Rocky Mountain Express

William Cornelius Van Horne

was born on a dirt farm in Illinois.

As a young man, he was given the task

of building the longest, toughest wilderness railroad

on the face of the earth,

a task many considered impossible.

Pa'?

They once roamed the earth by the tens of thousands.

Their whistles spoke of distant places,

of adventure and romance.

Abandoned for decades,

what memories might still be evoked,

what spirits conjured up

from an age left behind so long ago?

Their crews considered them living things,

each with a unique personality.

Some were cranky and difficult;

others, good natured and spirited.

2816 has been resurrected

by the Canadian Pacific

in an extraordinary attempt to illuminate history itself,

to summon the spirits of the past.

They were explorers, engineers,

surveyors and guides.

They traveled by boat and foot,

packhorse and raft.

They passed through landscapes

the likes of nothing else on earth.

They fell through ice, slipped from cliffs,

died in rockslides and were lost in rapids.

They followed countless rivers

and many a promising route that ended nowhere.

For years, they searched for an ideal passage

across the vast mountain wilderness of western Canada.

Some worked too late into the fall

and were ambushed by snowstorms.

Trapped in makeshift shelters,

they struggled to survive winters

that could last over six months.

After 20 years of exploration

spanning hundreds of thousands of square miles,

at least 40 men had died

and still no ideal route had been found

through the mountains.

The province of British Columbia had joined Canada

on the condition that it would be connected to the east

by a transcontinental railway.

In desperation, the federal government began construction

beside a small church on the edge of the Fraser River

in the spring of 1881.

(engine chugging, wheels squealing)

Departing from Vancouver, what lies ahead is

one of the longest, toughest railways on earth.

An extraordinary, 3000-mile journey

for a locomotive that first turned a wheel

over 80 years ago.

The first few miles along the Fraser River flood plain

were easy going for the builders,

at least, until the line turned north

into the jaws of the Fraser Canyon.

Hard granite walls towering 3,000 feet above the river

brought construction to a painful crawl

that would last over six years.

10,000 men worked the Fraser Canyon

in the early 1880s.

6,500 were Chinese.

They blasted night and day,

drilling tunnels into the granite rock,

carving roadbeds on the sides of vertical cliffs.

Working with hand tools and black powder,

they averaged barely five feet a day.

In these canyons, six men died for every mile of track laid,

most of them Chinese.

We can only glimpse the courage of these men

in the extraordinary work they left behind.

Pa'?

Pa'?

By 1882,

construction moved out of the Fraser Canyon

and east along the Thompson River

as the railway climbed inland

up to the central plateau of British Columbia.

Here the land becomes arid

and the rock gives way to softer sandstone.

It made for easier construction,

but this barren desert absorbs little water.

Torrential rains erode and sculpt sandstone cliffs

into hoodoos that can collapse into mudslides,

and bury the line.

Pa'?

Here, engineers and tracklayers

encountered a new set of obstacles

that could be neither filled, nor bridged,

nor tunneled through.

When construction crews arrived at these lakes,

they fully intended to bridge them and continue.

But when they dropped weights

attached to 400 feet of rope,

they never reached the bottom.

The lakes would be simply too deep to cross.

Trains would have to take the long route around--

as they do to this day.

Where the ground was flat and the grades easy,

General Manager Van Horne pushed hard

to make up for time and money

lost in the canyons and mountains.

They were Canadians, Americans,

British, Europeans, and Asians.

They froze in bitter cold

and toiled in fierce summer heat,

eaten raw by insects.

Yet, with bare hands,

they laid as many as six miles of track every day.

In 1882,

nearly 500 miles of track

were laid in a single season--

a world record and a source of enormous pride

for the track crews.

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At the railroad town of Revelstoke

the canyons, lakes and deserts

of the interior lay behind.

Relatively easy going, compared to the Selkirk

and Rocky Mountains looming ahead.

General Manager Van Horne was an amateur geologist,

a talented artist, and an accomplished violinist.

Though he was best known

as an all-night, scotch-drinking poker player.

Perhaps his greatest gamble, however,

lay in the route chosen east of Revelstoke.

Van Horne, the CPR, and the government

were anxious to keep powerful American railroads

from moving into Southern Canada.

There were two routes through the mountains being considered:

a northern route recommended by the surveyors,

and a southern route considered much more difficult

by virtually everyone.

A fateful, perhaps reckless, decision was made,

by the railway and government,

to gamble on this southern route,

where no passes were yet known to exist.

An American surveyor by the name of A. B. Rogers

had convinced many, including Van Horne,

that he could find a southern pass

through the Selkirks.

The future of the Canadian Pacific

was now in the hands of two Americans.

One, a brilliant leader and gambler,

the other, a stubborn surveyor considered wildly eccentric.

Pa'?

Rogers and his guides only traveled in the spring

and summer months up the western face of the Selkirks.

Ominously, they found no evidence

that humans of any kind

had ever ventured amongst these almost vertical slopes.

In the summer of 1882,

when Rogers declared he had discovered

a viable railroad pass,

he did not fully appreciate the nature of the beast

that would come to bear his name.

When engineers and tracklayers

arrived the following season, at the foot of the Selkirks,

they were appalled

by what Rogers had declared a pass.

They would have to build massive looping trestles

to give the railway distance to lessen the steep climb

up the mountain face.

For the men working here,

it was a bad omen.

The trestles were frail,

and prone to fire in the summer

and avalanches in winter.

They were soon replaced with stone pillars,

and eventually, those too were abandoned.

In February of 1910,

the chief engineer wrote to Van Horne:

"There has been a terrible accident:

"many men died last night in the valley of the lllecillewaet.

The rest are afraid."

In the early years,

this short stretch of track

would threaten the very survival

of the entire railway.

Some thought Rogers had been more than eccentric.

His ego had led him to promote a route of total madness.

Railway surveyors seek the lowest possible route

through the mountains,