Edgar Dewdney was born in 1835. He came from Devonshire, England with a civil engineering degree. He surveyed New Westminster under contract to the Royal Engineers in 1859 before taking a fateful steamboat ride up the Fraser River to Hope. On the paddlewheeler, he met his future wife, Jane Shaw Moir. Jane's stepfather, Thomas Glennie, farmed along the Coquihalla River, where the Glen-halla Subdivision is now, in the town of Hope. Her mother, Mrs. Louisa Glennie, was the first school teacher in Hope. Edgar Dewdney and Jane Moir were the first couple married in Hope's Christ Church Anglican, on March 28, 1864.
Under Governor James Douglas' direction, the Royal Engineers surveyed the Hope Mountains in anticipation of building a wagon road through the Hozameen Range. Edgar Dewdney and Walter Moberly were awarded the contract to construct this road to the Okanagan. (Segments of the Engineers Road begun in 1859 are still visible east of Hope along the Hope-Princeton Highway.) However, gold was discovered in the Cariboo in 1860 and the Engineers were re-assigned to build a road north. Then gold was discovered at Rock Creek, east along the 49th parallel, in 1860. Edgar Dewdney was awarded the contract and built the 1.2 metre-wide Dewdney Trail from Hope to Princeton that same year. Dewdney's future brother-in-law, John Fall Allison, and the citizens of Princeton extended this trail east to Osoyoos where it deaked into Washington to avoid Anarchist Mountain.
In 1864, Governor Seymour called Dewdney back from his work with Joseph Trutch on the Cariboo Road in the Fraser Canyon and contracted him to extend the Dewdney Trail from Rock Creek to the Kootenays. It reached Galbraith's Ferry on the Kootenay River, near present-day Fort Steele, in 1865.
As a cost-cutting measure, the two colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia were united as the colony of British Columbia in 1866. As the new colony developed, Edgar Dewdney switched from engineering to politics. After Victoria became the capital in 1868, Dewdney was elected to represent Kootenay on the colonial Legislative Council. After British Columbia became a province of Canada in 1871, he was elected to Ottawa as Conservative Member of Parliament for Yale in 1872, 1874, and 1878.
In federal service, Dewdney was Indian Commissioner for the North-West Territories, now Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, from 1879 to 1888, the years treaties were being signed with prairie First Nations in anticipation of the railroad crossing the Great Plains. He was also Lieutenant Governor of the North-West Territories from 1881 to 1888 during the years of railroad building and the second Riel Rebellion. In 1888 and 1891 he was re-elected to the House of Commons as Member of Parliament for Assiniboia East. From 1888 to 1892 he held federal cabinet positions as Minister of the Interior and Superintendent of Indian Affairs.
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