British Columbia—as with many other places that have seen boom and then bust times—is littered with ghost towns; a testament not so much to the fickle finger of Fate than to the fact that the resources which first draw people to an area can soon grow thin. David Williams Higgins wrote of the men who flocked to Yale seeking “the Golden Butterfly”, only to be disillusioned, disappointed, or both when they either “panned out” their claim or never found anything of much worth.
Even those few who found their butterfly at, or near, Yale soon realized its ephemeral nature. Gold is not an infinite resource in a given spot. The miners who stampeded to the Fraser and Thompson Rivers in 1858 seeking gold, and who found it, soon exhausted the relatively easy pickings available to a man, or a group of men, with basic equipment. The search for the precious metal moved ever north, away from Yale. The remote Cariboo district was soon touted as the place to moil for gold; a claim that was heard around the world when William “Billy” Barker “struck the lead” in a creek below the settlement of Richfield in August 1862.
News of Barker’s strike was all it took to send men flooding north to the Cariboo, chasing that elusive butterfly. Yale—which just four short years earlier had been the epicentre of gold fever—was in danger of being left behind in favour of an upstart, and beginning the slow slide toward becoming a ghost town.
Just as geology had made Yale famous as a centre for gold, however, so geography now played its part in ensuring that Yale did not fade into oblivion, as the necessity of a proper road north to the Cariboo was soon established. The first European had established trails and rough roads north to the Interior and Cariboo, but these were not, for the most part, suitable for the stagecoaches, wagons, and pack trains heading north.
Things did not look good for Yale at first. In 1858 a 38-mile-long trail had been slashed from Harrison Lake to Lillooet, and in 1860 it was widened to accommodate wagons. In 1861, when the Cariboo began opening up in earnest, the road was extended 47 miles from Lillooet to what would become Clinton. A series of roadhouses was established along the route, and it seemed that Yale’s days as the jumping-off point for the Interior and the Cariboo were over.
However, the Lillooet to Clinton route—the original Cariboo Wagon Road—left much to be desired. Between Harrison Lake and Lillooet freight had to be transferred from steamer to wagon and then back again at least eight times, increasing freight rates, and the road from Lillooet to Clinton climbed 4,000 feet, with steep and hazardous grades. Another route was clearly needed, and Governor James Douglas decided that it would traverse the Fraser and Thompson Canyons. Since steamers could make it as far up the Fraser as Yale, that town was selected as the start of the second Cariboo Wagon Road, which was completed in 1864 and widely considered an engineering marvel.
In addition to providing easier access to the northern goldfields, the second Wagon Road was also intended to reduce the cost of goods there, in order to entice more settlers to move to the area. It worked, but at a price: the cost of building the road put the fledgling colony of British Columbia deeply into debt.
From possibly fading into a ghost town, Yale took on new life. Engineers and labourers poured into the area to begin the laborious process of building the road, and even before it was complete it saw heavy traffic as people sought a quicker and easier way north. Yale quickly became the commercial capital of the region, since almost all the people and goods heading north to the Cariboo—where Barkerville was in the process of being founded—came through the town, which by 1864 was the headquarters of the Barnard’s Express Stagecoach Company.
It had been founded in 1860 by Frank Barnard, who at first made the 380 mile trip to the Cariboo on foot, charging $2 to deliver a letter and $1 to deliver a newspaper. In December 1861 he established a pony express from Yale to Fort Alexandria, and in the summer of 1862 won the government contract to deliver the mail from Yale northward. And at 5 a.m. on May 12, 1864 Barnard took the reins of a stagecoach carrying nine people and set out from Yale on the first stagecoach journey along the new Cariboo Wagon Road.
The presence of an outfit like Barnard’s Express had a profound impact on Yale, as it was subsequently to have in Ashcroft. The many different stagecoaches and wagons of Barnard’s Express and other outfits—not to mention the pack trains comprised of dozens of animals that passed through—made Yale a bustling hub of commerce, as businesses sprang up to cater to the freighters, as well as the many people heading north.
Barnard’s Express remained headquartered in Yale for more than 20 years, and it has been claimed that its address at the corner of Front and Albert Streets was the best-known one in the Interior. However, in 1886 Frank Barnard decided he wanted out: partly because he planned to pursue a career in politics, and partly because he felt that, with the coming of the railway, the days of the stagecoach were numbered. He was bought out by his long-time partner, Steve Tingley, who promptly moved the headquarters of the BX from Yale to Ashcroft, spurred on by the building of the new town and the completion of a bridge across the river connecting Ashcroft to the Cariboo Wagon Road.
Even though the CPR took a toll on the Cariboo Wagon Road, it provided another boom time for Yale. We’ll look at that in the next installment.
editorial@accjournal.ca
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