Location: Tete Jaune Cache is located at the junction of the Yellowhead South Highway 5 and Yellowhead Highway 16; 211 miles north of Kamloops, 160 miles east of Prince George, 60 miles west of Jasper. Located at the confluence of the Fraser and Robson Rivers, Tete Jaune Cache is seven miles west of Mount Robson, at the southern end of the Cariboo Mountains and the northern end of the Monashee Range. Population: 1500.
Tete Jaune Cache, the Yellowhead Highway and Yellowhead Pass were named after a fur trader and trapper who guided for the Hudson’s Bay Company in the early 1800s. The yellow-haired Iroquois Metis guide Pierre Hastination (aka Pierre Bostonais) was nicknamed Tete Jaune (yellow head) by the French voyageurs because of his blonde-streaked hair. He led a Hudson’s Bay group across the Rocky Mountains in December 1819 to meet with the Shuswap Indians. Hunting and trapping in the area between the Smoky River Post, Jasper and Fort George, Tete Jaune established a fur cache on the Grand Fork of the Fraser, somewhere in the vicinity of the present day viewpoint. In 1825 the Hudson’s Bay Company sent a group guided by Tete Jaune to survey the Yellowhead Pass area.
By 1827 Tete Jaune had relocated his cache from the Grand Fork of the Fraser to the vicinity of the Shuswap salmon fishing camp on the Fraser River where the town of Tete Jaune Cache stands today. Unfortunately, Tete Jaune was not allowed to continue trapping. Sometime in 1828, near the headwaters of the Smoky River, Tete Jaune and his brother, their wives and children were killed by Beaver Indians in apparent retaliation for their earlier encroachment into the Beaver’s hunting territory.
By the 1830’s the Yellowhead Highway was in heavy use. Red River carts rolled along it in 1841, miners used it for the Caribou Gold Rush in 1856, the 1862 Overlanders followed it to Kamloops and Prince George, and settlers followed it to their new homesteads in the West.
