Wagon Road North

A newly revised and updated edition of the classic pictorial account of the Cariboo Gold Rush trail. First published in 1960, Wagon Road North is the quintessential popular history book chronicling gold-rush-era BC. Focusing on the Cariboo Wagon Road—the crucial transportation route stretching from Fort Yale to Barkerville that made it possible for tens of thousands of prospectors to make their way to the Cariboo goldfields in the 1860s—this newly updated, expanded, and re-designed edition brings to life the adventures, hardships, and blind ambitions of the men and women who risked everything in the quest for gold. Packed with more than one hundred archival photos, many of them rarely seen, as well as maps and contemporary images of historical sites, this fascinating book is a visual celebration of a pivotal chapter in early BC history.

The B.C. encyclopedia calls this "the most notable B.C.-published book to follow the 1958 breakthrough [in regional publishing, and is] among the top five all-time B.C. bestsellers."

The Appalachian Warriors' Path (1607-1744) was used by the Iroquois of the north to head south for trade or make war in Virginia and the Carolinas. The English acquired the Warriors' Path through treaties. Known as the Philadelphia Wagon Road (1744-1774); also as the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road, Great Road, etc., immigrants used this road to enter the back country and often branched off onto the Wilderness Road to move further west.

This book offers readers an opportunity to ride the historic Humboldt Wagon Road from Chico to Susanville through images that have been collected since the 1860s. Many never-before-published photographs and oral histories tell a story of people who established what has been called this "small corner of the West." In the 1850s, John Bidwell, a California pioneer, agriculturist, businessman, and politician, envisioned a freight and passenger route that would connect San Francisco, the Sacramento River, and his newly established community of Chico. He wanted it to cross the mountains to the gold and silver mines in Idaho and Nevada. Bidwell financed, constructed, and opened the road for horses, wagons, stagecoaches, and eventually trucks and automobiles. From the Civil War era until the present, the road has carried everything from lumber to tourists.