Moving Amid the Mountains, 1870-1930

Abstract

From the explorations of Mackenzie, Fraser and Thompson to the present, British Columbia has embodied a problem of movement that externally has been a function of distance, and internally of rugged terrain. Means of transportation easily imposed on gentler, more proximate lands penetrated this wilderness at enormous cost. Yet, as white settlement overrode Indian, new means of transportation were adapted to new needs. Some did not require mechanical power : the canoe brigades and packhorse trains of the fur companies, the stage coaches on the Cariboo Road, the ox teams that hauled logs a mile or two to tidewater along greased corduroy roads (skid roads), the horse or mule trains that rawhided ore down steep mountainsides. Important locally, such transportation was insufficient when an advanced industrial technology began to penetrate the Cordillera in the last third of the nineteenth century. With it came agglomeration and scale economies that depended on relatively frictionless movement. Bulky goods, services and people would have to be moved rapidly and cheaply over considerable distances. Otherwise, resources would remain undeveloped, towns would not grow, and urban systems would hardly emerge. British Columbia would neither participate vigorously in the world economy nor rationalize its internal spatial economy. The construction of such a system was an engineering challange of the first order and a continuing political dilemma. After two expeditions (Fraser's in 1808 and Simpson's in 1828) had established that the Fraser canyon was not a feasible canoe route, the vast territory from the lower Columbia to the upper Fraser had been linked in a single trading system by a packhorse trail through the Okanagan Valley. The border agreement of 1846 bifurcated this system and inaugurated a continuing effort north of the international border to maintain a port that was connected