Origin of the name unknown.
Jasper Park warden Percy Hamilton Goodair (died 1928 at the age of 52) was killed by a grizzly bear and buried near his cabin in the Tonquin Valley. Goodair was an educated Englishman who traveled extensively in South Africa and Australia before coming to Jasper and joining the warden service.
In September 1928, after Goodair failed to contact Parks headquarters for over a week, wardens went in to search. Their dog found Goodair’s snow-covered body lying on a trail near the cabin. He had claw marks on his face and a handkerchief stuffed under his arm in an attempt to stop bleeding from an opened artery.
An attendee who had met Goodair at the 1926 Alpine Club of Canada camp in the Tonquin stated, “So died, where he would have liked to, one of the most delightful and cultivated gentlemen I have known. He was in no sense a climber, although he could mount the hills faster than I care to do; but he had an intense love of the mountains surpassed by no man. You know the setting of his Maccarib Creek Cabin faces towards the Ramparts. Of that glorious outlook he never tired. We spent five nights with him and he would call us our again and again to see the magnificent and ever-changing light effects on the peaks.”
In Goodair’s files was a letter stating, “If anything happens to me I want to be buried in the mountains.” The wardens made a coffin with floor-boards from the cabin veranda. A number of Goodair’s Masonic brothers went in with the doctor and police, who were holding an inquest, and conducted the funeral. “He was one of our best wardens and loved the outside life and disliked the town,” said a Parks report.
The was formerly known as “Warden Peak” in association with Portcullis Peak. After the Goodair, the new name suggested in his memory by the Alpine Club of Canada.
Origin of the name unknown.
The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway station at Mile 117 (west of the Yellowhead Pass) was initially named “Rooney,” after W. J. Rooney, superintendent of construction in charge of the GTP Telegraph Service. Sometime between 1918 and 1925 the station was renamed “Goat River.”
Bohi’s listing says the station name “Goat River” was preceded by the names “Rooney” and “Brundell.”
The post office at Goat River Station operated from 1923 to 1945.
“We followed a stream to the summit or divide, between Big [Issac] Lake and the upper Fraser, having to cut our way through a heavy growth of brush and fallen timber. After passing over the summit at a distance of about four miles we came to a stream, which we called Goat River.” So reads the report of Robert Buchanan’s 1886 prospecting expedition, which started from Barkerville.
In 1871 a Canadian Pacific Railway survey had cut a trail from Barkerville to Tête Jaune Cache through the Goat River valley, and the trail was used over the next year, but when the CPR abandoned the Yellowhead Pass route the trail fell into disuse. After Buchanan’s expedition the trail was occasionally used by miners, trappers, and lumbermen wanting to outfit out of Barkerville rather than Quesnel or Fort George.
In 1887 rumors of gold drew 40 Cariboo miners to the river, but after a week of fruitless panning they returned empty-handed.
The trail was used in the 1910s to deliver bootleg liquor to the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway construction camps on the Fraser River , and in the 1930s when mining began at Wells. Mica from a mine on Mica Mountain near Tête Jaune Cache was transported over the trail.
When newlyweds Cliff and Ruth Kopas traveled through the Goat River valley in 1933, they described the trail as being so bad that “when you get part way in, you keep going because you wouldn’t have the guts to go back over the trail again.”
There are dangerous rapids in the Fraser River near the mouth of the Goat.
Association with Goat Rover.
A “glacis” is a gently sloping bank. The ridge was a camera station on the survey of the Alberta-British Columbia Boundary Commission, which worked through the Yellowhead Pass in 1917.
Origin of the name unknown.
The source is an unnamed glacier on the east slope of Mount Thompson.