Engineer's Road
Along Sumallo Creek just inside Manning Park at Mile 22 on the Hope-Princeton
highway, there stand two cabins that are gradually disappearing into
the gloomy, damp underbrush
The inhabitant of the cabin was Bill Robinson who had been there since the
First World War. The Dewdney Trail went right past his door.
A story goes that one night Bill had quite a bad night.
Apparently a bear tried to get in his cabin so Bill took his frying pan
and started banging on it.
While he made noise the bear would stop tearing at the roof shakes but
whenever he would stop the bear would try again.
Needless to say he didn't get too much sleep that night.
The Hope-Princeton highway didn't open until November 2, 1949.
The Dewdney Trail was commissioned by Governor James Douglas in 1860 in
response to the discovery of gold in the Okanagan-Boundary region,
Edgar Dewdney was an English civilian surveyor only three months in the
colony, hired to blaze the trail under supervision of the Royal Engineers.
Dewdney eventually extended the trail all the way to Fort Steele in the east Kootenays.
Riding the Dewdney Trail through the Hope Mountains soon after its completion,
Douglas wrote that the journey could without exaggeration be compared to
"the passage of the Alps."
Governor Douglas visited the diggings at Rock Creek and decided to have a
wagon road built from Hope to offset the competition at the mines from
imports from Oregon. In 1861, Dewdney and Moberly built the first seven
miles, but the plans to continue it were cancelled in September 1861
when Douglas decided instead to focus resources on a road to the Cariboo.
Engineers Loop -
this 15 minute trail starts in the parking lot at the west entrance to the park.
Take a step into a part of British Columbia's past. This short walk will
lead to the Engineers Road built in 1861 to take miners to the gold rush
of Rock Creek and the Kootenays. The impressive rock walls are the
foundation of a route that saw hundreds of men trudge the miles from Hope
to the Similkameen with pack horses laden with supplies.
Laying the foundation from 1857-1863 the Royal Engineers helped to lay the
foundation of the roads, survey the land, plan the tour, draw up the maps and
even settle the dispute of the new colony of BC. When their tour of duty in
BC ended most quit the army and settled here. One of their tasks was to
survey a route to the gold fields at Rock Creek. Miners were flooding across
the border with supplies, mining the gold and then exporting it back to
the US. All this without paying import taxes or duty on the gold.
It became obvious that if sovereignty was to be maintained a "good mule
road from Hope to Similkameen" would have to be built.
Edgar Dewdney of Hope was the low bidder at 76 pounds sterling per mule.
In 1861 portions of the Dewdney Trail were widened and upgraded to a wagon
road by the Royal Engineers.