The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (31 page)

“Tom,” the Major said as the two men sat outside his tent that evening, “I mustn’t make any mistakes and I am not quite easy in my mind about the Howse Pass. It might be an easier one than this and I must be sure about it. I’d like to take a trip over it and I’d like you to go with me.”

Wilson agreed, and the two set off with packhorses the following morning, struggling through muskegs and over fallen timber and chopping their way through trails rendered impassable by deadfalls. After the second day they found they had travelled only half the distance they had planned. Rogers began to fret. He still had the Selkirks to worry about. He had assigned a team of natives to cut a pathway to the summit. “I wonder how those damn Indians are getting along with that trail,” he kept muttering. Finally at supper he let flow a stream of profanity.

“Blue Jesus! We won’t get through here to the Columbia in two weeks at this rate. A man carrying a pack on his back, could travel twice as fast as we are doing. I’ll give you a fifty dollar bonus if you’ll go through alone on foot.… You ought to do it in ten days easy.”

Rogers promised to meet Wilson in ten days’ time on the far side of the Rockies where the Blaeberry, flowing down from the Howse Pass, empties into the Columbia. Then he went off with the horses leaving Tom Wilson to face the most terrible ordeal of his career.

There was no trail. He groped his way through a forest of eternal night – the trees and underbrush packed so tightly that he could get his bearings only by glimpsing the tips of the mountains above. Bear Creek (another Bear Creek), its banks walled in by an impenetrable mass of tangled willows, was in flood and he used it as a guide. It proved to be a fickle ally. At one point he broke out of the gloomy labyrinth of the evergreens only to find his way blocked by an immense wall of ice – the Freshfield Glacier. He had taken the wrong fork and lost a day.

He kept plugging along like a blind man, following the racing waters, which led him ever upward. This was virgin country; there was no sign that any human being, white or native, had passed this way before. Then, when he seemed to have penetrated to the very core of the wilderness, he saw on the trunk of a tree a scar that could only have been made with an axe; it was grey with age and he realized that this must be a surveyor’s blaze, left by one of Moberly’s men a decade before. He had reached the summit of Howse Pass.

The descent from the pass was even more difficult than the descent
from the Kicking Horse. Nature, jealous of invasion, appeared to have devised a series of obstacles to frustrate all human passage. Wilson’s account of his Odyssey is reminiscent of those medieval tales in which an invisible wizard bestrews the hero’s path with frightening examples of his sorcery. Wilson faced mile upon mile of deadfalls – great trees torn up and tossed helter-skelter, as if by an unseen hand, forming an apparently unending series of eight-foot barriers over which he had to scramble. There were other pitfalls. A canyon barred his way at one point; he was forced to scale a mountain wall to circumvent it. Later he faced a vast slide – an unstable desert of shattered rock. There was no way around, and so he was forced to strike out directly across it, like a man on shifting ice, knowing that a single slip or even the displacement of a loose piece of shale could send the whole mass roaring into the depths below.

There were more canyons and more delays, and, because of the delays, the greatest obstacle of all came to be hunger. After twelve days of exhausting travel – he could sometimes cover no more than a mile in an hour – Wilson was down to a half a bannock. Every mile began to count, but every mile was criss-crossed with uprooted tree trunks. His pace grew slower and slower and for the first time he began to grow alarmed. Would he die in this maze of fallen timber? He decided, at last, on a desperate gamble. After a night’s sleep he cast aside every scrap of equipment except for his axe and made for the Columbia as swiftly as he could. Late the following day, as fatigue dragged his movements to a crawl, he ran into Major Rogers.

“Blue Jesus! What kept you so long?” was Rogers’s only greeting. Then he snorted, turned on his heel, and uttered no further word until Wilson had been fed. The others in the camp later told the packer that the old man had paced up and down for hours like a caged lion, crying over and over again: “If that boy don’t show up what in hell will I do? No-one but a fool would send a lad on such a trip alone, and no-one but a fool would try to make it alone.” Wilson’s journey served to confirm his original hunch that the Kicking Horse provided a better route for the railway than the Howse.

By early fall Rogers was ready to leave the mountains. He wanted to carry the news personally to Montreal. Wilson, who had departed earlier, encountered him on the prairies one Sunday morning in a democrat drawn by four horses, galloping towards the end of steel, “feeling jubilant, for his ambitions were promising realization.”

At Blackfoot Crossing, Rogers met the saintly Father Lacombe and, in the presence of the Oblate missionary, made a herculean effort to avoid any blasphemy.

“Blue——,” he began, and checked himself as he paid off I. G. Baker’s men for provisions. He stared at the bills remaining in his hand and then turned to the priest, who had just finished conducting Mass.

“You’ve got a mission here, haven’t you?” he began, speaking slowly and carefully, watching every word.

He handed the priest the rest of the money: “This is no use to me until I get to the end of steel where I can get lots more. Here, take it – you’ve got some sort of school, haven’t you?”

Lacombe, who had become used to profanity serving as chaplain to the railroad navvies out of Rat Portage, appeared to hesitate. Wilson, who was present, was certain that the priest was trying to make Rogers lose control of his tongue. The Major became embarrassed and “with what looked like a do-or-die attempt,” pushed the money into Lacombe’s hands.

“Here, take it,” he burst out. “If you can’t use it that way then buy yourself some cigars. Blue Jesus, what in hell’s the use of me toting it across these damnation prairies.”

Lacombe, Wilson noted, uttered a guffaw that could be heard at Fort Calgary.

Some time later, George Stephen, faultless in white tie and tails, was entertaining guests in his home in Montreal. His butler was taken aback to discover on the doorstep a wiry little man, roughly dressed and sporting a set of the largest Dundreary whiskers he had ever seen. The butler protested that Stephen could not be disturbed, but the little man was adamant. The
CPR
president reluctantly came to the door and instantly recognized the Major. He ordered the butler to array him in suitable style and then bring him down to dinner. There he heard at first hand the tale of the discovery of the pass through the Selkirks.

True to Jim Hill’s promise, the railway presented Rogers with a cheque for five thousand dollars. To the frustration of the
CPR’S
accounting department, he refused to cash it. A year later Van Horne tried to remonstrate with him on the matter.

“What! Cash that cheque?” Rogers cried. “I would not take a hundred thousand dollars for it. It is framed and hangs in my brother’s house in Waterville, Minnesota, where my nephews and nieces can see it.”

“I’m not here for money!” the Major added. It was an unnecessary comment – but one which must have given considerable satisfaction to James J. Hill, the man who originally made that puzzling decision to send a prairie surveyor into the unknown Selkirks.

4
The Prairie Gopher

Rogers’s discovery of a feasible pass through the Selkirks intensified the Canadian-American rivalry, which was a feature of railway location and construction in the West. How could a Yankee engineer, with no mountain experience, succeed where seasoned Canadians had been forced to admit defeat? Sandford Fleming’s official survey report had published in 1872 the entry for December 22, 1871, from Walter Moberly’s journal: “I found there was not any practicable pass through the Selkirk range.” Two years later, the man in charge of the Canadian Pacific Survey in British Columbia, Marcus Smith, wrote that “there is little probability of a pass being found across the Selkirk range between the upper and lower arms of the Columbia river.” That was one of the reasons why a southern route had been ignored for all of the seventies.

The Opposition press was sceptical of Rogers’s report. “…  on the face of it, the story appeared highly improbable,” the Edmonton
Bulletin
wrote in February, 1883. It published a rumour that the route was a failure and that Rogers was to be dismissed, a tale for which the newspaper offered an intriguing explanation: “There is very little doubt that these favorable reports of Major Rodgers have been a put up job from the first.… The question may very naturally be asked, what object would the syndicate have in so misleading people. The answer is plain. When they took the contract for building the
C.P.R
., it was with the full intention of gobbling up the entire North West.… The failure to find a pass through the Selkirks will form a sufficient excuse for building another line on the prairie, and receiving another grant of good land, before the heavy work in the mountains is commenced.…”

The
Bulletin
, of course, had a vested interest in the failure of the southern route, which had doomed Edmonton to the status of village for the foreseeable future. The fact was, however, that although Rogers had found a pass there was not much hard evidence that it was a practicable one. He had measured it with his eye alone. No one had put a surveyor’s chain on a foot of the Selkirk Mountains. No human being, white man or Indian, had succeeded in making a continuous passage from west to east along the route that he was recommending. One thing was fairly clear: the pass was a steep one – so steep that it might not be diplomatic to call it a pass at all. “I want to tell you positively, that there is no pass in the Selkirk Range,” the company’s western superintendent, John Egan, told
the press that year. “It has to be crossed in the same manner as any other mountain. The track must go up one side and down the other.” Nonetheless, the decision had been made. The Governor General himself was worried about the heavy mountain grades but, as he told the Prime Minister, “it wd be better to have them than further delay, with the N. Pacific gaining Traffic.”

Stephen was himself concerned about Rogers’s credibility. Could that strange, tobacco-chewing little man really be trusted? The president decided that a disinterested party of proven ability and integrity must be engaged to check up on him. The choice fell, obviously, on the former engineer-in-chief Sandford Fleming, who had left the government service in 1880 and had since been living in England.

Van Horne also had some reservations about Rogers and was planning a second expedition to check up on him. He quite liked Rogers and respected his ability (“While the Major is somewhat eccentric and given to ‘burning brimstone,’ he is a very good man … honest and fair dealing”), but he was not happy about the location survey over the Kicking Horse, he was not certain about the practicability of the Selkirk pass, and he was greatly concerned about Rogers’s penchant for economizing on food and pay.

“We must take no chances on this season’s work,” he told the Major early in 1883, “because any failure to reach the desired results and have the line ready to put under contract will be serious if not disastrous. I think it important that you should take an extra engineer, who is fully competent, to take charge of a party in case of sickness or failure of any of your regular men.

“It is also exceedingly important that an ample supply of food be provided and that the quantity be beyond a possibility of a doubt.

“Very serious reports have been made to the Government and in other quarters about the inadequacy of the supplies provided last year and a good many other reports have been made tending to discredit our work. The officials at Ottawa, as a consequence, look upon our reports with a good deal of suspicion.…

“We cannot expect to get good men for that work at as low or lower rates than are paid further East and we must feed the men properly in order to get good service. It will be cheaper for the Company to pay for twice the amount of supplies actually necessary than to lose a day’s work for lack of any.”

But to a New York businessman, one of those who reported rumours “tending to discredit our work,” Van Horne defended Rogers:

“There has been a good deal of feeling among some of the Canadian Engineers particularly those who have been accustomed to the Government Service against Major Rogers, partly from natural jealousy of one who is looked upon as an outsider, partly from his
lively
treatment of those whom he looks upon as shirkers or ‘tender feet’ and partly from his somewhat peculiar methods of securing economy, but more than all perhaps from his having succeeded, as is supposed, in doing what was unsuccessfully attempted by the Government Engineers, namely, in getting through the Rocky and Selkirk Mountains by a direct line.

“I believe him to be capable and I know him to be thoroughly honest. He is something of an enthusiast and is disposed to undertake himself and put upon his men more severe duties than most engineers are accustomed to and I have reason to believe that in his anxiety to economize in every possible way he has gone too far in some cases and that a good deal of unnecessary discomfort, although no suffering, has resulted from it.”

Van Horne admitted that most of the men under Rogers were “utterly useless” but pointed out that the shortage of good engineers was so great he had to take chances in his hiring. He also admitted that “it may be that his work in the Selkirks will not turn out as well as his reports would lead us to believe.” He planned to send “two competent and disinterested engineers” over the work in the early spring to make sure of it. Van Horne revealed that he had considerable correspondence in his file on the subject of Rogers and that he believed there was something more than the mere dissatisfaction of subordinates behind it – “it may be that our friends of the Grand Trunk have something to do with it.”