British Columbia's Long Road to the Far North
By Robert Stone
Published: February 27, 2000
A gas station on the corner of Route 16, at Kitwanga in the northwestern quarter of British Columbia, displays a homemade sign: ''North to Alaska.'' The station marks Kilometer Zero off Route 37, the Cassiar Alaska Highway, at its junction with the section of the Yellowhead Highway between Prince George and Prince Rupert on the Pacific Coast. From Kitwanga, the Cassiar runs 446 miles to join the main trunk Alaska Highway at Watson Lake in the Yukon Territory.
The highway runs west of the Skeena Mountains and east of the Coast Range, connecting fingers of the great northwestern rain forests with the spruce and jack pine plains of the Yukon. At Dease Lake it passes the continent's other ''great divide,'' where the waters stop flowing westward into the misty valleys of the Pacific drainage and flow instead to the north, into the treeless ultraplanetary deltas of the Arctic. Along the way they plunge through vast silent forest in many ways unchanged by time. A short walk from the roadside brings the stroller to the margins of human settlement on this continent, unspoiled wilderness that still belongs to the wolf packs, the grizzlies and mountain goats. The sheer beauty of this part of North America, its thin magical light, the short, star-dazzled summer nights and the snowpeaks laced with rainbows and glittering white waterfalls, is hard to exaggerate.
The Cassiar, completed in 1972, is busier than it used to be. More and more recreational vehicles, many driven in convoy by senior citizens from the United States and southern Canada, lumber over its grades. It's still a long, lonely highway by United States summer standards. There are few towns and few roadside facilities. Logging trucks own the road and have to be watched for and allowed clearance. A couple of the Cassiar's bridges are still single-lane. People who drive it are cautioned to inspect the mechanical soundness of their vehicles beforehand and advised to carry a spare tire and extra fuel, especially in the off-season.
In its course from the beautiful, relatively populous skeena and Nass Valleys to the flats of the Dease and the Liard Rivers, the Cassiar Highway follows an ancient route that traces the frontiers of vanished native empires. In the upper reaches of the westward flowing rivers, it leaves the sites of the potlatching, coastal empires for the traditional lands of interior Athapascan speakers. Between the coasts and the Arctic plains it passes through different climatic zones, marked by landscapes that range from canyons where sage and juniper grow, glaciers that stretch to the sea and surreal stretches of black volcanic rock that mark the craters of extinct volcanoes.
The area has a dramatic history. Gold rushes, from the mid-19th century on, turned silent caribou trails into frenzied thoroughfares, churned up populous boom towns that thrived for a while and then disappeared into new-growth forest. Missionaries and Hudson Bay Company factors pressed ever deeper into the fur-rich northern forests.
During the great fur-trading years in the early 19th century, imperious, highly cultivated coast tribes like the Haida and the Tlingil, who commanded the western inlets and river mouths of northwesternmost British Columbia and Alaska, briefly prospered and expanded their areas of control. In the first heady days of European trade, the Indians obtained a plentitude of metal implements -- axes, knives, traps and firearms -- from Hudson Bay Company and New England traders. The Yankees, operating from ships that had come around the Horn, were known to the Indians as ''Bostons.'' The ''Bostons'' carried Canadian and Alaskan furs across the ocean to exchange for ivory and patterned china in Canton.
The sea-based Tlingit and Haida empires extended their influence far inland. Their cedar totem poles were emulated all over the Northwest. So were practices like drying salmon in cottonwood smoke and sculpturing in argellite. Neighboring tribes often found themselves subjugated, enslaved and absorbed by the ambitious coastal nations, whose culture and language they adopted.
The affluence and dominance of the coast peoples, stimulated by contact with whites, were finally undone from the same source. European diseases and incessant intertribal warfare reduced their numbers grievously. By late century the days of the great feasts and potlatches were over. The Hudson Bay Company, an imperial corporation in its own right, took over.
The first town on the highway north to Alaska is Kitwanga, the predominantly white town of that name adjoining the more phonetically correct Gitwangak, a village on the reserve of the Gitxsan people, whose home is this section of the Skeena Valley. Gitwangak has some fine relics of Canada's frontier days, including one of the last of the Grand Trunk Pacific railroad stations and St. Paul's Anglican Church. Both are handsome wooden structures decorated in the neat red-and-black trim beloved of the Hudson Bay Company. They seem representative of the mixture of American Gothic and Anglophile nostalgia seen in so many of the older buildings of the Canadian West. The village also contains a number of authentic and well-preserved totem poles. Local kids who operate one-bucket, two-teenager carwashes here during the summer can explain each, like, totally.