At Owl Creek, a few miles up the Birkenhead, there was one of the major missions of the Oblate missionary organization, to which Lil'wat people from up and down the Pemberton Valley (Lillooet River valley above Lillooet Lake) moved, ultimately to become the Mount Currie community.
Owl Creek is now a large non-native subdivision on the west side of the local highway from Mount Currie to N'quatqua (D'Arcy).
Just under 25 km up from its mouth, the main Gates Valley branches east off the north-aligned Birkenhead River's valley via Poole Creek, which drains the westward side of the Pemberton Pass; Birken Lake at its summit is part of the Gates River system which drains towards Anderson Lake and Lillooet.
In this area there is a large stone with a foot-shaped impression on it - still there to this day and witnessed by Alexander Caulfield Anderson on his journey through the area in 1846 - where it is said one of the transformers stamped his foot in the rock to make a boundary between the people of the Canyon and those of the Lillooet River valley, who had converged on the spot bearing salmon (from the canyon) and spatsum (weaving reed-grass, from the Lillooet River).
The story of HMS Birkenhead is famous in British Naval history for the fact that women and children aboard were saved when she sank in February 1852 because they boarded the few lifeboats first.