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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Less celebrated than its wagon-road contemporaries, the Old Cariboo Road and later on the Cariboo Road proper, the River Trail (also known as the "Mule Trail") was the choice for most prospectors and travellers heading north from Lillooet who could either not afford the tolls of the Old Cariboo Road, or had no need of it as the River Trail ...
Construction of the railway destroyed parts of the Cariboo Wagon Road, which was severed between Yale and Boston Bar and between Lytton and Spences Bridge. A new highway north from Yale was not built until the Cariboo Highway in 1922, partly built using surviving roadgrades of the original waggon road and since upgraded to the Trans-Canada Highway.