Sometimes a town defines itself, by establishing a vital presence and then taking measures to ensure it stays relevant and thriving; sometimes a town is defined by outside measures, staying relevant and thriving largely because it was in the right place at the right time.
The town now known as Yale was very much in the right place at the right time. No one could have known, when the Hudson’s Bay Company established a fort at Yale in 1847, that a little more than a decade later gold in vast quantities would be found in the Fraser River that passed right by, making the site on which the fort was built a place of immense importance. Yale boomed as thousands of treasure-hunters descended upon it, to seek their fortune nearby or use it as a launching-point to places north as they chased the golden butterfly.
The town absorbed, welcomed, and profited from all those who came to it, rolling with the punches and adapting as needed. It was both a wild and woolly frontier town and a business hub; the starting point of the Cariboo Wagon Road and then a railway town. Fortunes were made, and lost, in its taverns, saloons, pubs, stores, and hotels. It welcomed the widow of famed Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin, as well as confidence men and criminals, and saw a parade of colourful characters walk its streets, including young journalist David Williams Higgins, who had arrived in 1858 shortly after gold was discovered on the Fraser, and who left a vivid record of what he saw.
By 1885 Higgins was long gone from Yale, and so was Andrew Onderdonk, the contractor who had orchestrated the 127-mile stretch of Canadian Pacific Railway between Port Moody and Savona, and who had built for himself and his family a lavish house in Yale. When Onderdonk departed, the house was left empty, but a new tenant was soon found.
Education was rapidly becoming an issue throughout the Interior of British Columbia, as an influx of settlers meant young families, and a demand for a good education for their children. A college for the daughters of white settlers—Columbian College—had been established in New Westminster in the early 1880s, but it collapsed due to a lack of funds. Anglican Bishop Acton Sillitoe, who had been a driving force behind the establishment of the collage, looked north, to Yale, where Anglican Sisters from England had started a school for First Nations girls, and suggested that the Sisters take in white girls as well, using funds that had been promised to Columbian Collage by an English missionary society.
The Sisters agreed, and Onderdonk’s former home was purchased, and remodelled into classrooms and dormitories, with the spacious home and its grounds providing everything necessary. It was “not only delightful as to externals but within provided with all things necessary to the health and comfort of the pupil-protegees,” with the grounds including a tennis court and hockey and croquet grounds.
All Hallows School was officially opened in Yale in 1890; the only school in Canada to enroll both First Nations and white girls in the same facilities. Upon opening, the school enrolled thirty-five First Nations girls and forty-five white girls ranging in age from six into the late teens.
The girls at All Hallows received, by all accounts, a first-rate education, and were also known for their musical accomplishments, as noted by the Duke and Duchess of York (the grandparents of Queen Elizabeth II) during a visit to the school in 1901. Like the town, however, All Hallows gradually decreased in importance. Yale found itself on a slow decline following construction of the Canadian Pacific railroad and the fading of the Cariboo Wagon Road—which had been badly damaged in places when the railroad was constructed, and not repaired—as a vital transportation link, while All Hallows found itself competing against other schools that had sprung up around the province. In 1915, the completion of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway opened a new transportation link to the north of the province, sealing Yale’s fate. In 1920, All Hallows school closed its doors.
Let us give the last word about Yale to Higgins, its best chronicler. He had left in early 1860 to pursue a newspaper career in Victoria, but found himself back in Yale for a brief stopover in 1906. By then the town’s decline was apparent: Front Street, once the home of 13 saloons within 50 yards, had few remaining businesses, and Higgins noted that all that remained of the Oppenheimer’s General Store—once the pre-eminent business in town—were the sagging walls of its fireproof warehouse, in danger of imminent collapse.
Higgins ran into two old acquaintances from his early days in Yale: Ned Stout and Bill Aldway. Stout mentioned that the three of them had outlived all the early inhabitants of Yale they had once known, and as they reminisced Higgins cast his mind back to when the people of whom they spoke had all been living and breathing, and Yale had been a bustling frontier town basking in its glory days. Now everything had changed; everything except the river and the overhanging mountains.
The three men parted, and Higgins continued his walk through what remained of the townsite, recalling “the spots where the various establishments stood in those days, and where the old and young, the grave and gay, the good and bad, conquered in common companionship. I picked out the site of Billy Ballou’s express office, Barry’s saloon, Oppenheimer’s warehouse and residence, Bennett’s gambling house, the Hudson’s Bay Company store over which Ovid Allard presided with profit to his company and satisfaction to his customers; the gambling house in which in 1859 Justice Begbie held his first court, in a room where three nights before a man had been shot… .”
The whistle of an approaching train interrupted Higgins’s musings. He dusted himself off, took a last look at the river, knocked the ashes from his pipe, and “turned my back upon the scene of one of the most eventful incidents of my eventful life.”
editorial@accjournal.ca
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