by Ray Argyle
The dispute between Arthur Farwell and the railway didn’t end there. The Dominion government refused to recognize provincial land grants, and British Columbia refused to recognize Dominion land grants. Arthur Farwell sued the Dominion government for the rights to his land. Meanwhile, no one in Farwell could get clear title to their land. Many banks and other businesses refused to set up shop in a town where property rights were such a mess.
It wasn’t until 1894 that Farwell won his land title, less parts of his grant that the Dominion government had given to others. He was fed up by this point, though, and moved further south to Nelson, British Columbia.
Revelstoke was finally incorporated in 1899, and the big task, making up the lost years when nobody knew who owned what around what had been Farwell, began.
CHAPTER 5
NO TIME TO FIGHT
The boards in the wooden bridge across the Columbia River creaked and groaned with every step, as Edward and Jim, leading their horses, made their way to the far side and into Farwell. The new lumber in the bridge was still green, so it squeaked and snarled when walked on.
“If you’d been here last winter,” Jim said, “we’d have crossed the river on an ice bridge.
They just lashed a bunch of trees together and let them freeze up in the ice. So solid that teams of horses could cross over on them.”
The first thing Edward saw in Farwell was the burned out shells of buildings along Front Street. Tall spires of blackened trees stood like forlorn statues, their branches having been consumed by flames. Dozens of tents lined both sides of the street, mixed in among the wooden frames of new buildings that were being hastily thrown up. He stepped around bits of blackened wood and ash that still littered the roadway.
A figure of controversy, A.S. Farwell gave his name on the place where the railway crossed the Columbia River. The settlement of Farwell was later renamed Revelstoke.
“Guess I forgot to tell you about the fire,” Jim told Edward. “Pretty near the whole place burned down in May. These wooden buildings burn like match boxes. But they’re building ’er up again. Old Art Fartwell — that’s what I call him — started this place. Got himself over a thousand acres of Crown land. Expects to make a lot of money selling it off when the railway gets here.”
Farwell stood about halfway between the two sections of the railway. To the east, the track gangs were struggling day and night under the merciless urging of the CPR’s general manager, William Van Horne. They were still some distance away in the Selkirk Mountains. To the west, Andrew Onderdonk’s navvies were struggling to blast a right of way through Eagle Pass, in the Monashee range.
That night, Edward and Jim slept on the river bank behind the Columbia Hotel.
Neither wanted to pay the fifty cents that the innkeeper, Mrs. Clarke, had demanded for a room. The night was warm, the mosquitoes weren’t too plentiful, and Edward had no trouble dropping off to sleep.
Daylight in Farwell came on at about five o’clock in the morning. The air had chilled during the night, and Edward awoke to find frost on the ground. He rolled his bedclothes together, gathered up his satchel, and said goodbye to Jim, who had business to attend to. The last Edward saw of him was when he led his two horses to a stable with the sign, Horses bought and sold.
I’ve come this far, Edward thought to himself, but I’ve still a ways to go if I’m going to help put down the Rebellion. I’ve got miles to go before I reach the end of the line where I can catch a train to the Prairies.
Front Street was alive with men coming and going from the tents and log shacks on either side of the road. Boats were already moving on the river, carrying men and supplies to the gold mines up in Big Bend Country. Edward went into a small café that was filled with hungry men being served by a Chinese cook. All these places seem to be run by Chinese, Edward thought as he gobbled up a plate of eggs and burnt toast.
Railway navvies pose with the driver of a wagon team bringing supplies to a camp in the Monashee Mountains in 1885.
He had arrived at just the right time. Two men were talking about the load they had to cart east to the railhead. He heard one say that they could use some help leading their pack horses into the Selkirks.
Edward put down his cup of coffee and went over to where they were sitting. “I’ve just come through Eagle Pass,” he told them. “Did it on horseback. I want to get to the end of track. Let me come along with you and I’ll work for my grub.”
“Yer justa kid,” muttered one of the men.
“Doesn’t matter,” the other chimed in. “Iff’en he can hold the pony’s leash, he’ll help us reach the pass.”
The man was referring to the Rogers Pass, the narrow opening that Major Albert Rogers had found in the Selkirk Mountains between Farwell and Golden, on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. Without the pass, the railway would have had to go much further north, where the mountains were lower and less rugged.
The trio set off — with one of the men grumbling about Edward, while the other offered encouragement. It took four days of steady hiking through the mountains to reach the railway workers’ advance camp.
Edward’s two companions were George Lafferty and Johnny Nelson. They’d been running supplies up the Columbia to the gold camps around Big Bend. But they couldn’t resist getting in on the easy money to be made carrying supplies to the railway camps.
As they travelled, Edward started to feel that he was proving his worth. There was the time, for example, that the whole pack train might have tumbled into a canyon if he hadn’t held firmly to the lead horse’s line.
The railway workers’ tents and shacks were set up on a bank of the Illecillewaet River that flowed from Rogers Pass down into the Columbia River. As soon as they arrived, Edward and his companions headed straight for the cook house, a large tent distinguished by a tall tin stovepipe giving off a constant stream of smoke. They ate freshly caught river trout, along with steak and vegetables that had been hauled in from Calgary, the nearest town of significant size east of the Rocky Mountains.
Surveyors like Major Albert Rogers had to clamber over high peaks to find their way through British Columbia’s mountains.
The Secret Pass
Albert Bowman Rogers wanted to make history. And he did, finding the pass through the Selkirk Mountains that became the route for the Canadian Pacific Railway into British Columbia.
Albert Rogers, born in the United States, was an eccentric, tobacco-chewing, hard-swearing man, and a controversial figure — and he was famous for his bushy, white whiskers. Canadian engineers resented his presence. But his superiors praised him for his determination. As a surveyor for the CPR, Rogers had his work cut out for him: he had been told that no route through the Selkirk Mountains existed.
One day, however, he thought he saw a pass in the distance that looked like it might lead to a valley on the other side. Rogers had to give up when his supplies ran out twenty-nine kilometres short of his goal. But he returned twice before finally succeeding on July 24, 1882. That day, he stood in a mountain-ringed meadow on the bank of the Illecillewaet River, which led down to the south-flowing Columbia River. He had found Rogers Pass.
His boss, J.J. Hill, later hired him to help survey the route for his Great Northern Railway in the United States. Rogers was badly injured in a fall from his horse while working in Idaho. He died from cancer in 1889.
The railway had to cross many ravines and rivers. This bridge spanned the Illecillewaet River. The river roared down into the Columbia River, and the two merged at the site of present-day Revelstoke.
The Stoney Creek Bridge is one of the most spectacular bridges on the CPR’s main line. Measuring 183 metres long, it lies within Glacier National Park in the Rocky Mountains.
After a night in a bunkhouse with twenty railway workers, and with an enormous breakfast tucked into his stomach, Edward set about getting himself a seat on one of the work trains going back to Calgary. Coming in, the trains carried rails, spikes, dynamite, and other equ
ipment and supplies for the railway workers; returning, they ran mostly empty. As the group Edward had arrived with was under contract to the railway, he had no trouble talking himself into a seat in the train’s only boxcar.
Sitting on a long bench that ran the full length of the car, Edward watched through an open window as the work train slowly puffed its way up to Rogers Pass. It eventually arrived at the summit, where he could look down into the Beaver River valley.
Edward saw a series of bridges that cut across deep chasms. One especially caught his attention: it was the wooden trestle over Stony Creek that carried the track several hundred feet above the valley floor.
Once over the bridge, Edward could tell by the easy roll of the boxcar that the train was coasting downhill. Before long, the green Columbia River came into sight. It was running north, flowing along a deep chasm gouged out in the Rocky Mountain Trench. Eventually the river would make a giant hairpin turn and head south, back past Farwell. But Edward’s train was chugging north, toward the headwaters of the river. In another few hours it pulled into a makeshift station. The station was called Golden, where the Kicking Horse River joined the Columbia.
“Why do they call the river Kicking Horse?” Edward asked the man sitting opposite him.
“Because a horse kicked a fellow in the gut and they thought he was dead,” the man answered. “When they went to bury him, he sat up, as alive as could be. So they called the stream Kicking Horse River.”
Edward hardly believed the story but he thought it’d be a good one to remember.
Everybody seemed to be getting off the boxcar, so Edward followed. He found out the train crew would be sleeping in Golden overnight before continuing to Calgary in the morning. There was a cook shack near the station and Edward set out for it, thinking he could get a free meal.
But when he got there, he found out that dinner would cost him fifty cents. This wasn’t a railway mess car, but a private café owned by Wan Lee, the first Chinese man to settle in Golden.
“You pay, you eat,” he told Edward. Hungry, Edward decided he had better pay. What he got for his money was much more than he had expected.
While Edward chewed on a tough piece of meat, a burly man in blue overalls and a railway cap on his head came into the café and sat down beside him. He spread out a newspaper on the counter and began to read aloud the headlines.
“Riel surrenders,” the man read aloud. “Rebellion is over. Big Bear taken prisoner.”
Edward couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Craning to see the small print on the front page of the Calgary Herald, Mining and Ranch Advocate Edward’s eyes confirmed what his ears had heard. The North-West Rebellion was over!
“You’re awful interested in this paper,” the man said to him. “It just came in on the train.
Filled with news of the Rebellion. What’s it to a young fellow like you?” Edward was so shocked by what he’d heard and read that he hardly knew what to say.
“I didn’t think it would be over this soon,” Edward told the man. “I was on my way to join the militia. Thought I should get in on the trouble.”
“Well, it’s all over,” the man repeated. “You’re too late. The fighting’s done.”
“I’m surprised it’s over so soon,” Edward said. “What do you think will happen now?”
The man glowered at Edward. “Don’t ya know anything, kid? They’ll hang Riel and all his gang. I didn’t do ten years in the U.S. Army without learning what an army does when it wins. It takes out its frustrations on whoever it’s whupped.”
The man, it turned out, was Lieutenant James W. Jeffries (retired), who was only too eager to educate Edward about the ways of armies, politicians, and anybody who gets in their way.
“Why, Canada never had an army until the North-West Rebellion,” the old soldier said.
“You just had the Royal Navy sitting out there off Halifax and Victoria. You even had an Englishman, name of General Middleton, commanding what you had for a militia. Three thousand militia came west on the CPR to fight Riel. Took nine days from Montreal to the Qu’Appelle Valley.
“It went like this,” Jeffries continued. “They had orders to stamp out Métis and Indian resistance. They got their butts kicked at Duck Lake and Cut Knife Creek. Turning point came at the Battle of Batoche. But only because the Indians used up all their ammunition and Riel had to surrender. His Métis general, Gabriel Dumont, ran off to the States.”
Jeffries went on to tell Edward what he’d read in the paper: that the last shots in the Rebellion had been fired by Steele’s Scouts, the unit of the North-West Mounted Police commanded by Colonel Sam Steele. His men encountered Chief Big Bear’s retreating Cree at Loon Lake. This was the bunch that had held Amelia McLean and other civilians from Fort Pitt prisoner for seventy days. The Calgary paper had more about her and her family. Edward wondered how a girl like Amelia would have dealt with being held prisoner by the Natives.
“Riel’s been charged with high treason,” Jeffries said, pointing to an article in the paper.
“The trouble with the Indians is over. Everything’ll go on just as the government wants. The railway’ll get millions of acres for its trouble. White settlers will get their choice of homesteads. Those poor bloody Indians, and their half-breed Métis, will be left to starve. Just as well you’re not part of it, boy.”
Edward felt deflated. There was no time left to fight. He also felt ashamed. Ashamed because he’d told everyone, including his friends from school, that he was going to help put down the North-West Rebellion. He didn’t understand much about the causes of the Rebellion, or the injustices that the Métis and the Native people of the Prairies had been forced to endure. He had just wanted the excitement of the action, serving Queen and Country. It was a natural enough feeling for a young man just turned eighteen.
What do I do now?
Edward pondered his choices. He could take the train the next morning to Calgary in the hope that he still might be able to enlist in the militia. He could run back to Victoria, confessing defeat in his great adventure. Or he could look for fresh adventure along the route of the Canadian Pacific Railway as it pressed its way through the uncharted wilderness of mountainous British Columbia.
The locomotives that pulled construction trains had their own names.
This engine was the Kamloops.
Edward was both tired and discouraged when he dragged himself to the Golden Hotel, a two-storey wooden building that was the largest on the town’s main street. For twenty-five cents, he got a bed in a dormitory with a dozen other men. By now, Edward had become accustomed to the rough ways and crude talk of the men he met along his travels. He put his satchel under his pillow, closed his eyes, and fell fast asleep.
He awoke with a start the next morning as the men stirred around him, complaining of a poor night’s sleep, and muttering 69 about what the coming day might have in store for them. He felt the need for fresh air, and was only too glad to escape the stuffy dormitory ahead of most of his roommates. By the time he’d reached the street he was feeling better, but he still didn’t know what he was going to do. He kept thinking about his options. In the bright light of the morning, the idea of joining the militia held less appeal than it had the day before. He dreaded the thought of going home and facing his family and friends without some great accomplishment to talk about.
After a while, Edward found himself in front of the small building that served as the railway station in Golden. He saw a locomotive tugging a chain of flatcars carrying steel rails. It was bound for the end of the rails lying between Golden and Farwell. I could get aboard right now, and be in Farwell by tomorrow morning. There’s lots going on there, he thought. If I get my oar in before the railway construction’s done in the fall I might be able to fix myself up for the winter.
At the last moment, just as the engineer pulled on the throttle to send more steam to power the big engine, Edward made his decision. The train was chugging faster now. He threw his satchel onto
the last flatcar and clambered aboard, clinging desperately to the pile of steel rails it carried. He had to hang on, all the way through Rogers Pass and back to where he’d started from.
I’ve been a fool. Wasted my time, Edward thought as the train gathered speed. What’s going to become of me?
The Beavermouth Station as it looked in the 1880s. The workers who built the station went months without pay when the CPR ran short of money.
CHAPTER 6
EDWARD GETS
HIS CHANCE
Black puffs of smoke billowed from the stack of the locomotive as the train carrying Edward made its way out of the Columbia River Valley and into the Selkirk Mountains. The newly laid tracks hadn’t firmly settled into the railbed, and Edward’s spine rattled with every dip and turn of the train. He wiped specks of coal dust from his eyes and, holding his hat in his hand, brushed cinders out of his hair. The ride reminded him of the forest fire that had caught him on the bank of the Fraser River when he he’d first set out for the Prairies.
At first, as the train followed the line up the Beaver River from where it joined the Columbia, it travelled fairly quickly. Before long, however, the train began to grind its way along S-shaped switchbacks, which added many miles to the journey. The switchbacks were the only way the train could edge its way up the sides of mountains, gaining only a bit of altitude at each turn. Edward could look back over the country he’d descended into only the day before, but he worried about slipping off the flatcar. The fear of falling made him cling tightly to the stack of rails he was sitting on.
As the day wore on and the train worked its way farther into the mountains, Edward became more and more entranced at the beauty of his surroundings. Green forests carpeted the lower elevations and, from time to time, he could make out creeks tumbling wildly down the slopes. Going through the Rogers Pass, Edward could see where great slides of stone had scraped bare the near-vertical walls of the mountains. He could make out, at the very tops of the highest mountains, splotches of snow that still clung to their peaks, even in mid-July.