Barnard's Express
There was a great demand for the transportation of passengers to and from the goldfields, as well as the delivery of mining equipment, food supplies and mail between Victoria and Barkerville.
[1]: 17 In 1876, the company had a stagecoach built in California specifically for the visit of the Governor General, Lord and Lady Dufferin, who rode in it from Yale to Kamloops and back.
It cost $50 a day to ride in this famous coach, but many visiting diplomats and English aristocracy rode in the Dufferin when they went hunting in the Cariboo.
The company wanted their horses trained exclusively for staging, a process that generally took three months, even then they were never truly broken and had to be expertly handled.
Passengers who left the train at Ashcroft and boarded a stage at 4am could expect to arrive at 83 Mile House that evening and Barkerville two days later.
In anticipation of the influx of new settlers to the region, Charles Millar expanded the company's services into sternwheelers and automobiles and extended the route to Fort George.
A few vehicles, owned by private freighters, had been operating on the road since 1907 and the company realized that they needed to add cars to their services in order to stay competitive.
The BC Express Company purchased two cars at a cost of $1,500 each and then added a variety of options such as tops at $150, Klaxon horns, $50 and kerosene parking lamps, $75.
[2]: 174 At the end of August 1913, Captain Bucey was taking the BC Express up from Fort George to Tête Jaune Cache when he was stopped a cable strung across the river at Mile 141 where the railway was building a bridge.
Bucey turned the BC Express back towards Fort George and immediately wired the company's head office at Ashcroft and informed them of the obstruction.
[5]: 82–83 With no substantive response by the dominion government, the company continued with legal action which was unsuccessfully appealed as far as the Privy Council in London.
[7] With the completion of the railway on April 7, 1914 and navigation blocked at the Hansard bridge on the route to Tête Jaune Cache, the company ran the BX and the BC Express only from Soda Creek to Fort George.
With the construction of the Pacific Great Eastern Railway underway, the sternwheelers were needed to help deliver equipment and food supplies to the work camps.
Then, in 1918, after an appeal from the Quesnel Board of Trade, the provincial government granted the BC Express Company a $10,000 per year subsidy to continue river navigation from Soda Creek to Fort George.
The request was justified because Quesnel and the other communities along the river had been promised a railroad, but the construction on the PGE had slowed to a crawl and would in fact not to be completed to Prince George until 1952.
[1]: 93 [5]: 223 The BX ran until August 30, 1919, when she was punctured by an infamous rock called the "Woodpecker" and sank with a 100 tons of bagged cement intended for construction of the Deep Creek Bridge.
[5]: 225 The BC Express ran until November 1920 and then it joined the BX on the riverbank at Fort George, where their hulls were abandoned.,[5]: 225 thus ending the days of the pioneer transportation company that Francis Barnard had established nearly 60 years earlier.
