The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (32 page)

The two “competent and disinterested engineers” were Charles Aeneas Shaw, who had spent more than half his thirty years working at his profession, and James Hogg, a cousin of James Ross, the man in charge of mountain construction. Competent they were; “disinterested” they were not. No surveyor was disinterested in those days. They were ambitious, often blindly stubborn and jealous of their fellows, brave to the point of being foolhardy, and sometimes temperamental; but they were never disinterested. The petty hatreds and suspicions within the engineering division of the Department of Public Works in the early days of the Canadian Pacific Survey were legendary. Walter Moberly and Sandford Fleming, who had once been staunch friends and drinking companions, were practically at each other’s throats at one point; Charles Horetzky tried to blackmail his chief; Marcus Smith, while acting as Fleming’s deputy, connived against him; James Rowan refused to speak to Marcus Smith or answer his letters. Such passions did not cool when the railway passed into
private hands. Shaw could not stand Secretan, whom he called “selfish” and “disagreeable.” The snobbish Secretan took every opportunity to denigrate Shaw. Shaw despised Hogg, who was to be his companion in the mountains. And all three men had very little use for Rogers.

The conditions of the surveyors’ existence make much of this understandable. They were thrust into one another’s company far from civilization for months and sometimes years. The food was often bad and at times non-existent. Living conditions were generally uncomfortable if not subnormal. The work was exhausting and the hours were long. Perhaps most important, they were, for a great portion of their lives, without the company of women. They were also a garrulous bunch, much more so than the contractors, many of whom – Ross, Holt, Mackenzie, Mann, and Sifton – went on to public fame and private fortune without leaving behind a scrap of memoir. If the contractors were consumed by petty jealousies, they kept it a secret, but the surveyors told all. They were used to spinning yarns around the campfire and so developed a flare for anecdote, both witty and malicious. Moreover, it was part of their job to keep a journal. In the diaries and memoirs they left behind, full of conflicting evidence, each writer tends to play the hero, fighting off his villainous colleagues. They were an egotistical lot, as their memoirs show, craving public notice far more than money, as Jim Hill guessed when he made Rogers his original proposition. Rogers was equally well aware of this trait in his colleagues. On his second attempt to scale the Selkirks, he was able to persuade a reluctant transit man to climb a distant peak, even though the party was down to its last bannock, by offering to name the mountain after him. The starving surveyor eagerly leaped to his feet and headed for the crags.

Charles Shaw first tangled with Rogers, by his own account, in Winnipeg early in March of 1883. James Ross, then in charge of all engineering on the railroad’s western division, outlined the plans for the coming season and then asked Shaw to look over the profile of Rogers’s final location line between Calgary and Bow Gap – a distance of some sixty miles: “It’s a nightmare to me and I’m afraid it will hold us back a year.”

Shaw examined the plan and announced at once that he could get a far better line. A stranger working near by sprang to his feet and cried out: “That’s the best line that can be got through the country. Who in hell are you, anyway?” It was Rogers. Shaw told Ross that he was prepared to relocate the Major’s line and “if I don’t save at least half a million dollars over the estimated cost of construction of this line, I won’t ask any pay for my season’s work.”

A fight threatened to break out between Shaw and Rogers. Ross calmed both men down but, at a later meeting, asked Shaw to go ahead.

Van Horne in the meantime was examining Rogers’s profiles and plans out of Fort Calgary and was not happy. He called in Secretan and there took place a memorable encounter, which became part of the Van Horne legend.

“Look at that,” the general manager exclaimed. “Some infernal idiot has put a tunnel in there. I want you to go up and take it out.”

“But this is on the Bow River – a rather difficult section. There may be no other way.”

“Make another way.”

Secretan hesitated, whereupon Van Horne hurled a question.

“This is a mud tunnel, isn’t it?” Secretan nodded. Engineers shunned mud tunnels; it was impossible to keep the track in line as the bank tended to move constantly.

“How long would it take us to build it?”

“A year or eighteen months.”

Van Horne swore and banged his fist on the desk.

“What are they thinking about? Are we going to hold up this railway for a year and a half while they build their damned tunnel? Take it out!”

Secretan picked up the profile and studied it as he headed for the door. He turned back for a moment:

“Mr. Van Horne,” he said in his sardonic way, “those mountains are in the way, and the rivers don’t all run right for us. While we are at it we might as well fix them, too.”

But Van Horne insisted that Secretan personally “take that damned tunnel out. Don’t send anybody else.” The engineer was spared the trip, however, when Shaw found a route around the offending hill by way of a small creek valley, which actually shortened the main line by a mile and a half.

By the end of June, when Shaw had finished his task of relocation, James Ross had arrived. He told Shaw that the new line would save the company an estimated $1,350,000 in construction costs and assigned him to relocate the rest of the line to the summit of the Rockies. At a mountain near the future site of Banff, Shaw eliminated another tunnel by routing the road through a valley to the east. It was a simple matter to go around the mountain rather than through it, and Shaw could not understand why the engineers following the switchback trail had missed the valley route. “Rogers’ location here was the most extraordinary blunder I have ever
known in the way of engineering,” he wrote in his memoirs. The mountain without the tunnel is still known as Tunnel Mountain.

At the summit, Shaw was met by James Hogg, who had arrived with instructions from Van Horne: he and Shaw were to examine and report on the pass through the Selkirks because, in Shaw’s words, “Rogers’s reports were very unsatisfactory and inconclusive.” They set off down the difficult incline of the Kicking Horse on the zigzag pathway, which the survey crews had already christened “the Golden Stairs” because it was the most terrifying single stretch of trail on the entire route of the railway. Actually it was little more than a narrow ledge, less than two feet wide, cut into the cliffs several hundred feet above the foaming river. It was so frightening that some men used to hang on to the tails of their packhorses and keep their eyes tightly shut until they had passed the most dangerous places. Shaw had one horrible moment when his horse ran into a nest of hornets and another when he met two men with a pack-horse coming from the opposite direction. Since it was impossible for anybody to turn around, they simply cut the lashings off one of the horses and pushed the wretched animal over the cliff.

At the base of the Golden Stairs, on the banks of the Columbia, they ran into Rogers. Shaw noticed that the seat of his pants was patched with a piece of buffalo hide that still had the hair on it. Apparently the Major did not recognize his antagonist of the previous spring.

“Who the hell are you, and where the hell do you think you’re going?” was Rogers’s greeting.

“It’s none of your damned business to either question,” Shaw retorted. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“I am Major Rogers.”

“My name is Shaw. I’ve been sent by Van Horne to examine and report on the pass through the Selkirks.”

Shaw recalled that Rogers practically frothed at the mouth when he heard the name.

“You’re the.… Prairie Gopher that has come into the mountains and ruined my reputation as an Engineer.” A stream of profanity followed.

Shaw, a big man with a high, intelligent forehead and an all-encompassing black beard, was not inclined to take this sort of abuse. His Scottish ancestors were all notorious fighters – chiefs of the Clan Chatten in the Inverness country. His grandfather had fought at Waterloo, and his father in the Papineau rebellion and the Fenian raids. Since the age of fourteen Charles Shaw had been doing a man’s work, first as a farmhand and later as a surveyor. He was as hard as nails and would live to his eighty-ninth
year. Before Rogers was finished Shaw had leaped from his horse and seized him by the throat; in his own words, he “shook him till his teeth rattled.”

“Another word out of you,” said the infuriated Shaw, “and I’ll throw you in the river and drown you.”

Rogers immediately apologized for losing his temper and said that the engineers in charge of the relocated section had let him down badly. He offered to guide Shaw to the pass in the Selkirks.

“That will be all right,” Shaw told him, “as long as you keep a civil tongue in your head.”

The trip to the mouth of the Beaver could not have been very pleasant, since Shaw kept up a continual barrage of criticism regarding the line that Rogers had located along the east bank of the Columbia. Shaw kept insisting that it was on the wrong side of the river and, as a result, “relations between us were strained for the rest of the day.” In this instance, however, Shaw’s advice was ignored by the
CPR
and the railway followed Rogers’s location.

Shaw’s version of the scene at the pass along with the “prairie gopher” incident, which clearly rankled, were told and retold by him in his old age, half a century later. He recounted it in letters to various editors, in newspaper interviews, in an article in the
CPR’S
staff publication, and in his memoirs, which were set down in 1936 but not published until 1970, twenty-eight years after his death.

According to Shaw, Rogers, “in his usual pompous manner,” after gazing up at the great Illecillewaet Glacier, turned to him and remarked: “Shaw, I was the first white man ever to set eyes on this pass and this panorama.”

Shaw walked over to a small spring to get a drink and there, he related, he found the remains of a fire, some partly rotted poles, evidently used for a tent, and a couple of badly rusted tins. He called Rogers’s attention to these.

Rogers’s reaction, as quoted by Shaw, was astonishment: “How strange! I never noticed those things before. I wonder who could have camped here.”

“These things were left here years ago by Moberly when he found this pass!” Shaw claimed he replied.

It was the repetition of this story that helped convince Canadian engineers and journalists that Major Rogers was a fake and that the credit for discovering the pass rightfully belonged to Walter Moberly. Even Moberly began to believe it in his declining years, as his imperfect reminiscences
reveal, though he was generous enough at the time. In 1885 he wrote: “I cannot … but pay a high tribute to the dauntless energy and untiring zeal that has characterised and, I am glad to say, crowned with success the unwearying struggles of my successor in the mountain surveys, Major A. B. Rogers.” Thirty years later he was insisting that Rogers had not seen the pass named after him until the railway had gone through it, and that it should have been named the Perry Pass after his assistant who, Moberly came to believe, actually
had
seen the pass. The memoirs of aging surveyors are not very good evidence when set against words actually written on the spot at the time. Moberly’s journal of 1866 makes it clear that the campfire Shaw said he found did not belong to his party.

Then who left those relics? Certainly, they could not have been as old as Shaw thought they were. The snow on the top of the Rogers Pass reaches a depth of fifty feet or more in the winter; it is scarcely credible that the remains of a small fire could have survived for seventeen years. It is more likely that (assuming that Shaw was not indulging in a pipe dream) the camp was left by Rogers himself the previous season or by his men, who had hacked a road to the summit and were working on the western slopes of the pass at that very time.

5
“The loneliness of savage mountains”

On their way back to the summit of the Rockies, on the Kicking Horse Trail, Shaw and Hogg ran into the second party dispatched by the
CPR
to check up on Major Rogers: Sandford Fleming, at the invitation of George Stephen, was also heading for the Selkirks, accompanied by his son Frank and his old comrade George Grant, the Presbyterian minister who had been with him on the memorable trip from ocean to ocean in 1872.

Shaw informed Fleming that he and Hogg had gone as far as it was possible to go – a short distance down the west side of the Selkirks – that there was no path or track of any description beyond the point they had reached, and that no one had been through to the western slope of the mountains. This was the second such report that Fleming had received from Canadian surveyors. Earlier, two other men had told him that Rogers had not been able to pass over to the far side of the mountains and that “it was questionable, if it were possible to find a route which could be followed.” Fleming took it all with a grain of salt: “I had some very serious reflections on what I heard from these gentlemen.”

Nonetheless, the Selkirks remained a mysterious, unknown land for some time. Morley Roberts, the British adventurer and novelist who worked on the railway the following year, wrote: “I could find no one who had been on the journey, and the reports about it were so contradictory that in the Kicking Horse Pass it was impossible to find out how far it was across the Selkirk Range, whether it was 60 or 120 miles or even more. There was a halo of romance thrown over the whole place west of us, and when we passed in imagination the Columbia for the second time all beyond was as truly conjectural as El Dorado or Lyonesse.” James Ross himself, who kept sending Indian couriers out to the Selkirks, had only the vaguest idea of what lay ahead.

Fleming and Grant were far more concerned about the terrible descent down the Golden Stairs of the Kicking Horse. It was almost a dozen years since these two companions had set out, in the prime of life, to breast the continent. Now the years were beginning to tell. Fleming, though a superb physical specimen, was fifty-six. For the past three years he had been leading an intriguing but sedentary life in England with side visits to various European capitals, attempting, without much success, to interest the Royal Society in his proposals for standard time and engaging in such mild adventures as a gondola ride in Venice and a trip in a hot-air balloon. Grant, who was forty-seven and inclined to a paunch, had quit his ministry in Halifax for the principal’s chair at Queen’s. Now these middle-aged explorers were forced to negotiate a trail that terrified the most experienced mountaineers.