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Rails Across the Rockies

Surveying and Constructing the Great Railways of the Canadian West

Researched and written by Graeme Pole.

Published by Mountain Vision Publishing, Hazelton, British Columbia, Canada.

http://mountainvision.ca/

graeme@mountainvision.ca

Cover: CP 5803, a Santa Fe-type 2-10-2 locomotive, heads an eastbound “double-header” freight on the Canadian Pacific Railway, midway up the Field Hill in the late 1930s.

Photographer: Fred C. Stoes

Used with the kind permission of Rick Hamman, Yesteryeardepot

Locomotive identification by Ray Verdone.

Title page: Canadian Pacific Railway work camp and work train at the Second Crossing of the Illecillewaet River, The Loops, Rogers Pass, 1885

Photographer: Alexander Ross

Detail from Glenbow Archives NA 4428-3

Editor: Marnie Pole

Maps: Scott Manktelow Design

This book is a revised and much enlarged edition of the print title Great Railways of the Canadian West, published in 2006 and out of print since 2008.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Pole, Graeme, 1956-, author

Rails across the Rockies : surveying and constructing the great railways of the Canadian West / Graeme Pole.

Previously published under the title: Great railways of the Canadian West.

Includes bibliographical references.

Electronic monograph in HTML format.

ISBN 978-0-9697249-8-8 (html)

1. Railroads--Canada, Western--History. I. Pole, Graeme, 1956- . Great railways of the Canadian West. II. Title.

HE2808.P65 2014 385.09712 C2014-901320-5

There is no branch of the organization of a country – political, municipal, social, or constructive – to the success of which a good map is not essential.

Millington Henry Synge, 1852

The work of an engineer on construction is but little understood by the general public. Some doubtless regard him as simply a fellow who looks through a telescope and sees things upside down.

P. Turner Bone, When the Steel Went Through, 1947

My principal assistant engineer wrote me a report stating that he quite despaired of building the line on the West Slope [of Rogers Pass], as he considered it quite impracticable and he evidently wanted to throw any responsibility off his own shoulders should I determine to go on with it, and he had no remedy to suggest.

Letter from Construction Superintendent, James Ross, to CPR General Manager, William Cornelius Van Horne, February 1885

Contents

Prologue

1. The Pipedream of Millington Henry Synge

2. Ocean to Ocean

3. The World According to Walter J. Moberly

4. Two Streaks of Rust

5. The Bishop, The General, and the Impossible

6. One Railroad Too Many

7. Paper, Rocks, and Steel

8. Railhead, Roadhouse, and Ruin

9. A Spike as Good as Any Other

10. The Road of a Thousand Wonders

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Author’s Notes

Recommended Reading

Graeme Pole

Prologue

In the frigid autumn of 1883, surveyor Charles Shaw received a desperate assignment. Track-laying for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was proceeding apace through the Bow Valley in the Rocky Mountains, aiming for the eastern approach to Kicking Horse Pass. To the west of the pass, the railway’s proposed route plunged into the confines of the Kicking Horse Valley. Avalanche slopes scoured the canyon-rent course for most of the ensuing 50 miles to the Columbia River. Major A.B. Rogers had surveyed the route in 1882, and had staked his reputation on it, but no one else making decisions concerning the construction of the CPR believed the route viable.

Word came from the company’s head office in Montréal: If there was a better way, find it. And now. Shaw’s boss dispatched him to make a reconnaissance survey of Howse Pass, the next major break through the mountains to the north. In the Howse Valley, Shaw investigated a series of tributaries, but each ended at “a glacier in high, rugged peaks.” He reported that “we were reduced to something less than half rations,” so he travelled alone, not wanting to subject his men to slogging through the mountains on empty stomachs.

When Shaw finally found Howse Pass, his brother Norman, who was part of the crew, volunteered to accompany the surveyor on a tentative crossing. Taking six biscuits and two blankets, they set off for the 20-mile walk to the pass and the unknown country beyond. Frigid rain soon drenched them, forcing a bivouac.

Next day, while Norman attempted to dry the blankets, Shaw crossed Howse Pass to where he discovered the stumps of some axe-felled trees. The stumps were 12 feet high, indicating the likely depth of the snow when the lumberjacks had done their winter’s work. The biscuits gone, Shaw and his brother hiked through the night back to camp, where they found the other men sick from over-indulging in tobacco. They also found renewed orders to run a trial line across any prospective pass.

Shaw set his men to the task, but snow began to fall. It was soon piled four feet deep. One morning while the crew was departing for work, an avalanche swept down. Shaw had foreseen the likelihood, and had made it a practice to cache supplies away from camp. The avalanche heaped debris several hundred feet deep, blocking the narrow valley. Their tents were destroyed but Shaw and his men had blankets and food enough for the 80-mile forced march back to the railhead at Laggan (now Lake Louise), which they began that afternoon. When they arrived five days later, Shaw described his companions as looking like “wild men,” their boot-less feet wrapped in gunnysacks and deer hides. At the railroad’s mess house they ate their first “civilized meal” in many months. So ended a routine season of surveying for the CPR.

A single avalanche had killed any lingering hope for the Howse Pass route. The CPR was out of time. The following summer, the railway would lay track across Kicking Horse Pass, although no one believed that the route could be any better.

1. The Pipedream of Millington Henry Synge

Canadian Confederation was more than fifteen years away when an Irish soldier, a Royal Engineer named Millington Henry Synge, floated his idea. In January 1852, Synge presented a paper to the Royal Geographical Society in London. In his Proposal for a Rapid Communication with the Pacific and the East, via British North America, the engineer described a transportation system – a hybrid of railways and canals – that would stretch from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Pacific Ocean.

In making his pitch in the stuffy chambers of the Society, Synge cared not for the possible future of a nation, the kernel of which was just beginning to coalesce. He had in mind the economic interests of the British Empire. With the disappearance five years earlier of Captain John Franklin’s fourth expedition, British mariners and merchants had all but given up on a navigable Northwest Passage. The commercial fleets of the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal, by nature of their slight geographical advantages, had long dominated the trade routes around the Cape of Good Hope to what were then called the East Indies. By nature of this maritime supremacy, those countries had also held the upper hand in the commercial and colonial interests of the Far East for more than two centuries.

The Northwest Passage was a bust, but Synge still believed that he could help forge a trade shortcut that would allow Britain to dominate world commerce. Although two centuries of fur trade experience in the wilds of British North America (as Canada was then known) had proven the landscape harsh, complex, and exacting, Synge thought it would be a relatively simple task to build a transportation network across the middle latitudes of the continent. With ocean ports established at each terminus, the plan would cleave some 3700 miles from what was then the shortest, strictly maritime route between Britain and its newest colonial interest, Australia.

The Irishman’s interest in British North America, and what he misrepresented as his knowledge of it, stemmed from a brief military posting at Bytown, now Ottawa. Synge had never travelled west of his barracks there. He relied heavily on the published accounts of others – principally, fur trade explorers and governors. Synge was highly selective in what he included. His paper brimmed with descriptions of park-like landscapes dotted with tranquil lakes, of luxuriant forests, of productive farmland that never needed to be left fallow, of mountains that were beautiful and inspiring, and always – when it came to proposed transportation routes – trivial obstacles.

Synge penned an utterly fanciful description of the continental divide that separates the North Saskatchewan and the Columbia river systems in the Rocky Mountains: “The width and elevation of the land of the dividing ridges are so slight, that in seasons of flood, the waters of these different systems commingle at their sources.” The only place that such a flood had occurred since the end of the last ice age, was in Synge’s imagination.

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What he included may have been bending the truth, but what Synge excluded – whether intentionally or through ignorance – amounted to an outright lie. The six-month Canadian winters were merely an impediment to travel, not a crucible of wilderness existence. Summers were blissful, with not a mosquito, black fly, noseeum or horsefly to be found. First Peoples were background objects, with no claims, no rights, and posing no threat. The Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes basin, the Canadian Shield, the prairies, the Rocky Mountains, and the five ranges of peaks that lay to their west – all of these, if Synge were to be believed, formed a straight shot for a railway and its attendant canal system. Synge described the Grand Rapid at the mouth of the Saskatchewan River – a three-mile long cataract whose banks were littered with the graves of drowned fur traders – as a “small obstacle.” The “removal” of the rapid would enable navigation “to the very foot of the Rocky Mountains, and in effect carry the Atlantic seaboard to their base.” Synge’s transcontinental route would breach the Rockies by an artificial waterway, constructed of “steps of still water.”

At the time that Synge put his thoughts to paper, Great Britain and most of Europe were at the height of a railway boom that had thoroughly transformed the way of life. Only a century earlier, European commerce had been plodding along as it had for hundreds of years – at the pace of a barge towed by mules. However, by 1804, the steam engine, refined by James Watt in 1765, had been embraced at all levels of enterprise. Britain’s canals were being supplanted by railways, the speed of whose locomotives began to impel industry and the pace of everyday affairs with the urgency of chugging steam. On the seas, too, transformation was underway, as freighters driven by steam-powered turbines overtook the clippers, barques, and galleons of sail.

Although there were 9000 miles of railway track in the US in 1850, the steam era was much slower in coming to British North America, where only 222 miles of track had been laid when Synge proposed his plan. But because there was a perceived inevitability to the construction of railways everywhere in the world, Synge’s idea, although it seems far-fetched today, caught the interest of British newspapers.

Synge was not the only railway dreamer of his time. An Englishman, Robert Carmichael Smyth – another soldier and engineer – proposed a similar scheme. The principal difference was the source of construction labour. Synge favoured importing the unemployed from Britain; Smyth thought that convicts could build the railway in the frozen wilds – his version of a colonial Siberia.

Both proposals included maps with bold lines showing “the routes of communication” between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans across 3600 miles of Canada. Those lines fell eerily close to the eventual route of Canada’s first transcontinental railway, the Canadian Pacific. But beyond the obvious impediments of landscape, labour, and capital, neither proposal mentioned what was at the time the greatest obstacle – the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC).

By nature of a Royal Charter granted in 1666, the HBC outright owned a subcontinent known as “Rupert’s Land” – all territory that drained into Hudson Bay. For almost two centuries it had been HBC policy to drive off rival fur traders and to stifle settlement. To discourage interlopers, the HBC tore out bridges wherever they were built, with the result that not a single span existed across a lake or river in central Canada, west of Sault Ste. Marie. To imagine in 1852 that the HBC would be willing to grant easements for a transcontinental railway, was the pipedream of engineers.

The interest in a transcontinental railway might have then foundered if left solely to the British newspapers, but it was to be sustained on two fronts. In 1848, a young Irishman named John Palliser returned to Britain from a hunting trip along the Missouri River in the US Midwest. Palliser, who had been raised in a family of means but was now short on cash, began to fancy himself an explorer. He approached The Royal Geographical Society to sponsor a quest to chart the lands of central and western British North America. The Society was keen but wanted an expedition that was less intent on personal glory-seeking and more dedicated to scientific exploration. In 1856, the Society hurriedly assembled its team and commissioned the North West America Exploring Expedition, sending it overseas under Palliser’s command the following year. The expedition had many goals, but among them it was to inventory potential railway routes through the mountains of western British North America.

The travels of James Hector, the geologist and doctor to the expedition, were ultimately the most important with regard to Canadian railway history. In journeys that can only be called heroic – some made in the dead of winter – Hector traversed four passes through the central Canadian Rockies – Vermilion, Kicking Horse, Bow, and Howse – and provided elaborate descriptions of the landscape. He commented specifically on the utility of each pass to railway construction and operation in reports to his superior.

In his published summary, Palliser was utterly skeptical about the possibility of a transcontinental railway entirely on Canadian soil. He described the Canadian Shield, the billion-year-old granitic soul of central Canada, and the most ancient geological feature on the surface of the planet, as “the obstacle of the country… almost beyond the remedies of art.” Palliser considered the southern prairies worthless to agriculture, whereas he described a fertile belt to the north in the valley of the North Saskatchewan River. For the next twenty years, the net effect of Palliser’s appraisal was to deter British investors from any interest in at Canadian transcontinental railway.

John Palliser was still writing his report in London when a Canadian Scots weighed in on the discussion. In 1862, Sandford Fleming, a surveyor and railroad construction engineer, published a paper, Observations and Practical Suggestions on the Subject of a Railway through British North America. It was a meticulously researched work, long on detail, short on assumptions. Finally, the politicians, the press, and the public could consider the proposition of the railway on the basis of a no-nonsense document written by a proven railway builder.

Fleming’s paper was but one domino that fell between 1858 and 1871, when events propelled the idea of a Canadian transcontinental railway from parlour room discussion to political debate. The Cariboo gold rush of 1858 attracted thousands to the colony of British Columbia (BC). Almost all arrived by steamship from San Francisco, underscoring the need for an overland route from eastern Canada. The American Civil War of 1861-63 raised the issue of border security between the US and British North America. After the war, the US possessed a large, idle standing army. Many Americans, including Secretary of State William H. Seward, advocated Manifest Destiny. They openly spoke of using force to appropriate British territory – to “finish the job” begun in the American Revolution. There was ample precedent to fear US sabre rattling – the Americans had “absorbed” Texas and California in 1847. The US Midwest was beginning to fill with settlers, whereas, due to the HBC, there were only 23,000 Europeans in British territory west of Lake Superior, most of them on Vancouver Island. Railway building had become an obsession. In a decade, track-length in the US had more than tripled to 31,000 miles; in Canada it had increased ten-fold to 2138 miles.

In 1867, Seward purchased Alaska from Russia, stating that “nature had intended the whole of the continent to be American.” The province of BC – 2200 km distant from the next closest part of what would soon become Canada – began to feel the squeeze between two arms of US territory: the Alaska panhandle of “Seward’s Icebox” to the north and that part of the Oregon Territory (later to be Washington state) to the south. In the same year, Ontario, Québec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia entered Canadian Confederation. Two years later, the Hudson’s Bay Company ceded Rupert’s Land to the fledgling country.

The final domino, that made construction of a transcontinental railway inevitable, fell in 1871, when Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald, struck the bargain with BC that ushered the anxious colony into Canada. What tipped the scale was Macdonald’s promise to begin construction of a railway to BC within two years and to complete the project within ten years. Synge’s pipedream had become a political platform.

Although Macdonald’s plan had critics aplenty, political and public will were mostly in favour. The only impediment that remained to construction of the railway was, as Sandford Fleming had put it in 1862, “half a continent [that had] to be redeemed and parted at least from a wild state of nature.” Fleming had done such a splendid job with his proposal, that John A. Macdonald appointed him to survey the route for what would become known as the Pacific Railway, and to oversee its construction.

2. Ocean to Ocean

Sandford Fleming, Engineer-in-Chief of the Pacific Railway, knew a thing or three about railroads. At the time of his appointment in April 1871, he was 45 and was in charge of the surveying and construction of the Intercolonial Railway, which would link Canada’s four eastern provinces. Construction of the Intercolonial dragged on until 1876, so for the first five years of his tenure with the Pacific Railway, Fleming had the monumental task of overseeing proposed railway construction from coast to coast.

In March 1871, the government established the Pacific Survey to find a route that would link existing railway lines in eastern Canada with BC. Fleming divided the country west from Ottawa into 21 sections, assigning to each a survey party of approximately 40 men. Four of the parties were to survey the BC side of the Rockies. The first left for the field on June 20, but could not begin work until July 20, 1871 – the day that BC entered Confederation. Rather than having his surveyors make cursory trial surveys, in many cases Fleming instructed them to undertake full-blown location surveys. In doing so, the Engineer-in-Chief soon went over-budget, planting a seed that, after cultivation by his detractors, would bear him many woes.

Although other terrain would ultimately present more physical and logistical problems, most of the initial concern with the route involved where the rails would cross the Rocky Mountains. Fleming’s first assignment for surveyor Walter Moberly was to scout Howse Pass in the central Rockies. After Fleming digested Moberly’s preliminary reports, he dismissed Howse Pass. On Fleming’s advice, in April 1872 the government committed to building the railway through Yellowhead Pass. This meant that the rails would cross the prairies some 250 miles north of the US border – far enough away that US branch lines might have been able to infiltrate future Canadian soil. This, too, was a decision that eventually brought Fleming much trouble.

Fleming had never travelled west of Georgian Bay. His remedy for this knowledge gap was typical of the man. With the route for the railway essentially decided – at least in his mind – he crossed the country to inspect the terrain and to meet with surveying parties. As companions, Fleming chose his son, Franky, and George Munro Grant, a Presbyterian minister from Halifax. The three men journeyed separately by rail from Halifax to Toronto, where they met on July 15, 1872. The following day, the trio took passage from Toronto to rail’s end at Collingwood, where they boarded a steamship for Fort William (now Thunder Bay). This mode of travel bypassed the rugged north coast of Lake Superior, which, had Fleming been travelling on foot, would surely have given him pause.

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On the ship, Fleming met botanist John Macoun, a college professor eagerly pursuing his craft on a summer collecting trip. Fleming’s invitation to Macoun to join the expedition – which the botanist accepted – seemed innocent at the time. But it would ultimately help to undermine Fleming’s choice of Yellowhead Pass as the route for the railway.