The year was 1919, and there was great excitement in the Williams Lake valley as the steel rails of the Pacific Great Eastern Railway inched closer and closer.
As surveyors began laying out the streets for the new town to be called Williams Lake, people came from all over to mark the historic event with an impromptu picnic and a day of cowboy sports held in the big natural amphitheatre near the creek.
By the following year the first hotels, stores and homes had blossomed on the bare hills, and that casual get-together had been organized into the first official Williams Lake Stampede. It included, of course, a parade made up of mounted cowboys eager to compete in contests of racing, riding and calf-roping — the type of competition that came naturally to the rugged men from the vast range lands of the Cariboo-Chilcotin.
For many years it was a small amateur rodeo — a time of easy informality, a time to meet old friends. Suspended in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II, it was not revived again until 1947. But the days of it being strictly a Cariboo Stampede with local contestants were over, as it began attracting attention all over the country.
Today the Williams Lake Stampede is a highly professional show, with some of the best cowboys and riders in Canada and the United States competing — and the parade, naturally, has changed too.
No longer a simple line of cowboys, it has mushroomed into a colourful spectacle attracting more than 140 entries each year: marching bands and pipe bands, decorated floats from local businesses and community groups, horse groups and outriders, vintage cars and trucks, clowns, mascots and visiting royalty.
The early years in pictures
These photographs are the oldest surviving images of the parade, taken in the 1920s and 1930s when horses still outnumbered motor vehicles on the route.