Above Photo: Winter on the Morice River Houston, British Columbia.
The Morice River holds a lot of good memories for me. The times with the kids fishing on the river, or just exploring different areas on it. The river has a beautiful glacial blue color to it which you can see in one of my photos below.
I remember one time when three of us launched a twelve foot car top boat at the Lamprey Creek Recreation Site and floated the river. We were armed with fishing rods and mosquito repellent and was the fishing great, it was better than that, it was awesome !
Above Photo: The beautiful glacial blue color to the Morice River,
Houston, British Columbia.
As we floated along we saw different types of wildlife and the fishing holes were loaded with Salmon, Dolly Varden, Trout and Whitefish and just as you were to float out of one of the holes, there they were just sitting in the fast water, steelhead all lined up ready to make their run up the next portion of the river.
Above Photo: Winter on the Morice River Houston, British Columbia.
The Morice is an amazing river to see, and even better, Morice Lake, now that truly is breathtaking.
Video Footage of two Wolves running on the ice on the Morice River. The wolves are in the distance when I spotted them, so they look small.
Video Clip: https://youtu.be/kxEGSBF48z0
So when you are passing through, or have plans to visit, please drop by our Visitors Centre or send them an email to get all the information on everything Houston, B.C. has to offer.
Houston and District Chamber Of Commerce/Visitors Centre.
Website: http://www.houstonchamber.ca/
Above Photo: Winter on the Morice River Houston, British Columbia.
The text information below from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
The Morice River is the outflow of Morice Lake south west of Houston, British Columbia, Canada. Morice Lake and Morice River are named after Father Adrien-Gabriel Morice.
Above Photo: Winter on the Morice River Houston, British Columbia.
The Morice has many small creeks joining it along its length, but retains the clear glacial hue for its length. The Morice river continues on to the town of Houston at which point the river is joined by a small tributary river called "The Little Bulkley" and the two rivers joined become the Bulkley River. They become the Bulkley, not the Morice despite the fact the Morice is larger. This was done by Poudrier, a government cartographer whom, it is rumored, never saw the region.
Above Photo: Winter on the Morice River Houston, British Columbia.
Adrien-Gabriel Morice:
Adrien-Gabriel Morice (1859–1938) was a missionary priest belonging to the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. He served as a missionary in Canada, and created a writing system for the Carrier language.
Above Photo: Winter on the Morice River Houston, British Columbia.
Early life:
Born and raised in France, as a seminarian he was inspired by Father Émile Petitot and set himself the goal of becoming a missionary and explorer in Northwestern Canada. He arrived in British Columbia in 1880, and after a stint in Williams Lake at St. Joseph's school, where he studied Chilcotin and, with the aid of Jimmy Alexander, the son of a Carrier woman and a fur trader who was sent to St. Joseph's School, began his study of Carrier.
Above Photo: Winter on the Morice River Houston, British Columbia.
Work with aboriginal languages:
In 1885 his dreams were realized and he was posted to Fort St. James, the fur trading and missionary center in the Carrier region. Father Morice rapidly learned the Carrier language and became the only missionary to speak more than rudimentary Carrier. Within a few months of his arrival he created the first writing system for Carrier, the Carrier syllabary, by making a radical adaptation of the Cree syllabics. From 1891-1894 he published a bimonthly newspaper, the Dustl'us Nawhulnuk, in Carrier. He was responsible for the translation of the catechism and many
hymns and prayers into the language.
Above Photo: Winter on the Morice River Houston, British Columbia.
From this, Father Morice was the first person to recognize all of the phonological distinctions in an Athabascan language and write it accurately.
He was also the first person to make extensive transcriptions of material in an Athabascan language. His magnum opus was his massive two volume The Carrier Language: A Grammar and Dictionary, which immediately made Carrier by far the best documented Athabascan language of the time.
Above Photo: Winter on the Morice River Houston, British Columbia.
Disputes with the Church:
Father Morice would have preferred to remain in Fort Saint James but in 1904 he was withdrawn by the bishop, who finally paid heed to the complaints of the Hudson's Bay factor. Father Morice proved unwilling to perform the other duties the bishop assigned him and unable to get along with other priests, so after several years of conflict the Church set him up in a house in Winnipeg where he spent the remainder of his life as a scholar, writing extensively on Carrier language and culture, more general Athabaskan topics, the history of the Roman Catholic church in Western Canada, the history of the French and Métis of the West, and occasional other topics.
Above Photo: Wolf tracks on the Morice River road, Houston, British Columbia.
Legacy:
Morice River, Morice Lake, Morice Range, and Moricetown - all located in the Bulkley region of northwest British Columbia, are named in honour of Morice.
Travel British Columbia with Brian Vike blog, please contact me at b_vike@telus.net
Travel British Columbia with Brian Vike.
Travel Houston, British Columbia with Brian Vike.
