This village was devastated by the 1862 Pacific Northwest smallpox epidemic, in which native populations were reduced by 50-90% of their former totals.

[2] In the wake of the epidemic, Reverend Turner, one of early British Columbia's "saddlebag parsons", came through the village, finding only a few children and elders huddled in some of the underground houses, but in other houses there were only the dead; others had been thrown in the lake, which had frozen.

The survivors told Turner about a huge beast of some kind which came down off the icecaps and dug up the bodies out of the other houses and out of the frozen lake.

During that conflict, the lake became the setting for the encampment of the assembled forces of the Colonies, which consisted of troops from Victoria, accompanying Governor Frederick Seymour and his officials, and a posse of mostly Americans raised from the Cariboo goldfields but also including Donald McLean, former Chief Trader at the HBC's Fort Kamloops who came out of retirement to join in the hunt for the leaders of the Tsilhqot'in revolt and who would in the course of events die near the lake.

The runway still operates today as CYPU and was, at the time, the second-longest airstrip in British Columbia.