The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (61 page)

Apart from the slides, the prodigious falls of snow – as much as fifty feet on the summit of the pass – presented a considerable hazard. In one six-day period, eight and a half feet of snow fell. Sometimes three weeks could pass without the blizzard ceasing. Even in mid-May there might be two feet of snow remaining in the summit area. In the winter, the scene from the Rogers Pass was eerie. The traveller, gazing westward, looked down into a two-thousand-foot gorge, muffled in a white blanket twenty feet deep. Above and around him the glaciers dangled, shimmering in the sunlight. At one spot, forty-two glaciers were visible, the largest being the vast Illecillewaet, which would for more than half a century be one of the great Canadian tourist attractions until the changing climate caused it to recede. (One lady from Seattle gazing upon it in awe and wonder wanted to know if it was real or whether the
CPR
had installed it for advertising purposes.)

This scenery, an uncalculated asset for the railway in the summer season, was an uncalculated liability in the winter. It became obvious that no trains could operate in safety in the months of January and February; but even if the company had fully comprehended the problem in 1885, it is doubtful that it could have raised the money to solve it. The problems of the Selkirks delayed the opening of through passenger service to the Pacific by at least six months. In the winter of 1885–86 entire sections of completed track were swept away by snowslides and the line had to be closed. The scene of desolation was described by Michael Phillips, a rancher who travelled the line on foot: “A deserted house or cabin looks dreary in these mountains, a deserted town more dismal yet; but imagine, if you can, a railway deserted! Hundreds of miles of line abandoned! Signal boxes, stations, small towns lifeless, and fast being buried beneath the snow, all battered to pieces by fierce mountain storms!” Phillips added
that he did not think it would ever be possible to keep the railroad operating through the Selkirks, and certainly never during winter and spring.

The
CPR
, of course, had no intention of retreating, but it took herculean efforts to open the track in the early years of its operation. Specially designed ice chisels were used to burrow into the snow; the resulting tunnels were filled with sacks of black powder and the snow packed in behind so that the entire right of way could be blasted clear. In the end, the company was forced to construct almost six miles of snow sheds – fifty-four sheds, built of heavy timbers. Even then there were unforeseen accidents – a tree driven right through the roof of one shed, a ten-ton boulder crashing through another. The sheds cost forty dollars a foot to construct, an expenditure Van Horne had not foreseen when he adopted the Rogers Pass route.

For the next quarter-century, this westward descent, like that of the Big Hill in the Rockies, was an operating nightmare. “I think the Rogers Pass was the worst place for snow in the whole world,” a
CPR
engineer named Alex Forrest recalled. “It was just one eternal fight to buck snow from early fall to the following summer. We kept 150 men and 5 engines with plows and rotaries on the jump all the time. And a man’s life was not rated very high.”

In March, 1910, a snowslide which caused the loss of fifty-eight lives finally convinced the
CPR
that it must abandon the Rogers Pass. This resulted in a second engineering feat, equal to the drilling of the spiral tunnels – the boring of the longest double-track tunnel on the continent, the five-mile-long Connaught. Passing under Mount Macdonald, the tunnel lowered the grade by 540 feet, shortened the line by four and a half miles, and reduced the track curvature by an amount corresponding to seven complete circles. The man who did the job was the same Jack Stewart who worked as a youth in helping build the mountain line and who had once ferried Van Horne across a stream at Three Valley.

Snow or no snow, the line had to be driven to completion somehow by the end of 1885. As winter gave way to spring, every mile of the right of way was throbbing with activity – teamsters jogging in with wagonloads of supplies, other teams ploughing up the rough, root-ridden earth, small armies of men swinging picks and shovels, others blasting out hand-cuts and tunnels – trees toppling, stumps flying sky-high, boulders splintering, and always the stench of smoke and horse manure blotting out the subtler scent of the cedar forest.

Along the gorge of the Kicking Horse, the railway had kept close to the river, crossing it at the most economical spots, with the tote road suspended
above. But in the valley of the Beaver, which led up towards the Selkirks, the line rose high above both road and river, as much as two and three hundred feet in places. The mountain streams tumbling down from the glaciers above had cut deep gouges in the naked rock, and it was over these gulches that the longest and highest bridges were required. Built entirely of timber cut on the spot, they had few counterparts in the world. The Mountain Creek bridge, which rose more than 175 feet above the torrent, was one of the largest wooden structures ever built, being twelve hundred feet long with a Howe truss in the centre and trestles at either end. The bridge over Stoney Creek was the highest in North America, a continuous Howe truss of four spans (the longest 186 feet) supported on wooden towers two hundred feet high, set in concrete.

There is a tale of Van Horne arriving at the half-completed Stoney Creek bridge when it was imperilled by rising floods. Men were felling trees, dragging logs to the site, and building new trestle braces and bulwarks when the general manager appeared. He plunged in to help, assisting with his own hands the placing of heavy blocks of stone, instructing the carpenters as to the best method of securing the huge wooden braces, showing the blacksmiths how to fashion their iron clamps, and never once losing his demeanour of cool authority. He drove the men all day until the light faded and the bridge was saved. By that time his private car was drawn up on the rails and Van Horne retired to it. Not long afterwards, the sounds of violin music came drifting through the night air. The general manager was playing an aria by Gounod, a sure sign that he was satisfied with the day’s labour.

Another bridge crossed Cedar Creek at a height of one hundred feet. The rock approaches here were so sheer that the engineers laying out the job had to climb the cliffs on a rope and work suspended against the rock face. On one occasion, Turner Bone, in charge of the party, was standing on a ledge, clinging to the rope, when a chunk of hardened snow thundered down upon him and his assistant. Both men toppled from their perch but were able to slide to safety “at lightning speed.”

It was no easy task to work with the diamond-hard rocks of the Selkirks. The strata often ran at right angles to the course of the stream. Sometimes extraordinarily hard layers of rock would stand out from the cliff face like a kind of fence left behind by the erosion of the centuries. One such fence was more than four inches thick and twenty feet high. Such irregularities made the work more than usually difficult. In one case it was easier to bridge the corner of a stream than to cut through the rock.

On the wet western slopes of the mountains, the railroad builders en countered another unexpected difficulty, a viscous gumbo formed from a sandy loam quicksand, which oozed from the sides of the cuts and covered the track with a mucilage that was almost impossible to remove. The gumbo was finally conquered by driving a double row of piles on either side of the track and filling the intervening space with coarse gravel or broken rock.

On the far side of the pass, where the Prussian blue waters of the Illecillewaet raced downhill between thick jungle walls, the line made a double loop, curving first to the left, then swinging back across the valley to the very tip of the great glacier – the future site of Glacier House – and then, a mile farther on, twisting back again in the shape of an inverted S. This was three more miles of railway than Van Horne had counted on; it took nine and a half miles to reach the level of the stream four miles from the summit. But it was necessary to avoid the snowslides. For the future tourists, swaying down this dramatic slope from the vantage point of an observation car in what was shortly to become Glacier National Park, the experience would be electrifying – the awesome cedars rising like great pillars from the thick beds of ferns, the mountainsides sprinkled with wild columbine and pigeonberry, the glittering ice-fields, the sword points of the mountain peaks, the cataracts pouring off the cliffs as airily as wood-smoke, and the shining track coiling through the dark cuts and over the slender bridges on its journey to the Columbia. This was the same trail, bestrewn with devil’s club and skunk cabbage, that Major Rogers and his nephew Albert had toiled up on their voyage of discovery in 1881, that Fleming and Grant, badly lacerated from thorns, had managed to negotiate in 1883, and that a hungry Van Horne had struggled over in 1884. Nobody except an enthusiastic mountaineer would ever have to make that journey again; and only a few, gazing up at the shattered rock of the clefts and tunnels and the pilings of the matchstick bridges, would let their thoughts rest upon the thousands of sweating workmen who made it possible.

2
Riel: the return of the Messiah

To those who had known the North West before the time of the steel, the railway was a symbol of the passing of the Good Old Days. To the Indians it was a new kind of boundary, as solid in its own way as a wall. To the white settlers of northern Saskatchewan, its change of route had meant disappointment. To the farmers of Manitoba it spelled monopoly and grinding freight rates. To the half-breeds, it stood for revolutionary social change.

From Winnipeg to Edmonton, the North West was in a ferment. Whites, Indians, and half-breeds were all organizing. At the end of July, 1884, the Crees of the North Saskatchewan, who had come to the point of rebellion earlier in the year, were welded into an Indian council by Big Bear, the most independent of the chiefs. The Indians felt that the government had betrayed and deceived them, and the Indians were right. Ottawa had promised to save them from starvation; in fact, one treaty – Number 6 – spelled it out. Yet already their meagre rations had been cut back as part of an official policy of retrenchment brought on by economic conditions. It was plain that the eastern politicians had little understanding of conditions in the North West. The new Minister of the Interior, Senator David Macpherson, had not even ventured as far as Winnipeg.

The western newspapers, in contrast to their attitude to the Chinese, were sympathetic towards the plight of the natives. The Moose Jaw
News
declared that the suffering of the Indians in the Assiniboia reserves was “a burning shame to us [and] a lasting reproach to our government.” It reported that they were dying by the score as a result of semi-starvation or scurvy resulting from the bad quality of the food supplied by the agencies.

The white settlers and farmers were equally disaffected. In addition to the burgeoning Manitoba Farmers’ Union, which was threatening secession, annexation, or even rebellion, there were in the Territories other organized groups petitioning Ottawa for redress, such as the Settlers’ Rights Association at Qu’Appelle and the Settlers’ Union at Prince Albert. Their demands were similar: local autonomy, reform of the land laws, control of their own railways, reduction of protective tariffs, and an end to the
CPR
monopoly.

The English and Scots half-breeds and the French-speaking Roman Catholic Métis had another grievance. They wanted in the North West Territories what the government had recognized and granted in Manitoba after the first collision with Louis Riel in 1869 and 1870 – a share in the aboriginal title to the land. From 1873 to 1884 they had been vainly petitioning Ottawa to grant them this recognition. They had been put off, time after time, with the maddening reply that consideration would be given to their demands. Nothing concrete was done.

In Manitoba, the government’s land policy had been a hopeless muddle. Some Métis received free land but others, who were absent on the plains when a census was taken, did not. Long delays in the actual distribution
of the land were frequent. Many half-breeds who had been issued money scrip in lieu of actual acreage gave up in despair, sold out to fast-talking speculators, and moved farther west ahead of the advancing army of white settlers. The coming of the railway marked for them the end of a social order that had been based on hunting and freighting.

A note of nostalgia crept into the report of the Qu’Appelle correspondent of the Moose Jaw
News
in April, 1884, when he noted that because the Red River cart had been rendered obsolete, the Métis could no longer occupy themselves in the freighting business, long an auxiliary source of income:

“It is sad to watch how the half-breeds have been driven by the inevitable back and aback, like their half-brothers, the red men of the continent.… What is their future? Absorption I suppose, for I have noticed they do not seem to be able to breathe the same atmosphere as the white man. Wherever they go they form a distinct community, and do not like to be divided.”

In St. Albert near Edmonton, in the Qu’Appelle Valley, and in St. Laurent near Duck Lake on the South Saskatchewan, these distinct communities had been forming since the early 1870’s as the Métis struggled to maintain their identity. By 1884 they were in a state of frustration and alarm because of the government’s stumbling land policy. One of the problems was the difficulty of acquiring title to land on which many had squatted for years. If, after the long-awaited surveys were completed, it was discovered that a man was squatting on an odd-numbered section or one reserved for a school or for the Hudson’s Bay Company, he was expected to pay for it. Even if he was found to be on property available for homestead, he was required to wait for three years after the survey before he could apply for a patent. To families that had been on the land as long as ten or a dozen years, this was maddening. Later arrivals, who had been used to the traditional long, river lots, discovered that, except in the original settlements, the government was insisting on a square township survey. This led to further bitterness and confusion as the newcomers, disregarding the surveyors’ lines, took up their land in the traditional manner.