In 1871 Canadian Pacific Railway surveyor James Adams Mahood [d. 1901] left Quesnel with a large party, crossed Dominion Pass, and went down Castle Creek to the Fraser River. The party wintered at the Fraser and the next year continued their fruitless search for a pass suitable for a rail crossing. This crossing with pack animals may have been the first recorded crossing of a glacial pass in Canadian mountains.

— Zillmer

“Dominion Pass” is not a currently recognized name.

Named by the Alberta-British Columbia Boundary Commission in 1923, in association with Casket Mountain (on the Alberta side of the boundary); in turn named “due to a rock outcrop at the summit which bears a resemblance to a sarcophagus.” (BC-Alberta Boundary Report, part III, p.61)

“Casket mountain lies directly northeast of Intersection Mountain and is an extension of the same ridge. The name is due to a rock outcrop at the summit which bears a resemblance to a sarcophagus,” wrote boundary surveyor Arthur Oliver Wheeler [1860–1945].

“North Morkill” and “Sheep Creek” identified on BC name card as old/other names for Casket Pass.

See Casemate Mountain.

In the earliest references to this location, it was called “Wolverine Pass.” Named in association with Carcajou Creek.

The name appears as “Wolverine Pass” on the 1915 map North and West of Robson by Donald “Curly” Phillips [1884–1938].

“Nearly midway between Bess Pass and Robson Pass is a pass of the watershed which is locally known as Wolverine Pass, noted
Arthur Oliver Wheeler [1860–1945] during the 1924 Alberta-British Columbia Boundary Commission survey. “There is another Wolverine Pass in a more southerly part of the Canadian Rockies, so the pass under discussion is here referred to as Carcajou Pass, a synonym for Wolverine.”

Pertaining to passes on the Great Divide, Wheeler wrote, “North of Mount Robson are a number of passes …. Of these Carcajou Pass, 5120 feet in altitude, originally named Wolverine Pass, but changed on account of duplication, is most striking. Its summit is a broad swamp, numerous channels carrying off the glacial outflow of the magnificent ice-bound cirque below Mt. Phillips. Here, half a dozen icefalls sent their masses down in wildest confusion.”

The word carcajou was used by the French in North America, and is apparently of Indian origin. “The fur hunter’s greatest enemy is the wolverine or carcajou,” wrote Milton and Cheadle in 1863.

Origin not known.

In 1811, at this river’s confluence with the Columbia River, North West Company explorer David Thompson [1770–1857] and his men built the canoe in which they voyaged down the Columbia.

Our residence was near the junction of two Rivers from the Mountains with the Columbia: the upper Stream which forms the defile by which we came to the Columbia, I named the Flat Heart, from the Men being dispirited ; it had nothing particular. The other was the Canoe River ; which ran through a bold rude valley, of a steady descent, which gave to this River a very rapid descent without any falls…

Birch trees grew in the vicinity, but because of the mild climate, according to Thompson, the bark was too thin to use. So his men “split out thin boards of Cedar wood of about six inches in breadth and builded a Canoe of twenty-five feet by fifty inches in breadth, of the same form of a common canoe, using cedar boards instead of Birch Rind, which proved to be equally light and much stronger than Birch Rind, the greatest difficulty which we had was sewing the boards to each other round the timbers. As we had no nails we had to make use of the fine Roots of the Pine which we split.”