Barman_packing in British Columbia

Packing in British Columbia
Transport on a resource frontier
Roderick J. Barman University of British Columbia

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he material culture that the Spanish and Portuguese brought to the New World included a distinctive system of land transport – the carriage of goods on the backs of mules and horses. In terrain which was mountainous, or where travel by water was impossible, packing by horse or mule became the principal form of transport and continued to be significant even during the railway era. Not until the coming of bush aviation and all-terrain vehicles was packing abandoned. In its organisation and methods packing was standard across the western hemisphere from 40° S (in modern Argentina) to 60° N (in British Columbia). Historians have paid little attention to packing. Few scholars possess the command of Spanish and Portuguese needed to study the institution as it existed in Hispanic America, and packing was not part of the material culture of the Northern European settlers in the New World. In what is now eastern and central Canada the layout of rivers and streams facilitated the carriage of goods by sailing ship and canoe, while the density of the forests discouraged the use of horse and mules. Along the eastern seaboard of what is now the United States carting provided the most common form of transport, as the development of the Conestoga wagon attested. By contrast, packing was the main form of transport in what are now Mexico, Peru, Bolivia and central and southern Brazil. Supplies for the silver mines of Zacatecas and Potosí were brought in by mule trains which took out the processed silver. The same happened in Brazil with the gold of Minas Gerais and the coffee of the Paraíba valley.1 In North America the westward advance of the French and British depended upon established forms of transport, while the Spanish, moving into what are now the states of New Mexico, Arizona and California, found that packing ideally suited the area’s mountains and deserts. The United States’ conquest of the region in 1846 did not displace packing, which provided the essential means of transport in the California gold rush of 1848. That gold rush transformed the entire west coast of North America, first drawing in newcomers by the thousand and then, as the original mining strikes ran out, inspiring a search for fresh goldfields. Throughout the 1850s miners moved relentlessly north from California. James Watt, a veteran prospector and packer, later commented:

T

Figure 1 The Pacific North-west, 1840–1900

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Folks now-a-days haven’t much conception of the richness and extent of those early placer [alluvial] mines. Why, the whole country from the Blue Mountains [in Oregon State] to the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, and from southern Idaho far north into British Columbia, was just one big goldfield. There was rarely a stream that wouldn’t ‘pan at least a color’ and practically every square mile of that vast territory was some time or other traveled over and prospected by some of those prospecting parties in the latter 50s and early 60s.2

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‘That vast territory’, stretching north from the California border to the Yukon and bounded by the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, was the last region of North America to be occupied by Europeans. Difficult of access by land and sea, the Pacific North-west was rich in furs, particularly the sea otter and the beaver, which attracted Russian, American and British trappers. By the 1820s the Hudson’s Bay Company, with its regional headquarters at Fort Vancouver (on the north bank of the Columbia, opposite modern-day Portland), had established a virtual monopoly over the fur trade in the region, with some twenty trading posts along the coasts and throughout the interior. The influx of Americans coming by the Oregon trail and settling in the Willamette valley led to the Hudson’s Bay Company gradually withdrawing northwards. Fort Victoria (now Victoria, the capital of British Columbia), established in 1843, eventually replaced Fort Vancouver as the entrepot of the fur trade in the Pacific North-west.3 In 1846 the Treaty of Washington divided the region between Great Britain and the United States, with the new boundary running along the 49th parallel but giving Vancouver Island (with Fort Victoria) to the British. A decade later, in 1857, gold deposits, long known to the Aboriginal population, were found in the bars of the Thompson and Fraser rivers that lay to the north of the 49th parallel.4 The ensuing gold rush into what became in November 1858 the colony of British Columbia and the demarcation of the boundary fixed by the 1846 treaty together introduced the system of packing already used in the western United States.5 The British boundary commission, charged with the task of tracing the new border along the 49th parallel in conjunction with a similar US commission, sent one of its members down to California to acquire mule trains and their crews. The gold miners, fanning out along the Fraser and Thompson rivers and their tributaries, found that the numerous rapids prevented mining supplies and foodstuffs being brought in by water. Existing trails were therefore improved and new ones developed, particularly the route between Port Douglas and Lillooet (see Fig. 4).6 To work these trails mule trains were brought north from the United States. This system of packing did not end with the completion of the Cariboo Wagon Road in 1865, the decline of gold mining later in that decade, or the building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad (Canada’s first transcontinental railway) in the 1880s, but continued until the middle of the twentieth century. Until the establishment of bush aviation for prospecting and for the carriage of goods and humans, packing by mule and horse was an indispensable part of the resource

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frontier as it expanded into the more distant and more isolated parts of British Columbia.7 As the settlement frontier advanced, packing was usually displaced but the pack trains and their crews did not vanish. They simply moved on into new areas which needed their services. During the hundred years that packing was a viable and indeed indispensable part of frontier life in British Columbia the system remained remarkably stable both in its organisation – animals, equipment, personnel and cargo – and in its functioning – capability, management and costs. The dynamics and importance of packing as a system of transport across the North American west become clear through an analysis first of each element in its organisation and in its functioning on the British Columbia frontier. In respect to animals, pack trains could employ mules or horses. Contemporary opinion, for a variety of reasons, was emphatically in favour of the former. ‘Mules are far preferable to horses for all purposes of transport.’ Mules were sturdier, with flatter backs than horses. Whereas horses could never carry more than 250 lb of cargo and usually carried a good deal less, ‘a mule would carry from 300 to 500 pounds’.8 Mules required less feed and possessed greater endurance. More specifically, mules were far more surefooted and reliable than horses in the mountainous terrain that characterises so much of British Columbia and other parts of western North America. ‘A horse packed belonging to one of the Packers made a false step rolled down & was killed – he had just bought him for $224.00 [£44·80],’ a traveller to the Cariboo noted in his diary in May 1862. ‘As far as I can see now we have made the wisest plan by getting our grub on a mule train for they get along better than horses.’9 James Watt, a veteran American packer, recalled in old age, ‘On the Boise pack trail in early days some boys had a cayuse [wild horse] pack train. I made one trip with that train. It was a poor outfit.’10 Mules were certainly not perfect. The first drawback was their proverbial stubbornness and uncertain temper. ‘Every member of the crew carried a blind, mostly used on mules. It is not generally known but a mule won’t do anything right for you unless blinded.’11 Another means of control was to acquire a bell mare, which served, in the words of a modern guide to packing, ‘as hostess, lure, mother confessor, and Emily Post [etiquette guide].’ The mules would stay close to the mare (which always wore a bell) and follow it anywhere.12 The second drawback to using mules was finding a supply. Being the offspring of a male donkey and a mare, mules are sterile. They cannot reproduce. For there to be a constant supply, the animals have to be systematically bred. In areas with rich pastures and a mild climate, such as southern California, Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and Salta in Argentina, mules were bred as a business.13 No such enterprise was undertaken in British Columbia, partly because of the availability and lower price of horses and partly because of the harshness of the winters.14 Mules had to be imported from the United States or from Mexico, adding considerably to their cost. In 1860 two mule trains, composed respectively of thirty-four and thirty-two mules, each with a bell mare, were brought up from Washington Territory (later State) to the

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goldfields and sold for $5,150 and $4,750, or about $150 [£30] a head. Other evidence suggests that a single mule in good condition would command a price in this range.15 Prices often went much higher. In September 1861 a Victoria newspaper reported, ‘Frank Way’s pack train of fifty-eight mules and four horses was sold for $14,000 cash, to three Cariboo traders.’16 In this instance the mules changed hands at over $225 (£45) a head, about the price an American packer remembered in old age. ‘The average pack mule sold for $250. A very good mule would bring $400.’17 This expense explains why, in September 1861, ‘Messrs Fellows and Way, packers, … are bound for Sonora, Mexico, with $24,000 [£4,800] with which to buy animals.’18 In contrast, acquiring a large horse pack train was fairly easy and comparatively cheap. Horses, usually termed ‘cayuses’, bred wild on the plains of eastern Washington Territory and in the southern interior of British Columbia.19 In 1861 a herd of 100 horses was sold at Lillooet, the forward supply base for the goldfields, for between $120 and $180 (£24–£36) each, but the following year an American received a little over $43 (£8·60) a head for the sixty-one horses he had brought in.20 Since mules could be acquired only in the United States or Mexico, their cost rose proportionately as the resource frontier moved northward, farther and farther from the US border. The growing difference in ease of acquisition and purchase price between mules and horses favoured using the latter. Even though mules could carry heavier loads, cost less to run and were more surefooted, they were increasingly used in harness to pull wagons, not as pack animals. Two newspaper reports from the early 1880s illustrate this change. ‘A short time since we advertised in our columns the 12-mule team of Messrs. Burns & McKane for sale. The outfit was sold … to Mr. U. Nelson, of this place, for $2,200 [£440]. The mules and wagons were brought to Yale last week, and Mr. Nelson divided the big team into two 6-mule teams, with a large and small wagon each.’ A year later the same newspaper noted, ‘Mr. U. Nelson has shipped a considerable amount of goods to the upper country this week. On Friday he sent out a pack train of some twenty horses to Bridge River where several of our young men have lately gone to seek their fortunes’ in mining.21 By the early 1880s mule pack trains had become unusual but they continued to be employed. At the start of the twentieth century the Hudson’s Bay Company still maintained a pack train of thirty mules in northern British Columbia, probably based on Hazelton. In 1901 that train was rented out to a contractor constructing the Yukon Telegraph line for the Dominion government.22 It is also probable that, even from the earliest days, pack trains were mixed, made up of both horses and mules as the state of the owner’s finances dictated. In a diary kept in 1876 a novice packer usually referred to ‘the animals’ in his train, distinguishing between horses and mules only when there was specific reason to do so.23 No matter which type of animal was used, the same equipment, or ‘rigging’, as it was called in the nineteenth century, was employed. The pieces of equipment had, as their names attested, been developed in the Hispanic world.24 The most important was the aparejo. ‘What is an Aparejo? Why it is a Span-

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ish pack saddle made of leather and stuffed with moss, dry hay or grass – anything handy; it protected the mule’s back from any rubbing of the load, and equalised the weight of the pack on the animals.’25 ‘The aparejos are made like a couple of square leather sacks, all in one piece, one intended for each side of the animal,’ a novice packer wrote in his diary in 1876. ‘These sacks are first filled with willows, placed upright in them and about 3 or 4 inches apart, then hay is stuffed in so that the whole is like a couple of large pads.’26 Before the aparejo was put on, the animal’s back was covered with three different cloths. First came the ‘sweat’ cloth, and on it was laid the carona, a coloured and embroidered cloth reserved for a specific animal. Over the carona went the ‘bed’ blanket, and finally the aparejo was laid on. Attached to the back edge of the aparejo’s two sacks was a crupper, a broad leather strap, that ran around the animal’s hindquarters and under its tail. The three blankets and the aparejo were secured by the latigo, or cinch strap, which circled the animal’s belly and was pulled as tight as possible before being buckled up. The cargo was next loaded, a highly skilled operation involving two men standing on either flank of the animal. Two large boxes or casks were first hoisted up on each side of the aparejo and tied to each other by the sling rope, the intent being to ensure a balance of weight and burden. The rest of the ‘pack’ was piled on and around these first items. The entire cargo was

Figure 2 ‘Packed mule. The load is supposed to represent four 50 lb sacks of flour. a, a, lower edge of aparejo. b, b, showing where the aparejo rests on the mule’s back. h, h, showing where the “riata” is tightened upon the load. g, the crupper. e, corner of sweat cloth. c, the corona. b 2, synch. f, loose end of the riata.’ Source: J. K. Lord, At Home in the Wilderness (1876), p. 75. Reproduced by courtesy of the University of British Columbia Library

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secured to the aparejo by means of the lariat, some 50–60 ft of cord, looped over and under in the celebrated ‘diamond hitch’.27 The rigging for packing was widely available. In 1863 a tack shop in Victoria offered for sale, as its invoices proclaimed, ‘Spanish Saddles, Pennsylvania and Concord Harness, Aparejos, Enameled Cloths, Whips, Spurs, &c. &c.’28 A set of rigging for a pack animal was by no means cheap. The aparejo alone cost from $35 to $60 (£7–£12), and the ‘bed’ blanket, made of the best wool, from $15 to $20 (£3–£4).29 It was a price, however, that had to be paid. Alternative forms of equipment, such as the crosstree saddle, were markedly less efficient, while cheap rigging gave endless trouble on the road, trouble that meant loss of time and money.30 Careful maintenance of the aparejo was essential. The internal stuffing, if wetted, became matted and lumpy and required swift replacement. Similar care had to be taken with the leatherwork. ‘One of the packers known as the “saddler” had to be familiar with leather; his job was to repair pack saddles, etc.’31 If healthy animals and good equipment were essential to the successful running of a pack train, so too was capable personnel. Packing was essentially a male occupation, although there are records of women owning or running pack trains.32 It required great strength and stamina. Working conditions were hard. The items of cargo often weighed over 200 lb and were awkward in size. Each crew member had to oversee six or seven animals when the train was in motion. Once the route to the Cariboo mines was well established, trains could stop at the many roadhouses, but packers often had to sleep outside, regardless of the weather. ‘A big spruce tree was our camp each night,’ a train master from northern British Columbia recalled in old age.33 The day’s work was long, varied in its demands and full of the unexpected. Strength and stamina were not the only qualities demanded. Adept handling of animals, swift and certain loading of cargo and resourcefulness in emergencies were necessary skills. ‘If straps and ropes broke you had to splice them; you had to mend the pack saddles; sometimes you had to shoe the mules; sometimes animals got sick and you had to nurse them,’ James Watt recalled. ‘Worst of all, sometimes the packs broke, or sprung a leak, and you had to devise means – way out alone in the wilderness – to save your cargo.’34 Finally, packers had to possess integrity. They were in charge of valuable animals and expensive equipment and were entrusted with the delivery of goods worth thousands of dollars and with bringing back the gold dust, specie and letters of credit offered in payment for those goods. As the Rev. James Reynard aptly remarked in 1869, the packers’ work ‘demands strength, skill, daring, endurance and trustworthiness.’35 Not surprisingly, in view of the demands made on them, pack crews expected to receive good treatment, including copious food, while on the trail. ‘I always treated my men well and fed them the best,’ the former owner of a pack train recalled in 1929. ‘It is no economy trying to cut down on the expenses for grub in this game. The men had lots to eat and it was all good and a good cook got it ready.’36 Good the food may have been by the early twentieth century, but traditionally packers ate the beans, bacon and bannock

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(unleavened bread) that formed the staple diet of the frontier. ‘A case of Brandy and a Box of preserves for our Grub arrived,’ a builder of the Cariboo Wagon Road noted with satisfaction in June 1862, ‘as we [had] complained [of] having nothing to eat but Beans and Bacon three times a day which is a very good thing now and then, but 21 times a week is too often.’37 In addition to being fed well, packers expected to ‘earn considerable wages’, as the Rev. Reynard commented in 1869. South of the 49th parallel these wages varied from $100 to $120 (£20–£24) a month, while a train master could earn as much as $150 (£30) a month. Court cases from the early 1860s indicate that pack crews in British Columbia were paid at similar rates. ‘Plaintiff had been in our employ before – he was getting $100 p.m. He was a very good packer. He had his victuals & expenses besides.’38 The packers certainly earned their money. ‘In many respects the packers I worked among were, take them all in all, a rough, lawless and profane bunch of men,’ concluded James Watt, a veteran train master, in old age, ‘but they were brave, hardy and extremely loyal and trustworthy towards their employers.’39 Packing was an occupation that rewarded innate qualities and paid little regard to status or civility. In the early years most of those in the pack crews were Mexicans, with some Chileans and other Spanish Americans. In June 1859 the secretary of the British boundary commission commented in his diary, ‘You must first of all understand that all of our muleteers & packers are Mexicans.’40 A year later, in June 1860, the Anglican Bishop of Victoria, the Rev. George Hills, travelling from Yale to Lillooet, recorded talking ‘to Mexicans who are the muleteers of the country’.41 The make-up of the work force is in no way surprising. These nationalities had dominated packing in both California and the Oregon Territory during the gold rush. Many men simply moved north when the British Columbia boom began.42 The size of the new finds attracted packers directly from Spanish America. Pancho Gutierrez and his two brothers arrived at Victoria by steamer from Mexico.43 Some of these men did not stay long or did not survive. Others contracted a union with Aboriginal women and put down roots in British Columbia. The descendants of Manuel Alvarez, Jesus Garcia, Pancho Gutierrez and José Maria Tresierra – to name but four of these early packers – can be found across the province to this day.44 The first packers were Catholic in religion, Spanish in speech and often mestizo (mixed Indian and European) by descent. To the Canadians, British and Americans who controlled the official and commercial life of British Columbia the Spanish Americans were neither civilised nor white.45 It is not surprising that packing as a calling attracted other men who, like the Spanish Americans, were outsiders by reason of their race or their culture. Two such men were David Wiggins, an Afro-American who had learnt the art of packing in California, and Jean Caux, a native of the French Pyrenees who began his life in British Columbia as a gold miner.46 Aboriginal men quickly learned the art of packing. In July 1862 ‘Indian George’ took out at Lytton a trading licence as a packer. The Indian Superintendent for British Columbia reported in 1886 to Ottawa, ‘Owing to railways construction, the last five

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Figure 3 ‘A pack train “pulling out”. The four men belong to four races: Indian, negro, half-breed white, and Chinaman.’ Source: W. A. Baillie-Grohman, Fifteen Years’ Sport and Life in the Hunting Grounds of Western America and British Columbia (1900), p. 22. Reproduced by courtesy of the University of British Columbia Library

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years have been profitable seasons for these Indians who are expert packers and good labourers.’47 By the end of the nineteenth century Aboriginals probably constituted the largest group among the packing crews.48 Some ran their own outfits, as did Pierre Jack over the Hope–Princeton trail and Jean Marie, a Babine packer on whom the Omineca miners depended during the 1920s for contact with the outside world.49 Also increasingly prominent in packing were men of mixed race, sons of the union of native women and newcomers. Packing was one of the few occupations open to this group of men caught between the settler and Aboriginal societies.50 Last, but not least, a very visible element in packing were the Chinese, who both owned and ran pack trains. During 1861 no fewer than six Chinese took out at Lytton trading licences as packers. In 1867 Kwong Lee & Co. had a train of thirty-five mules working out of Yale, then the starting point of the wagon road to the Cariboo mines.51 Healthy animals, good equipment and tough, expert personnel meant nothing without cargo. Cargo depended upon a demand for goods by humans working in areas unreachable by water transport. In British Columbia none of the gold strikes subsequent to the original discoveries could be supplied solely by steamer or canoe. The first need of the miners was for foodstuffs. ‘What they usually carried for grub was beans, bacon, flour for bannock, and a little tea, sugar and salt, and maybe some coffee,’ the daughter of an early miner and packer later recalled. ‘The Californians liked coffee but tea has always been a great favourite with the miners and packers.’52

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The attention that government reports, newspaper stories and private letters of the period paid to the price per pound of flour, bacon and beans confirms that these were the indispensable victuals. Foodstuffs constituted a good proportion, probably the predominant part, of the early cargoes carried into the interior.53 Pack trains going up to the mines willingly sold such staples to those they met in need of provisions. Indeed, as Bishop Hills noted in his diary on 8 July 1862, ‘I found it was a custom for returning trains if short of food to purchase of the laden trains what they want.’54 Salt, tea and tobacco were also carried, but just as important were the barrels of cheap whisky stocked by the roadhouses on the way to the goldfields and by the countless saloons and bars that sprang up in the mining camps.55 Besides drink and foodstuffs the pack trains brought in the pickaxes, shovels and other ironware that the miners required when sinking shafts to reach bedrock. Just as important were the footwear, such as waterproof boots, and heavy clothing rapidly wore out. All these goods commanded high prices in the mining communities, as did the saws, nails and building tools required to construct the stores, saloons and gaming establishments, built of rough-cut lumber, which rapidly sprang up at the site of a successful gold strike.56 Since the miners who made the strikes customarily made little or no attempt to hoard their new-found wealth, the pack trains brought in a whole range of luxury goods, such as champagne, canned and bottled comestibles and fancy clothing, all of which found a ready market.57 Most of these goods were dispatched on consignment in the expectation that they would sell quickly. A significant part of cargo was composed of items which had been specially ordered or which the pack train’s owners were to use for a commercial venture. To the first category belonged the billiard tables which were such an indispensable part of every saloon. The son of an early packer recalled proudly how ‘four billiard tables were taken in by him one time from the Fountain to Barkerville and he got $4,000 [£800] for them’.58 In the second category came the metal parts, engine and boiler required to build the first steamer launched on the upper Fraser river. It took at least four mule trains to bring these items to their destination.59 The only goods not to figure in cargo, given the slow pace of travel and the great distances to be covered, were perishables. Milk cows and beef cattle could be and were driven in on the hoof, while the farms established near many of the mining camps ‘got good prices for everything they had to sell, and there was a good demand all the time for vegetables of all sorts, and for beef and mutton, poultry, eggs and butter’.60 Sound animals, good rigging, capable crew and suitable cargo were the prerequisites of a successful pack train. Equally important was the train’s actual functioning, which can be analysed in its three aspects – capability, management and costs. The capacity of pack trains, and in particular mule trains, to carry cargo safely over long distances was very great but it was not absolute. Pack trains could function only if feed and water were available along the route. To have had to carry such items would have so reduced cargo capacity as to make the

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entire venture impracticable.61 Terrain that was permanently or seasonally arid, such as existed in eastern Washington Territory, defeated the pack trains. During the winter months blizzards and heavy snowfalls closed trails and covered the grass on which the pack trains depended. At that time of year little or no packing took place. At Lillooet, at the start of the newly opened Cariboo Wagon Road, the number of pack trains and the weight of cargo stood at 103 outfits carrying 194,053 lb in October 1862, declined to fifty outfits carrying 55,775 lb in November and dropped to only six outfits carrying 5,556 lb in December.62 Another unfavourable environment for pack trains was vividly painted by the Rev. John Sheepshanks, who went up to the Cariboo in the summer of 1862.
But, oh, the green timber! The rays of the sun could not get down to the narrow trail, which was in some degree walled in on either side by the felled trees and the logs that had been rolled out of the way. Thus the hundreds of pack animals, mules and horses, all the time going up to or returning from the mines, had trampled the trail into a long continuous line of quagmire. The tramp of the animals had worn the trail into ‘ridge-and-furrow’ steps.63

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Sheepshanks was describing the trail that linked Quesnel Forks, the original entry point to the Cariboo gold mines, to Williams Creek, the heart of the mining area. This stretch of trail through green timber was, a government official asserted, the main cause of packers losing some 20 per cent of their animals each year.64 Mountain ranges were another serious obstacle, especially where the route went by a narrow trail along the edge of a precipice. Such a terrain necessitated the employment of mules alone, and even they occasionally came to grief, as the secretary of the British boundary commission recorded in June 1859. ‘Roche’s return mule train came in from a mountain gorge called Tommeahai this evening & I am sorry to say the news are rather bad, one mule had fallen over a precipice & broken its neck, the burthen all lost, & one man broken his leg.’65 On narrow trails through the mountains pack trains had above all else to avoid meeting another going in the opposite direction. In such circumstances mules could not and would not turn about or stand still, and some losses inevitably occurred. The mules had to wait at places where the trail widened until it was certain that the way ahead was unimpeded.66 Another obstacle that required careful handling was crossing rivers. ‘Cannot ford a pack train in four feet of water,’ so as to avoid wetting the stuffing in the aparejos, Donald Graham, a novice packer, noted in 1876. The animals had to be unloaded and the rigging and cargo carried across.67 Fast-flowing rivers, without a bridge or a ferry, presented a considerable challenge. The crossing had to be carefully reconnoitred and the landing place chosen with care. The mules were unloaded and swam across, following the bell mare. The cargo and equipment were taken over by boat or raft.68 Skilled management was crucial in the functioning of pack trains. It is regrettable that so little documentation on management has survived. How-

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ever, sufficient information exists for its dynamics to be understood. The key individual was the cargador or pack-train master who managed the outfit on its journeys, oversaw animals, equipment, men and cargo and saw to the safe disposal of the goods at their destination. It was not a job for a novice, as Graham observed in May 1876: ‘in fact, without going any further into it, it requires a great deal of experience to take charge of a train’.69 The success of the entire venture depended upon the energy, shrewdness and integrity of the train master and his segundo, as his foreman was sometimes called. It is not surprising that some train masters were the owner of the outfit they commanded. A larger number were probably part owner, running the venture in partnership with a merchant or merchant firm, which supplied the capital and the cargo. Some cargadores were simple employees who worked for the excellent wages the calling offered. Such men may not have aspired to a more exalted role, especially since illiteracy was common among packers. When Rafael Carranza, one of the earliest and most prominent of the Mexican packers, took British citizenship in October 1873 he could not even sign his application papers and had to mark them with a cross.70 Neither illiteracy nor lack of capital barred the way to an ambitious and capable man who sought to own a pack train. Pancho Gutierrez, who in the 1880s ran an outfit over the Hope–Princeton trail, began life in British Columbia as a porter, carrying goods from the steamers arriving at Yale to the pack trains awaiting their loads.71 Acquiring a string of animals was the first step to success, as the career of Jesus Garcia attests. Garcia’s son recalled in 1934:
For two years my father stayed on this pack train job, then made up his mind to quit and work for himself. He went to the boss and told him his intention was to buy a few head of mules for a starter. Raphael Carranzo [sic] told Father that if he intended to have a train of his own he would give him a show. Father asked him, ‘In what way?’ He said, ‘I’ll sell you half of my train.’ Father said,‘It’s a go.’ The bargain was made in a few words and this was his start in business for himself.72

Once the first animals had been acquired, an astute packer could build up the size of his outfit, either slowly – animal by animal – or by the purchase (probably on credit) of a string of them. It is clear that the independent train masters, who knew that the economy could not function without them, depended a great deal on credit to finance their operations. During the packing season merchant houses provided cargo and allowed the purchase of equipment and supplies, with payment delayed until the trails closed in the autumn.73 The size of a packing outfit had an important influence in determining costs and so the efficient running of a train. ‘Trains of twenty-five pack animals were easier to handle than larger trains,’ an American packer recalled in old age, ‘on account of the greater convenience in making camp and finding feed.’74 A listing in The Pacific Coast Business Directory for 1867 of the fifty-

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Figure 4 Transport routes, 1858–1890

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seven pack trains then working out of Yale shows them to have ranged in size from four to 174 animals. The average size of a train was just over thirtyseven animals, the median being twenty-eight.75 A portion of the cargo consisted of victuals to feed the pack crew, but the rest was goods to be delivered to the consignee or to be sold by the pack master. In the latter case the cargador had to be sure that the goods he loaded would find a ready sale.

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Pack trains of any size worked out of a base where cargoes could easily be procured, fresh animals purchased and packers hired. In the years of the gold rushes the bases stood at the head of navigation. On the lower Fraser river, Hope served the outfits which carried goods to the strikes at Rock Creek (1860), Cherry Creek (1863) and Wild Horse Creek (1864) in the far southeast of the province. Port Douglas, at the head of Harrison Lake, Lillooet, on the middle Fraser, and finally Yale, on the lower Fraser, served consecutively as the bases of outfits going up to the Cariboo goldfields. In 1867 the Pacific Coast Directory recorded three packing outfits with a total of fifty-four animals working out of Hope and fifty-seven outfits with 2,115 animals working out of Yale.76 The goldfields along the southern border of British Columbia, discovered in the first half of the 1860s, drew a good part of their supplies from the United States. American packing trains worked out of Wallula on the Columbia river and out of Walla Walla, farther to the east, which was the garrison town of the US army in eastern Washington Territory.77 At the start of the packing season (ranging from March to May), when snow had left the trails and fresh pasture was available, the trains assembled at their bases, recruited such crew as was necessary, loaded cargo and set out.78 The distance an outfit could travel each day depended upon conditions along the trail and the distance from camp to camp. ‘Twelve or fourteen miles is considered a long way for a pack train,’ a novice packer commented in 1876.79 The ideal camping site was sheltered from the prevailing winds and possessed good water, plentiful pasture and a supply of wood.80 The day would begin well before first light: ‘we would roll out of our blankets at two or three in the morning.’81 The outfit’s cook would get the banked fire going and prepare breakfast. Some of the crew would break camp while others would gather the mules or horses in. The easiest method was to find the bell mare, which was usually white or grey in colour. The mare’s bell would attract all the mules, but in the case of horses one or two stragglers often had to be searched out. The bell mare would be led to the head of the waiting packs and ‘the animals stand there in line like a regiment of cavalry’. Donald Graham continued, ‘Now the work of the Cargadore and his assistant commences. They start at opposite ends of the line and throw a halter over each animal’s head. When they are all haltered, they pass along, tying one to the other until the whole line is thus fastened.’82 Each animal faced its own aparejo and rigging, which had been covered with mantas, waterproof squares. Breakfast would follow. The crew, divided into pairs, then went to work, untying each mule in turn, saddling it and loading the assigned cargo. ‘The mysteries of the “diamond hitch” were then swiftly performed’ and the mule, ‘tightly sinched up until his stomach looked like an hourglass, grunted, and was dismissed with a kick, and another victim selected to take his place. All this was done with bewildering rapidity.’83 It took two experienced men a minute and a half to two minutes to load a mule, James Watt, an American packer, recalled.84 Once the loading was finished, usually by six in the morning, the cook mounted the bell mare and led the way out of the camp site, the animals fol-

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lowing in single file. Each member of the crew had charge of six or seven animals and rode alongside them on his own mount.85 The cargador, or train master, inspected each animal as it left camp, checking for incipient sores (the recurrent problem with mules), defective equipment or insecurely packed cargo. Any animal with an immediate or potential problem was pulled out of line and the matter remedied at once. When the entire outfit was in motion, the train master and his segundo would take up position at the head and the rear of the train, always alert to handle any emergency the day’s journey might bring. If rain began to fall, for example, the cargoes had to be covered with mantas.86 The length of the day’s journey was determined in part by the difficulty of the terrain – a river crossing, for example, consuming a great deal of time – but also by the distance to the next desirable stopping place. The train would often reach the camp by midday and always by the early afternoon. ‘When the train gets into camp the unloading is gone about as systematically as the loading, everything laid away neat and safe, the Cargadore seeing that his rigging and animals are in good shape for another day’s drive,’ Donald Graham noted in his diary on 14 May 1876. ‘If any animal is hurt he fixes his aparejo so as to bear as little as possible on that particular spot next day.’87 The bell mare was usually hobbled so as to prevent her from straying too far during the night. Meanwhile a fire had been started and the cook prepared first a brew of tea and then the second meal of the day. The crew were kept busy inspecting and, if necessary, mending equipment and overhauling cargo. ‘At the end of a hard day’s work the men would drink down a big pannikin of scalding hot tea, and feel that it was a pretty good world.’88 Any time available after the meal was devoted to recreation. Hispanic muleteers, the censorious complained, were irremediably addicted to gambling and played monte, a Spanish-American card game, whenever opportunity offered.89 The crew bedded down, often under blankets in the open, at an early hour, since they had to rise well before dawn the next morning.90 This demanding but fairly repetitive round lasted for a considerable number of days, because the pack trains did not move fast in the best of circumstances. As a British observer wrote, when aparejos rather than crosstree saddles were employed, ‘the pace can never be more than a walk’.91 At a court case tried in December 1862 two packers testified that, during the optimum months of June to August, a train would take at least thirty days to cover the 230 miles from Lillooet on the middle Fraser river to the Cariboo goldfields (under eight miles a day), while a third estimated thirty-two to thirty-four days.92 There were plenty of causes for delay. A storm or heavy rain would keep the train in camp for that day. A particularly heavy or bulky item, such as the ship’s boiler plates transported to the upper Fraser river in 1862 or the gold stamp mill weighing 667 lb carried by a single mule over a 100 mile trail, would slow down the progress of an entire train.93 Encounters with outfits coming from the opposite direction brought the train to a standstill. Halts were made to sell foodstuffs and other goods. As an outfit travelled it swapped news and gossip with travellers and local inhabitants. ‘It is not

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nearly so lively these last few years since the pack-trains were given up,’ the daughter of an early packer lamented in 1929. ‘Every now and then a motorcar goes along there but it is gone before you see it, but in the old days you could hear the pack-train and it took some time to pass, and if you were down near the boundary fence you would hear of the news from the packers.’94 As they made their slow way to their destinations the pack trains thus served more purposes than the carriage of goods. On arriving at its destination a train would dispose of its cargo. When the goods were to be delivered to a specific merchant, no problem existed. Selling direct to the public was a more uncertain business. In the summer of 1862 a miner at Van Winkle creek reported, ‘directly a train of grub arrives it is picked up as soon as it is unloaded at any price they choose to ask and only sold for cash even to the best men in the country’.95 In the autumn of that same year the gold towns of the Cariboo were ‘loaded up with winter stocks, and prices were so low that packers could get little more than freight rates for whatever goods they might have on hand’.96 To avoid such risks, a cargador carrying his own goods might entrust them to a local merchant who ‘engaged in the commission business, advancing money to packers, and getting ten per cent for selling goods’.97 Some pack masters ‘would wait for Sunday’, which ‘was the miner’s day off and a busy day for all those in the mining towns’, a veteran American packer recalled, ‘and then, unpacking their goods, would often sell out their stock in the day. If there was any remainder, it was disposed of to some merchant at a price which covered the packing charges and a fair profit on the goods.’98 There was no certainty that a speculative cargo could be sold. In 1870, during the Omineca gold rush, one packer took in a loaded train from Fort St James but, before reaching the mining camps along Vital Creek, learnt that no market existed. The diggings were exhausted and all the miners had departed to new strikes on Germansen Creek. He was forced to dump his goods outside Takla Landing.99 For the journey back to the pack train’s base, at Lillooet or Yale in the early days and later at Quesnel, Ashcroft or Hazelton, the cargador attempted to find as much cargo as he could, but the load was likely to be small. Packers would have endorsed a judge’s 1863 observation about ‘gold dust being a most inconvenient freight’.100 The journey down to the coast would therefore be made comparatively speedily. Indeed, the success of a packing outfit really depended on how many full cargo loads it could carry each year before winter closed the trails. When the snows came, the cargador took his animals to a sheltered site where he could be sure of finding sufficient grass until the return of good weather. In the early 1860s a group of Mexican packers began to spend the winter at the forks of the Nicola river, thus beginning a settlement that became the town of Merritt. Other Mexican packers spent their winters in the Similkameen valley, on the site of what is now the town of Cawston.101 Later in the century, when the building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad line shifted the base of packing outfits northwards, the pack animals were wintered in the Bonaparte and other valleys close to the railhead at Ashcroft.102 As settlement thickened and road communication improved it

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became easier to provide pack animals with grain feed in winter, and so access to snow-free pasture became less important. Pack trains were capable of moving very considerable quantities of goods, often through difficult terrain. A train of twenty-eight mules would carry about four tons, a similar number of horses about three tons. Packing was never a cheap form of transport. Animals and equipment required a considerable outlay of capital. The cost of personnel, in the form of wages and keep, was high. Any attempt to cut expenditure in respect of animals, equipment and personnel was counterproductive. Since packing was for long the only practical means of transport on the British Columbia resource frontier, pack-train masters had little incentive to keep their freight charges low. In April 1859 the Times correspondent in British Columbia estimated that, while it cost just over 1¢ per lb to carry goods from London to Victoria, the cost of moving goods from Victoria to the gold mines was about eleven times greater (11·6¢). The cost of carriage from Victoria to Douglas or Yale, the heads of navigation, was not in fact markedly higher than the sea freights (1·4¢ per lb). It was the land transport that was so expensive, the basic charge in 1859–60 being 12¢ (2·4p) per lb.103 In July 1862, at the very height of the Cariboo gold rush, the cost of freighting goods from both Lillooet and Yale to the gold fields reached as high as 65¢ (15p) per pound.104 Freight charges oscillated wildly in part because, as a mode of transport, packing was incapable of adapting to a sudden expansion or decrease in demand. The supply of animals, equipment and personnel was not elastic and an outfit could be neither rapidly assembled nor swiftly laid off. In 1861–62 a prolonged winter put back the start of the mining season and the opening of the trails northward. The pack trains lacked the capacity to bring in sufficient supplies for the thousands of men pouring into the goldfields. ‘There has been such a rush of strangers here this year that animals are not in the country to pack provisions for one half the crowd,’ wrote a miner to his family in the summer of 1862.105 The selling price of flour, a key commodity, rose to $1·50 (30p) per lb in July and August. Bishop George Hills, visiting the goldfields, noted in his diary on 13 August:
Yesterday the price of flour again rose to a Dollar & half a lb. It is down today at a Dollar & quarter. I met Mr S. MacDonald, a Packer, he said the price of flour at Yale is 8 cents, the Packers freight is 65 cents to Williams Creek, in all 73. So upon $1.50 the Traders’ gain is 77¢, above hundred per cent, & upon 1.25, 52¢ or near 70 per cent.106

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These high prices did not last, since new cargoes came in and miners left the goldfields for the winter. At the end of September 1862 a Victoria newspaper reported that ‘freights in the upper country are now so low that packers are turning out their animals to winter, rather than work them for unremunerative prices’.107 It is no wonder that exploitation by merchants and packers was a constant

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cause of complaint among prospectors and miners, who, having no alternative, could grumble but had to pay what was asked. Money was there to be made by everyone involved in packing. In July 1860 Bishop Hills, then at Lillooet, commented, ‘Packing is one of the most lucrative employments. A train of 12 or 13 Horses, or mules, very soon pays the expenses of first cost[s] and then great profits are made.’108 In December that year Ramon Gutierrez, a Mexican who had been ‘previously working up the Country in the mule trains as Muleteer’, complained to the police at New Westminster that he had just been robbed of gold dust worth $450 kept in his saddlebags. The two magistrates who heard the complaint expressed no scepticism as to the value of his loss. In May 1863 a Latin American packer testified in court that ‘I earned $693 last season beyond expenses starting with 5 horses’.109 The difficulty for packers lay not so much in making money as in keeping it. As a long-time resident of Lillooet remarked in old age, packers ‘used to pasture their stock across the river at what was originally known as Parsonville and afterwards as East Lillooet, and they came across here by ferry for liquor and women’.110 If drink and women did not consume a packer’s savings, gambling might well do so. Hoarded savings could be easily stolen, as Ramon Gutierrez discovered in 1860. Those who eschewed temptation and guarded their money carefully could still come to grief. Bad weather could bring disaster. ‘In ’62 I lost my pack train on Bald Mountain during the winter, many other packers suffered a similar loss,’ Donald Walker recalled in old age.111 Animals could easily fall sick, stray or be stolen. Cargoes could be lost, damaged or abandoned. Trusted employees could peculate or abscond.112 Illness and death intervened to thwart the best laid plans. Rheumatism and pneumonia were occupational hazards. In the summer of 1883 Pancho Gutierrez contracted pneumonia while travelling with his pack train. Miles from any medical care, he died at Clinton on 14 August, leaving his Aboriginal wife to bring up four children.113 Not everyone had the foresight or the good fortune of Manuel Barcelo or Jesus Garcia, who managed their outfits efficiently and used the profits to buy land near where they wintered their animals. Both retired from packing before it exceeded their strength and both died wealthy men.114 The high and uncertain cost of carriage by pack train encouraged demands for the introduction of speedier and more flexible means of transport. The colonial government responded by building the Cariboo Wagon Road, which at first (1863) ran from Lillooet to Soda Creek on the upper Fraser and, when completed in 1865, from Yale to Barkerville in the heart of the mining area. Although exceedingly expensive, burdening the colony of British Columbia with a heavy debt, the new road achieved its purpose, serving as an indispensable north–south artery.115 The road certainly reduced transport costs. ‘On anything like a passable road,’ a veteran packer observed, ‘it was far cheaper to haul merchandise, than to pack it; bigger loads could be carried, better time made, and the expense of equipment and labor was greatly reduced.’116 Although freighting did not eliminate pack trains, even on the Cariboo Wagon Road itself, by the early 1880s they had become a

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cause for comment, as the following item in the Inland Sentinel of Yale shows:
A Good Turn-out. Friday of last week might have been seen one of the finest pack trains traveling the Cariboo road. There were 53 mules, in excellent condition and full of life. … When the mules are loaded they look, to those not used to such scenes, rather singular. … [They] travel about 15 to 20 miles per day. Every night the animals are unloaded and reloaded again in the morning; this labor has to be gone through until the end of the journey, sometimes requiring weeks to perform the task and reach their destination.117

By the time the wagon road to the Cariboo was complete, in 1865, the yield from the goldfields had started a long decline. Using Quesnel, a town on the upper Fraser river and the northern end of the wagon road (which there turned east), as their base, the miners began prospecting northwards. The discovery of the Omineca mines in 1869 was followed in 1873 by that of the far richer Cassiar mines, in the distant north-west of British Columbia.118 Supplying the mining camps in those areas expanded and revitalised the trading trails north of Quesnel already established by the Aboriginal people and the Hudson’s Bay Company.
There were no wagons above Quesnel when I came to the country twentythree years ago [a former packer recalled in 1929] and of course no wagonroads. You had to pack everything on horseback, or travel on foot with your grub and blankets. There were well-travelled trails in every direction from Quesnel, and you could get anywhere in comfort, as we considered it, from there.119

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The construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, one of the benefits promised to British Columbia in return for joining the Confederation in 1871, stimulated a renewed burst of packing. When completed in 1885 the new railway caused Ashcroft, the station closest to the Cariboo, to replace Yale as the base of both packers and freighters.120 The increased pace of economic life in British Columbia in the second half of the 1880s and into the 1890s kept packers busy, especially in the Kootenay area, where the new hard rock mines were being prospected and developed.121 In the north of the province the Yukon gold rush of 1898, the construction of the Yukon Telegraph line in 1900–01, the building of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway in 1910–14 and a boom in mining in the years before the First World War meant that ‘packing was big business’.122 During the thirty years from 1885 to 1914 the role played in British Columbia by packing changed significantly. It became subsumed in ‘freighting’ and generally ceased to provide a sole occupation for anyone. ‘Charley Barrett did a great deal of freighting for the contractors [building the Grand Trunk Pacific] nearer the coast during construction days, and had a packtrain of sixty mules and fifty horses,’ David Hoy, a veteran rancher and packer, recalled in 1929. ‘Like myself, he got a market for the produce of his

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ranch in the [railway] camps, and made use of his grain to feed his horses and mules.’123 These packers were doing themselves out of business, as Hoy pointed out.
As soon as the railway was completed and in operation it was the finish of the pack-train and dog-team and other modes of freighting in this part of the country, and when the Pacific Great Eastern Railway began running [from Squamish] to Quesnel it put an end to the Cariboo Road in the same way.’124

In the years between the two World Wars packing continued to survive in the far north of British Columbia. Based on Hazelton, the trains carried in supplies for the Yukon Telegraph line, the Hudson’s Bay Company posts, the newly opened mines, and the prospecting and surveying parties.125 By the 1930s new technology in transport and communications increasingly made packing unnecessary. From 1936 onwards short-wave radio stations replaced the posts on the Yukon Telegraph line. The development of bush aviation meant decreased traffic on the packing trails, which soon became overgrown and unusable.126 The expansion of British Columbia’s road network from 1945 onwards and increasing use of the ‘cat’ (all-terrain vehicle) meant that pack trains finally ceased to be viable except as outfits for big game hunting. During this last era most of the pack trains were run by the local Indian people who provided the crews. One figure stood out: David Wiggins, ‘one of the best saddlemen in the province’.127 Born around 1870, ‘Darkie Dave’ was the son of David Wiggins, the Afro-American packer who had come to British Columbia in 1858, and an Aboriginal woman. The 1891 census shows Wiggins as employed in the household of a Mexican packer, Rafael Valenzuela.128 He thereafter became part of Cataline’s outfit. When George Beirnes purchased Cataline’s pack train, about 1912, David Wiggins was one of the assets that changed hands.129 He took over as cargador for Beirnes, packing supplies each summer up the Yukon Telegraph trail. We even have a photograph of him, sitting encircled by the aparejos of his pack animals, busy repairing the rigging.130 He continued active and employed during and after the Second World War. In the summer of 1949 Wiggins, then close to eighty years old, was flown into the Ground Hog Basin, north of Hazelton, in order to bring out a train of horses trapped there. ‘I’ll never fly them mechanical birds again!’ he informed his friends.131 Two eras in transport history had for an instant intersected. The death of ‘Darkie Dave’ Wiggins on 16 January 1951 marked, as well as any single event could do, the end of packing as a mode of carrying goods in the province of British Columbia.132

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Notes
1 See Herbert S. Klein, ‘The supply of mules to central Brazil: the Sorocaba market, 1825–80’, Agricultural History 64, 4 (1990), pp. 1–25; José Alípio Goulart, Tropas e tropeiros na formação do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1961); Nicolás Sanchez-Albornoz, ‘La saca de mulas de Salta al Peru, 1778–1808’, Anuario del Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas 8 (1970), pp. 264–314; Floyd F. Ewing, Jr, ‘The mule as a factor in the development of the southwest’, Arizona and the West 5 (1963), pp. 315–26; Emmett E. Essin, ‘Mules, packs, and pack trains’, Southwestern Historical Quarterly 74, 1 (1970), pp. 52–80. 2 James Watt, born in Ohio in 1843, came to Washington State in 1860 and spent the rest of his life as a prospector, packer and rancher in the region. His oral reminiscences, recorded in the late 1920s, were first published in the Washington Historical Quarterly 19 (1928) and 20 (1929) and were reprinted as a pamphlet, Journal of Mule Train Packing in Eastern Washington in the 1860’s (Fairfield WA, 1978). References are to the pamphlet, in which the passage quoted is on p. 34. 3 See Jean Barman, The West beyond the West: a history of British Columbia, revised edition (Toronto, 1991), pp. 32–43; Richard S. Mackie, Trading beyond the Mountains: the British fur trade on the Pacific, 1793–1843 (Vancouver BC, 1997), pp. 3–34, 257–83, and Carlos A. Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: an interpretative history, revised edition (Lincoln NE, 1989), pp. 25–79. 4 See William J. Trimble, The Mining Advance into the Inland Empire (Madison WI, 1914), pp. 15–27. 5 The colony of Vancouver Island had been created in 1849. The two colonies were merged in 1866 as the United Colony of British Columbia; see Barman, The West, pp. 53, 81. 6 This route, that ran from Douglas at the head of Harrison Lake north, via a mixture of trails and lakes, to Cayoosh (later Lillooet) on the middle Fraser river, was first surveyed in 1847 and opened up in 1858–59; see James R. Gibson, Lifeline of the Oregon Country: the Fraser Columbia Brigade System, 1811–47 (Vancouver BC, 1997), p. 279, n. 48, and R[ichard] C. Mayne, Four Years in British Columbia and Vancouver Island: an account of their forests, rivers, coasts, gold fields and resources for colonisation (1862), pp. 50, 56, 93, 130. See Louis Lebourdais’s comments on the supplying of the Omineca mining camps by air, British Columbia Archives (Victoria BC; hereafter BCA), Add. Ms 676 LLB, vol. 9, file 19, Typescript headed ‘New Slate Creek, Omineca’ and dated by hand ‘November 22, 1934,’ p. 2 (hereafter Lebourdais, ‘New Slate Creek’). Letter to the editor from ‘M.F.’, Victoria Gazette, 29 February 1860; BCA C AB 30 3 N 1, British Columbia Supreme Court, Notes of Proceedings, 1 December 1862–16 April 1863, Judge Matthew B. Begbie’s notes on the evidence of William J. Armstrong in the case of Cranford v. Wright, 14 December 1862, p. 51 (hereafter ‘Cranford v. Wright’); John Keast Lord, At Home in the Wilderness: what to do there and how to do it: a handbook for travellers and emigrants (1876), p. 7; Watt, Journal, pp. 19–20; BCA E E M963, Typed reminiscences of Alexander Campbell Murray, Fort St James, no date [but before January 1931], p. 16 (hereafter ‘Reminiscences of A. C. Murray’). BCA Add. Ms 843, Diary of James Willison G[rant] Nelles, entry of 22 May 1862. In the 1860s the exchange rate oscillated around $5 = £1. Watt, Journal, p. 19. In Shavetails and Bell Sharps: the history of the US army mule (Lincoln NE, 1997) E. M. Essin shows, on pp. 91–8, that in the 1870s the superiority of mule over horse forced the US army, despite its prejudices, to adopt mule pack trains as its means of transport in its wars with the Aboriginal people. ‘Time and place: more about pack trains and Cataline, by Hugh McLean, as told to Wiggs O’Neill’, Terrace Omineca Herald, 24 December 1963 (hereafter ‘Time and place’); and see Lord, At Home in the Wilderness, p. 79: ‘when this dreaded affair is fairly on, you might as well attempt to make a log move as induce a blinded mule to shift its position’. Joe Back, Horses, Hitches and Rocky Trails (Boulder CO, 1989), p. 48, and see Lord, At Home in the Wilderness, pp. 19–21, and George M. Grant, Ocean to Ocean: Sandford Fleming’s Expedition through Canada in 1872 (Toronto, 1873), pp. 272–3.

7

8

9

10

11

12

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13 George Harwood Phillips, Indians and Intruders in Central California, 1769– 1849 (Norman OK, 1997), pp. 82–8; Goulart, Tropas, pp. 35–7; SánchezAlbornez, ‘La saca’. 14 None of the photographs of animals taken during the 1860s includes donkeys, indispensable for mule breeding; personal communication from Richard Thomas Wright, 11 February 1999. The adverse effect on mules of the severe British Columbia winters during the 1860s can be deduced from Lord, At Home in the Wilderness, p. 17, D. W. Higgins, The Mystic Spring, and other Tales of Western Life (Toronto, 1904), p. 204, and BCA Colonial Correspondence (hereafter ‘CC’), file 142f, Judge Matthew Begbie Baillie to the Colonial Secretary, Victoria, Vancouver Island, 19 January 1863. 15 Information given, citing no source, in Ron Angelin, Forgotten Trails: historical sources of the Columbia’s Big Bend country, ed. Glen W. Lindeman (Pullman WA, 1995), p. 162. In late July 1862 a group of Americans, arriving at Van Winkle, ‘sold Billy Mule at once for $140’; see BCA Add. Ms 676, vol. 5, file 17, Diary of C. S. Hathaway, entry of 6 August 1862. According to Lord, At Home in the Wilderness, p. 16, mules purchased in California ‘on a rough average, will amount to about 120 dollars (25£.) to 150 dollars (30£.) per head’. 16 British Colonist, 23 September 1861. 17 See Watt, Journal, p. 19. 18 British Colonist, 23 September 1861. This news item is separate from the one quoted above. 19 See James R. Gibson, Farming the Frontier: the agricultural opening of the Oregon country, 1786–1846 (Vancouver BC, 1985), pp. 52–3, and Angelin, Forgotten Trails, p. 58. During 1862 686 mules and 3,097 horses entered British Columbia by the customs post at Osyoos, on the inland trail from the United States; see BCA CC 1862, Report by John C. Haynes. 20 Memoir of Robert Stevenson, in W. Wymond Walkem, Stories of Early British Columbia (Vancouver BC, 1914), p. 142; Angelin, Forgotten Trails, p. 167, citing the diary of George Masiker, held at the University of Oregon. 21 Inland Sentinel, 30 August 1883, 21 August 1884. Between 11 and 18 September 1876 eleven mule teams, pulling 96,850 lb, left Yale up the Cariboo road, compared with seven horse teams,

22

23

24

25 26 27

28

29

30

31

pulling 37,200 lb; British Colonist, 22 September 1876. Provincial Archives of Manitoba, Hudson’s Bay Company Archives MF 1214, Correspondence, Manager to A. C. McNab, 23 January 1902; Reminiscences of A. C. Murray, p. 11. University of British Columbia Library, Special Collections, Typescript copy of Donald Graham’s diary, 30 April–23 September 1876 (hereafter ‘Diary of D. Graham’). See the entry of 8 May: ‘We arrived at Clear Water River about 10 a.m. … Train got to river about noon. With the exception of horned cattle, the animals were got across easily.’ ‘Most of our packing terms were Spanish, picked up by the Forty-niners from the Mexicans in California’; see Watt, Journal, p. 39. Of the equipment, the words aparejo, carona, latigo and manta are Spanish, while ‘lariat’ and ‘hackamore’ derive from Spanish (la riata and jáquima). Ibid. Diary of D. Graham, entry of 10 August 1876. The best description of the ‘rigging’ is in Lord, At Home in the Wilderness, pp. 69–71, 74-9, a description confirmed by that in Watt, Journal, pp. 39, 41, 42, and by that in W. A. Baillie-Grohman, Fifteen Years’ Sport and Life in the Hunting Grounds of Western America and British Columbia (1900), pp. 20–1. Lord distinguished the aparejo from the rigging but, for convenience, it is here included. Victoria City Archives and Record Service, W. A. G. Young Collection, Receipt from J. Martin, dated 2nd/16th September 1863. In 1868 Ben. Douglas advertised ‘A good supply of Whips, Blacksnakes, Ladies, Aparajo and other Leathers’, British Columbia Examiner, 7 December 1868. See Watt, Journal, pp. 39, 41. Lord, At Home in the Wilderness, p. 72, mentions $50 (£10) as the price of an aparejo and the same amount for the rest of the rigging. ‘The weight of this rig is very much greater than that of the pack-saddle, with its cross-trees at both ends, but, notwithstanding this, far greater weights can be transported on the aparejo, though the pace can never be more than a walk’; see Baillie-Grohman, Fifteen Years, pp. 20–1. See Diary of D. Graham, entry of 10 August 1876; Lord, At Home in the Wilderness, pp. 71, 204; ‘Time and

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place’. 32 In 1867 Mrs M. R. Toy was listed as running a pack train of ten animals out of Yale and as owning a hotel in Clinton; see The Pacific Coast Business Directory for 1867 … (San Francisco CA, 1867), pp. 565–6. Sophie Morigeau (1835– 1916) ran a pack train in the Kootenays and Montana; see Olga W. Johnson (ed.), The Tobacco Plains Country: the autobiography of a community (Caldwell ID, 1950), pp. 41–50, and Marie Cuffe Shea, Early Flathead and Tobacco Plains: a narrative history of northwestern Montana (n.p., 1977), pp. 98–102. In the 1930s Mrs Dora Moore ran a pack train in the gold-mining area around Bridge River; see BCA Add. Ms 676 LLB, vol. 11, file 26, Undated clipping from unidentified newspaper. 33 BCA E E H85, Typed reminiscences of David Henry Hoy, freighter and trapper, Fort St James [interviewed at Prince George, 8 October 1929], p. 6 (hereafter ‘Reminiscences of D. H. Hoy’). 34 Watt, Journal, p. 45. John Keast Lord never discusses the treatment or the pay of packers nor describes who they were. His references to packers’ trustworthiness are all negative and carping; see At Home in the Wilderness, pp. 71, 160, 164. 35 Report of the Rev. James Reynard, Twelfth Annual Report of the Columbia Mission for the Year 1870 (1871), p. 63. 36 Reminiscences of D. H. Hoy, p. 6. 37 Typescript of the diary of Sergeant John (Jock) McMurphy (original held in the Royal Canadian Engineers Museum, Camp Chilliwack, Chilliwack BC), entry of 10 June 1862 (hereafter ‘Diary of Sergeant McMurphy’). 38 Report of the Rev. James Reynard, Twelfth Annual Report, p. 64; Watt, Journal, p. 19; BCA C AB 30 3 N 2, British Columbia Supreme Court, Notes of Proceedings, 24 April 1863–23 April 1864, Judge Matthew B. Begbie’s notes on the evidence of Oscar Bailey in M‘Linden v. Snow & Bailey, Lytton Assizes, 2 May 1863; BCA GR 569, vol. 1, Lillooet, County Court, p. 145, plaint No. 75, 1 August 1862, Bidante v. Mattingley; p. 1924, plaint No. 98, 17 November 1862, Flynn v. Mattingley. 39 Watt, Journal, p. 47. 40 Diary entry of 19 June 1859, transcribed in George F. G. Stanley (ed.), Mapping the Frontier: Charles Wilson’s diary of the survey of the 49th parallel, 1858–62, while Secretary of the British Boundary Commission (Toronto, 1970), p. 52.

41 Entry of 18 June 1860, at Yale. On 12 July 1860, at Lillooet, he commented, ‘The packers are principally Mexicans. There are, however, many Americans.’ See R. L. Bagshaw (ed.), No Better Land: the 1860 diaries of the Anglican colonial bishop George Hills (Vancouver BC, 1996), pp. 150, 184. Of the forty packers treated during the 1860s and 1870s at the Royal Columbian Hospital, New Westminister BC, twenty-eight were Latin American; see BCA Film 95A, Hospital Register, 1862–1901. 42 See the references to Spanish Americans joining the gold rush to British Columbia in 1858 in Doyce B. Nunis, Jr (ed.), The Golden Frontier: recollections of Herman Francis Reinhart, 1851–69 (Austin TX, 1962), pp. 118–19, 120–1, 122, 134–5. 43 Oral information passed down in the family and kindly communicated to me by Mr Al Gutierrez, Khawathil (Katz Landing) BC, 17 March 1997. Other evidence shows that the brothers came from Buena Vista, Sonora State. 44 This paragraph is based on my on-going research into the pre-1914 Hispanic and Portuguese community of British Columbia. That research draws on the 1881, 1891 and 1901 censuses, manuscript and printed sources from the period, and secondary literature. 45 Writing home to Nova Scotia in May 1888, a schoolteacher remarked, ‘There were four half-breed girls there belonging to one family – Kossuth or Garcia, they get both names, one is Spanish & the other English. They have attended schools for years but in spite of that they still have the squaw looks & manners. Their father is a Mexican Spaniard, and is himself as black as any Dinash, so they come honestly by their black looks.’ See Nicola Valley Archive, Merritt BC, A78–34–06, Jessie McQueen to Catherine McQueen, Lower Nicola, 28 May 1888. The father was Jesus Garcia, whose first name was customarily pronounced in British Columbia ‘Cassus,’ heard by outsiders as ‘Kossuth’. 46 On David Wiggins, Sr, see ‘Whiskey Cases’, British Colonist, 24 July 1860; BCA E E D42, Typed reminiscences of John Dunlop, Lillooet, undated, p. 4; ‘Pioneer packer frozen to death’, Interior News, 1 February 1951. On Jean Caux, better known as Cataline, see R. J. Barman, ‘Jean Caux’, Dictionary of Canadian Biography XV (forthcoming). 47 BCA GR 833, Trade Licences, Licence No. 367, 22 July 1862; National

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48

49

50 51

52 53

54

55

Archives of Canada, Department of Indian Affairs, RG 10, vol. 3656, file 9063, C10115, J. N. Powell, Indian Superintendent, British Columbia, to the Superintendent General, Ottawa, Indian Office, Victoria, 22 July 1886. See also Margaret Ormsby (ed.), A Pioneer Gentlewoman in British Columbia: the recollections of Susan Allison (Vancouver BC, 1976), p. 21, and Andrea Laforet and Annie York, Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon histories, 1808–1939 (Vancouver BC, 1998), p. 76. See BCA E C B172.2, Typed reminiscences of Mrs August Baker (born Susie Elmore), Quesnel, ‘October 11th, 1929’, p. 1 (hereafter ‘Reminiscences of Mrs Baker’), and E E M311, Typed reminiscences of William Francis Manson, Indian constable at Stony Creek, 2 October 1929, p. 16. See the obituary of Pierre Jack, born 16 December 1869, died 28 March 1971, in the Thirty-fifth Report of the Okanagan Historical Society (1971), 140–1. On Jean Marie and his wife Agathe see Lebourdais, ‘New Slate Creek’, p. 5. See ‘Time and place’. BCA GR 833, Trade Licences, Licences Nos 266, 320, 344, 348, 354, 393; The Pacific Coast Business Directory for 1867, p. 565. On Kong Lee, the leading Chinese merchant in British Columbia, see Walter Cheadle, Cheadle’s Journal of a Trip across Canada, 1862–63, new edition (Edmonton AB, 1971), pp. 267–8. Reminiscences of Mrs Baker, p. 5, confirmed by W. J. Trimble, Mining Advance, p. 147. Of the 25·6 (short) tons of goods that Robert Cranford, Jr, sent north from Victoria in the summer of 1862, foodstuffs made up 22·75 tons, or 89 per cent; see Cranford v. Wright, 4 December 1862, pp. 81–3, which itemise the goods dispatched by the plaintiff. The Anglican Church, Ecclesiastical Province of British Columbia, Archives, Typescript of the Bishop George Hills diaries (hereafter Diary of Bishop Hills). On 29 May 1862 a miner noted in his diary, ‘Struck tent at 6 AM walkd 19 miles campd side Bonaparte river and found had taken the wrong road and lost about 20 miles. Bought flour and beans from one of the Hudson Bay Company trains.’ See BCA Add. Ms 676, vol. 5, file 17, LLB, ‘Diary of Unknown Cariboo Miner found by Mrs Alf Brown in the old Bowron House (in the attic), 1930’. On 5 July 1862 Bishop Hills deplored

56

57

58

59

60 61

62

63

64

the fact that in the Cariboo mining camps ‘train after train was coming in laden not with the necessaries of life, to keep poor men from starvation, but with whiskey, and Billiard Tables’; see Diary of Bishop Hills. The cargo sent north in the summer of 1862 by Robert Cranford, Jr, included picks, pick handles, shovels, nails, shirts, hose and boots and shoes, to a total weight of 1·73 (short) tons; see Cranford v. Wright, pp. 81–3. On 5 September 1862 Bishop Hills noted, ‘I met today two trains whose principal cargo was Champagne for the mines’; see Diary of Bishop Hills. The cargo sent north in the summer of 1862 by Robert Cranford, Jr, included 252 lb of ‘ginger snaps’, 180 lb of canned lobsters and 118 lb of canned oysters; see Cranford v. Wright, pp. 81–3. BCA E C B81.3, Typed notes of conversation with James Nathaniel Jerome Brown, carpenter, 1515 Venables Street, Vancouver BC, 7 July 1930, marked ‘As told to Robert Hartley’, p. 1. Diary of Sergeant McMurphy, entries of 7, 11 June, 11 July, 28 September 1862; and see entry of 16 October 1863 in Cheadle, Journal, p. 245. Reminiscences of Mrs Baker, p. 5. See the adverse comment made by the Colonial Secretary of British Columbia in 1864 on the trail from Fort Shepherd to Kootenay Valley: ‘it would be impossible for packers to pass through this portion without carrying food for their animals’. Arthur N. Birch to Frederick Seymour, Governor of British Columbia, New Westminster BC, 31 October 1864, transcribed in Matthew Macfie, Vancouver Island and British Columbia: their history, resources, and prospects (1865), p. 257. BCA Add. Ms 2013, Untitled ledger (misidentified in the archive catalogue as ‘The Packers Account Book of Dodge and Co.’), with toll entries from 1 September 1862 to 17 December 1864. In September 1862 there were eightythree outfits carrying 274,230 lb. Diary entry cited in Rev. D. Wallace Duthie, ed., A Bishop in the Rough (1909), p. 74. Sheepshanks visited the Cariboo gold fields in August and September 1862. BCA CC file 142f, Judge Matthew B. Baillie to the Colonial Secretary, Victoria, Vancouver Island, 19 January 1863. In December 1862 John Jeffries testified, ‘I wo.d not have taken a cargo

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65 66

67 68

69 70

71

72

73

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74 75

to W.ms Crk with my own animals. I sh.d only take to [Quesnel] Fks – thence to the mines on cayooshes. Very seldom a train goes through’; see Cranford v. Wright, p. 166. Diary entry of 19 June 1859, transcribed in Stanley, Mapping the Frontier, p. 53. See R. Byron Johnson, Very Far West Indeed: a few rough experiences on the north-west Pacific coast (1872), pp. 74–5; Grant, Ocean to Ocean, pp. 266–7, 280–1; ‘Memories of Alice Maude Mary Northcott, Mrs Early’, Quesnel Advertiser, 15 October 1976. Diary of D. Graham, entry of 10 August. Ibid., entries of 1 and 16 June; Lord, At Home in the Wilderness, pp. 184–8. Three Mexican packers employed by the British Boundary Commission drowned in July 1860 when two canoes swamped while crossing the Ashnola river; see Stanley, Mapping the Frontier, p. 119 n. Diary of D. Graham, entry of 14 May. BCA GR 1554, British Columbia County Court (Victoria), Naturalisation applications and oaths of allegiance, box 3, April 1873–May 1874, file 4, No. 210B. Oral information passed down in the family and kindly communicated to me by Mr Al Gutierrez, Khawathil (Katz Landing) BC, 17 March 1997. Account by Frank Garcia in ‘Nicola Pioneers Column, No. 12’, Merritt Herald, 30 November 1934. On 8 September 1859 a trading licence was granted at Lytton to ‘Jesios Gasso’ as a packer; see BCA GR 833, Trade Licences, No. 70. On 14 August 1862 Bishop Hills noted, ‘A Packer today told me there was great difficulty in getting supplies from the Lower Towns. One reason was the provisions were not there, another reason the merchants would not sell except for cash. So that if a Packer could not pay for his goods before taking them he could not have any. He complained of this on the ground of requiring a large capital.’ Diary of Bishop Hills. In his memoirs Dr Helmcken wrote, of the years 1864–65, ‘The merchants were in a bad state; the packers to whom huge credits had been given without adequate security could not pay, but the goods were gone, tremendous losses’; see Dorothy Blakey Smith (ed.), The Reminiscences of Doctor John Sebastian Helmcken (Vancouver BC, 1975), p. 207. Watt, Journal, p. 45. The Pacific Coast Business Directory for

76 77

78

79

80

81 82

83

84

85 86

87 88

1867, p. 565. Fifty-nine pack trains were listed, but two have to be excluded from the calculations. The number of animals in the train of J. Davis is not given. The train of the Collins Overland Telegraph Company, which numbered 300 animals, was not a trading outfit. Ibid. Watt, Journal, pp. 26, 32; Trimble, Mining Advance, p. 58; and see R. Cole Harris, ‘Moving admist the mountains, 1870–1930’, BC Studies 58 (1983), p. 5. In 1861 the trading licences issued at Lytton to packers were taken out mainly in March, in 1862 not until May and June, in 1863 in April and May, in 1864 in March, in 1865 not until May, and in 1866 in April and May; see BCA GR 833, Trade Licences. Diary of D. Graham, entry of 16 May. Camping sites ‘averaged about 15 miles apart, at convenient places where there was feed and water’, according to Watt, Journal, p. 42. These qualities characterise the two probable camping sites I have inspected: Mexican Flats, on the north bank of the Fraser river, near Whonnock BC, and Spanish Prairie, just north of the town of Colville WA. The names of the sites point to their having served as camping grounds for pack trains. See Watt, Journal, p. 41. Diary of D. Graham, entry of 14 May; and see J. H. E. Secretan, Canada’s Great Highway: from the first spike to the last spike (1924), p. 58. Secretan, Canada’s Great Highway, p. 58; Lord, At Home in the Wilderness, pp. 158–69; Watt, Journal, pp. 41–2. The pack train supplying the stations on the Yukon Telegraph line from Hazelton to the Naas river in the 1920s followed precisely the procedures described by Graham, Lord and Watt; see H. Glynn-Ward, The Glamour of British Columbia (Toronto, 1932), pp. 128–32. See Watt, Journal, p. 41. In the early days the two men loaded fourteen animals and later as many as eighteen or twenty. See ‘Time and place’. Packers used both mules and horses to ride. Lord, At Home in the Wilderness, pp. 170–4; Watt, Journal, p. 42. Lord placed the cargador at the head and Watt at the rear of the train (which seems the more likely). I infer that the foreman (segundo) took the other post. Diary of D. Graham. Reminiscences of D. H. Hoy, p. 6.

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89 On the reputation of the Mexican packers as gamblers see Johnson, Very Far West Indeed, p. 67, and the comments in the Victoria Gazette, 8 August 1858, on the recent conviction of Antonio Garcia for keeping a gambling house at Fort Hope. 90 Lord, At Home in the Wilderness, pp. 196, 204. 91 Baillie-Grohman, Fifteen Years, pp. 20–1. 92 Evidence of William J. Armstrong, George W. Campbell and Frederick Black in Cranford v. Wright, 9 December 1862, pp. 50–2. 93 Diary of Sergeant McMurphy, entries of 7, 11 June, 11 July, 28 September 1862; Wat, Journal, p. 43. 94 Reminiscences of Mrs Baker, p. 11. 95 BCA Add. Ms 48, file 2, Typescript of letters sent by Dr John B. Wilkinson to members of his family in Ontario, letter, Van Winkle Creek, undated [July 1862]. 96 Memoir of J. C. Bryant in Walkem, Stories, p. 142. 97 Memoirs of Robert Stevenson in ibid., p. 261. 98 Watt, Journal, pp. 11, 43. In 1860 Bishop Hills was informed that Sunday closing of stores in the town of Lillooet was not possible, since ‘it was the custom for the miners to do their business that day & they came in from a distance’; see diary entry of 14 December 1860 in Bagshaw, No Better Land, p. 278. 99 See Allan S. Trueman, ‘Placer Gold Mining in Northern British Columbia, 1860–90’, M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia, 1935, as reproduced in part in Thomas Turner (ed.), Sa Ts’e: historical perspectives on north British Columbia (Prince George BC, 1989), p. 91. 100 BCA CC, file 142f, Judge Matthew B. Baillie to the Colonial Secretary, Victoria, Vancouver Island, 19 January 1863. 101 Pat Lean, ‘The Garcia story’, Nicola Valley Historical Quarterly 6, 4 (1984), p. 2; Sam Manery, ‘Sam McCurdy stage driver passes’, Twentieth-eighth Report of the Okanagan Historical Society (1964), p. 48. 102 Reminiscences of Mrs Baker, p. 10. In 1868, after the laying of the second Atlantic cable from Ireland to Newfoundland had caused the Collins Overland Telegraph Company to abandon constructing its overland telegraph line through British Columbia, Alaska and Siberia, the mules and horses it was using

103

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106 107 108 109

110 111

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on the venture were being pastured at Alkali Lake, just to the west of the Bonaparte valley. See the offer for sale of these animals in the British Colonist, 19 May 1868. The Times, 3 June 1859; ‘Letter from Yale’, Victoria Gazette, 9 August 1859; letter from ‘M.F.’, Victoria Gazette, 29 February 1860. Evidence of Robert Cranford, Jr, in Cranford v. Wright, 9 December 1862, p. 88; Diary of Bishop Hills, entry of 13 August 1862. BCA Add. Ms 48, file 2, Typescript of letters sent by Dr John B. Wilkinson to members of his family in Ontario, letter, Van Winkle Creek, undated [July 1862]. In 1862 it was not until 28 April that the first trading licence was issued at Lytton to a packer, whereas in 1861 the first licence was issued on 5 March; see BCA GR 833, Trade Licences, Nos 264, 486. Diary of Bishop Hills. Daily Press, 25 September 1862. Entry of 12 July 1860 in Bagshaw, No Better Land, p. 184. BCA CC, New Westminster Police, Chartres Brew, Magistrate, to W. A. G. Young, Colonial Secretary, New Westminster BC, 13 December 1860, enclosing three depositions; BCA C AB 30 3 N 2, British Columbia Supreme Court, Notes of Proceedings, 24 April 1863–23 April 1864, Judge Matthew B. Begbie’s notes on the evidence of an unidentified Spanish-speaking witness in Burke v. Torres, Lytton Assizes, 2 May 1863. BCA E E D42, Typed reminiscences of John Dunlop, Lillooet, undated [c. 1931], p. 8. ‘A pioneer’s experiences, narrative of life and adventure with the H. B. Co.’, Inland Sentinel, 12 February 1904. The British Colonist, 3 November 1862, reported, ‘Among those who lost all their animals are Dan Shafer, Armstrong, and John Clugston – forty or fifty each. Several other smaller trains have also been lost.’ In British Columbia packers were generally spared one danger endemic south of the border. ‘Beside all this work we had to be on the alert to preserve our own scalps,’ James Watt remembered. ‘On the trail there was always more or less danger from attacks by hostile Indians, and murderous road agents [highwaymen]. If they didn’t kill you they might run off with your horses and mules, or rob you of your freight. It wasn’t an easy life by any means.’ See Watt, Journal,

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p. 46. 113 British Colonist, 26 August 1883. Fourteen of the forty packers treated at the Royal Columbia Hospital, New Westminster, in 1863–79 were suffering from some form of rheumatism; see BCA Film 95A, Hospital Register, 1862–1901. 114 Lean, ‘The Garcia story’, pp. 2–11; Doug Cox and Elizabeth Pryce, ‘The Barcelos of Cawston’, Fifty-fifth Report of the Okanagan Historical Society (1991), 99–105. 115 See Harris, ‘Moving’, p. 7. 116 Watt, Journal, p. 47. 117 Inland Sentinel, 30 August 1883. These comments suggest that on the road a mule train could travel between 20 per cent and 40 per cent farther a day (fifteen to twenty as against twelve to fourteen miles) than on a trail. In terms of costs the wagon team’s key advantages over the pack train were needing only a single driver and its cargo staying loaded throughout the journey. 118 Trueman, ‘Placer gold mining,’ pp. 85–7, 92–3, 97–8, 99. 119 Reminiscences of D. H. Hoy, p. 5. See also Glynn-Ward, Glamour, p. 107. Waterways, travelled by steamer and scow, were far more available for transport in this area of the province than in the south. 120 On the building of the CPR see J. Barman, The West, pp. 106–7. 121 See R. Cole Harris, The Resettlement of British Columbia (Vancouver BC, 1997), pp. 196–9, and Louise McFadden, ‘Andy Daney of Ferguson’, in Pioneer Days in British Columbia (Surrey BC, 1973), pp. 140–7. The ores around Idaho Peak were discovered in 1890 and transport was provided by mule and horse trains until the first railway was built in 1895. 122 At Hazelton ‘seldom a day passed but a party would depart’; see J. Glen, Sr, Where the Rivers Meet (Duncan BC, 1977), pp. 48–9, also 23–4. See Guy Lawrence, Forty Years on the Yukon Telegraph (Vancouver BC, 1965), pp. 36–9; Frank Leonard, A Thousand Blunders: the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway and northern British Columbia (Vancouver BC, 1996). 123 Hoy added that in 1907 he had homesteaded ‘land on the Nechako up towards Fraser Lake. On my ranch we grew grain, and dandy crops at that, but we had no market for it, so I went packing to make a use for it.’ Reminiscences

124 125

126

127 128

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130 131 132

of D. H. Hoy, pp. 4, 7. On Charley Barret and his pack train see Glynn-Ward, Glamour, pp. 107–8. Reminiscences of D. H. Hoy, pp. 6–7. The PGE Railway reached Quesnel in 1921. J. C. Loutet, ‘Pioneer days in Hazelton’, Pioneer Days in British Columbia (Surrey BC, 1973), pp. 8–9, 12. In 1937–39 a mine just south of the border was regularly supplied by a pack train (composed of horses and one mule, which went last in the train) based on a ranch at Chilliwack in the eastern Fraser valley; information from Dr Neil Sutherland, telephone interviews, 25 February, 4 March 1998. On the use of pack trains to take ore out from the Bridge River mines see BCA Add. Ms 676 LLB, vol. 11, file 26, Undated clipping from unidentified newspaper. See Lawrence, Forty Years, pp. 110–11; Ronald A. Keith, Bush Pilot with a Briefcase: the incredible story of aviation poneer Grant McConachie, new edition (Vancouver BC, 1997), pp. 78–99; personal information from Mr G. B. Leech, Ottawa, 1 June 1998. Mr Leech managed the pack horses of surveying crews in the 1940s. ‘Time and place’. Census of Canada, 1891, British Columbia 1, Cariboo (Clinton), household 56. His father is given as born in the United States, his mother in British Columbia. According Wiggins’s death certificate, he was born at Douglas Portage BC and was aged eighty when he died on 16 January 1951; see BCA, Vital Statistics 51–09–002815. H. Glynn-Ward, who met him in the late 1920s, wrote, ‘he will assure you he was born at New Westminster, down near Vancouver’; see Glamour, p. 117. BCA E E C61, Cataline, by Sperry Cline, Burnaby BC, March 1959, typescript, p. 12. Cline stated, ‘I was present when the transfer took place … I firmly believe that he [Cataline] considered Wiggins to be his property.’ Photograph in Glynn-Ward, Glamour, p. 132, and see the text on him, pp. 120–2, 128–30. Obituaries in Bridge-River-Lillooet News, 25 January 1951, and Interior News, 1 February 1951. The US army disbanded its last two operational mule trains on 15 December 1956; see Essin, Shavetails and Bell Sharps, p. 1.

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank Mr Christopher J. P. Hanna and Dr Jean Barman for aiding me with expert research and invaluable assistance. I am also extremely grateful to Mr Al Gutierrez, of Khawathil BC, Mr G. B. Leech and Dr Neil Sutherland for sharing with me personal and family information on packing. Since no secondary literature exists on packing in British Columbia, and little on packing in the United States, the article necessarily cites a great many primary sources. Address for correspondence Department of History, University of British Columbia, 1297–1873 East Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z1, Canada. E-mail [email protected]

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