Description
The Yellowhead Trail, which passes through Edmonton, is part of the nearly 3,200-kilometre-long Yellowhead Highway that
connects Winnipeg in the East to Massett on the Queen Charlotte Islands in the west. The highway is an amalgamation of
many highways that originated as historic Aboriginal and fur trade routes. Before construction of the roads, the
Canadian Northern Railway and the Grand Trunk Pacific forged their ways through the Yellowhead Pass between 1912 and
1914.
In the late 1910s and early 1920s the Edmonton Area Good Roads Association became involved in the first concerted effort
to build automobile roads to the Rocky Mountains and beyond, and encouraged development of what would become a key
section of the Yellowhead Highway. In 1947 the inaugural conference of the Trans Canada Highway System (Yellowhead
Route) took place.
The Yellowhead Highway takes its name from Yellowhead Pass, the lowest crossing of the Continental Divide on the North
American continent. The mountain pass was used for centuries by Aboriginal people and was first mentioned in European
accounts around 1826. It was for many years the route used by fur traders travelling to the New Caledonia Department (an
area beyond the Rocky Mountains in northern British Columbia) of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). HBC documents used the
name Tête-Jaune, or Yellowhead, for Pierre Hatsinaton, sometimes called Pierre Bostonais, who was a Métis guide and
trapper who worked in the area of the pass now known as Yellowhead.
Feature Type
Road
Designation Year
CU