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Known as The Falls during the early nineteenth century because of the rapids upstream in the Fraser. The present name dates back to 1847, when Ovid Allard was sent with a party from Fort Langley to establish a new VIBC post here. This post, though it had neither a stockade nor bastions, was named Fort Yale, after James Murray Yale, 'a courageous, peppery little man,' the officer in charge at Fort Langley.

J.M. Yale (1796-1871) entered the service of the HBC in 1815. He was at Fort Langley from 1828 to 1859, being given the command of the fort in 1834, and was promoted to Chief Trader in 1844. Very aware of his short stature, Yale tried to avoid standing close to the commanding height of Governor Douglas, but Douglas, aware of this foible, took a sly delight in moving close to Yale.

During the days of the Fraser gold rush, the town of Yale had a lurid reputation. D.W. Higgins, who lived there in 1858, has left the following description of it in that year:

A city of tents and shacks, stores, barrooms and gambling houses. The one street crowded from morning till night with a surging mass of jostling humanity of all sorts and conditions. Miners, prospectors, traders, gamblers and painted ladies mingled in the throng.

In every saloon a faro-bank or a three-card-monte table was in full swing, and the halls were crowded to suffocation. A worse set of cutthroats and all round scoundrels than those who flocked to Yale from all parts of the world never assembled anywhere. Decent people feared to go out after dark. Night assaults and robberies, varied by an occasional cold-blooded murder or a daylight theft, were common occurrences. Crime in every form stalked boldly through the town unchecked and unpunished. The good element was numerically large; but it was dominated and terrorized by those whose trade it was to bully, beat, rob and slay. (The Mystic Spring, p. 31)

At the head of navigation on the Fraser, Yale remained important as long as goods were transshipped there from the river steamers to the wagon trains going up the Fraser Canyon to the Cariboo goldfields. With the completion of the CPR, such transshipments ceased, and Yale almost became a ghost town. Mrs. St. Maur, passing through on the train in 1887, observed: 'the railway has changed everything, and consequently many nice-looking little wooden houses, with their patches of garden, are closed and deserted. A feeling of sadness came over me at the sight of the pretty little desolate homes' (Impressions of a Tenderfoot, p. 73). The Halkomelem Indian name for the site of Yale means 'short-leaved willow trees' (Sitka willows).