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.