Packing in British Columbia Transport on a resource frontier

Roderick J. Barman University of British Columbia

he material culture that the Spanish and Portuguese brought to the New TWorld 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 vehi- cles 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

The Journal of Transport History 21/2 command of Spanish and Portuguese needed to study the institution as it existed in Hispanic America, and packing was not part of the material cul- ture 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 car- riage of goods by sailing ship and canoe, while the density of the forests dis- couraged 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 Mex- ico, 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 ide- ally 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 140 California. James Watt, a veteran prospector and packer, later commented: Figure 1 The Pacific North-west, 1840–1900 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 lat- ter 50s and early 60s.2

‘That vast territory’, stretching north from the California border to the Yukon and bounded by the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, was the The Journal of Transport History 21/2 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 Thomp- son 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 pre- vented 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 pack- ing 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 Cana- dian Pacific Railroad (Canada’s first transcontinental railway) in the 1880s, but continued until the middle of the twentieth century. Until the establish- ment of bush aviation for prospecting and for the carriage of goods and 142 humans, packing by mule and horse was an indispensable part of the resource Packing in British Columbia 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 indispens- able 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 organisa- tion and in its functioning on the British Columbia frontier. In respect to animals, pack trains could employ mules or horses. Contem- porary 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 charac- terises 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 pack- ing, ‘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 system- atically 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 143 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 com- mand 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

The Journal of Transport History 21/2 In contrast, acquiring a large horse pack train was fairly easy and compar- atively cheap. Horses, usually termed ‘cayuses’, bred wild on the plains of eastern Washington Territory and in the southern interior of British Colum- bia.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 contin- ued 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 gov- ernment.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 equip- ment had, as their names attested, been developed in the Hispanic world.24 144 The most important was the aparejo. ‘What is an Aparejo? Why it is a Span- Packing in British Columbia ish pack saddle made of leather and stuffed with moss, dry hay or grass – any- thing 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 cir- cled the animal’s belly and was pulled as tight as possible before being buck- led 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 145 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 Vic- toria 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 30 The Journal of Transport History 21/2 on the road, trouble that meant loss of time and money. Careful mainten- ance 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 out- side, 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 ani- mals, 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; some- times 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 ani- mals 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 Rey- nard aptly remarked in 1869, the packers’ work ‘demands strength, skill, dar- ing, 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 146 twentieth century, but traditionally packers ate the beans, bacon and bannock Packing in British Columbia (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 Cari- boo Wagon Road noted with satisfaction in June 1862, ‘as we [had] com- plained [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. ‘Plain- tiff 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 Span- ish 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 Colum- bia reported in 1886 to Ottawa, ‘Owing to railways construction, the last five 147 The Journal of Transport History 21/2

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

years have been profitable seasons for these Indians who are expert packers and good labourers.’47 By the end of the nineteenth century Aboriginals prob- ably 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 newcom- ers. 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 work- ing 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 Colum- bia 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 daugh- ter of an early miner and packer later recalled. ‘The Californians liked cof- 148 fee but tea has always been a great favourite with the miners and packers.’52 Packing in British Columbia 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 pro- portion, 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, shov- els 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 bil- liard 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 dis- tances 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 mut- ton, poultry, eggs and butter’.60 Sound animals, good rigging, capable crew and suitable cargo were the pre- requisites of a successful pack train. Equally important was the train’s actual functioning, which can be analysed in its three aspects – capability, manage- ment 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 149 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 car- rying 5,556 lb in December.62 Another unfavourable environment for pack trains was vividly painted by the

The Journal of Transport History 21/2 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

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, espe- cially 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 commis- sion recorded in June 1859. ‘Roche’s return mule train came in from a moun- tain 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 bur- then 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 consid- erable challenge. The crossing had to be carefully reconnoitred and the land- ing 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 150 regrettable that so little documentation on management has survived. How- Packing in British Columbia 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 com- manded. 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 inten- tion 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 pack- ing 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- 151 The Journal of Transport History 21/2

Figure 4 Transport routes, 1858–1890

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 thirty- seven animals, the median being twenty-eight.75 A portion of the cargo con- sisted 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 car- 152 gador had to be sure that the goods he loaded would find a ready sale. Packing in British Columbia 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 south- east 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 ani- mals 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 gar- rison 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 com- mences. 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- 153 lowing in single file. Each member of the crew had charge of six or seven ani- mals 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 Journal of Transport History 21/2 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 pre- pared 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 pan- nikin 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 num- ber of days, because the pack trains did not move fast in the best of circum- stances. 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 154 swapped news and gossip with travellers and local inhabitants. ‘It is not Packing in British Columbia 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 motor- car 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. Sell- ing 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 dis- posed 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 settle- ment 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 155 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

The Journal of Transport History 21/2 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 Vic- toria, 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 suffi- cient 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 fam- ily 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

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 newspa- per 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 unremu- nerative prices’.107 156 It is no wonder that exploitation by merchants and packers was a constant Packing in British Columbia cause of complaint among prospectors and miners, who, having no alterna- tive, 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 Lil- looet, 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 Parson- ville 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 sav- ings, 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 fore- sight 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 win- tered 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 157 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

The Journal of Transport History 21/2 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 Colum- bia.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 twenty- three years ago [a former packer recalled in 1929] and of course no wagon- roads. 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

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 eco- nomic 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 pro- vince 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 ‘freight- ing’ 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 pack- train of sixty mules and fifty horses,’ David Hoy, a veteran rancher and 158 packer, recalled in 1929. ‘Like myself, he got a market for the produce of his Packing in British Columbia 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 net- work 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 Valen- zuela.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 photo- graph 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

159 Notes 1 See Herbert S. Klein, ‘The supply of account of their forests, rivers, coasts, mules to central Brazil: the Sorocaba gold fields and resources for colonisation market, 1825–80’, Agricultural History (1862), pp. 50, 56, 93, 130. 64, 4 (1990), pp. 1–25; José Alípio 7 See Louis Lebourdais’s comments on the Goulart, Tropas e tropeiros na formação supplying of the Omineca mining camps do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1961); Nicolás by air, British Columbia Archives (Vic- Sanchez-Albornoz, ‘La saca de mulas de toria BC; hereafter BCA), Add. Ms 676 Salta al Peru, 1778–1808’, Anuario del LLB, vol. 9, file 19, Typescript headed Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas 8 ‘New Slate Creek, Omineca’ and dated (1970), pp. 264–314; Floyd F. Ewing, Jr, by hand ‘November 22, 1934,’ p. 2 ‘The mule as a factor in the development (hereafter Lebourdais, ‘New Slate of the southwest’, Arizona and the West 5 Creek’). The Journal of Transport History 21/2 (1963), pp. 315–26; Emmett E. Essin, 8 Letter to the editor from ‘M.F.’, Victoria ‘Mules, packs, and pack trains’, South- Gazette, 29 February 1860; BCA C AB western Historical Quarterly 74, 1 (1970), 30 3 N 1, British Columbia Supreme pp. 52–80. Court, Notes of Proceedings, 1 2 James Watt, born in Ohio in 1843, came December 1862–16 April 1863, Judge to Washington State in 1860 and spent Matthew B. Begbie’s notes on the evi- the rest of his life as a prospector, packer dence of William J. Armstrong in the and rancher in the region. His oral remi- case of Cranford v. Wright, 14 niscences, recorded in the late 1920s, December 1862, p. 51 (hereafter ‘Cran- were first published in the Washington ford v. Wright’); John Keast Lord, At Historical Quarterly 19 (1928) and 20 Home in the Wilderness: what to do there (1929) and were reprinted as a pam- and how to do it: a handbook for trav- phlet, Journal of Mule Train Packing in ellers and emigrants (1876), p. 7; Watt, Eastern Washington in the 1860’s (Fair- Journal, pp. 19–20; BCA E E M963, field WA, 1978). References are to the Typed reminiscences of Alexander pamphlet, in which the passage quoted is Campbell Murray, Fort St James, no date on p. 34. [but before January 1931], p. 16 (here- 3 See Jean Barman, The West beyond the after ‘Reminiscences of A. C. Murray’). West: a history of British Columbia, 9 BCA Add. Ms 843, Diary of James Willi- revised edition (Toronto, 1991), pp. son G[rant] Nelles, entry of 22 May 32–43; Richard S. Mackie, Trading 1862. In the 1860s the exchange rate beyond the Mountains: the British fur oscillated around $5 = £1. trade on the Pacific, 1793–1843 (Van- 10 Watt, Journal, p. 19. In Shavetails and couver BC, 1997), pp. 3–34, 257–83, Bell Sharps: the history of the US army and Carlos A. Schwantes, The Pacific mule (Lincoln NE, 1997) E. M. Essin Northwest: an interpretative history, shows, on pp. 91–8, that in the 1870s revised edition (Lincoln NE, 1989), pp. the superiority of mule over horse forced 25–79. the US army, despite its prejudices, to 4 See William J. Trimble, The Mining adopt mule pack trains as its means of Advance into the Inland Empire (Madi- transport in its wars with the Aboriginal son WI, 1914), pp. 15–27. people. 5 The colony of Vancouver Island had 11 ‘Time and place: more about pack trains been created in 1849. The two colonies and Cataline, by Hugh McLean, as told were merged in 1866 as the United to Wiggs O’Neill’, Terrace Omineca Her- Colony of British Columbia; see Barman, ald, 24 December 1963 (hereafter ‘Time The West, pp. 53, 81. and place’); and see Lord, At Home in 6 This route, that ran from Douglas at the the Wilderness, p. 79: ‘when this dreaded head of Harrison Lake north, via a mix- affair is fairly on, you might as well ture of trails and lakes, to Cayoosh (later attempt to make a log move as induce a Lillooet) on the middle Fraser river, was blinded mule to shift its position’. first surveyed in 1847 and opened up in 12 Joe Back, Horses, Hitches and Rocky 1858–59; see James R. Gibson, Lifeline Trails (Boulder CO, 1989), p. 48, and of the Oregon Country: the Fraser see Lord, At Home in the Wilderness, pp. Columbia Brigade System, 1811–47 19–21, and George M. Grant, Ocean to (Vancouver BC, 1997), p. 279, n. 48, and Ocean: Sandford Fleming’s Expedition R[ichard] C. Mayne, Four Years in British through Canada in 1872 (Toronto, 160 Columbia and Vancouver Island: an 1873), pp. 272–3. Packing in British Columbia 13 George Harwood Phillips, Indians and pulling 37,200 lb; British Colonist, 22 Intruders in Central California, 1769– September 1876. 1849 (Norman OK, 1997), pp. 82–8; 22 Provincial Archives of Manitoba, Hud- Goulart, Tropas, pp. 35–7; Sánchez- son’s Bay Company Archives MF 1214, Albornez, ‘La saca’. Correspondence, Manager to A. C. 14 None of the photographs of animals McNab, 23 January 1902; Reminis- taken during the 1860s includes don- cences of A. C. Murray, p. 11. keys, indispensable for mule breeding; 23 University of British Columbia Library, personal communication from Richard Special Collections, Typescript copy of Thomas Wright, 11 February 1999. The Donald Graham’s diary, 30 April–23 adverse effect on mules of the severe September 1876 (hereafter ‘Diary of D. British Columbia winters during the Graham’). See the entry of 8 May: ‘We 1860s can be deduced from Lord, At arrived at Clear Water River about 10 Home in the Wilderness, p. 17, D. W. a.m. … Train got to river about noon. Higgins, The Mystic Spring, and other With the exception of horned cattle, the Tales of Western Life (Toronto, 1904), animals were got across easily.’ p. 204, and BCA Colonial Correspond- 24 ‘Most of our packing terms were Span- ence (hereafter ‘CC’), file 142f, Judge ish, picked up by the Forty-niners from Matthew Begbie Baillie to the Colonial the Mexicans in California’; see Watt, Secretary, Victoria, Vancouver Island, 19 Journal, p. 39. Of the equipment, the January 1863. words aparejo, carona, latigo and manta 15 Information given, citing no source, in are Spanish, while ‘lariat’ and ‘hack- Ron Angelin, Forgotten Trails: historical amore’ derive from Spanish (la riata and sources of the Columbia’s Big Bend coun- jáquima). try, ed. Glen W. Lindeman (Pullman 25 Ibid. WA, 1995), p. 162. In late July 1862 a 26 Diary of D. Graham, entry of 10 August group of Americans, arriving at Van 1876. Winkle, ‘sold Billy Mule at once for 27 The best description of the ‘rigging’ is in $140’; see BCA Add. Ms 676, vol. 5, file Lord, At Home in the Wilderness, pp. 17, Diary of C. S. Hathaway, entry of 6 69–71, 74-9, a description confirmed by August 1862. According to Lord, At that in Watt, Journal, pp. 39, 41, 42, and Home in the Wilderness, p. 16, mules by that in W. A. Baillie-Grohman, Fif- purchased in California ‘on a rough aver- teen Years’ Sport and Life in the Hunting age, will amount to about 120 dollars Grounds of Western America and British (25£.) to 150 dollars (30£.) per head’. Columbia (1900), pp. 20–1. Lord distin- 16 British Colonist, 23 September 1861. guished the aparejo from the rigging but, 17 See Watt, Journal, p. 19. for convenience, it is here included. 18 British Colonist, 23 September 1861. 28 Victoria City Archives and Record Ser- This news item is separate from the one vice, W. A. G. Young Collection, Receipt quoted above. from J. Martin, dated 2nd/16th Sep- 19 See James R. Gibson, Farming the Fron- tember 1863. In 1868 Ben. Douglas tier: the agricultural opening of the Ore- advertised ‘A good supply of Whips, gon country, 1786–1846 (Vancouver Blacksnakes, Ladies, Aparajo and other BC, 1985), pp. 52–3, and Angelin, For- Leathers’, British Columbia Examiner, 7 gotten Trails, p. 58. During 1862 686 December 1868. mules and 3,097 horses entered British 29 See Watt, Journal, pp. 39, 41. Lord, At Columbia by the customs post at Osyoos, Home in the Wilderness, p. 72, mentions on the inland trail from the United $50 (£10) as the price of an aparejo and States; see BCA CC 1862, Report by the same amount for the rest of the rig- John C. Haynes. ging. 20 Memoir of Robert Stevenson, in W. 30 ‘The weight of this rig is very much Wymond Walkem, Stories of Early greater than that of the pack-saddle, with British Columbia (Vancouver BC, 1914), its cross-trees at both ends, but, notwith- p. 142; Angelin, Forgotten Trails, p. 167, standing this, far greater weights can be citing the diary of George Masiker, held transported on the aparejo, though the at the University of Oregon. pace can never be more than a walk’; 21 Inland Sentinel, 30 August 1883, 21 see Baillie-Grohman, Fifteen Years, August 1884. Between 11 and 18 pp. 20–1. September 1876 eleven mule teams, pull- 31 See Diary of D. Graham, entry of 10 ing 96,850 lb, left Yale up the Cariboo August 1876; Lord, At Home in the road, compared with seven horse teams, Wilderness, pp. 71, 204; ‘Time and 161 place’. 41 Entry of 18 June 1860, at Yale. On 12 32 In 1867 Mrs M. R. Toy was listed as run- July 1860, at Lillooet, he commented, ning a pack train of ten animals out of ‘The packers are principally Mexicans. Yale and as owning a hotel in Clinton; There are, however, many Americans.’ see The Pacific Coast Business Directory See R. L. Bagshaw (ed.), No Better Land: for 1867 … (San Francisco CA, 1867), the 1860 diaries of the Anglican colonial pp. 565–6. Sophie Morigeau (1835– bishop George Hills (Vancouver BC, 1916) ran a pack train in the Kootenays 1996), pp. 150, 184. Of the forty pack- and Montana; see Olga W. Johnson ers treated during the 1860s and 1870s (ed.), The Tobacco Plains Country: the at the Royal Columbian Hospital, New autobiography of a community (Caldwell Westminister BC, twenty-eight were ID, 1950), pp. 41–50, and Marie Cuffe Latin American; see BCA Film 95A, Hos- Shea, Early Flathead and Tobacco Plains: pital Register, 1862–1901.

The Journal of Transport History 21/2 a narrative history of northwestern Mon- 42 See the references to Spanish Americans tana (n.p., 1977), pp. 98–102. In the joining the gold rush to British Columbia 1930s Mrs Dora Moore ran a pack train in 1858 in Doyce B. Nunis, Jr (ed.), The in the gold-mining area around Bridge Golden Frontier: recollections of Herman River; see BCA Add. Ms 676 LLB, vol. Francis Reinhart, 1851–69 (Austin TX, 11, file 26, Undated clipping from 1962), pp. 118–19, 120–1, 122, 134–5. unidentified newspaper. 43 Oral information passed down in the 33 BCA E E H85, Typed reminiscences of family and kindly communicated to me David Henry Hoy, freighter and trapper, by Mr Al Gutierrez, Khawathil (Katz Fort St James [interviewed at Prince Landing) BC, 17 March 1997. Other evi- George, 8 October 1929], p. 6 (hereafter dence shows that the brothers came from ‘Reminiscences of D. H. Hoy’). Buena Vista, Sonora State. 34 Watt, Journal, p. 45. John Keast Lord 44 This paragraph is based on my on-going never discusses the treatment or the pay research into the pre-1914 Hispanic and of packers nor describes who they were. Portuguese community of British Colum- His references to packers’ trustworthiness bia. That research draws on the 1881, are all negative and carping; see At Home 1891 and 1901 censuses, manuscript and in the Wilderness, pp. 71, 160, 164. printed sources from the period, and 35 Report of the Rev. James Reynard, secondary literature. Twelfth Annual Report of the Columbia 45 Writing home to Nova Scotia in May Mission for the Year 1870 (1871), p. 63. 1888, a schoolteacher remarked, ‘There 36 Reminiscences of D. H. Hoy, p. 6. were four half-breed girls there belong- 37 Typescript of the diary of Sergeant John ing to one family – Kossuth or Garcia, (Jock) McMurphy (original held in the they get both names, one is Spanish & Royal Canadian Engineers Museum, the other English. They have attended Camp Chilliwack, Chilliwack BC), entry schools for years but in spite of that they of 10 June 1862 (hereafter ‘Diary of Ser- still have the squaw looks & manners. geant McMurphy’). Their father is a Mexican Spaniard, and 38 Report of the Rev. James Reynard, is himself as black as any Dinash, so they Twelfth Annual Report, p. 64; Watt, come honestly by their black looks.’ See Journal, p. 19; BCA C AB 30 3 N 2, Nicola Valley Archive, Merritt BC, British Columbia Supreme Court, Notes A78–34–06, Jessie McQueen to Cather- of Proceedings, 24 April 1863–23 April ine McQueen, Lower Nicola, 28 May 1864, Judge Matthew B. Begbie’s notes 1888. The father was Jesus Garcia, on the evidence of Oscar Bailey in whose first name was customarily pro- M‘Linden v. Snow & Bailey, Lytton nounced in British Columbia ‘Cassus,’ Assizes, 2 May 1863; BCA GR 569, vol. heard by outsiders as ‘Kossuth’. 1, Lillooet, County Court, p. 145, plaint 46 On David Wiggins, Sr, see ‘Whiskey No. 75, 1 August 1862, Bidante v. Mat- Cases’, British Colonist, 24 July 1860; tingley; p. 1924, plaint No. 98, 17 BCA E E D42, Typed reminiscences of November 1862, Flynn v. Mattingley. John Dunlop, Lillooet, undated, p. 4; 39 Watt, Journal, p. 47. ‘Pioneer packer frozen to death’, Interior 40 Diary entry of 19 June 1859, transcribed News, 1 February 1951. On Jean Caux, in George F. G. Stanley (ed.), Mapping better known as Cataline, see R. J. Bar- the Frontier: Charles Wilson’s diary of man, ‘Jean Caux’, Dictionary of Cana- the survey of the 49th parallel, 1858–62, dian Biography XV (forthcoming). while Secretary of the British Boundary 47 BCA GR 833, Trade Licences, Licence 162 Commission (Toronto, 1970), p. 52. No. 367, 22 July 1862; National Packing in British Columbia Archives of Canada, Department of the fact that in the Cariboo mining Indian Affairs, RG 10, vol. 3656, file camps ‘train after train was coming in 9063, C10115, J. N. Powell, Indian laden not with the necessaries of life, to Superintendent, British Columbia, to the keep poor men from starvation, but with Superintendent General, Ottawa, Indian whiskey, and Billiard Tables’; see Diary Office, Victoria, 22 July 1886. See also of Bishop Hills. Margaret Ormsby (ed.), A Pioneer 56 The cargo sent north in the summer of Gentlewoman in British Columbia: the 1862 by Robert Cranford, Jr, included recollections of Susan Allison (Vancouver picks, pick handles, shovels, nails, shirts, BC, 1976), p. 21, and Andrea Laforet hose and boots and shoes, to a total and Annie York, Spuzzum: Fraser weight of 1·73 (short) tons; see Cranford Canyon histories, 1808–1939 (Vancou- v. Wright, pp. 81–3. ver BC, 1998), p. 76. 57 On 5 September 1862 Bishop Hills 48 See BCA E C B172.2, Typed reminis- noted, ‘I met today two trains whose cences of Mrs August Baker (born Susie principal cargo was Champagne for the Elmore), Quesnel, ‘October 11th, 1929’, mines’; see Diary of Bishop Hills. The p. 1 (hereafter ‘Reminiscences of Mrs cargo sent north in the summer of 1862 Baker’), and E E M311, Typed reminis- by Robert Cranford, Jr, included 252 lb cences of William Francis Manson, of ‘ginger snaps’, 180 lb of canned lob- Indian constable at Stony Creek, 2 Octo- sters and 118 lb of canned oysters; see ber 1929, p. 16. Cranford v. Wright, pp. 81–3. 49 See the obituary of Pierre Jack, born 16 58 BCA E C B81.3, Typed notes of conver- December 1869, died 28 March 1971, in sation with James Nathaniel Jerome the Thirty-fifth Report of the Okanagan Brown, carpenter, 1515 Venables Street, Historical Society (1971), 140–1. On Vancouver BC, 7 July 1930, marked ‘As Jean Marie and his wife Agathe see told to Robert Hartley’, p. 1. Lebourdais, ‘New Slate Creek’, p. 5. 59 Diary of Sergeant McMurphy, entries of 50 See ‘Time and place’. 7, 11 June, 11 July, 28 September 1862; 51 BCA GR 833, Trade Licences, Licences and see entry of 16 October 1863 in Nos 266, 320, 344, 348, 354, 393; The Cheadle, Journal, p. 245. Pacific Coast Business Directory for 60 Reminiscences of Mrs Baker, p. 5. 1867, p. 565. On Kong Lee, the leading 61 See the adverse comment made by the Chinese merchant in British Columbia, Colonial Secretary of British Columbia see Walter Cheadle, Cheadle’s Journal of in 1864 on the trail from Fort Shepherd a Trip across Canada, 1862–63, new edi- to Kootenay Valley: ‘it would be impos- tion (Edmonton AB, 1971), pp. 267–8. sible for packers to pass through this 52 Reminiscences of Mrs Baker, p. 5, con- portion without carrying food for their firmed by W. J. Trimble, Mining animals’. Arthur N. Birch to Frederick Advance, p. 147. Seymour, Governor of British Columbia, 53 Of the 25·6 (short) tons of goods that New Westminster BC, 31 October 1864, Robert Cranford, Jr, sent north from transcribed in Matthew Macfie, Vancou- Victoria in the summer of 1862, food- ver Island and British Columbia: their stuffs made up 22·75 tons, or 89 per history, resources, and prospects (1865), cent; see Cranford v. Wright, 4 p. 257. December 1862, pp. 81–3, which itemise 62 BCA Add. Ms 2013, Untitled ledger the goods dispatched by the plaintiff. (misidentified in the archive catalogue as 54 The Anglican Church, Ecclesiastical Pro- ‘The Packers Account Book of Dodge vince of British Columbia, Archives, and Co.’), with toll entries from 1 Typescript of the Bishop George Hills September 1862 to 17 December 1864. diaries (hereafter Diary of Bishop Hills). In September 1862 there were eighty- On 29 May 1862 a miner noted in his three outfits carrying 274,230 lb. diary, ‘Struck tent at 6 AM walkd 19 63 Diary entry cited in Rev. D. Wallace miles campd side Bonaparte river and Duthie, ed., A Bishop in the Rough found had taken the wrong road and lost (1909), p. 74. Sheepshanks visited the about 20 miles. Bought flour and beans Cariboo gold fields in August and from one of the Hudson Bay Company September 1862. trains.’ See BCA Add. Ms 676, vol. 5, file 64 BCA CC file 142f, Judge Matthew B. 17, LLB, ‘Diary of Unknown Cariboo Baillie to the Colonial Secretary, Vic- Miner found by Mrs Alf Brown in the toria, Vancouver Island, 19 January old Bowron House (in the attic), 1930’. 1863. In December 1862 John Jeffries 55 On 5 July 1862 Bishop Hills deplored testified, ‘I wo.d not have taken a cargo 163 to W.ms Crk with my own animals. I 1867, p. 565. Fifty-nine pack trains were sh.d only take to [Quesnel] Fks – thence listed, but two have to be excluded from to the mines on cayooshes. Very seldom a the calculations. The number of animals train goes through’; see Cranford v. in the train of J. Davis is not given. The Wright, p. 166. train of the Collins Overland Telegraph 65 Diary entry of 19 June 1859, transcribed Company, which numbered 300 animals, in Stanley, Mapping the Frontier, p. 53. was not a trading outfit. 66 See R. Byron Johnson, Very Far West 76 Ibid. Indeed: a few rough experiences on the 77 Watt, Journal, pp. 26, 32; Trimble, Min- north-west Pacific coast (1872), pp. ing Advance, p. 58; and see R. Cole Har- 74–5; Grant, Ocean to Ocean, pp. ris, ‘Moving admist the mountains, 266–7, 280–1; ‘Memories of Alice 1870–1930’, BC Studies 58 (1983), p. 5. Maude Mary Northcott, Mrs Early’, 78 In 1861 the trading licences issued at

The Journal of Transport History 21/2 Quesnel Advertiser, 15 October 1976. Lytton to packers were taken out mainly 67 Diary of D. Graham, entry of 10 August. in March, in 1862 not until May and 68 Ibid., entries of 1 and 16 June; Lord, At June, in 1863 in April and May, in 1864 Home in the Wilderness, pp. 184–8. in March, in 1865 not until May, and in Three Mexican packers employed by the 1866 in April and May; see BCA GR British Boundary Commission drowned 833, Trade Licences. in July 1860 when two canoes swamped 79 Diary of D. Graham, entry of 16 May. while crossing the Ashnola river; see Camping sites ‘averaged about 15 miles Stanley, Mapping the Frontier, p. 119 n. apart, at convenient places where there 69 Diary of D. Graham, entry of 14 May. was feed and water’, according to Watt, 70 BCA GR 1554, British Columbia Journal, p. 42. County Court (Victoria), Naturalisation 80 These qualities characterise the two applications and oaths of allegiance, box probable camping sites I have inspected: 3, April 1873–May 1874, file 4, No. Mexican Flats, on the north bank of the 210B. Fraser river, near Whonnock BC, and 71 Oral information passed down in the Spanish Prairie, just north of the town of family and kindly communicated to me Colville WA. The names of the sites by Mr Al Gutierrez, Khawathil (Katz point to their having served as camping Landing) BC, 17 March 1997. grounds for pack trains. 72 Account by Frank Garcia in ‘Nicola Pio- 81 See Watt, Journal, p. 41. neers Column, No. 12’, Merritt Herald, 82 Diary of D. Graham, entry of 14 May; 30 November 1934. On 8 September and see J. H. E. Secretan, Canada’s Great 1859 a trading licence was granted at Highway: from the first spike to the last Lytton to ‘Jesios Gasso’ as a packer; see spike (1924), p. 58. BCA GR 833, Trade Licences, No. 70. 83 Secretan, Canada’s Great Highway, p. 73 On 14 August 1862 Bishop Hills noted, 58; Lord, At Home in the Wilderness, pp. ‘A Packer today told me there was great 158–69; Watt, Journal, pp. 41–2. The difficulty in getting supplies from the pack train supplying the stations on the Lower Towns. One reason was the pro- Yukon Telegraph line from Hazelton to visions were not there, another reason the Naas river in the 1920s followed pre- the merchants would not sell except for cisely the procedures described by Gra- cash. So that if a Packer could not pay ham, Lord and Watt; see H. for his goods before taking them he Glynn-Ward, The Glamour of British could not have any. He complained of Columbia (Toronto, 1932), pp. 128–32. this on the ground of requiring a large 84 See Watt, Journal, p. 41. In the early capital.’ Diary of Bishop Hills. In his days the two men loaded fourteen ani- memoirs Dr Helmcken wrote, of the mals and later as many as eighteen or years 1864–65, ‘The merchants were in a twenty. bad state; the packers to whom huge 85 See ‘Time and place’. Packers used both credits had been given without adequate mules and horses to ride. security could not pay, but the goods 86 Lord, At Home in the Wilderness, pp. were gone, tremendous losses’; see 170–4; Watt, Journal, p. 42. Lord placed Dorothy Blakey Smith (ed.), The Remi- the cargador at the head and Watt at the niscences of Doctor John Sebastian rear of the train (which seems the more Helmcken (Vancouver BC, 1975), p. likely). I infer that the foreman (segundo) 207. took the other post. 74 Watt, Journal, p. 45. 87 Diary of D. Graham. 164 75 The Pacific Coast Business Directory for 88 Reminiscences of D. H. Hoy, p. 6. Packing in British Columbia 89 On the reputation of the Mexican pack- on the venture were being pastured at ers as gamblers see Johnson, Very Far Alkali Lake, just to the west of the Bona- West Indeed, p. 67, and the comments in parte valley. See the offer for sale of the Victoria Gazette, 8 August 1858, on these animals in the British Colonist, 19 the recent conviction of Antonio Garcia May 1868. for keeping a gambling house at Fort 103 The Times, 3 June 1859; ‘Letter from Hope. Yale’, Victoria Gazette, 9 August 1859; 90 Lord, At Home in the Wilderness, pp. letter from ‘M.F.’, Victoria Gazette, 29 196, 204. February 1860. 91 Baillie-Grohman, Fifteen Years, pp. 104 Evidence of Robert Cranford, Jr, in 20–1. Cranford v. Wright, 9 December 1862, 92 Evidence of William J. Armstrong, p. 88; Diary of Bishop Hills, entry of 13 George W. Campbell and Frederick August 1862. Black in Cranford v. Wright, 9 Decem- 105 BCA Add. Ms 48, file 2, Typescript of let- ber 1862, pp. 50–2. ters sent by Dr John B. Wilkinson to 93 Diary of Sergeant McMurphy, entries of members of his family in Ontario, letter, 7, 11 June, 11 July, 28 September 1862; Van Winkle Creek, undated [July 1862]. Wat, Journal, p. 43. In 1862 it was not until 28 April that the 94 Reminiscences of Mrs Baker, p. 11. first trading licence was issued at Lytton 95 BCA Add. Ms 48, file 2, Typescript of to a packer, whereas in 1861 the first letters sent by Dr John B. Wilkinson to licence was issued on 5 March; see BCA members of his family in Ontario, letter, GR 833, Trade Licences, Nos 264, 486. Van Winkle Creek, undated [July 1862]. 106 Diary of Bishop Hills. 96 Memoir of J. C. Bryant in Walkem, Sto- 107 Daily Press, 25 September 1862. ries, p. 142. 108 Entry of 12 July 1860 in Bagshaw, No 97 Memoirs of Robert Stevenson in ibid., Better Land, p. 184. p. 261. 109 BCA CC, New Westminster Police, 98 Watt, Journal, pp. 11, 43. In 1860 Chartres Brew, Magistrate, to W. A. G. Bishop Hills was informed that Sunday Young, Colonial Secretary, New West- closing of stores in the town of Lillooet minster BC, 13 December 1860, enclos- was not possible, since ‘it was the custom ing three depositions; BCA C AB 30 3 N for the miners to do their business that 2, British Columbia Supreme Court, day & they came in from a distance’; see Notes of Proceedings, 24 April 1863–23 diary entry of 14 December 1860 in April 1864, Judge Matthew B. Begbie’s Bagshaw, No Better Land, p. 278. notes on the evidence of an unidentified 99 See Allan S. Trueman, ‘Placer Gold Min- Spanish-speaking witness in Burke v. ing in Northern British Columbia, Torres, Lytton Assizes, 2 May 1863. 1860–90’, M.A. thesis, University of 110 BCA E E D42, Typed reminiscences of British Columbia, 1935, as reproduced John Dunlop, Lillooet, undated [c. in part in Thomas Turner (ed.), Sa Ts’e: 1931], p. 8. historical perspectives on north British 111 ‘A pioneer’s experiences, narrative of Columbia (Prince George BC, 1989), p. life and adventure with the H. B. Co.’, 91. Inland Sentinel, 12 February 1904. The 100 BCA CC, file 142f, Judge Matthew B. British Colonist, 3 November 1862, re- Baillie to the Colonial Secretary, Vic- ported, ‘Among those who lost all their toria, Vancouver Island, 19 January animals are Dan Shafer, Armstrong, and 1863. John Clugston – forty or fifty each. Sev- 101 Pat Lean, ‘The Garcia story’, Nicola eral other smaller trains have also been Valley Historical Quarterly 6, 4 (1984), lost.’ p. 2; Sam Manery, ‘Sam McCurdy stage 112 In British Columbia packers were gener- driver passes’, Twentieth-eighth Report ally spared one danger endemic south of of the Okanagan Historical Society the border. ‘Beside all this work we had (1964), p. 48. to be on the alert to preserve our own 102 Reminiscences of Mrs Baker, p. 10. In scalps,’ James Watt remembered. ‘On 1868, after the laying of the second the trail there was always more or less Atlantic cable from Ireland to New- danger from attacks by hostile Indians, foundland had caused the Collins Over- and murderous road agents [highway- land Telegraph Company to abandon men]. If they didn’t kill you they might constructing its overland telegraph line run off with your horses and mules, or through British Columbia, Alaska and rob you of your freight. It wasn’t an easy Siberia, the mules and horses it was using life by any means.’ See Watt, Journal, 165 p. 46. of D. H. Hoy, pp. 4, 7. On Charley Bar- 113 British Colonist, 26 August 1883. Four- ret and his pack train see Glynn-Ward, teen of the forty packers treated at the Glamour, pp. 107–8. Royal Columbia Hospital, New West- 124 Reminiscences of D. H. Hoy, pp. 6–7. minster, in 1863–79 were suffering from The PGE Railway reached Quesnel in some form of rheumatism; see BCA Film 1921. 95A, Hospital Register, 1862–1901. 125 J. C. Loutet, ‘Pioneer days in Hazelton’, 114 Lean, ‘The Garcia story’, pp. 2–11; Pioneer Days in British Columbia (Surrey Doug Cox and Elizabeth Pryce, ‘The BC, 1973), pp. 8–9, 12. In 1937–39 a Barcelos of Cawston’, Fifty-fifth Report mine just south of the border was regu- of the Okanagan Historical Society larly supplied by a pack train (composed (1991), 99–105. of horses and one mule, which went last in 115 See Harris, ‘Moving’, p. 7. the train) based on a ranch at Chilliwack 116 Watt, Journal, p. 47. in the eastern Fraser valley; information The Journal of Transport History 21/2 117 Inland Sentinel, 30 August 1883. These from Dr Neil Sutherland, telephone inter- comments suggest that on the road a views, 25 February, 4 March 1998. On mule train could travel between 20 per the use of pack trains to take ore out from cent and 40 per cent farther a day (fif- the Bridge River mines see BCA Add. Ms teen to twenty as against twelve to four- 676 LLB, vol. 11, file 26, Undated clip- teen miles) than on a trail. In terms of ping from unidentified newspaper. costs the wagon team’s key advantages 126 See Lawrence, Forty Years, pp. 110–11; over the pack train were needing only a Ronald A. Keith, Bush Pilot with a Brief- single driver and its cargo staying loaded case: the incredible story of aviation throughout the journey. poneer Grant McConachie, new edition 118 Trueman, ‘Placer gold mining,’ pp. 85–7, (Vancouver BC, 1997), pp. 78–99; per- 92–3, 97–8, 99. sonal information from Mr G. B. Leech, 119 Reminiscences of D. H. Hoy, p. 5. See Ottawa, 1 June 1998. Mr Leech man- also Glynn-Ward, Glamour, p. 107. aged the pack horses of surveying crews Waterways, travelled by steamer and in the 1940s. scow, were far more available for trans- 127 ‘Time and place’. port in this area of the province than in 128 Census of Canada, 1891, British Colum- the south. bia 1, Cariboo (Clinton), household 56. 120 On the building of the CPR see J. Bar- His father is given as born in the United man, The West, pp. 106–7. States, his mother in British Columbia. 121 See R. Cole Harris, The Resettlement of According Wiggins’s death certificate, he British Columbia (Vancouver BC, 1997), was born at Douglas Portage BC and was pp. 196–9, and Louise McFadden, ‘Andy aged eighty when he died on 16 January Daney of Ferguson’, in Pioneer Days in 1951; see BCA, Vital Statistics British Columbia (Surrey BC, 1973), pp. 51–09–002815. H. Glynn-Ward, who 140–7. The ores around Idaho Peak met him in the late 1920s, wrote, ‘he will were discovered in 1890 and transport assure you he was born at New Westmin- was provided by mule and horse trains ster, down near Vancouver’; see Glam- until the first railway was built in 1895. our, p. 117. 122 At Hazelton ‘seldom a day passed but a 129 BCA E E C61, Cataline, by Sperry Cline, party would depart’; see J. Glen, Sr, Burnaby BC, March 1959, typescript, p. Where the Rivers Meet (Duncan BC, 12. Cline stated, ‘I was present when the 1977), pp. 48–9, also 23–4. See Guy transfer took place … I firmly believe Lawrence, Forty Years on the Yukon that he [Cataline] considered Wiggins to Telegraph (Vancouver BC, 1965), pp. be his property.’ 36–9; Frank Leonard, A Thousand Blun- 130 Photograph in Glynn-Ward, Glamour, p. ders: the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway 132, and see the text on him, pp. 120–2, and northern British Columbia (Vancou- 128–30. ver BC, 1996). 131 Obituaries in Bridge-River-Lillooet News, 123 Hoy added that in 1907 he had home- 25 January 1951, and Interior News, 1 steaded ‘land on the Nechako up February 1951. towards Fraser Lake. On my ranch we 132 The US army disbanded its last two oper- grew grain, and dandy crops at that, but ational mule trains on 15 December we had no market for it, so I went pack- 1956; see Essin, Shavetails and Bell ing to make a use for it.’ Reminiscences Sharps, p. 1.

166 Packing in British Columbia 167 [email protected] E-mail Address for correspondence East Mall, Van- University of British Columbia, 1297–1873 Department of History, V6T 1Z1, Canada. couver, British Columbia Acknowledgements for aiding me Dr Jean Barman J. P. Hanna and to thank Mr Christopher I would like to Mr Al also extremely grateful assistance. I am research and invaluable with expert sharing with Neil Sutherland for G. B. Leech and Dr of Khawathil BC, Mr Gutierrez, exists no secondary literature on packing. Since and family information me personal the article in the United States, and little on packing in British Columbia, on packing sources. cites a great many primary necessarily