Raymond Olson writes: Around the beginning of World War II, Bert and Wilfred Leboe started a small mill two miles east of Loos at what became Crescent Spur. They had seen an opportunity in using the back channel of the Fraser River to transport and store their logs and thus minimize transportation, loading and unloading costs. They were still logging for Thrasher and they set about getting materials to Crescent Spur to construct their mill. There wasn’t a road between Loos and Crescent Spur so everything had to be transported by speeder. The money made from working for Thrasher was used to pay for a Spur line put in by the C.N.R. at a cost of $700. A side track with a switch at one end connecting to the main line is quite often referred to as a “Spur”; this coupled with the “Crescent” shape of the back channel may have been the origin of the name of the community. This is only speculation on my part as no one has been able to give me a clear indication of as to why it was called Crescent Spur; however Bert Leboe is credited with coming up with the name Crescent Spur.

Origin of the name unknown.

Lloyd Crate (born 1920) was maintenance foreman for the department of highways for most of the twenty-five years he worked in the McBride-Tête Jaune Cache area. Crate was born in Prince Rupert, and came to Lucerne, in Mount Robson Park, around 1945. Ice from Lucerne Lake supplied Canadian National Railroad passenger trains, and Crate worked in the icehouses one summer. Starting in 1936, the Crate family operated a fishing and hunting camp on Yellowhead Lake. In 1961 they moved to Tête Jaune Cache. At a farewell dance in the Red Pass community hall, “best wishes were extended from all the district with the hope that Lloyd will frequently be seen in the district operating the highways grader.” He retired in 1980.

Cranberry Lake, BC. Benjamin F. Baltzly, 1871
McCord Stewart Museum

Hudson’s Bay Company director George Simpson [1792–1860] wrote in 1824,

At our Encampment [Boat Encampment, near the junction of Canoe River and the Columbia] fell in with a band of free Iroquois who have for several years hunted in the neighbourhood of Canoe River Cranberry & Moose Lake New Caledonia and the North branch of Thompson’s River.

Cranberry Lake, labelled on BC map 3H, 1919, was later drained and divided into lots (description of subdivision in 1924).

“Cranberry Lake, which is about seven hundred acres in area, lies on the divide between the McLennan and Canoe rivers,” wrote surveyor A. W. Johnson in 1912. “The lake apparently drains naturally into the McLennan, but it is a mere trickle. The lake is of beaver construction, and must have been quite recently a spruce-swamp, for there are many old roots under the water, which is nowhere more than three or four feet deep. It has nothing to justify its perpetuation as a lake, except that it makes a fine foreground for photographs of the surrounding mountains. So shallow that our paddle stirs up evil smells all the time, and while we were there, at any rate, avoided by ducks and geese, it would fulfill a higher destiny as a hay meadow. The water is warm in summer and almost stagnant; quite unfit to drink. Cranberry Lake is so called because there are no cranberries anywhere near it.”

The Cranberry Lake post office was open from 1913 to 1918, when it was changed to Swift Creek. In 1928, Swift Creek was changed to Valemount. There are less than ten cancellation marks known from the Cranberry Lake post office.

“Who remembers Cranberry Lake ?” asks an early settler. “It had a small island in the centre which grew swamp cranberries.” During the construction of the Yellowhead Highway in 1965, Cranberry Lake was filled in.

Location approximate. Origin unknown.

On August 22, 1911, Ernest C. Cox at Cranberry Lake (Valemount) wrote in his diary, “Saw Craig, the Fire Warden, Ed Garrett, and Kennedy.”

Stan Craig farmed at Croydon, east of Horsey Creek, and worked on the railroad atSwiftwater and other stations. He was listed in the 1943 Mount Robson post office directory as “section-man on the CNR,” a job he had held since 1918.

In the 1920s, to accommodate J. Bennett’s pole-cutting operation, Cariboo was moved to Mile 7 west of McBride. The station was renamed after Bennett and D. A. Craig, the section foreman. In 1928, Craibenn had four settlers and a government ferry.

“Curve (Coyote) Creek” labelled on BC map 3H, 1915. “Curve Creek (not Coyote Creek)” identified in the 1930 BC Gazetteer.