The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (33 page)

Fleming dared not look down. To do so “gives one an uncontrollable dizziness, to make the head swim and the view unsteady, even with men of tried nerve. I do not think that I can ever forget that terrible walk; it was the greatest trial I ever experienced.”

At that point the members of the party found themselves teetering on a ledge between ten and fifteen inches wide, eight hundred feet above the river. There was nothing to hold on to – not a branch or even a twig. Grant, who had lost his right hand in childhood, was especially vulnerable: “It seemed as if a false step would have hurled us to the base, to certain death.” The sun, emerging from behind a cloud, beat down upon them until they were soaked with a perspiration that was accentuated by their own state of tension. “I, myself, felt as if I had been dragged through a brook, for I was without a dry shred on me,” Fleming admitted. It was an exhausted party that finally arrived that evening at Rogers’s camp on the Columbia.

Rogers’s men were highly amused at the idea of the hard-swearing
“Bishop” entertaining a man of the cloth. They warned Grant of the Major’s roughness of speech and attitude: “He can blow, he can swar, and he can spit tobacco as well as any man in the United States.”

Because Grant was addressed as “Doctor,” Rogers at first believed him to be a medical man. When, on the following morning – a Sunday – Fleming proposed that his companion hold a service, Rogers thought the idea was a practical joke. He indulged in a good deal of jubilant profanity and bustled about, drumming up his men for the event, until the truth dawned upon him.

Grant was no mean preacher. In his Halifax parish, before he moved to Queen’s, confirmed sinners used to rush to their favourite pew to hear themselves scourged in masterly fashion. One Irish saloonkeeper, attacked unmercifully from the pulpit for his public vices, emerged from St. Matthew’s, his face beaming, and insisted on congratulating the baffled clergyman.

“A grand sermon, Mr. Grant. A grand sermon; it did me good to listen to it.”

Grant was taken aback. “To tell the truth,” he ventured, “I rather thought that some parts of it hit you rather hard.”

The publican laid an affectionate hand on the minister’s shoulder: “My dear fellow,” said he, “it’s a poor sermon that doesn’t hit me somewhere.”

On the banks of the Columbia, Grant used subtler tactics. As always when he had a captive and willing audience (a sermon was, after all, a diversion from common toil), he preached at great length. Slowly he brought the subject around to profanity and, being careful not to single anyone out, pointed out that it was a useless device and one not generally heard any longer in the conversation of gentlemen. Grant was a shrewd judge of character. He had grasped an essential aspect of Rogers’s motivation: above all, the little engineer wanted to be thought of as a gentleman. Then and there Rogers resolved to abstain from swearing. He was not always successful; at one point, when something went wrong with the canoes and Rogers made herculean efforts to suppress his normal vocabulary, Grant took pity upon him. The Major was standing with his mouth open, struggling to force the words back. The minister laid a hand on his arm: “Major, hadn’t you better go behind a tree and say it?”

In spite of such lapses, Rogers stuck to his resolve. Van Horne encountered him the following fall and was baffled by him.

“What’s the matter with you, Rogers?” he asked. “You haven’t cursed once.”

Rogers told his tale briefly and succinctly: “Fleming passed through
the camp last summer, and he had with him a parson named Grant. Thought he was a sawbones at first, but he was a parson. He gave us a sermon on swearing, and he made out it wasn’t gentlemanly. So I quit.”

That Sunday evening, Grant and Fleming climbed to the benchland five hundred feet above Rogers’s camp to ponder the “noble landscape” and to soliloquize on the future of the virgin country that stretched off below them.

The scene was like a painted backdrop – the great river winding its slow way through the forested valley; the evergreen slopes of the foothills rising directly from the water; a line of blue mountains, sharp as sword blades, limned behind the dark hills; and behind them another line of peaks, stark white, chiselled into the blue of the evening sky.

“I asked myself,” Fleming wrote, “if this solitude would be unchanged, or whether civilization in some form of its complex requirements would ever penetrate this region? … Will the din of the loom and the whirl of the spindle yet be heard in this unbroken domain of nature? It cannot be that this immense valley will remain the haunt of a few wild animals. Will the future bring some industrial development: a future which is now dawning upon us? How soon will a busy crowd of workmen take possession of these solitudes, and the steam whistle echo and re-echo where now all is silent? In the ages to come how many trains will run to and from sea to sea with millions of passengers?”

All these thoughts crowded in on Fleming as the sun dipped down behind the white plumes of the Selkirks: “I do not think that I can ever forget the sight as I then gazed upon it.”

The following day he and his son with George Grant, Albert Rogers, and the Major set off up the valley of the Beaver for the pass. Grant thought that it “was like riding through a deserted garden.” The trail was bordered with half a dozen varieties of ripe fruits and berries, which the travellers could pick and eat without dismounting. The gooseberries were as large as grapes and the red clusters that hung suspended from the mountain ash along the trail formed bright splashes of colour against the dark wall of evergreens. Asters, bluebells, and fireweed spangled the forest floor. Refreshed by such luxuriance, the travellers emerged from the forest and into the saucer-shaped meadow where Rogers had planted a yew stake to mark the actual summit.

Fleming had had the foresight to bring along a box of cigars and these were smoked as the group sat down on natural seats of moss-covered rock and listened to the Major tell the story of how he discovered the pass. The whole company was in high spirits. Fleming proposed that a
Canadian alpine club be organized on the spot. This was done, with Fleming named interim president, Grant secretary, and Frank Fleming treasurer. A toast was drunk in the ice-cold waters of Summit Creek. Then the entire party set about picking and eating wild fruit; it was a treat after the Spartan fare of Rogers’s camp. To show that they were still young and unaffected by the journey, Fleming proposed a game of leapfrog, “an act of Olympic worship to the deities in the heart of the Selkirks!”

The following day the Major returned to the Columbia while the others, with Albert Rogers as their guide, set off down the western slope. Twenty-four miles from the summit, the freshly cut trail came to an end, and from this point on the party bade farewell to all civilization. It was to be Grant’s last journey. After it was over he vowed that he would never attempt to pioneer through a wilderness again. “In all my previous journeyings,” he later wrote, “other men had been before me and left some memorial of their work, a railway, a Macadamized or gravel road, a lane, a trail, or at least, blazed trees to indicate the direction to be taken. Now we learned what it was to be without benefit of other men’s work. Here, there was nothing even to guide, save an occasional glimpse of the sun, and the slate-coloured, churned-up torrent … hemmed in by cañons, from which we turned aside only to get mired in beaver dams or alder swamps, or lost in labyrinths of steep ravines, or to stumble over slides of moss-covered rocks that had fallen from overhanging mountains.”

They were now in the true Pacific coast rain forest. “It rained almost every day. Every night the thunder rattled over the hills with terrific reverberations, and fierce flashes lit up wierdly [57c] tall trees covered with wreaths of moss, and the forms of tired men sleeping by smouldering camp fires.”

For five days, in which they managed to travel only seventeen miles, they struggled on, in Grant’s description, “through acres of densest underbrush where you cannot see a yard ahead, wading through swamps and beaver dams, getting scratched from eyes to ankles with prickly thorns, scaling precipices, falling over moss-covered rocks into pitfalls, your packs almost strangling you, losing the rest of the party while you halt to feel all over whether any bones are broken, and then experiencing in your inmost soul the unutterable loneliness of savage mountains.”

Fleming, with his scientist’s eye, noted that the undergrowth was formed of “the genuine flora of the Pacific slope” including
echinopanax horridus
and
Symplocarpus foetidus –
devil’s club, “perpetually wounding us with their spikes,” and skunk cabbage “in acres of stinking perfection.”
The nettles of the devil’s club were so bad that long after reaching civilization again, at Kamloops, the travellers felt the effects of them; their hands had to be wrapped in oatmeal poultices and even then the pain was so severe that one member of the party was unable to sleep.

All this time James Ross had been worrying about the suitability of the Kicking Horse Pass. Like Rogers before him, he began to wonder whether every other method of crossing the Rockies had been considered. The terrible descent from the Great Divide by way of the Kicking Horse River bothered almost everybody: if grades of 2.2 per cent were to be maintained, as the contract stipulated, construction costs would be very heavy. But if steeper grades were agreed upon, maintenance and running costs would be vastly increased and the government would probably not pay a subsidy on any part of the line that did not adhere to the contract.

Ross asked Shaw to explore the headwaters of the Bow and the Howse Pass – the very region which Tom Wilson, the packer, had reported on to Rogers the year before. If Shaw found a better pass, Ross was prepared to move swiftly. Shaw was instructed to run an immediate trial line from the summit without waiting for further orders while Ross stood ready to rush a survey crew to the spot. There was not a day to be lost; the rails had moved across the prairies at record speed and were now inching into the mountains.

Ross, meanwhile, decided to move over the summit, down the Kicking Horse, and then down the Columbia to the spot where the Blaeberry River flows to join it from the Howse Pass. He took James Hogg with him; en route he picked up Major Rogers and Tom Wilson.

Rogers was desperately worried when he learned that another attempt was being made on the Howse. Would “his” pass be rejected after all? Was Wilson’s report of the previous year accurate? He stoutly defended it, but he was reminded that “Wilson is not an engineer so what does he know about grades?” Ross was inclined to agree with Wilson and abandoned his idea of climbing to the top of the Howse Pass to rendezvous with Shaw. Hogg, however, was determined, in Wilson’s words, “to prove that my report was wrong.” He insisted on heading up the mountainside with only a day’s rations in his pack. It was almost the end of him. Shaw found him, quite by accident, crouched over a dying fire, insensible from exhaustion and frostbite, with most of his clothing burned away.

It was late October by this time; already the snow was falling thickly. Rogers left the mountains without knowing the results of Shaw’s explorations. By now Tom Wilson had become his friend and confidant and he revealed to him something of his feelings. He was in a state approach
ing despondency. All his work, he felt, had been for nothing: the contractors wanted to circumvent his pass in the Selkirks by taking the long way round, using the hairpin valley of the Columbia, “and if they did that he would be robbed of his ambition.” The Kicking Horse was also in doubt. If it were rejected, too, there would be nothing in the mountains to mark his passing. “Are you sure you’re right about the Howse Pass, Tom?” he asked time and time again.

In Calgary, to his great relief, the Major learned that Shaw and Ross had rejected the rival pass. The gradient was easier but the summit was one thousand feet higher than that of the Kicking Horse, and its employment would lengthen the railway by thirty miles. For better or for worse, the route which he had so enthusiastically and so profanely endorsed would become the main line of the
CPR
, and the name of Rogers would go down in history.

*
Tom Wilson’s memoirs, written in the straight-laced thirties, reproduce the Major’s favourite bit of profanity as “Blue ——!” Since it is doubtful that he would have censored so mild a word as “blazes” (and equally doubtful that the Major himself would have lapsed into such a euphemism), I have filled in the blank with the most obvious expletive.

*
After forty-five years only two of the originals were left alive. The last letter linking the men of the Great Divide was scribbled in pencil by Al Rogers in Waterville, Washington, on two report sheets of the Seattle Grain Company. It reached Tom Wilson in Banff late in February, 1924. “Dear Old Tom,” Rogers had written, “you are a loyal soul as ever lived and I love you for it.…” Three months later Rogers, too, had gone, leaving Tom Wilson as the sole survivor of the group that sat around the campfire and talked about the great railway on that haunting night in the mountains.

*
Now Canmore.

Chapter Five

1
Onderdonk’s lambs

2
“The beardless children of China”

3
Michael Haney to the rescue

4
The
Sentinel
of Yale