It’s not every evening that I sit up in my chair and squeal with delight while watching Jeopardy!, but it happened during the closing moments of the Double Jeopardy! round on April 15.
For the handful of people out there who might not know, Jeopardy! — now in its 40th season — features two rounds, each with six categories of six clues each. The clues in each category go from easy to hard as the dollar value increases, and in Double Jeopardy! the clues start at $400. Players have to answer in the form of a question, and while many like to run a category from the easiest question to the hardest, they can pick the clues in any order they want.
Thus it was that as the Double Jeopardy! round on April 15 drew to a close, the only clues left in each category were the $400 ones. One of the categories was called “Road” Scholarly, with each clue focusing on (surprise!) a different road somewhere in the world. It had been nothing special until that point, but as host Ken Jennings started to read the clue, a picture came up to accompany it that made me sit bolt upright in my chair; when a second picture flashed up, I literally squealed with joy.
There, on screen for millions of viewers to see, was Frederick Dally’s iconic photo of a pack train on the Cariboo Waggon Road, passing through the split rock just north of Spences Bridge (the previous shot had been another one of Dally’s photographs, of the 17 Mile Bluff north of Yale). The accompanying clue was “Built into the Fraser Canyon, the Cariboo Road served those pounding their way to the gold rush in this country,” and one of the players buzzed in to answer correctly “What is Canada?”
Canucks are notorious for loving it when we get acknowledged or recognized outside our own borders, and for many years Jeopardy! has been a reliable source for these name checks. That’s in large part due to the show’s longtime host, the late (and much lamented) Alex Trebek, who was born in Sudbury, Ontario and wore his Canadian heritage proudly during his 36 years as Jeopardy!’s host. While he had no direct input into the clues that were used on the show, almost every game featured at least one clue that was related to Canada, in deference to Trebek’s roots.
It’s one thing to be referenced in a clue, however; it’s something else entirely to see one of the most famous photographs ever taken in Western Canada up on screen, particularly when that photo shows a spot only 20 or so minutes down the road, and which I’ve driven through countless times over the decades. I described the photo as “iconic”, and that’s not an exaggeration. There are numerous contemporary photographs of the Cariboo Waggon Road — many of them taken by Dally himself during trips along the road in 1867 and 1868 — but few capture it as vividly as the “split rock” photo: the narrow, cribbed road cut through a massive rock outcrop; the stark landscape of the area; the river far below; and a covered wagon heading north, frozen in place forever.
A man sits on horseback near the front of the wagon. He is too far away for us to see, nearly 160 years later, any expression on his face, but it would probably betray a certain annoyance at this interruption to his journey to the goldfields, since the team pulling the wagon is clearly at a standstill, to facilitate the longer exposure cameras needed back then.
The rider had no way of knowing — as he waited for Dally to get his shot and ge out of the way — that whatever he might or might not find in the goldfields, whatever fortunes he might gain or lose or never grasp, in that moment he was achieving immortality. The phrase “TV game show” would have been incomprehensible to him, but thanks to something of which he could not even dream, millions of people saw him once more, forever poised on the brink of eternity on the Cariboo Road.