In 1861, an American miner named George Salter built a roadhouse on what was soon to be known as the Cariboo Waggon Road through the Fraser and Thompson canyons. Salter's post — which came to be known as the 42 Mile House, that being the distance from Yale — was built on a flat area six miles north of Boston Bar, at the base of Jackass Mountain.
Salter constructed a two-storey log structure on the west side of the road. It was a rough-and-ready place, designed to cater to the drivers of freight wagons, rather than stagecoach passengers, who generally expected rather more genteel accommodation. Since it was just below the steepest grade on the road, freight drivers would sometimes stay there for several days, particularly in bad weather.
Salter retired to the Lower Mainland in 1873, and the 42 Mile House changed hands several times between then and the coming of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885. The advent of the railroad, and the washing-out of the Alexandra Bridge at Spuzzum in 1894 — which severed the Cariboo Waggon Road as a means of transportation between the coast and the Interior — meant the end of the 42 Mile House, which is preserved in an 1867 photograph by Frederick Dally.
