Growing Up in the Valley: Pioneer Childhood in the Lower Fraser Valley

In the days of the earliest settlers the Lower Fraser Valley was a vast forest, broken here and there by stretches of open prairie. The latter were islands, and other natural meadows, subject to flooding at high water.It was there that the first farming took place. Around 1840 the Hudson's Bay Company started a farm on Langley Prairie in connection with the fort. Similar areas were settled twenty years or more later by miners, teamsters, and others from the Fraser River gold fields. By then the Pre-emption Acts of 1859 and 1860 had made it possible for anyone to take up land, and quite a few of them settled on the large accessible prairies around Sumas Lake and the lower reaches of the Chilliwack River. They brought in cattle from across the border and fattened them on the wild grass and the pea vine.Although they had little or no clearing to do, they had to cope with annual floods, and hordes of mosquitoes that hatched out when the waters receded. This story is told in "Floodland and Forest" (Sound Heritage Series, No. 37)By contrast, most of the people who concern us now pioneered the uplands of Surrey, Langley and Mission. They arrived during the 1870's or the two following decades, by which time all the suitable land had been taken up, and there was nothing for it but to move in among the firs and the cedars, which presented them with a very different challenge.Access was by wagon roads or trails, meandering through dark woods and marshy bottom lands. Some had been made by Indians—like the one which ran from Semiahmoo Bay on the U.S. border to Brownsville, a small settlement and landing on the Fraser, opposite New Westminster. Another ran from Bellingham Bay to Fort Langley, the so-called Smugglers' Trail.One trail had been cut in 1865 for a telegraph line that was to have been built all the way to Alaska, and then to Siberia. That it never got there is another story. But the trail itself was used by riders and pedestrians prepared to wade or swim any creeks they encountered. There were no bridges.During the 1870s the new provincial government made an effort to open up wagon roads, beginning with the Semiahmoo Trail, which had already been improved by the Royal Engineers. In 1873 it was improved again. And during the next few years an entirely new road was cut through the middle of Surrey, Langley and Matsqui. It was known as the Yale Road, and from it settlers themselves constructed trails north and south into their homesteads.About that time, too, the Old McLellan Road, as it got to be called, was cut from the top of Wood wards Hill on the Semiahmoo Trail to Langley Prairie; and a few years later the Coast Meridian was opened up from the Yale Road south to the border.These so-called wagon roads brought the homesteaders into the very heart of the Surrey and Langley woods, and brought them out again when they went to New Westminster for supplies. But for several years they were hardly more than muddy trails that dodged the stumps and were at their best when frozen hard. Roads and bridges, however, were an immediate concern of the newly formed municipal councils, and many a settler found himself working on the roads in lieu of taxes. Bit by bit it became less difficult to move about, especially when they started using gravel.Loggers and shingle makers also helped to open up the country. As with the farmers, they started at the water's edge and, as hand-loggers, worked their way along the banks of the Fraser and the smaller rivers. Pushing further inland, they built skid roads and brought in ox teams to haul the logs down to a river landing or a ditch they had constructed. From there the logs would be towed to one of the big mills near New Westminster, or perhaps to the one at Elgin.In 1891 the New Westminster and Southern Railway was built from Brownsville, down through the middle of Surrey by way of Cloverdale and Halls Prairie, to link up with the American line at the border. By a system of branch lines, l