Before there was 100 Mile House, there was Lone Butte.
The arrival of the railway in 1919 turned the quiet outpost into a bustling hub of the era.
At an elevation of 3,900 feet, the town held a key position because the railroad did not have to haul water to operate the steam engines. As the train came into the station, the spout from the water tower was maneuvered over the water car, filling the tanker. Two heaters inside the tower prevented the water from freezing during winter.
The tower and the railway station became the centre of a community that grew up around it. Through an agreement with the Pacific Great Eastern Railway (PGE) in the late 1920s, water was piped in to feed town water lines that eventually serviced a hotel, post office and store.
The train meant residents no longer had to make their long and tiring annual journey to Ashcroft to stock up on supplies for the coming year. They could order fresh fruit, building supplies, dry goods and other items to be delivered by train. Mail was delivered weekly. Newspapers were no longer out of date.
The demise of the Iron Horse - the train - has left the community of Lone Butte a shadow of its former self. The water tower is still there but the spring has dried up. Vast stockyards that served a huge swath of the ranches in the B.C. Interior in that era have disappeared. The caboose no longer leaves the station. It is instead used as the meeting place for the Lone Butte Historical Association.
But the people who made this place home and their history live on in four murals that adorn the walls of the South Cariboo Theatre: The Lone Butte Stockyards, Charlie Reed and the railroad, Carl Nath and daughter Anna Granberg and Anna Horn and the Lone Butte Hotel.
Williams Lake artist Dwayne Davis painted the stockyards using a set of old historical photos. The main snapshot he used shows an anonymous area rancher on horseback in the foreground, with more riders partly visible in the dust behind him, driving cattle through Lone Butte to the stockyard.
Shirley Canning, president of the historical association, said the PGE had shipping corrals built in the town, which was the only shipping point in the region.
Cattle were brought in from Bridge Lake, the Bonaparte and all areas in between before being shipped via rail to Squamish and then by barge to Vancouver.
In an interview last year with the Free Press, long-time area resident Dave Abbs said cattle shipping day was a major event.
“The day before, Dad, the neighbour and all the kids used to drive the cows to Lone Butte,” he said. When they got to town the next morning, it was full of cattle. “Where the grocery store, the post office, all that is? It was all stockyards.”
This would have been a familiar sight for Reed, who worked as a PGE section foreman for 17 years in Lone Butte.
Gayle Jones, secretary of the historical association, said her grandfather passed away before she was born but artist Neil Pinkett did a good job portraying his likeness.
“He was standing in the door of a boxcar at the time,” said Jones, referring to the photo she chose for Pinkett to use as a reference for the mural. “He worked for the railway and he was standing in the door of a boxcar. He has the coveralls on and that flat cap thingy and it just seemed to me that was probably what he looked like every day when he went to work. I never saw him, so to me, that’s what he looked like when he was working.”
Reed grew up in Sweden and came to Canada in the early 1920s, after the First World War. He eventually made his way to Lone Butte, where he was hired on by the railroad. He married Maggie Jowsey in 1924 and they raised two sons and a daughter.
When Reed retired in 1942, he joined his family ranching in Bridge Lake on the property that became known as Reed’s Corner.
The arrival of the railway brought the need for other services to the area, including the Lone Butte Hotel, built in the early 1920s to provide accommodations for cattle buyers from Vancouver and other visitors to the area.
Twice a week, owner Anna Gibson (formerly Horn, and Canning’s great-aunt) met the trains arriving at 4 a.m. going north and 1 a.m. heading south.
“My mom’s dad was Carl Nath and Anna and Carl were sister and brother from Germany,” Canning said. “My aunt had a car so she could take people back and forth.”
The hotel building was used as a place to write secondary school entrance exams, served as the courthouse in a notorious cattle rustling case, and even saw the birth of two children. When it burned to the ground in 1998, 76 years of history went up in flames in a little over two hours.
Lone Butte lost a trove of history when Canning’s mother, Anna Granberg, passed away in 2019. Granberg was an avid gardener and seamstress and was a wealth of local historical information, as she lived in the area all her life.
She was an active member of the historical association and was a motivating factor in the upkeep of the Pioneer Cemetery, attending every work bee. One year, when she was unable to attend when the historical association replaced and extended the old fence, she came and spent the next few days painting the entire fence herself. She was in her 80s at the time.
Both Jones and Canning tell a story of when the mural depicting Anna Granberg and her father Carl Nath loading up the wagon on one of their twice-yearly trips into Lone Butte was painted.
“They had painted the horses the wrong colour but my mom got them straightened out on that. She said the horses were not that colour so they had to redo them,” Canning said.
“Historically, it had to be right with my mother.”
