The Cariboo LeeWagon Road
The boom in the Cariboo goldfields was the impetus for the construction of the Cariboo Wagon Road by the Royal Engineers, which bypassed the older routes via the Fraser Canyon and Lakes Route via Lillooet by using the valley of the Thompson River to Ashcroft and from there via the valley of the Bonaparte River to join the older route from Lillooet at Clinton.
Towns along the Cariboo Road include Clinton, 100 Mile House and Williams Lake, although most had their beginnings before the Cariboo rush began. During the rush, the largest and most important town lay at the road's end at Barkerville, which had grown up around the most profitable and famous of the many Cariboo mining camps.
The Cariboo Wagon Road was an immense infrastructure burden for the colony but needed to be built to enable access and bring governmental authority to the Cariboo goldfields, which was necessary in order to maintain and assert control of the wealth, which might more easily have passed through the Interior to the United States.
The wagon road's most important freight was the Gold Escort, which brought government bullion to Yale for shipment to the colonial treasury. Despite the wealth of the Cariboo goldfields, the expense of colonizing the Cariboo contributed to the mainland colony's virtual bankruptcy and its forced union with the Island Colony, and similarly into Confederation.
Read more about this topic: Cariboo Gold Rush
Famous quotes containing the word road:
“There was now no road further, the river being the only highway, and but half a dozen log huts, confined to its banks, to be met with for thirty miles. On either hand, and beyond, was a wholly uninhabited wilderness, stretching to Canada.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)