The first miners arrived in BC from California in the 1850s, drawn by rumours of gold discoveries in the gravel beds of the Fraser River. They stopped in Victoria on the way, buying equipment and provisions before crossing to the mainland in canoes, rowboats and anything else that floated. As prospectors continued to come in the thousands, a transportation system developed to take them to the claim sites. A steamer service ran from Victoria to Fort Langley where they boarded shallow-draft stern wheelers for the trip up the Fraser to Hope and Yale. From there the miners packed in to their claims.

After gold was discovered in 1858 up-country in the Bridge River and Lillooet area, miners under the direction of the Royal Engineers pushed a road through from Harrison Lake to Lillooet. When the rich claims of the Cariboo drew them further north, they needed to construct a road that would transport them and their equipment to the mining settlements, and bring the gold back to Yale. The 480-mile Cariboo Road, completed in 1865, connected Yale, in the Fraser Canyon, to Barkerville, the centre for gold discoveries in the Cariboo. According to one traveller, the route along the Fraser Canyon:

“conducted us among the most frightful precipices. There was no help for this, as we could select no route more passable. The rivers flow oftimes through dark and awful gorges whose rocky sides tower perpendicularly from a thousand to fifteen hundred feet. By a series of zigzag paths, often but a yard in width, man and beast have to traverse these scenes of grandeur. Sad and fatal accidents often occur, and horses and their owners are dashed to pieces on the rocks below, or drowned in the deep foaming waters rushing down the narrow defiles from the vast regions of mountain snow melting in the summer heat.”  

The remainder of the route followed the Fraser upriver to Quesnel before branching east to Barkerville.

In the 1880s, the construction of the CPR (Canadian Pacific Railway required rebuilding large sections of the Fraser Canyon route and paved the way for automobile access from Yale to Prince George on the New Cariboo Road, which opened in 1928.