As long as the discovery of gold was confined to the Fraser river-bars, the important matter of transportation gave the government no difficulty. Hudson's Bay steamers crossed from Victoria to Langley on the Fraser, which was a large fort and well equipped as a base of supplies for the workers in the wilderness. Stern-wheelers, canoes, and miscellaneous craft could, with care, creep up from Langley to Hope and Yale; and the fares charged afforded a good revenue to the Hudson's Bay Company. Even when prospectors struck above Yale, on up to Harrison Lake and across to Lillooet, or from the Okanagan to the Thompson, the difficulties of transportation were soon surmounted. A road was shortly opened from Harrison Lake to Lillooet, built by the miners themselves, under the direction of the Royal {101} Engineers; and, as to the Thompson, there was the well-worn trail of the fur-traders, who had been going overland to Kamloops for fifty years. It was when gold was discovered higher up on the Fraser and in Cariboo, after the colony of British Columbia had taken its place on the political map, that Governor Douglas was put to the task of building a great road. Henceforth, for a few years at least, the miners would be the backbone, if not the whole body, of the new colony. How could the administration be carried on if the government had no road into the mining region? And so the governor of British Columbia entered on the boldest undertaking in roadbuilding ever launched by any community of twenty thousand people. The Cariboo Road became to British Columbia what the Appian Way was to Rome. It was eighteen feet wide and over four hundred and eighty miles long. It was one of the finest roads ever built in the world. Yet it cost the country only two thousand dollars a mile, as against the forty thousand dollars a mile which the two transcontinental railways spent later on their roadbeds along the canyon. It was Sir James Douglas's greatest monument. {102}