Waddington Range - History

History

The difficulty of access to the core of the massif delayed actual sighting, measurement and climbing of Mount Waddington until 1936; it had only been espied from Vancouver Island by climbers in the 1930s and was at first referred to as Mystery Mountain - because its existence until then had been unknown. Apparently even in First Nations lore its existence was spoken of only vaguely, as a possibility, and it seems unlikely the core of the massif was penetrated by any First Nations adventurer given the tremendous difficulty posed even for mountaineers equipped with modern outdoor gear.

At its eastern edge, deep in the Grand Canyon of the Homathko River, occurred the first gruesome event in the guerilla war known to history as the Chilcotin War of 1864. This resulted from the attempt by Alfred Waddington to build a road from Bute Inlet to Barkerville. Port Waddington, a land-survey left over from those days, remains on the map on the south bank of the Homathko where it empties into Bute Inlet.

Waddington's Road was never completed because of the war, but was examined in later years as one of the main possible routings for the mainline of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Choice of the route would see the terminus of the railway at Victoria but despite strong favour from that city and the province the railway chose Burrard Inlet, which as a result became today's Vancouver.