Colonial Despatches

Tête Jaune Cache is a community located on the Fraser River near the British Columbia-Alberta border. The area is named after Pierre Bostonois, an Iroquois guide with blond hair who first led HBC explorers west through the Rocky Mountains pass in 1820. “Tête jaune” is French for yellow head, and the Yellowhead Pass is also named after Bostonois.1

Tête Jaune Cache became an important travel point on the way to Jasper, and was described in this despatch as remarkable [for] being the western terminus of one of the least elevated and most accessible passes in the Rocky Mountains. The community boomed at the beginning of the twentieth century with the establishment of a supply depot for the Grand Trunk Railway.2 At one point, Tête Jaune Cache was considered the largest tent city in British Columbia, with all the trappings associated with living rough in close quarters: gambling, fighting, and seized whisky smuggled into the fray in the bellies of pig carcasses.3 Today, however, Tête Jaune Cache is a ghost town.4

• 1. G. P. V. Akrigg and H. B. Akrigg, British Columbia Place Names (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), 265.
• 2. E. O. S. Scholefield, British Columbia from the Earliest Times to the Present, vol. 1, 1875-1919 (Vancouver: The S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1914), 292.
• 3. Bruce Ramsey, Ghost Towns of British Columbia (Vancouver: Mitchell Press, 1963), 210-13.
• 4. Ibid.