The valley of the Miette River, over which Caledonia Mountain looms, was sometimes referred to as the Caledonian Valley during the fur trade era. “The afternoon proved that the valley is worthy of its old name Caledonian, if the name was meant to suggest the thistle of the ‘wha’ daur meddle wi’ me!’” wrote George Monro Grant [1835–1902] after his 1872 trip with Sandford Fleming [1827–1915].
“New Caledonia” was the name for the interior of British Columbia during the fur trade, a name given by Simon Fraser [1776–1862] because the country reminded him of his mother’s descriptions of her native Scotland. Caledonia is a Celtic word meaning “a dweller in woods and forests.”
A cache is a hiding place, as in Tête Jaune Cache.
Significance not known.
Patrick Burns. Glenbow Museum, Calgary Dictionary of Canadian Biography
Burns was born near Oshawa, Upper Canada. While living at nearby Kirkfield, he made a friendship with William Mackenzie, a young contractor who would help Burns in establishing a meat business on a large scale. Mackenzie’s firm was general contractors for the construction of the Canadian Northern Railway.
Burns came west in 1878, and established a slaughter-house in Calgary in 1890. He bought the 7,000 deeded acres of the CK Ranch on the north side of the Bow River about 10 km west of Calgary in 1905.
His company became one of the largest meat-packing businesses in the world, with branches in London, Liverpool, and Yokohama. In 1931 he was appointed to the Canadian Senate, but relinquished his seat in 1936. He died at Calgary.
“Burns P & Co Ltd meat market” is listed in the 1918 Wrigley’s British Columbia Directory under McBride. The company also had British Columbia operations in Ashcroft, Corbin, Cranbrook , Fernie, Field, Golden, Grand Forks, Greenwood, Hazelton, Kamloops, Kaslo, Kelowna, Marpole, Nanaimo, Natal, Nelson, New Westminster, North Vancouver, Phelan, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Prince George, Prince Rupert, Princeton, Revelstoke, Rossland, Salmon Arm, South Fort George, Steveston, Trail, Vancouver, Vernon, and Victoria.
Adopted 1954 on Columbia River Basin manuscript 78 as a well-established local name.
Fur trader James McMillan [1783–1858] passed through the Yellowhead Pass in 1825. He wrote to William Connolly [1786–1848], “The country I passed through is not so bad as I expected, and with very little trouble horses will pass their loads with ease even at present it is not so bad as the Columbia portage. It was once supposed that a better communication would be found by coming up Millettes river and making a portage to Buffalo dung Lake, thence down to Moose Lake etc.”
in 1863, Yellowhead Lake was referred to as “Buffalo Dung Lake” by Milton and Cheadle. Cheadle wrote in his diary, “Thursday, July 9th. — Made a long morning, camping for dinner at the head of Buffalo Dung Lake.”
The lake had previously been referred to as “Cow Dung Lake,” including by John Arrowsmith on his on 1859 map and by the Overlander gold seekers who crossed Yellowhead Pass in 1862.
In his report on the 1911 Alpine Club of Canada–Smithsonian Robson Expedition, Ned Hollister wrote:
A few years ago buffalo skulls, old and weathered, were not uncommonly found in the mountains bordering the upper Athabasca Valley. Numbers were found on the east side of the Athabasca River, some fifteen miles south of Henry House, at a point locally known as Buffalo Prairie. Mr. Lewis Swift told me that at the time he came into this country, some seventeen years ago [ca. 1895], the oldest Indians could not remember the living buffalo. People then seventy-five years old knew nothing of the animals beyond the fact that the bleached skeletons were there. These buffalo probably wandered into the region by the route of the present road, and this point doubtless marks the western limit, at a very early day, of the former range of the species in Yellowhead Pass.