Toughest Cattle Trail in Canada

Conquering the Coast Mountains

By Daryl Drew

After the Klondike Gold Rush in the 1870s, the south Cariboo cattlemen were in crisis. They desperately needed a new market for their beef, and the closest opportunity was the coastal cities. However, blocking the route was the Coast Mountain Range, one of the most rugged chains of mountains in North America. As a political idea the new route was brilliant but as a cattle trail it was a disaster.

The proposed Lillooet-Burrard Inlet Cattle Trail was supposed to solve the market problem. There was a great deal of support for the proposed trail, with Lillooet’s citizens hoping it would bring back the prosperity they enjoyed when the town was Mile 0 on the old Douglas section of the Cariboo Road. The teamsters on the Cariboo Road were in favour of a new cattle trail. They were fed up with running into herds of cattle on a road that was little more than a notch carved into the Fraser Canyon.

However, the ranchers had a different opinion. They argued that the proposed route would be too rugged with too little grazing along the way. No one had actually travelled through the area of the new trail with so much as a single cow. They supported the continued use of the Cariboo Road and the building of an extension from Yale to New Westminster.

Their counsel was ignored and the crusade for construction funds began. Approached by the Honorable Thomas Basil Humphreys, the MLA for Lillooet from 1863 to 1890, the provincial government agreed to finance the work.

Construction began in 1873, taking four years to complete the 164-mile long trail.  It was at most three feet wide, the paths literally blasted through rock, then cleared, cribbed with stone walls or bedded with corduroy logs.  Especially difficult was the construction of the cribbing and bridges to traverse the sheer face of the Seton Lake cliffs.  Cariboo residents grew impatient but finally in the fall of 1877, after $38,000 had been spent, the trail was declared open. 

That was the news that 35-year-old rancher Robert Carson had been waiting to hear. He planned to be the first to drive his herd to the coast over the new trail from his ranch on the Pavilion Mountain Meadows, 26 miles north of Lillooet.

By November 1877, too late in the year to be crossing the mountains safely, Carson and his two friends, Richard Hoey and Pecullah Kostah, joined herds and together they started out with 200 steers. 

The mountain weather had wreaked havoc on the newly constructed trail.  Bridges and corduroy were washed out and the three had to rebuild sections as they went. In other places the steers were mired down in mud up to their bellies and feed was scarce due to early snow.  The riders often had to dismount and help their horses up steep sections.

Carson described the roughest section as consisting of steps cut into logs for the cattle to climb up and down again on the other side.  Some of the cattle had to be shot because of injuries while others died of exertion and fatigue.  When they finally reached the coast, Carson ferried the battered remnants of the herd across the inlet, sold a few that were in better condition to butcher George Black and wintered the rest on Fraser River Farm to sell in the spring.

The Carson drive was the only herd to ever cross the trail and a committee was set up in Victoria to investigate the poor conditions.  After hearing the evidence, the committee suggested that Humphreys return home via the route to see for himself, but apparently he did not follow the suggestion. It appeared that Humphreys would lose his political head over the scandal, but in 1878, came the news that a railway would be built. Railway construction meant work crews and workers needed beef. The market problem appeared solved. Instead of a cattle trail, the ranchers would have a rail line.

Today, the only official monument to the trail is a cairn with a plaque near Burrard Inlet.  However, some old-time ranchers in the Lillooet area have another view of monuments.  They say bleached cattle bones turn up below the roughest sections of the old trail and those are the real monuments to the Cariboo cowboys and the toughest cattle trail in Canada.

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