The Lillooet Cattle Trail, also known as the Lillooet-Burrard Cattle Trail and also as the Lillooet Trail, was an unusual and daring public works undertaking by the Province of

British Columbia British Columbia (commonly abbreviated as BC) is the westernmost province of Canada, situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. It has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that include rocky coastlines, sandy beaches, ...

in the 1877, and was the largest 19th century public works expenditure at $35,000 of the new province since it joined Canada in 1871.

History

Faced with burgeoning stock populations in the Pemberton-Lillooet and

Gang Ranch A gang is a group or society of associates, friends or members of a family with a defined leadership and internal organization that identifies with or claims control over territory in a community and engages, either individually or collectivel ...

areas and a lack of easy access to the huge market supplying meat to construction crews of the

Canadian Pacific Railway The Canadian Pacific Railway (french: Chemin de fer Canadien Pacifique) , also known simply as CPR or Canadian Pacific and formerly as CP Rail (1968–1996), is a Canadian Class I railway incorporated in 1881. The railway is owned by Canadi ...

just east, largely because of a lack of bridge crossings of the

Fraser River The Fraser River is the longest river within British Columbia, Canada, rising at Fraser Pass near Blackrock Mountain in the Rocky Mountains and flowing for , into the Strait of Georgia just south of the City of Vancouver. The river's annual d ...

, the ranchers of the

Lillooet Lillooet () is a district municipality in the Squamish-Lillooet region of southwestern British Columbia. The town is on the west shore of the Fraser River immediately north of the Seton River mouth. On BC Highway 99, the locality is by road abou ...

area lobbied the provincial government, and MLA Humphreys, to finance a trail to the coast via the Pemberton and Squamish areas to the north shore of

Burrard Inlet french: Baie Burrard , image = Burrard Inlet 201807.jpg , image_size = 250px , alt = , caption = Aerial view of Burrard Inlet , image_bathymetry = Burrard-Inlet-map-en.svg , alt_bathymetry ...

(i.e. what is now

Vancouver Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the ...

harbour), at the mouth of the Seymour River. The trail's route was improbable, to say the least, hugging lakeside cliffs where, in places, trestles and floating platforms had to be built out above or onto the lake and, beyond that, through marshes and heavy forests beset by infamously thick mosquitos and, lastly, a tortuous "stairway" section of the trail over the pass between the Squamish area and the head of the Seymour River, where cattle were expected to use steps on a trail that was nowhere more than 6 yards wide. Only one formal cattle drive was ever held over the full length of the route and most head were lost; those that finished the trip were put out to pasture to recuperate, being too skinny to be worth butchering. The multi-thousand-dollar loss incurred by trail construction left a bad taste with the provincial government for many years, although the son of its main sponsor, a rancher from Pavilion, later became provincial Minister of Highways and Public Works. Bridges to serve the cattle ranches of the West Fraser, including the suspension-span at

, were built in several places by the 1910s, although too late to keep the West Fraser Ranches competitive with those in the

Thompson Thompson may refer to: People * Thompson (surname) * Thompson M. Scoon (1888–1953), New York politician Places Australia *Thompson Beach, South Australia, a locality Bulgaria * Thompson, Bulgaria, a village in Sofia Province Canada * ...

and

Cariboo The Cariboo is an intermontane region of British Columbia, Canada, centered on a plateau stretching from Fraser Canyon to the Cariboo Mountains. The name is a reference to the caribou that were once abundant in the region. The Cariboo was the ...

regions. The trail remained in use in later years for residents of the Pemberton Valley for general travel purposes, and at least two more smaller cattle drives from that region to Squamish were attempted, both financial disasters as was the original one from

. The roadbed of the trail remained in place for many years, its stretch from Pemberton to Squamish ultimately being subsumed into the grade for the construction of the

Pacific Great Eastern Railway The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continen ...

through that stretch.

Route

Basically the route started from North Vancouver to Lillooet. The trail went through Britannia, Squamish, Garibaldi to Pemberton. From here it followed the Douglas road, but at this time the water routes were replaced with roads and the trail made it all the way to Lillooet.

References

*''Pemberton: The History of a Settlement'', Frances Decker (author), Gordon R. Elliot (editor), self-publ. unknown binding, ASIN B000XSVMXS *''Short Portage to Lillooet'', Irene Edwards, self-published, Lillooet, various editions, out of print. *''Halfway to the Goldfields: A History of Lillooet'', Lorraine Harris, Sunfire Books, one edition, out of print. J. J. Douglas (1977) {{ISBN, 978-0-88894-062-9

History

Route

References

See also