Yale is an unincorporated
though historically very important small town in the Canadian
province of British Columbia
. It was founded in 1848 by the
Hudson's Bay Company as
Fort
Yale by
Ovid Allard, the
appointed manager of the new post, who named it after his superior,
James Murray Yale, then
Chief Factor of the
Columbia District.
In its heyday at the
peak of the gold rush, it was reputed to
be the largest city west of Chicago
and north of
San
Francisco
. It
also earned epithets such as "the wickedest little settlement in
British Columbia" and "a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah" of vice and
violence and lawlessness.
Yale
played an important role in certain events of the gold rush period
which threatened to throw B.C. over to American annexation, the
Fraser Canyon War and McGowan's War, and it is to Yale that the
Governor (on the first occasion) and the government officials (on
the second) - Begbie,
Brew and Moody came to address American
miners and take control of matters that threatened
the rule of the Crown over the Mainland
(or "New Caledonia" as it was
called before the creation of the mainland colony, although that
term originally applied to the fur district northwest from
present-day Prince George
).
Yale is on the
Fraser River and is
generally considered to be on the dividing line between the
Coast and the
Interior.
Immediately north of
the village the Fraser
Canyon
begins, and the river is generally considered
unnavigable past this point, although rough water is common on the
Fraser anywhere upstream from Chilliwack
, and even more so above Hope
, about 20 miles south of Yale. But steamers
could make it to Yale, good pilots and water conditions permitting,
and the town had a busy dockside life as well as a variety of bars,
restaurants, hotels, saloons and various services. Its maximum
population during the gold rush was in the 15,000 range, although
typically it housed 5-8,000. The higher figure relates to the
evacuation of the Canyon during the Fraser Canyon War of
1858.
Being the head of river navigation also meant being the best
location for the start of the
Cariboo
Wagon Road (as there were no usable roads between Yale and the
settlements nearer the Fraser's mouth.
The Cariboo Road ran
from Yale to Barkerville
via Lytton
, Ashcroft
and Quesnel
, built in the early 1860s. By the start of the
1870s an overland route from New
Westminster
was finally built - the Yale Road, known today as
Old Yale Road and still extant in
sections from Surrey
through Abbotsford
and Chilliwack, though no longer entirely a continuous
"highway". Its counterpart on the north side of the
river was the Dewdney Trunk Road,
built in the same period in advance of railway construction in the
1880s, but which ran only to Hatzic
, just east of Mission City
.
Because of its unique role as a transshipment point for the Cariboo
Road, Yale prospered for another twenty years after the gold rush,
and though dwindled in population it retained some prestige and
such sophistication as had grown up within the rough gold town, and
it was as familiar to early provincial high society as were New
Westminster distant Barkerville. During the construction of the
Canadian Pacific Railway,
construction ran directly through the village and destroyed the
town's old commercial core and the onetime immediacy of its
waterfront to town life.
Handy
enough to travel to and from New Westminster
and the railway's
destination
on Burrard
Inlet
(soon after named Vancouver), it became the
headquarters and residence of railway
contractor Andrew Onderdonk and the
town boomed with population and new businesses because of railway
spending and employment. Yale and nearby Emory City, in the vicinity of
Hill's Bar, where the gold rush had become, as well as all the
major Canyon towns to Ashcroft, thronged with temporary residents and business of
various kinds and legitimacies.
Three-times daily rail service to Vancouver - begun in the early
1880s before construction in the Canyon was finished in 1885 - made
access between Yale a popular excursion run, although the
population of the railway boom was greatly reduce by 1890 and
progressively afterwards. Daily return service remained in effect
until World War I. When Onderdonk moved on in 1886, he donated his
estate for a girl's school, All Hallows, which became one of the
main society schools in the colony and continued in operation into
the 1920s.
Construction of the railway also meant the
destruction of the Cariboo Wagon
Road, which was severed between Yale and Boston
Bar
and between Lytton and Spences Bridge
. A new highway north from Yale was not built
until the Cariboo Highway in 1922,
partly built using surviving roadgrades of the original wagon road
and since upgraded to the Trans-Canada Highway, and was for a
long time the main route between the Interior
and the Coast
.
After major reconstruction of the Cariboo Highway in the 1950s,
involving the construction of several major tunnels, the difficult
old canyon stretch of the route became an actual highway (instead
of in name only) and towns such as Yale boomed once again. With the
opening of the faster
Coquihalla
Highway in the 1980s, Yale's economy and population fell off
again.
Most of today's population are members of the self-governing
Yale First Nation. Non-native
businesses include a couple of stores, restaurants and a few motels
and other services, as well as gas stations and automotive repair
and rescue outfits. The Yale area is the lowest main destination
for the Fraser River rafting expedition companies and several have
waterfront campgrounds and facilities near town. All Hallows is now
a campground and hostel. Not much of gold rush era Yale survives,
as the docks vanished long ago and the railway ran down the main
street of what had been town. The Yale Museum is located on old
Front Street, adjacent to the tracks, and next to it is the
Anglican Church of St. John the Divine, among the oldest in British
Columbia.
Visible history is mostly atmosphere, and in good weather the
town's setting is spectacular. Every summer, a historical
re-enactment group visits Yale to celebrate the
Royal Engineers, who had served under Moody
during McGowan's War and worked on the Cariboo Wagon Road and the
Douglas-Lillooet Trail and were an integral part of Yale's life
from the gold rush to the end of the 1870s.
References
- Short Portage to Lillooet, Irene Edwards,
self-published, Lillooet, various editions, out of print.
- British Columbia Chronicle: Gold and Colonists", Helen
B. Akrigg and G.P.V. Akrigg, Discovery Press,
Vancouver 1977.
See also
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