1909: Down The Fraser River From Tete Jaune Cache

     In 1909, when Stanley Washburn’s pack-horse party had finally fought their way through the Yellowhead Pass and into BC, their destination was Tete Jaune Cache, because they had somehow arranged to make contact with the Teare brothers, prospectors who camped close to what is now McBride.  At the time, the Teares were the only people living in what is now the Robson Valley.  Once they met up, the Teare Brothers wanted to show Washburn their claim, and the only way to get back there was by floating down the Fraser River.  Here is Washburn’s account of the trip:

    “(The Teare’s) know these rivers and their menaces, large and small, as a scholar knows his books. Their boat shoots around the obstacles, dropping downstream by other channels, through which the water pours like a mill-race.

    After dragging along behind a pack-train for many days, the life on the river afford the greatest ease in the world, for without an effort, we can sit on our blankets in the bottom of the boat; and while we smoke and chat over the latest gossip of the trail, the river sweeps us along at two or three times the speed we can possible get out of the horses.

    The valley here (Robson Valley) averages five or six miles across, from the base of the Rockies on the east side, to those of the Selkirks (Cariboo Mts) on the west.   The whole is well-nigh as flat as a board, and carpeted with a dense forest of fir, spruce, and cedar, as well as hemlock, and I know not how many other varieties of a lesser growth.

    As hour after hour we drift downstream, so level is the floor of the valley that the river winds like a serpent for miles.  There is one place where it makes a complete “S” in its course that, while we are traveling north, we actually make a complete bend, so that our boat is pointing almost due south up the valley down which we are coming.  Again and again, a portage of a few hundred yards across the tongues of land, would save five miles by river.

    

    Below is a satellite photo showing the crazy meanderings of the Fraser River.