Placename origin: Cassiar

[Mike Cleven]

An article in today's Vancouver Sun (July 31) on the "rebirth" of
Cassiar BC as an internet community prompted me to go have a look at the
site http://www.angelfire.com/bc/Cassiar/index.html because I've lately
been planning to add a guestbook to my Lillooet-Bridge River website(s),
the new version of which I hope to have up and running by September.  I
get lots of mail from former residents of the Bridge River Valley,
Seton/the Lakes and Lillooet and figure it would be a good thing to
have.

Anyway, upon visiting the site and poking around a bit I came across the
point that "Cassiar" is of native origin, from the local native language
(Tahltan?  Inland Tlingit?) - "casha", the native name for "fluffy rock"
- i.e. asbestos, which was the town's stock-in-trade until its huge mine
closed a while back.  Of course I doubt that "fluffy rock" is a literal
translation of "casha", but I'm curious as to what language this is, and
what the actual lexical meaning is.  The ore was known to local natives
(according to the site) so this was obviously a special word they had
for this special kind of rock; the "wool" of which apparently birds in
the region made nests of that survived forest fires.

It surprised me to see that Cassiar was of native origin.  I don't know
what else I expected it to be; Scots Gaelic _maybe_, or something
familiar.  But that familiarity is because "Cassiar" is a well-known
word on the Vancouver landscape, being one of the main north-south
streets on the far east side of town; the one that used to have the
horrendous traffic lights at Hastings between the Second Narrows Bridge
and the Freeway (now directly connected by a tunnel).  How the mutation
"casha" => Cassiar happened is anyone's guess.....