27 December 2008
The Stories of Yale: Gold, Politics, Trains and a Plane
Yale British Columbia - Yale is where travellers from the
east or north realize they are closing in on Vancouver. It's the place where the Fraser River emerges from a canyon so steep, deep,
and perilous that explorer Simon Fraser wrote of its Hell's Gate section in 1808: "We had to pass where no human being
should venture".
Gold and politics changed all that. Fifty years after Simon Fraser descended the river that would be named after him, thousands were
scouring its gravel bars. From Hope to Lillooet, they sought the gold that made some rich, kept most poor, and led to British Columbia
becoming a Canadian province.
That latter depended on the Canadian Pacific Railway being built where, as Fraser wrote, passage had depended on "poles hanging
to one another and crossed at certain distances with twigs, the whole suspended from the top to the foot of immense precipices and
fastened at both extremities to stones and trees".
The toughest part of that project began at Yale, beyond which steamboats couldn't navigate. A railway-construction town
of 10,000 grew there and, in three rip-roaring years, was almost burned down twice by whiskey drinkers. But the railway
was completed by 1885, making Burrard Inlet accessible to anyone with the price of a CPR ticket.
Or not, as the case might be. During the so-called Great Depression, many down-on-their-luck folk rode to
Vancouver freely aboard CPR freight trains. Among them was Karl Huber who, in a 1930 photograph whimsically titled Observation Car,
portrayed two pals perched atop a westbound boxcar nearing Yale. The scenery is majestic, the late-morning sun is on
their faces, and with it the expectation - shared by millions since - that better times lay ahead.
They sure did for me when I passed that way one long-ago Christmastime. I was driving a Land Rover that had needed chains
on all four wheels to break through the snowbound 50 kilometres to Lillooet. From there to Boston Bar, the snow dwindled, and the sun
was on my face. Around Yale, though, the coastal climate took over, and a lowering overcast masked Simon Fraser's "immense
precipices".
No sweat for me. With a top speed of 90 km/h, Land Rovers then were poor highway cruisers. But the road was clear, and who'd have
thought that others going my way still faced perils equal to those Simon Fraser encountered. Visions of beer and Chinese food, not
sugar plums, were dancing in my head as the Land Rover droned past Spuzzum.
Then, as though the sky was falling, a single-engined red aircraft skimmed over to land on the wet blacktop ahead. The
pilot coolly cut the engine, opened his door and said: "Sorry if I scared you. But I was committed, and just hoping that
you wouldn't speed up on this straight stretch".
Of course, I would have if I could have, whereupon these words and all those before it might never have been written. Instead, I
helped the guy push his aircraft off the road. Turns out he'd got socked in ahead, behind, and above, and, rather than smash into a
hidden mountainside, had headed for the highway. "If you can't stay up, you must go down", he said, grinning.
After phoning the Hope RCMP detachment as the pilot requested, I set off again. Three hours later I was downing draft beer with
friends in another Yale. It was the Granville-at-Drake-Street Yale hotel, so named after railway construction ended and
Fraser Canyon-based workers moved to a yard and shops beside the fledgling city of Vancouver's False Creek - Yaletown.
In that same pub last week, I re-encountered Lillooet. This time it was Lillooet Fox, who was conceived in that Fraser
River community and now sings with Tamara Rhodes and Carleen Lay in an ensemble called The Solid Gold Sisters of Soul. Fox was belting
out back-up lyrics and a solo with Billy Dixon and his four-horn band in a room where entertainment was
verboten in the old beer-parlour era. Now it is a lively Mecca for soul and blues fans, some as exuberant as the ones who
almost razed the original Yale with their shenanigans 128 years ago.
And if pubs have evolved, think of the music performed in them. In 1930, when Karl Huber rode a freight train to Vancouver, folk would
laugh at the notion of works by blues-singers Memphis Minnie, Ma Rainey, and Bessie Smith being studied at academies like
Yale. Today, though, city-based Johnny Ferreira-band guitarist Lindsay Mitchell is completing a PhD degree
at the University of B.C.'s Education Department. His subject: The Blues.
Others sing the blues about this year's economic woes continuing in 2009, with a new generation of hungry but hopeful folk riding
boxcar roofs to Vancouver. They say the risks are as dire as those faced by Simon Fraser at Hell's Gate, or the pilot who scared the
tar out of me just when the road ahead looked clear. Still, the latter did have an option. He could have proceeded, blindly at first,
to a safe landing strip at Chilliwack, stepped just as coolly from his aircraft and said: "If you can't stay down, you must go
up".
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