Great Railways of the Canadian West

Building the Dream

AUTHOR: Graeme Pole
FORMAT: 5.5 x 8.5 pb / 144 pages
ISBN-10: 1-55439-062-1
ISBN-13: 978-155439-062-5

The construction of the first three great railways of the Canadian West the Canadian Pacific, the Grand Trunk Pacific, and the Canadian Northern rank among the greatest political and financial gambles in this country's history. The enterprises helped to stitch the country together physically, while threatening to tear it apart politically.

Prologue

In the autumn of 1883, surveyor Charles Shaw received a desperate assignment. Track-laying for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was proceeding apace through the Bow Valley, aiming for the eastern approach to Kicking Horse Pass in the Rocky Mountains. To the west of the pass, the railway's proposed route plunged into the Kicking Horse Valley. Avalanche slopes scoured the canyon-rent course for most of the 50 miles to the Columbia River. Major A.B. Rogers had surveyed the route in 1882 and had staked his reputation on it, but no one else involved with the CPR believed it was viable.

Word came from the company's head oYce in Montreal: If there was a better way, find it. Shaw's boss dispatched him to make a reconnaissance survey of Howse Pass, the next major break through the mountains north of Kicking Horse Pass. In the Howse Valley, Shaw investigated a series of tributaries, but each ended at "a glacier in high, rugged peaks." He reported that "we were reduced to something less than half rations," so he travelled alone, not wanting to subject his men to the hardship of travel on empty stomachs. When Shaw finally found Howse Pass, he and his brother Norman took six biscuits and two blankets and set off to make a tentative crossing. Frigid rain soon drenched them, forcing a bivouac.

Next day, while Norman dried the blankets, Shaw crossed the pass, but the tangle of forest on the west side of the Continental Divide stopped him. The biscuits gone, he and Norman hiked through the night back to camp, where they found renewed orders to run a trial line across any prospective pass.

Shaw recrossed Howse Pass with his men, but snow began to fall and was soon piled four feet deep. One morning an avalanche swept down while the crew was departing for work. Shaw had foreseen the likelihood, and had made it a practice to cache supplies away from camp. The avalanche heaped debris several hundred feet deep, blocking the narrow valley. Their tents were destroyed, but Shaw and his men had blankets and food enough for the 65-mile forced march back to the railhead at Laggan (now Lake Louise), which they began that afternoon. When they arrived five days later, Shaw described his companions as looking like "wild men," their bootless feet wrapped in gunnysacks and deer hides. At the railroad's mess house they ate their first "civilized meal" in many months. So ended a routine season of surveying for the CPR.

A single avalanche had killed any hope for the Howse Pass route. The CPR was out of time. The following summer, the railway would lay track across Kicking Horse Pass, although no one believed that the route could be any better.

About the Author

Graeme Pole has been writing about the human history and the natural history of western Canada since 1989. This is his ninth book. He lives with his family near Hazelton in northwestern BC, where he serves as a paramedic. Visit his website: www.mountainvision.ca.

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