The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (35 page)

The approaches to many of the tunnels had to be galleried. Gallery work was only slightly less demanding than tunnelling. The trains were
destined to travel on the very lip of the precipice into which a kind of notch had been blasted, the roof consisting of solid rock which was usually several hundred feet thick and sometimes several thousand. One such gallery ran for one hundred feet; at its rim was a perfectly perpendicular wall of rock, two hundred feet high.

At Hell’s Gate on the Fraser, a traveller could stand and watch the agony of construction taking place directly across the foaming waters. It seemed impossible that a road could be carved out of those dripping black cliffs. Here men could be seen suspended at dizzy heights against the rock walls, let down the cliffs on ladders secured by ropes attached to trees on the summit so that they could drill blasting holes into the face of the escarpment. Each time a shot was fired, the men had to clamber up the ladders as swiftly as possible to escape the effect of the explosion. Engineers made their measurements and took their cross-sections suspended for hours and sometimes days “like Mahomet’s coffin between heaven and earth.” They worked often in their bare feet, which they believed ensured them a better footing. A break or a slip in the rope, a rock toppling from above, or a premature blast meant certain death.

All along the right of way, a traveller on the far side of the river could see the gaping mouths of the tunnels, ragged as a shattered windowpane, and hear the continual crump of the blasting. Splintered trees toppled into the Fraser’s muddy gorge, huge rocks catapulted into the sky, vast chunks of mountainside slid into the river.

High above the grade and sometimes below it, running along the same cliff face was the old corduroy road to the Cariboo mines, which Sir James Douglas, Governor of British Columbia, had caused to be built in the 1860’s. It was jammed with traffic. Twelve-mule teams thudded by. Ungainly prairie schooners, pulled by sixteen oxen with six spares plodding behind, rattled past, loaded with everything from rice for the coolie labour to portable sawmills for the construction camps. The road itself had been an engineering miracle in its day – a crazy, unbelievable highway cut into the cliffs, the only link between the coast and the interior plateau of British Columbia. In some spots in the Fraser Canyon the road had to be carried around the precipice on trestle-work, like the balcony of a house, so that passengers on the Cariboo stage were travelling directly over the boiling waters three hundred feet below.

Onderdonk was pledged to keep the road open; without it the economy of the Cariboo would be throttled. Besides, he needed it himself to bring supplies to his construction camps. The difficulty of achieving this, while the blasting and the building was going on all around – above it, below it,
and right beside it – was indescribable. Great chunks of the road sometimes slid into the Fraser. Sometimes the railway itself required the right of way; when that happened, construction had to be halted until a new section of road was built.

The traffic on the Cariboo road presented a constant problem. Two covered wagons linked in tandem and hauled by nine yoke of oxen made a cavalcade well over a hundred feet long. It was bad enough getting around the tight curves, but added to this was the loose rock blown from tunnel openings or cuts, which often held up the stages or caused accidents. Henry Cambie liked to tell the story of the time Steve Tingley, the most famous whip on the road, was waved through a pile of debris by the foreman, Dave McBeth. The stage struck a hidden rock, which McBeth had overlooked, with disastrous results. Inside the coach was Judge John Foster McCreight, the first premier of the province – “a nervous, fidgetty, queer tempered man,” the Lieutenant-Governor had called him. The infuriated McCreight warned McBeth that if he was ever brought before him he would have no compunction in condemning him to be hanged for his carelessness in allowing such an accident to happen.

By June of 1882, when Van Horne launched his record-breaking push across the prairies, Onderdonk had driven scarcely twenty miles of steel. (It had taken eighteen months working day and night to build the first two miles out of Yale.) An explosives factory was turning out four thousand pounds of nitro-glycerine a day. Ten vessels containing six thousand Chinese coolies were on their way from the Orient to swell his labour force, strung out all along the right of way from Port Moody on Burrard Inlet to the arid banks of the Thompson. Expenses were mounting alarmingly. The average cost of a mile of railroad on the Onderdonk contract was eighty thousand dollars, but there were many places where the price was three times that amount.

The freight rates on the old Cariboo corduroy road were strangling Onderdonk. He was paying as much as ten dollars a ton for a few miles’ haulage. As a result he decided, in the spring of 1882, to attempt a task that almost everyone else considered impossible: he proposed to build a steamer that could actually negotiate the most treacherous section of the Fraser Canyon, known as Hell’s Gate. Veteran rivermen all believed Hell’s Gate to be impassable. Here the river reached a peak of fury, hurling itself at ten knots over a ledge of black basalt and squeezing between twin ramparts only eighty feet apart. It was Onderdonk’s plan to force a steamboat through this chute and put her into service between Lytton and Boston Bar.

The sturdy little craft that he ordered was to be built at Spuzzum near Tunnel City (named for the Big Tunnel, sixteen hundred feet long, being drilled twenty miles upriver from Yale). It would be a 250-ton craft, 127 feet long with a beam of 24 feet and with 20 bulkhead compartments to keep it buoyant. It was to be called
Skuzzy
, after a mountain stream “that comes dancing and falling through the opening in the rocks at times causing attractive falls and finally uniting its clear stream with the less pleasant waters of the Fraser.” The little ship was launched on May 4 by Mrs. Onderdonk, modestly dressed, as always, in a long skirt and a plain whaleboned blouse.

It was easier to construct such a craft than it was to persuade a crew to man it. Old river hands pleaded with Onderdonk to abandon the scheme. One pioneer skipper said that to take a steamboat up the torrent of Hell’s Gate would be the same as announcing one’s intention of jumping from a tall building and expecting to live to tell about it. Onderdonk’s first choice as captain was Nat Lane, Jr., a man whose ability with steamboats was known from the Stikine to the Fraser; but Lane would have no part of the venture. By this time the river was in spring flow, rising rapidly day after day, spilling over its banks and endangering small settlements. At the last moment a skipper, Asbury Insley, was found to attempt the feat. He set off on May 17, using every river trick he had learned to pit the
Skuzzy
against the furious waters. Time after time he was beaten back until, at length, he turned the boat about and returned to Spuzzum with defeat written on his features.

It was generally agreed that the
Skuzzy
would be dismantled and scrapped or else taken overland to Boston Bar and reassembled. Then, to the astonishment of all, Onderdonk announced that another attempt would be made to force the boat through the canyon. He had gone all the way to the upper Columbia to find three expert boatmen foolhardy enough to make the attempt. These were Captain S. R. Smith of Lewiston, Idaho, his brother David, and J. W. Burse, who was to act as engineer. Smith had taken the steamer
Shoshone
one thousand miles down the Snake River to the Blue Mountains and then safely over the falls at Willamette, Oregon – the only boat in history to make such a perilous passage. If anyone could battle through Hell’s Gate, Smith and his colleagues were the men to do it.

On September 7, Onderdonk brought five flat cars loaded with guests from Yale to witness the ordeal. They rattled over the newly laid track, the train swaying around the sharp curves and plunging into the recently driven tunnels where from the jagged roofs of black rock water dripped steadily. They crowded the high bank of the Fraser, laying wagers of gold, timber, and other merchandise on the outcome – the odds running as high as a hundred to one against the boat’s getting through.

The crowds could not stay to witness the full struggle. After four days only a few miles of headway had been made. After ten it became apparent that the
Skuzzy
was losing the battle. At this point Andrew Onderdonk took command. He ordered ring-bolts driven into the rock walls of the canyon and he placed one hundred and fifty Chinese labourers at intervals along the banks passing heavy ropes through the bolts. These ropes were attached to the ship’s capstan. Finally on September 28, with the aid of the engines, the steam winch, fifteen men on the capstan, and the mass of coolies tugging and straining along the bank (to cling to the ropes and pull was imperative, for to lose one’s grip and fall meant certain death), the boat finally got through, and a public holiday was declared in Yale.

It took the
Skuzzy
another seven hours to fight her way upstream to Lytton before she went into freighting service. The current was so swift that it took only an hour to make the run back to Boston Bar, and on her first voyage she was badly damaged, with a gaping hole in her hull and her sides, it was said, scraped almost to the point of transparency. She limped into berth, had her wounds repaired, and for the next year worked the river, emerging splintered and battered after every journey.

All this time men were being mangled or killed by falling rock, by slides, by runaway horses, and above all by the incessant blasting that went on day and night. The temporary names along the way give a clue to the working conditions: “Jaws of Death Arch,” for example, and “Indictment Hole,” so named because, it was said, anyone who tried to put a right of way through the spot ought to be indicted.

Men grew careless with blasting powder and nitro-glycerine. At the ferry crossing at Spuzzum, tons of black powder were hauled to the edge of the bank by wagon and hurled down a chute into a waiting boat, the only cushion against the shock being a bale of hay. Some men whose hands were covered with blasting powder suffered severe burns when they recklessly tried to light their pipes. Others, returning prematurely to a half-finished tunnel following a blast, were met by a second, which blew them to pieces. One Chinese near Yale hid behind a tree two hundred feet from a tunnel about to be blasted and thought himself perfectly safe; a flying splinter sheared off his nose. Often, huge rocks came hurtling out of the mouths of tunnels like cannon-balls. One sank a boat, causing a man to drown. Another knocked down a bridge. The larger blasts touched off avalanches and mud slides. Almost every time heavy shots were fired
inside a tunnel, great boulders were ripped free from the mountainside by the reverberations. One of these tore through the roof of the engine house at Number One Tunnel, “somewhat injuring a couple of men,” in the casual report of the Yale
Inland Sentinel
One slide came down from such a height that it carried part of an oak forest and an entire Indian burying ground into the river, allowing the oaks to continue to grow “and the dead men’s bones to rest without being in the least disturbed – fences, roots, images and all.” (The natives were more concerned about the “arbitrary and illegal removal of Indian dead” when the right of way happened to coincide with one of their cemeteries, but the railway builders paid little heed to such obstacles.)

Another rock slide actually blocked the Thompson River, forming a dam half a mile long and a hundred and fifty feet wide, raising the water two hundred feet and flooding several farms while leaving the channel below almost dry. The Chinese and Indians working in the vicinity dropped their tools and rushed to the river-bed to collect the hundreds of fish wriggling and gasping in the mud and also to recover the gold, which was still plentiful and, with the water down, easy to pan. Some made two hundred dollars a day in this manner until the river, working its way round the barrier of rock, formed a new channel. Another slide in November, 1882, blocked the track east of the Big Tunnel to a depth of sixty feet; it was mid-April before the debris could all be cleared away. An unexpected slide near Keefers station was struck by a train with such impact that the locomotive became detached. It hurtled over a 250-foot embankment, did a full somersault, and landed upright at the river’s edge. The fireman and engineer climbed out, unhurt.

There was a curious accident at Cherry Creek caused by the near desert conditions of the Interior Plateau of British Columbia. To one teamster hauling blasting powder by wagon, the rocks on the roadbed beneath suddenly seemed to take fire. The sight caused the horses to plunge forward, breaking loose from the wagon and pulling the driver, who held fast to the reins, right off his seat and away from the vehicle, which blew up with a roar. Later the mystery was unravelled: the dry weather had shrunk the staves of the powder barrels so that every seam leaked explosive. Thus both the floor of the wagon and the road beneath it were covered with loose powder, which was finally ignited by sparks made by the horses’ shoes striking the rocks.

There were other odd mishaps caused by the treacherous terrain. It was not even safe to get drunk. One veteran railroader who did staggered to the top of a bluff not far from the Big Tunnel one January day and toppled
to his death. Even as careful and experienced an engineer as Henry Cambie was not immune. His horses bolted on the Cariboo Road – a fairly common occurrence – his carriage struck a new stump, and he, his wife, and his child were thrown out. The child escaped unhurt but both parents were injured, Mrs. Cambie suffering a severe concussion.

The danger was so great that it became difficult to get men who were willing to be suspended by ropes to drill holes in the chasm walls for explosives. The Indians were the most fearless; fortunately, they turned out to be first-class rock workers. Their task was to go down first and blast out the footholds in which other men could stand and work. But the Indians had a habit of working until payday and then quitting to spend their earnings.