Dewdney Trail
Establishing this route became important and urgent for the colony when many new gold finds occurred at locations near the US border that at the time were much more easily accessed from Washington Territory than from the then barely settled parts of the Lower Mainland and Cariboo.
Approximately 80 percent of what is now Highway 3 was originally part of the Dewdney Trail, largely because the terrain allows for no other low-altitude transit of the regions involved.
It passes through varied scenery, including four major mountain ranges (Cascades, Monashees, Selkirks and Purcells), some major river valleys (Skagit, Similkameen, Okanagan, Kettle, Columbia, Goat, Moyie and Kootenay) and historic townsites such as Hope, Princeton, Grand Forks, Trail, Creston, Yahk, Moyie and Cranbrook.
Edgar Dewdney, a Devonshire-born engineer, oversaw the trail's construction, since he and Walter Moberly had won the contract to build it.
The route for the second section was surveyed by a crew of the Royal Engineers, with local First Nations people hired to pack supplies over the mountains between Hope and Princeton, covering about 7 mi (11 km) a day.
They released their exhausted horses in the Kettle River valley near Rock Creek, and with the aid of some Sinixt people, forged eastwards to Christina Lake.
Dewdney sent former Royal Engineer George Turner and most of the crew up over what is now the Santa Rosa Pass through the Rossland Range to get to Fort Shepherd, built by the Hudson's Bay Company in 1858 on the Columbia River opposite the mouth of the Pend d'Oreille.
After exploring other possible options, Dewdney concluded that Kootenay Lake was too big a barrier to make it a viable route, so he returned to Fort Shepherd.
Meanwhile, Dewdney, ex-Royal Engineer Robert Howell and a small crew crossed the Columbia and travelled up the Pend d’Oreille to the Salmon (now Salmo) River and then up the Lost Creek valley and across the Nelson Range by way of the Kootenay Pass.
He received $25,000 in cash and gold dust to pay the crew, and had a nasty moment after he had cached the money in a tree stump while guiding Chief Justice Matthew Baillie Begbie from Summit Creek over a particularly boggy area as Begbie travelled to Fisherville (a mining town that had grown up near the gold strike), where he was going to preside over court.
