Telus brought fibre optic cable to Horsefly in 2024 and 2025. Broadband this far into the Cariboo backcountry is not something anyone takes for granted. Horsefly has been working on that same problem for well over a century: how to stay connected from a valley that most maps barely acknowledged.
The First Wire South
Harry Walters, born in 1865 as the first settler child in the Cariboo, arrived in Horsefly in 1891 and eventually added telegraph operator to his duties alongside postmaster and fire warden. His hotel held the town’s wire south. For a community where the road to the 150 Mile House took a full day in good conditions and could close entirely in winter, the telegraph was not a convenience. It was the difference between being part of British Columbia and merely being located in it.
When J.P. Patenaude took over the Horsefly store in the early 1900s, the telegraph office moved in with him. His son Albert, who had learned telegraphy somewhere along the way, became the operator. Albert’s wife Annie, Horsefly’s first schoolteacher, arrived in 1910 and moved into the same building. Their daughter Ida remembered her mother as “pretty fair at it too; she picked it up just being there.”
The Pipes
Albert had a younger half-brother, Hope, who had come out from Quebec with the rest of the family. Albert decided to teach him. He didn’t have proper equipment.
So they used the mine pipes.
The Miocene shaft had been sunk 585 feet into the earth, hit water, and abandoned with the pumps still underground. It left behind a scattering of hardware across the valley. The steel pipes, long and hollow, turned out to be good for practicing Morse code. Albert and Hope would sit on a pipe, one at each end, tapping messages through the metal until the rhythm became automatic.
Hope Patenaude remembered it for the rest of his life. He went on to become, in Ida’s words, “the best telegrapher that you could get,” working first in Horsefly, then at 150 Mile House, then at Blackwater north of Quesnel, and finally Williams Lake when the telegraph office moved there in the late 1930s. His line ran from Keithley Creek to Bella Coola. Everyone on the network knew everyone else by their key.
Same Valley, Faster
The fibre follows roughly the same geography the old telegraph line would have traced through the valley. The mountains haven’t moved. Horsefly has always been worth connecting, worth the effort of running a wire, a cable, or now a strand of glass. The infrastructure has just always had to work to keep up.
Sources
- Horsefly Historical Society Oral History Project, Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum. Ida (Patenaude) Zirnhelt, interview by Christine Houghton, Accession No. 20-1, April 27, 1978.
- Horsefly Historical Society Oral History Project, Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum. Ida (Patenaude) Zirnhelt, interview by Christine Houghton, Accession No. 20-2, May 4, 1978.
- Horsefly Historical Society Oral History Project, Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum. George Bryson Patenaude, interview, Accession No. 27-1.
- Horsefly Historical Society Textual Archives: “First Families in Horsefly.” harperscamp.ca/textual/families.html, Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum.