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The Cariboo Road (also called the Cariboo Wagon Road, the Great North Road or the Queen's Highway) was a project initiated in 1860 by the Governor of the Colony of British Columbia, James Douglas. It was built in response to the Cariboo Gold Rush to facilitate settlement of the area by miners.
It is located on the north slope of the Cariboo Plateau near the Cariboo Mountains 80 kilometres (50 mi) east of Quesnel. BC Highway 26, which follows the route of the Cariboo Wagon Road, the original access to Barkerville, goes through it.
The Old Cariboo Road is a reference to the original wagon road to the Cariboo gold fields in what is now the Canadian province of British Columbia. It should not be confused with the Cariboo Road , which was built slightly later and used a different route.
The Cariboo Wagon Road was an immense infrastructure burden for the colony but needed to be built to enable access and bring governmental authority to the Cariboo goldfields, which was necessary in order to maintain and assert control of the wealth, which might more easily have passed through the Interior to the United States.
70 Mile House was the first stopping place built on the Old Cariboo Road.Charles Adrian pre-empted the land in 1862 and built a roadhouse on the property. The roadhouse was used in the winter of 1862-1863 by pioneer road builder Gustavus Blin Wright as a camp for his labourers.
However, when the Cariboo Wagon Road was completed in 1865, Quesnel Forks was bypassed and Barkerville became the major center of gold mining activity. By the mid-1870s most of the population had left, but a small, stable group of Chinese miners and merchants remained in Quesnel Forks which supported a widely dispersed mining community.
As the years rolled on, complaints about Dug Road continued. The Times Recorder, on Jan. 13, 1900, argued: “Dug Road is almost bottomless. Unusual traffic makes it a regular morass and breeder ...
McVee ran a hotel and store at 108 Mile House on the Cariboo Wagon Road from 1875 to 1885 during the Cariboo Gold Rush. Along with her husband Jim McVee and her son-in-law Al Riley, she is said to have killed many miners for their gold and kidnapped women for sale to miners as white slaves. The story has achieved local prominence, but ...