d Yale; and the fares charged afforded a good revenue to the Hudson's
Bay Company. Even when prospectors struck above Yale, on up to
Harrison Lake and across to Lillooet, or from the Okanagan to the
Thompson, the difficulties of transportation were soon surmounted. A
road was shortly opened from Harrison Lake to Lillooet, built by the
miners themselves, under the direction of the Royal {101} Engineers;
and, as to the Thompson, there was the well-worn trail of the
fur-traders, who had been going overland to Kamloops for fifty years.

It was when gold was discovered higher up on the Fraser and in Cariboo,
after the colony of British Columbia had taken its place on the
political map, that Governor Douglas was put to the task of building a
great road. Henceforth, for a few years at least, the miners would be
the backbone, if not the whole body, of the new colony. How could the
administration be carried on if the government had no road into the
mining region?

And so the governor of British Columbia entered on the boldest
undertaking in roadbuilding ever launched by any community of twenty
thousand people. The Cariboo Road became to British Columbia what the
Appian Way was to Rome. It was eighteen feet wide and over four
hundred and eighty miles long. It was one of the finest roads ever
built in the world. Yet it cost the country only two thousand dollars
a mile, as against the forty thousand dollars a mile which the two
transcontinental railways spent later on their roadbeds along the
canyon. It was Sir James Douglas's greatest monument.

{102}

Five hundred volunteer mine-workers built the road from Harrison Lake
to Lillooet in 1858 at the rate of ten miles a day; and when the road
was opened in September, packers' charges fell from a dollar to
forty-eight cents and finally to eighteen cents a pound. But presently
the trend of travel drew away from Harrison Lake to the line of the
Fraser. At first there was nothing but a mule-trail hacked out of the
rock from Yale to Spuzzum; but miners went voluntarily to work and
widened the bridle-path above the shelving waters. From Spuzzum to
Lytton the river ledges seemed almost impassable for pack animals; yet
a cable ferry was rigged up at Spuzzum and mules were sent over the
ledges to draw it up the river. When the water rose so high that the
lower ledges were unsafe, the packers ascended the mountains eight
hundred feet above the roaring canyon. Where cliffs bro