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1389 Quartz Road |
British Columbia Tourism Region : Thompson Okanagan
Description From Owner:
- Commander R.C. Mayne, in his account of his inland journey in 1859, mentions camping 'by the side or Riviere de la Cache, a small stream flowing into the Bonaparte.'
- Cache Creek was earlier noted on David Douglas's sketch map of 1833.
- This latter mention of Cache Creek, many years before the discovery of gold, demolishes Gosnell's explanation that miners cached provisions here, and similarly the story, told in loving detail in Winnifred Futcher's The Great North Road to the Cariboo,
- of how a lone gunman, having murdered a miner travelling south from Barkerville and stolen his eighty pounds of gold, was seriously wounded by a pursuing settler, cached his stolen gold, and disappeared forever,
- leaving only a riderless horse with a bloody saddle as evidence of his fate.
- The story has all the marks of a fine Cariboo yarn but is nothing more. All we can say is that, at some time in or before 1833, somebody cached something in the vicinity of Cache Creek.
- Mary Balf, formerly of the Kamloops Museum, may be right in suggesting that there was a collection point at Cache Creek for furs enroute to Thompson's River Post (Fort Kamloops).
- Today the word cache often refers to a place where supplies have been deposited on a raised platform out of the reach of wild animals. The meaning of the word in French, however, is 'a hiding place,' and the cache of an early fur trader was exactly that.
- A round piece of turf about eighteen inches across was removed, leaving the mouth for a large bottle-shaped excavation. This excavation was lined with dry branches, and the cached goods were then inserted.
- Finally some earth and the round piece of turf were put on top and the surplus earth all carefully removed. If the job had been done expertly, possible marauders would see no evidence that they were passing a cache.
- Hat Creek - G.M. Dawson has preserved for us the origin of this name in a Shuswap legend about their hero Kwil-i-eli and two other supernatural men:
- A trial of strength was arranged, Kwil-i-eli proposing that each should push his head against a rock and see which could make the deepest impression.
- Kleså and Took-im-in-elst tried first, and each managed to make a shallow impression, but Kwil-i-elf followed and pressed his head in to the shoulders.
- This happened at a place near the mouth of Hat Creek, and the name of this stream …
- is derived from this story, and from the circumstance that the impressions made in the rock at this time are still shown by the Indians. (Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, Section 2 [1891]:32)
- With permission from G.P.V and Helen B. Akrigg 1997 British Columbia Place Names. UBC Press.
Address of this page: http://bc.ruralroutes.com/CacheCreek
