The Cariboo has always promised things. Gold, land, a fresh start. What it did not advertise was the road.
Bessie Lowry drove into Horsefly in May 1933 behind a big Chandler car, pulling a trailer of household goods all the way from southern Manitoba. Two crop failures had finished the prairie. The Horsefly they found was not what she had imagined. “The roads,” Bessie recalled, “were just two little tracks with grass growing between them.”
It was, in other words, exactly what the road had always been. Getting it to something better had taken most of thirty years, and the Depression had taken a good deal of that back.
The Main Road, Such As It Was
George Bryson Patenaude grew up at the 150 Mile House, where the Cariboo Road, the actual surveyed road, ran north from Ashcroft through the interior. He remembered the BX Express coaches running twice a week from Ashcroft to the 150 Mile House: two days on leather-strap springs, foot-warmer bricks tucked beneath the seats. The bricks were sheet metal boxes covered in bristle carpet, fitted with a sliding damper to control the charcoal heat inside. They kept feet warm. They did nothing, George noted, for your face and head.
The drivers wore buckskin gloves with a knitted silk glove inside, distributed six lines across their fingers one per finger, and never raised their hands above the waist. The horses they managed were never broken and never saddled, wild animals averaging 1,150 pounds that learned the work without ever being gentled for it. They were craftsmen handling beasts in a system of mutual understanding that took years to master. In heavy seasons, the coaches went “wallowing in mud almost to the axle.” That was on the main Cariboo road. Horsefly was a long way from the main road.
The coaches made their last official run in 1917, replaced by a fleet of twelve Winton Six automobiles painted in the same red and yellow company colours and quickly dubbed “fresh air taxis” by their passengers. Until Williams Lake was established around 1918 and 1919, the 150 Mile House had been the distribution hub for everything going east to Horsefly, Likely, and Quesnel Forks, and west into the Chilcotin. Every sack of flour and piece of mail destined for Horsefly passed through the 150 first, then turned off onto whatever track headed east toward the mountains.
Gumbo Hill
Glenn Walters was born in 1902 and spent his life ranching in the Horsefly country. When Christine Houghton sat down with him in July 1977, he described what the road east of the 150 actually was: ranchers pushing tracks through the bush to their own places, going over mountains rather than around them because nobody had the equipment to grade a hillside. “They’d go over mountains pret’ nearly,” Glenn said, “because they couldn’t grade the side of it.” The route into town crested a stretch everyone called Gumbo Hill, named with the specificity that comes from personal acquaintance with a place in April.
When government crews arrived to improve things, they came in gangs of ten or twelve, with a cook, a horse grader, and a couple of teams. Glenn worked the Horsefly Lake road during the years before haying, ten hours a day at $3.50, board paid out of that. Swampy ground got the corduroy treatment: round logs rolled in tight, then gravel shovelled on top by hand. Stumps came out by powder monkey, a specialist who packed and set blasting charges. Some crimped their detonator caps with their teeth. “Be sure they bite on the right end,” Glenn said, and moved on. The horse grader crowned the surface, pulling dirt up from the ditches so water would shed rather than pool. Without the crown, the road was simply a channel. Spring confirmed this every year.
The first freight trucks reached Horsefly around 1922 along a new route that bypassed Gumbo Hill. They “stopped at every mud hole when there was a rain,” Glenn recalled, and tires did not last four thousand miles on roads like that.
Not Too Damn Much
The trouble was the 1930s. When Christine asked Glenn how much road building had been done in that decade, his answer was unambiguous: “Not too damn much. The government didn’t have any money and they didn’t do much.”
The province’s own highway records confirm it. Vehicle registrations across BC had climbed steadily through the 1920s, reaching nearly 99,000 by 1930, then stalled flat for five years as the Depression bit down. Road investment, the government later acknowledged, did not keep pace with demand. Even the main Cariboo Road had changed little from the 1800s to the 1920s. The branch road to Horsefly had even less claim on anyone’s attention.
This is the fact that explains Bessie. A decade of neglect had undone much of the 1920s work by the time she and her husband Jim arrived. They sold the Chandler not long after. In a country with one weekly mail run and nothing to spare for gasoline, a Bennett Buggy served just as well: a car frame with a box built over it, drawn by horses, requiring no tires and no fuel. Mail came in from Miocene on Wednesdays, hauled by Edwin Kinvig, by truck in summer and horse team in winter. An order placed with Williams Lake this week would arrive, if all went well, the following Wednesday. Sometimes it did not.
Power graders replaced the horse graders around 1945. Glenn sold his 1944 Ford tractor sometime in the 1970s, still running. He noted the improvement, but that cattle were getting hit on the range now, people driving faster than the road used to allow. Some things were better. Some things had simply changed.
The mud arrives every spring without an invitation. Horsefly has been working out the terms ever since.
Sources
- Horsefly Historical Society Oral History Project, Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum. Glenn Walters, interview by Christine Houghton, Accession No. 1-5, July 13, 1977.
- Horsefly Historical Society Oral History Project, Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum. Bessie Lowry, interview by Leslie Crow, Accession No. 21-1, August 12, 1980.
- Horsefly Historical Society Oral History Project, Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum. George Bryson Patenaude, interview by Orchard, Accession No. 27-1.
- British Columbia Ministry of Transportation and Highways. “Frontier to Freeway: A Short Illustrated History of the Roads in British Columbia.” gov.bc.ca.