1794 - Fort St. John, the first white settlement in mainland British Columbia, was founded for the North West Company by Alexander Mackenzie, who first reached the Peace River site in 1793. (Oddly enough, the earliest evidence of Aboriginal settlement site in the province has been discovered only 13 kilometres northwest of modern Fort St. John, at the Charlie Lake Cave site, dating back almost eleven centuries.) In May of 1793, Mackenzie provided an enthusiastic description of a riverside site in the Peace River region that afforded "an excellent situation for a fort or a factory, as there is plenty of wood, and every reason to believe that the country abounds in beaver.... The country is so crowded with animals as to have the appearance, in some places, of a stall-yard, from the state of the ground, and the quantity of dung, which is scattered over it."; In particular, Mackenzie was also impressed by the "vast herds"; of buffalo that roamed the Peace River Valley, an area he described as a "magnificent theatre of nature."; The fur trading encampment originated by Mackenzie was moved six times before operations ceased in 1823. Re-opened in 1860, south of the present community, this trading post was re-located across the Peace River by Francis Work Beaton in 1872, then moved again to Fish Creek, northwest of the town, in 1925. By the time the trading post finally ceased business in 1975, the city of Fort St. John had arisen on the Alaska Highway in north-eastern B.C., 73 kilometres north of Dawson Creek.

[from Alan Twigg's Thompson's Highway, 2006]