interior stock industry went into high gear in the wake of the railway's opening, spurring on something of a golden age in BC ranching. In 1907 the Nicola branch line of the CPR was built into the Nicola Valley to serve the booming stock operation at Douglas Lake, which was already one of the country's largest and for many years second only to the sprawling Gang Ranch on the west side of the Fraser, which has since shrunk in scale leaving the Douglas Lake as the largest. The ranch includes leased grazing land as well as directly-leased or titled lands, and verges on the edges of metropolitan Kamloops and towards Shuswap Lake, spanning most of the high country of the northwestern Thompson Plateau.

The Nicola Valley line's original terminus at Upper Nicola, shown as "Nicola" on railway maps, was at the ranch and its cattleyards on Nicola Lake, but in 1915 a route from Merritt to Penticton was opened in 1915, connecting also with an existing Great Northern Line which ran up the Similkameen River to Princeton from the U.S. and which was built to Princeton in 1909, and then beyond in 1915 as far as Brookmere (track between Brookmere and Princeton was shared by the two railways). Nicola Station then became only a spur of the Nicola line, which itself was bypassed by the Coquihalla River route in 1926, which succeeded as the main route of the southern mainline of the CPR until it was decommissioned. The Nicola railway remains today, still serving the Douglas Lake Cattle Company's ongoing ranching operations.

Most of the cowboys of the Douglas Lake Ranch are members of the Spaxomin and Scw'exmx peoples, who are jointly known as the Nicola people, and the life of the adjacent reserves and the ranch is tightly integrated as a result. A slowdown in operations in the later 20th Century engendered new recreation-residential development on part of the ranch holdings, near the old main house at Douglas Lake. .

[edit] See also

List of historic ranches in British Columbia
Merritt, British Columbia
Quilchena, British Columbia

[edit] External links

Official history
Map showing CPR spur lines in the Nicola-Similkameen (shaded blocks at right are the Douglas Lake Ranch and Indian Reserves; "Nicola" is the ranch's station and cattleyards, called Upper Nicola today)