The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (30 page)

“Hobbled or picketed those horses?” he snarled.

“Neither,” Wilson growled back.

“Blue Jesus! You’ll walk to Padmore
^*
in the morning,” Rogers fairly screamed.

Wilson yelled back at him: “In that case you’ll go with me and I’ll have the poor consolation of damned poor company.”

Wilson broke the silence that followed with a question:

“What am I here for?”

“To look after me and tend the horses.”

“Haven’t I done that? Haven’t the horses always been ready when you wanted them?”

“Blue Jesus. Yes.”

“Then stop your damn growling and kick when they are not – kick when you’ve got a reason to.”

They did not speak again until the following morning at breakfast, when Rogers turned to Wilson and calmly said: “That’s a good idea letting the horses feed loose. They get more food that way and we can travel further and get more out of them next day.”

It was the nearest he ever came to an apology, but as a result the air was cleared and, as they set out once more, there sprang up between them for the first time a true intimacy that never faded.

At this point Rogers played a hunch that was to cause him a good deal of mental anguish during the months that followed. The two men were not far from the survey gang working at the headwaters of the Bow
River, trying to find whether a possible railway route led from that point over the Howse Pass. Rogers abruptly decided not to proceed further with the survey. Though he knew nothing about the Howse Pass, he had come to the sudden conclusion that it was not a feasible route and was not worth bothering with. As Wilson noted, “Always the Kicking Horse ruled his mind, and although at times he had doubts regarding it being the best route, yet those fears never lasted long.” But his sudden decision that morning caused him many misgivings the following summer, long after the Kicking Horse Pass had been officially chosen by the
CPR’S
board of directors and agreed to by Parliament.

Wilson, also on a hunch, quit Rogers at this juncture. By doing so he saved himself a good deal of hardship. The survey crews lingered too long in the mountains. They did not emerge until late October, and by the time they reached High River they were frozen in. Crowfoot, the sagacious Blackfoot chief, chose this moment to enter their camp. He was in an ugly mood because the Governor General on his trip west that summer had promised him a buggy and a piano, which had not arrived. Crowfoot called upon the stranded surveyors to produce the gifts; when they could not, the Indians robbed them of their food and some of their clothing. Half starved and freezing, the party managed to trudge to Blackfoot Crossing, where they were given some assistance. Then they began the long, sub-zero trek across the prairies, through the snowstorms and blizzards, to the end of steel near Flat Creek, Manitoba.

J. H. E. Secretan encountered the party, starving and in rags, on the high bank of the South Saskatchewan. The sight of them – and of Rogers in particular – offended the sensibilities of the fastidious Englishman who believed, above all else, in cleanliness, good order, and discipline (he even had gunny sacks sewn together to carpet the floors of his tents). Rogers he later described as “the worst looking, long-haired ruffian of them all.”

An avid sportsman, Secretan had been living all summer on ducks, prairie chickens, geese, cranes, and other game, which he shot himself. Rogers was as horrified by such Lucullan fare as Secretan was horrified by Rogers’s appearance. The two did not get along, but Rogers had his revenge- or thought he did. When he reached Winnipeg he informed General Rosser, who was then in command, that Secretan “was living like the Czar of Russia [with] tents carpeted with Brussels carpet [and] living upon roast turkeys and geese and other expensive luxuries unheard of in the cuisine of a poor, unsophisticated engineer.”

“Thus,” wrote Secretan, “did the Major bite the hand that fed him.”

3
The Major finds his pass

By the time Rogers reached Winnipeg, late in 1881, Van Horne’s appointment had been announced. The new general manager took Rogers with him to Montreal in January, 1882, to convince the
CPR
directors – the Syndicate, as the press and public still called them – that the Kicking Horse route was practicable with grades of 2.2 per cent and that there appeared to be a feasible pass through the Selkirks.

Rogers had not fully convinced himself, though his pronouncements to the board exuded confidence. Others were sceptical. The
Inland Sentinel
at Yale, in the heart of Andrew Onderdonk’s construction empire, reported with some asperity Rogers’s abortive attempt to cross the mountains, pointing out correctly that he had not taken enough supplies and had neglected also to bring along snowshoes. “Now Mr. Rogers reports that he has found a practicable route through the Selkirk Range with a grade of 80 ft. to the mile; if he has, he has done better than any engineer who preceded him.”

In truth, Rogers had discovered half a pass only. To confirm his findings he would have to scale the eastern wall of the Selkirks and make sure that the gap he thought he saw from the Illecillewaet actually pierced the mountain barrier.

Tom Wilson had sworn that he would never return to the mountains. Rogers thought he knew otherwise: “You may think you’re not coming back but you’ll be here next year and I’ll be looking for you,” he told him when they parted. Wilson rode off, muttering to himself that Rogers would have to look a long time. He spent the winter hunting and trapping in the Little Snowy Mountains of Montana, but as the snow began to melt, “longings for the unexplored solitudes of the far-away Canadian Rockies assailed me, nor could they be cast out.” The first of May, 1882, found him once again at Fort Benton impatiently awaiting the arrival of the survey parties from the East.

M. F. Hurd, the new engineer in charge (under Rogers), was one of the most experienced men on the continent. He had helped to build the Union Pacific across the American Rockies and had been prominent in surveys and explorations for the Denver & Rio Grande. Van Horne had hired him personally. He was a small, dynamic man – the antithesis of his predecessor, Hyndman – a solitary creature who shunned company. Like Rogers, he was a prodigious tobacco-chewer. In Wilson’s words, “tobacco chewing played a great part in the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway.”

Two of the routes explored the previous year – the Kananaskis route and the Simpson Pass route – had proved to be unsuitable. Rogers, on a whim, had also rejected the Bow Summit-Howse Pass route. That left only the Kicking Horse. The entire party immediately pushed full speed for the summit to try to locate a line of railway through the Rockies.

In the meantime, Major Rogers once again was attacking the Selkirks. He left St. Paul at the end of March, bought supplies in San Francisco and Walla Walla, Washington, and reached the Columbia Valley on May 20. One of his engineers, Donald McMillan, and nine men had spent the winter camped at the mouth of the Kicking Horse, shuttling supplies down the frozen Columbia towards the Beaver Valley, at the base of the hoped-for pass. On May 22 Rogers decided to try to reach the summit of the Selkirks and complete his exploration of the previous year. No detailed account of that abortive journey remains but it was clearly an ordeal. Swollen torrents, coursing down from the snow-fields above, heavy timber, and a dense undergrowth of vine-like alders, nettles, and devil’s clubs frustrated their movement. Once again Rogers had failed to bring along enough supplies. He put his grumbling men on half rations, relenting only on his birthday when he allowed them a little sugar to sweeten their tea in celebration. Only the discovery of an old canoe, which brought them swiftly back to camp, prevented the entire party from starving to death.

On July 17 Rogers tried again, taking two white men and three Indians with him and setting off from the point where the Beaver flows into the Columbia. Here, before the railway builders helped destroy it, was some of the loveliest scenery to be found in the mountains. There was a softness about it all-the river, pale milky green, winding through the golden marshland, the shining ponds winking through the dark spruces, the cataracts traced like tinsel strands on the crags above. Farther up the trail, the river knifed through the shaggy forest, boiling and frothing over shale steps and winding through carpets of ferns and thick tangles of saskatoons and raspberries. The timber was stupendous: the cedars were often ten feet or more in diameter; sometimes they rose two hundred feet above the matted forest floor.

Through this unknown country Rogers and his party climbed for hour after hour along a spectacular route that millions would one day traverse in comfort. They followed the Beaver through its canyon and then cut up a smaller tributary, the Bear, turning off again on a smaller stream that branched away to the south. The brush was so dense that they could make little more than two miles a day. Rogers suffered severely from blackflies and mosquitoes. His forehead swelled and his ears puffed up so badly that
they swayed as he walked and he remarked that they felt like pieces of liver. “Not one engineer in a hundred,” his friend George Grant later remarked, “would have risked, again and again, health and life as he did.”

Above them loomed glaciers fifty feet thick and mountains that would one day bear the names of famous Canadians – Shaughnessy, Sifton, Tupper, Macdonald – and of Rogers himself. The lower mountain slopes were flawed, each forested flank scarred by the paths of snowslides, the trees snapped off dozens of feet from the base. These mountains – conical, pyramidal, serrated – looked familiar to Rogers, for he had seen them all the previous year from the opposite side. There, before them, was the very peak on which he had stood in the summer of 1881 and there was the same broad meadow that he had spied from his vantage point. He and his party had reached an altitude of forty-five hundred feet and were standing in a valley that seemed completely enclosed by mountains. Ragged black precipices (later named for Macdonald and Tupper) stood guard at the entrance, apparently forming an impassable wall between them. To the north and west the black smudge of timber rose up to blend with sloping meadows, the soft grasses flecked with wild flowers. Beyond these spangled pastures were glacial fields of glistening white, tilting upwards to curved ridges which, in turn, led the eye higher to frosted peaks. A sharp-cut pyramid (it would later, appropriately, be named “Cheops”) was silhouetted against the sky. To the southwest more mountains stretched off into a haze of misty blue. Somewhere in the distance a brook gurgled above the sound of the wind in the swaying spruces. Here the waters flowed in opposite directions, spilling down both sides of the Selkirks. Now the Major knew he had found at last the long-sought passage through the barrier. In the face of considerable hardship – and some foolhardiness – he had succeeded where others had failed and done what his detractors had said was impossible. There was a way through the Selkirks after all, and its discovery would make him immortal. Almost from this moment, this smiling, mountain-ringed meadow would bear the name of Rogers’s Pass. The date was July 24, 1882, and Rogers, after searching vainly for an alternate pass, lost no time in retracing his steps so that he might let the world have the news of his discovery.

Tom Wilson, meanwhile, was engaged in packing supplies from Pad-more in the foothills to the summit of the Kicking Horse in the Rockies. One day in August he ran into a small band of Stony Indians and asked them about the roar of avalanches which was clearly audible in the distance. One of the band, a man known as Gold-seeker, told him that these slides occurred on “snow mountain,” which Wilson later identified as
Victoria Glacier. This mountain of snow, the Indian told him, lay high above “the lake of the little fishes,” whose source it was.

Something about the Indian’s description intrigued Wilson and he asked him to guide him to the lake. It was not a difficult passage on horseback and it was well worth the trip. The two men burst out upon a small, emerald gem, framed by a backdrop of dark evergreens, a dazzling white glacier, and a curtain of blue mountains.

“As God is my judge, I never in all my explorations saw such a matchless scene,” Wilson recalled. He sat down, pulled out his pipe and, as he smoked, gazed for a long time on that mirror of blue-green water, soon to become one of the most famous tourist attractions on the continent. It was noon, and the sun, directly above him, shone down upon the pool around which mountains and glacier formed an almost perfect horseshoe. Forests that had never known an axe seemed to grow directly out of the shining surface. A mile and a half beyond, the backdrop of the scene was divided into three distinct bands of colour – white, opal, and brown – where the glacier merged with the water. Wilson decided to name it Emerald Lake, and so it appeared on the first geological map of the Canadian Rockies. But even as the map was published the name was changed to Lake Louise in honour of the Governor General’s lady. (Wilson that same season discovered a second gem of a lake, which he also named Emerald Lake; this time the name stuck. So did that of the Yoho Valley, which he also discovered and which was to become a national park.)

Later that afternoon – the date was August 21 – Wilson arrived at one of the survey camps and ran into Major Rogers.

“Blue Jesus!” roared the Major. “I knew you’d be back. I knew you’d be back. You’ll never leave these mountains again as long as you live. They’ve got you now.” As it turned out, Rogers was absolutely right.

Rogers confided to Wilson that he still had doubts about his choice of the Kicking Horse Pass. Perhaps the Howse Pass, after all, was an easier grade. Both passes led to adjacent points on the Columbia; both were about the same length. What if, after the road was built, Rogers should be proved wrong?

Very little was known about the Howse Pass. Years before it had been used by Hudson’s Bay packers moving to and from the Columbia. James Hector had climbed the eastern slope in the days of the Palliser expedition more than fifteen years before. Walter Moberly and his men had ascended the western side and made a preliminary survey down from the summit to the Columbia in 1871. Moberly had been convinced at the time that the pass was the best possible route for the railway to follow; his persistent
and often foolhardy espousal of it had, in the end, forced his retirement from the Canadian Pacific Survey. What if Moberly should be proved right after the fact? He was not the sort of man who would ever let Rogers forget it.