In the autumn of 1893, a construction worker stood on a wooden platform suspended over Stoney Creek in the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia, reaching up to receive a steel section being lowered by a cable that stretched between anchor points on the canyon walls high above him. The platform on which he stood was tied to the face of the canyon at a height that put the creek 290 feet below his feet. The canyon walls around him were granite and argillite, wet from mountain drainage that did not distinguish between construction season and any other season. The Selkirks at Stoney Creek receive more annual precipitation than almost any other location on the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

The timber on the canyon walls was dense spruce and cedar. The sky above the canyon slit was the width of the structure he was building. The cable above him ran from a temporary anchor tower on the eastern rim to a similar tower on the western rim. The steel section sliding along the cable weighed several hundred pounds.

His job was to receive it at the loading point, guide it to its connection place, and hold his position on the platform while the workers above adjusted the load. The platform was not level. Things were never level at Stoney Creek. Nothing at Stoney Creek was level except the creek.

The creek, 290 feet below, looked like a white line passing through the canopy of conifers at the bottom of the gorge. It ran fast and cold from its source in the snowfields of the Selkirk range above, its temperature unsoftened as it would be in lowland rivers. It carried snowmelt from a high mountain watershed without a wide valley to slow its motion, and without soil to absorb what granite could not hold. The gorge it had carved through the Selkirk rock was narrow, vertical, and permanent in the way that water cutting through rock over geological time is always permanent.

The Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885 needed to cross that gorge because the gorge stood between the western entrance to Rogers Pass and the descent to the Columbia River valley, and the main line could not bypass it without re-grading slopes that had made Rogers Pass the preferred route in the first place. So they crossed it with timber. In 1885 there was no other option. In 1893 they were correcting the consequences of that choice.

The steel arch the construction worker was helping to build in the autumn of 1893 would span 336 feet between the canyon walls at a height of 290 feet above the stream. That fabricated steel arch would be responsible for carrying the Canadian Pacific main line between the summit of Rogers Pass and the Columbia River valley at Revelstoke. When complete, it would be among the highest railway bridges in Canada and among the most isolated. The nearest town of any importance was Revelstoke, thirty miles to the west along the main line.

The bridge site had no road access. It had no river access. It had the railway running directly through it, construction camps the contractor had set up beside the track in the narrow valley, and supply trains sent by the Canadian Pacific according to the schedule demanded by the construction work. The steel sections the workers were lowering by cables over Stoney Creek had traveled to the site by rail from fabrication plants in the east, been transferred at Revelstoke to construction supply trains, and climbed the grade to the point where the railway track crossed over the gorge that the new bridge was meant to span.

To understand why the Canadian Pacific Railway built a steel arch across Stoney Creek in 1893, one must understand what the original structure at that site was and why it could not bear what the main line had come to demand of it after eight years of service. The original Stoney Creek crossing was a timber trestle. It was erected in 1885 during the final push to complete the Canadian Pacific transcontinental main line under conditions that did not permit the engineering study typically required of a structure of that height and permanence. The men who built it built fast because speed was the only option the schedule allowed.

The schedule did not allow for deliberation or hesitation. It barely allowed for completion. The Canadian Pacific Railway had been chartered by the government of Canada in 1881 under terms requiring the completion of the transcontinental line within ten years. Those terms were not theoretical.

The government of Canada had committed to linking British Columbia to the eastern union by railway as a condition of British Columbia entering the confederation in 1871. By 1880 the commitment was a decade old, the railway was unbuilt, and the political consequences of that gap between promise and performance had become a structural problem for the government in Ottawa. The syndicate that won the Canadian Pacific charter in 1881—George Stephen, Donald Smith, James Hill until his departure, and the Montreal financial interests that backed them—accepted terms that granted them land grants and government subsidies in exchange for a construction schedule that required them to build faster than any transcontinental railway built before, across terrain that presented obstacles no prior transcontinental survey had fully resolved. The route through British Columbia was the problem that had delayed the project for a decade.

A railway line extending west from the prairies toward the Pacific coast had to cross the Rockies, then the Columbia Mountains, the Selkirk range, and the Monashee Mountains before it could descend toward the coast. The Rockies posed a massive barrier. The Columbia Mountains posed a second barrier after the first was cleared. The distance between the two ranges was not flat.

That was the Rocky Mountain Trench, a valley of suitable width and gradient, but crossing the Selkirk range itself had yielded no viable route for any of the surveys conducted during the 1860s and 1870s. No known pass through the Selkirks existed at elevations a steam locomotive could climb while pulling a loaded train until 1881. Major Albert Bowman Rogers was the surveyor sent by the Canadian Pacific into the Selkirks in 1881 to find the pass that earlier surveys had not identified. Rogers was a survey engineer of the American school, trained and experienced in Midwestern and mountain surveys during the American railway expansion of the 1860s and 1870s.

He was known among the men who worked under him for a combination of physical endurance and professional seriousness, expressed in long periods in high mountain terrain with minimal supplies and maximum field distance from any point of resupply. He found the pass that bears his name in the summer of 1881. The pass across the Selkirk range at the location Rogers identified intersected at an elevation of about 4,354 feet. The approach grades from both sides were within the limits set by the Canadian Pacific’s engineering specifications for an operable route.

It was the desired route. No other pass across the Selkirks was confirmed by later engineering as viable within the standards a railway required. The problem with Rogers Pass as a permanent operating route was the same problem that governed every aspect of construction in the Selkirks. The mountains received snowfall amounts that engineers from eastern surveys had not designed for and that the operating department had never experienced.

Snow accumulation at the summit of Rogers Pass in an ordinary winter reached depths that required the construction of snow sheds, roofed timber structures covering open sections of track to keep it from being buried. The approach routes to the summit were subject to avalanche conditions that no snow shed of practical construction could resist. The main line through Rogers Pass, once completed, would operate under conditions that eastern railway experience had no precedent for. The engineers knew that when they built the line through it in 1885.

They built it anyway because the route existed, the schedule required completion, and there was no other route. The Canadian Pacific main line through the Selkirk Mountains was contracted in 1884 and 1885, in its British Columbia sections, to Andrew Onderdonk, a California construction engineer who had managed huge workforces in the American West and understood that the work he had contracted to perform in the Fraser Valley and the mountain ranges beyond required a supply of labor he could not hire locally or bring from the eastern provinces in sufficient numbers. The workforce Onderdonk mobilized for the Canadian Pacific’s British Columbia sections was predominantly Chinese. The men who built the Canadian Pacific through the Fraser Valley, over the Gold Range, across the Columbia River valley at Revelstoke, and up to the western entrance of Rogers Pass were in the vast majority men who came from Guangdong province in southeastern China, mainly from the Pearl River Delta region and the rural districts around Canton and its surrounding counties.

They had been coming to British Columbia in increasing numbers since the Fraser River gold rush of 1858. By the early 1880s the Chinese population of British Columbia was the largest Chinese population in Canada. The labor market they formed was the market from which Onderdonk drew the workforce the Canadian Pacific needed. They came for the same structural reason that Irish immigrant workers had come to build American canals and railways a generation earlier, and that Italian immigrant workers were arriving in the eastern United States in the same years for the same purpose.

The wages available in British Columbia for men classified in the labor market as unskilled—blasting rock, moving earth, installing timber, laying track, and every other category of physical labor that a railway construction project in mountain terrain demanded in enormous quantities—represented a tangible improvement over what these men could earn in Guangdong, where the agricultural economy was under pressure from population density, land fragmentation, and the disruptions imposed by the Taiping Revolution and its aftermath on the rural districts during the 1850s and 1860s. That improvement did not mean comfort. The wages Onderdonk paid Chinese workers on the Canadian Pacific were one dollar per day at the standard rate. The wages he paid white workers for similar work ranged from $1.

50 to $2. 50 per day. That disparity was what the British Columbia labor market of 1882 had set as the price of Chinese labor compared to white labor. Onderdonk’s accounts reflected that disparity consistently across the construction record.

Chinese workers were hired and managed through a contracting system structurally similar to the padrone system through which Italian labor contractors managed construction work crews on American railway and construction projects in the same decade. A Chinese labor contractor, known in the literature of the period by the English term headman or the Cantonese term for the elder man of the work group, organized the workers, negotiated contracts with the construction company, provided camp housing, managed food and equipment supplies from stores kept by the company beside the railway track, and supplied the labor stipulated in the contract. The wage paid by the company went directly to the contractor. What the individual worker received was what remained after the contractor’s administrative fees, housing costs, and profit margin on food and supplies purchased from the contractor’s store were deducted.

The net wage that reached the worker after those deductions was the margin the 1882 British Columbia labor market allowed the Chinese worker to keep out of one dollar per day. Working conditions at the Fraser Valley and mountain sites were the conditions of rock construction in the 1880s in terrain that did not lend itself to construction work. The Fraser Valley section required blasting ledges on vertical rock faces above a river that ran fast, cold, and deep. Men were lowered by ropes to drill blast holes and place powder charges, then pulled up before the charge’s fuse was lit—or not pulled up in time, and the result in each case was recorded in the construction accounts at the level those accounts required for tracking material costs, not at the level required for tracking human beings.

The mountain sections beyond the valley required grading terrain whose level could only be achieved by moving rock, and rock could only be moved by powder, and powder was handled by men who acquired their experience with the behavior of black powder and nitroglycerin in mountain temperature conditions while working in the weeks preceding the accident that ended their acquisition of experience. The death toll of Chinese workers on the Canadian Pacific’s British Columbia sections is not precisely established in any historical source, because the construction accounts from which an accurate count could be drawn were not kept at a level of individual detail that makes accuracy possible. Estimates in the historical literature range from a few hundred to over a thousand deaths among the Chinese, attributed to construction accidents, disease spread by unsanitary conditions in the construction camps, and nutritional deficiency from a camp diet that contractors had not calibrated to the caloric requirements of mountain construction workers in a British Columbia climate. The published institutional histories of the Canadian Pacific address these figures at a level of approximation that the surviving records support.

The names below the level of headman exist in those records, sometimes in forms that archival research into the Chinese Canadian experience on the Canadian Pacific has been working to recover for decades without completion. Construction crews reached the Stoney Creek crossing at the western entrance to Rogers Pass in the spring of 1885. The summit of Rogers Pass lay ahead of them. The schedule required completing the line to Craigellachie and connecting with construction crews coming from the east by autumn.

The gorge at Stoney Creek was 290 feet deep and 336 feet wide at the elevation the railway grade required. There was no time to design, fabricate, and erect a permanent steel structure at that crossing within the available construction season. There was time to build a timber trestle. The timber trestle was what the schedule allowed.

That is what they built. The timber for the Stoney Creek bridge came from the surrounding forest, the Selkirk Mountains. At the main line elevation there are mature conifers, Douglas fir, and western red cedar of diameters that mature pine reaches at high elevations through centuries of slow growth in a mountain climate. The timber bents erected by the construction crews at Stoney Creek gorge in 1885 were built from that wood, cut and transported to the canyon rim, then lowered into place by crews working on rope scaffolding over the same slope that would later require the steel erectors to anchor their feet to a platform tied to the canyon wall.

The difference between the 1885 bridge and the 1893 steel construction was not the height above the stream. The height was the same. The difference was in material and permanence, and that was the reason the railway decided, eight years after the bridge was built, that the timber structure was no longer the appropriate solution. The locomotives the Canadian Pacific had introduced into service on the Rogers Pass grade during the late 1880s were heavier on every operating axle than the locomotives the 1885 bridge had been designed to carry.

Mountain service on the grades east and west of the Rogers Pass summit required the heaviest available freight power because the grades demanded it, and railway operating policy during the late 1880s assigned classes of steam power to the mountain main line whose tractive effort matched what the grades required. The timber members of the Stoney Creek bridge had been dimensioned for the locomotives of 1885. The locomotives of 1890 were not the locomotives of 1885. The dead load plus live load plus dynamic impact calculations that the bridge’s timber members were required to sustain every time a heavy freight crossed Stoney Creek gorge exceeded the calculations made by the bridge’s designers.

The Canadian Pacific’s engineering department inspected the structure, managed crossing speeds over it, and did everything that could be done. What could be done was not a permanent solution. The bridge had to be replaced with a structure the railway intended to build once, for the loads the main line would have to carry across any planning horizon the engineering department could define. The decision to replace the Stoney Creek bridge with a steel arch was the decision required by the geometry of the crossing.

The gorge was too deep and too narrow for a steel truss resting on piers from the bottom of the gorge. Building a pier seated in the gorge floor and rising 290 feet to track level was not an engineering impossibility, but it was a construction problem of a different order from a pier built in a wide, shallow river valley with suitable soil, manageable depth, and workspace around the cofferdam. The gorge walls at Stoney Creek provided no workspace at all. The stream ran fast and cold at the bottom.

The gorge floor was rock, roots, and running water, with no level surface sufficient for fabricating materials that the construction of a pier of that height might require. The geometry of the crossing—its depth, narrowness, and verticality—was ideal geometry for an arch. An arch required no support from below. It needed only two abutments, one on each canyon wall, and a structure capable of spanning the distance between them by transmitting compression along the arch curve from crown to springing.

Steel under compression is steel in its most efficient state. The arch form suited the crossing. The crossing demanded the arch form. The steel for the Stoney Creek arch was fabricated in manufacturing plants in eastern Canada and the United States and shipped west by rail, the only way any material reached the interior of British Columbia in 1893, and for that reason the Canadian Pacific construction department controlled its supply chain from the point of fabrication to the construction site.

The cable sections, lateral bracing members, and arch rib components that formed the Stoney Creek bridge arrived at the construction siding near the crossing on flatcars and were moved into the construction supply system to bring them to the gorge. There was no road in the gorge. The gorge contained the railway track across its top, which ended at the gap where the old bridge stood while the new bridge was being built, and it contained the canyon walls and the cable system that construction engineers had strung between anchor towers on the eastern and western rims to allow erectors to lower steel sections from the rim to preparation points on the canyon face. A bridge 290 feet above a mountain stream in the Selkirk range was built in 1893 using the equipment the construction technology of the time provided: cables, pulleys, winches, wooden scaffolding, and men.

The men who erected the steel arch at Stoney Creek in 1893 were not the Chinese construction workers who had built the original timber trestle in 1885. The British Columbia labor market of 1893 was not the labor market of 1882. The Chinese immigrant workforce that Onderdonk had assembled for the original construction had dispersed in part after the main line was completed; some remained in British Columbia, settling in communities that grew into the Chinatowns of Victoria and Vancouver and interior towns along the railway route. Some returned to China.

The mobile construction workforce available for the Stoney Creek bridge replacement in 1893 drew on the labor pool that Canadian Pacific projects in the 1890s employed: a mixture of new European immigrants, increasingly Italian and Slavic men arriving through Atlantic ports and moving west, along with men who had lived in British Columbia long enough to know the nature and conditions of the work. The Italian workers who appear in the Stoney Creek construction records, in whatever form those records survive, belonged to the same population that Pennsylvania Railroad contractors were employing at the Rockville Bridge over the Susquehanna in the same decade. Men from Calabria, Campania, Sicily, and Basilicata, seeking North American wages by the shortest available route, because the agricultural economy of southern Italy no longer provided the subsistence margin that a man’s labor on his own land or on the estate land he worked had once produced. They arrived at Halifax or New York and moved toward the work the labor market classified as requiring physical strength and not requiring English proficiency: excavation, blasting, hauling, and erection at construction sites where the continent’s infrastructure was being built.

The contracting system that brought them to the Stoney Creek site was the padrone system that managed Italian construction labor throughout North America in the 1890s, with the same structural relationship between worker and wage and the same intermediary taking a cut before the remainder reached the man who had done the work. Working conditions on the Stoney Creek scaffolding in 1893 were the conditions of high-altitude construction in the Selkirk range. The season in which the steel arch erection at Stoney Creek could be performed was bounded at its start by the spring snowmelt that kept the gorge wet and the rock faces unstable until drainage settled, and at its end by the approach of early mountain winter, which arrives in the Rogers Pass region before the calendar date suggests. The working period was summer and early autumn, which in the Selkirks meant July, August, and part of September before heavy snowfall began from the mountain peaks.

The men worked on erection platforms during that period in conditions ranging from summer heat in a mountain gorge under direct sun to the cold rain of the thunderstorms the Selkirk heights generate regularly during the construction months. The platforms they stood on were tied to the gorge rock at heights above the stream that made falling from them certainly fatal. Rope suspension, timber lashing, and the caution of the men on the platforms were all that the British Columbia labor laws of 1893 required the construction company to provide as protection from falls. Which is to say that the British Columbia labor laws of 1893 did not require the construction company to prominently document, in the later engineering history of the structure, what happened to any man who fell from the Stoney Creek gorge platforms in the summer of that year.

The steel arch was completed and the first trains crossed it before the end of the 1893 construction season. The timber trestle the arch replaced was demolished. The timber from which it was built—the mature spruce and cedar cut by the 1885 crews from the Selkirk forests—was removed from the gorge, and the steel arch was left to carry the Canadian Pacific main line across Stoney Creek alone. The first freight trains to cross the new structure were the Canadian Pacific’s mountain freight locomotives, Consolidation and ten-wheeler types assigned to the Rogers Pass grade.

The arch did not move the way the timber trestle had moved under heavy loads. The steel distributed the dynamic impact of the crossing locomotive through the arch shape to the abutments in the canyon walls. The abutments, seated in the granite of the canyon walls, did not compress under the load. The arch held.

The crossing that had been rebuilt because the original structure no longer suited the railway’s increasing loads now had a structure designed for loads exceeding those the line carried in 1893. Because the Canadian Pacific engineering department performed the same calculations the Pennsylvania Railroad engineering department would perform seven years later at the Rockville crossing. Whatever they built at Stoney Creek, the main line would still be there in fifty years, and the loads would not be lighter than they were in 1893. What the Stoney Creek arch was asked to carry in the decades after its completion was the full development of Canadian Pacific steam locomotives, from the Consolidation types of the 1890s to the development of mountain locomotives in the early twentieth century.

The grade of Rogers Pass imposed on Canadian Pacific motive power development a demand for tractive effort that the railway met with successive classes of heavy steam locomotives. The Selkirk locomotives, a class of articulated steam locomotive introduced by the Canadian Pacific in 1929 specifically for the mountains of Rogers Pass, were among the largest and most powerful steam locomotives that ever operated in Canada, named after the mountain range whose grades had demanded their development. They crossed Stoney Creek bridge because the bridge was the main line between the summit and the Columbia River valley, and the main line was the route through which traffic flowed. The bridge erected by the 1893 fitting crews carried mountain freight for the transcontinental railway for thirty-six years of steam locomotive development before the structure was rebuilt.

In 1929 the Canadian Pacific replaced the 1893 bridge with a new steel structure at the same crossing site. The 1929 bridge preserved the arch form that the gorge geometry demanded. The new arch incorporated the structural calculations that thirty-six years of steel bridge development and load increase experience had added beyond what the 1893 engineers had been able to determine. The rebuilt arch was designed for the loads of 1929, which included the Selkirk class locomotives then entering service and the loaded coal and grain cars they were assigned to pull down the eastern slope from the summit.

The rock walls of the gorge that had carried the 1893 abutments were the same walls that carried the 1929 abutments. The granite of the Selkirks was not a variable in the calculations. The Rogers Pass route through the Selkirks was bypassed in 1916 when the Canadian Pacific completed the Connaught Tunnel, a five-mile tunnel through the mountain mass at the summit, eliminating the steepest grades and the most avalanche-prone sections of the original surface line. The tunnel put the main line under the summit of Rogers Pass rather than over it, reduced the maximum gradient of the mountain section, and ended the operational disruptions that avalanche conditions had imposed on winter operations since 1885.

The Connaught Tunnel bypass did not eliminate the Stoney Creek crossing. The bridge remained in place on the new route because the western entrance to the tunnel and the descent to the Columbia River valley still required crossing Stoney Creek gorge. The tunnel changed the grade and operating conditions of the approaches. The gorge did not move.

The Canadian Pacific underwent the institutional changes the twentieth-century railway industry imposed on the companies that had built the transcontinental lines. The original syndicate led by Stephen, Smith, and their partners sold their interests through successive capital transactions over the decades following completion of the main line. The railway reorganized its management and operations under the competitive and regulatory pressures of the twentieth century and survived the disruptions that ended or absorbed many of the smaller railways that had been its contemporaries. It still operates under the name Canadian Pacific Railway, now Canadian Pacific Kansas City after the 2023 merger with Kansas City Southern.

The main line through Rogers Pass is still the company’s western main corridor. The Stoney Creek bridge on that corridor is the arch built in 1929, rebuilt again in 1993 to meet the load increases that six decades of traffic since 1929 had accumulated. If you drive the Trans-Canada Highway through Glacier National Park and stop at the viewpoint above Stoney Creek gorge, you can see the arch from above. The gorge below is the same one the 1885 trestle, the 1893 arch, and the present 1929 arch have spanned.

The creek still runs 290 feet below. The steel above it is the engineering the gorge requires. Two points on two opposing walls with a curve between them that transmits load through compression to the granite. A Canadian Pacific freight train will cross the bridge several times during the day.

The structure absorbs the crossing in the way a steel arch anchored in mountain granite absorbs the impact of a crossing. The arch does not visibly respond. The canyon walls do not shift. The creek moves between them as it has moved since before any of this existed.

There is no sign at Stoney Creek gorge that names the men who stood on the work platforms in the autumn of 1893. There is no sign naming the Chinese workers who built the timber trestle in the summer of 1885. The Canadian Pacific appears in the published histories of the Rogers Pass construction as the institution that owned the line, whose financial resources and engineering decisions determined what was built and when. Andrew Onderdonk appears in those histories as the contractor who executed the British Columbia sections under the terms set by the railway.

The Chinese workers who formed the bulk of his construction force through the Fraser Canyon and the mountain sections appear in those histories as a total figure: 15,000 workers, one dollar per day, and a death toll the sources do not agree on because the records do not settle it. The Italian and European immigrant workers who erected the steel arch in 1893 appear in the Canadian Pacific engineering department’s construction accounts at the level those accounts required for tracking material costs, labor costs, and contract payments. The men working under the headman, those who received the steel cable sections on the erection platforms above Stoney Creek gorge, guided them to the connection points, and braced their feet against the lashed timbers while the workers above adjusted the cable tension—those men exist in the construction records as a total labor cost against the budget items that accounting in 1893 required to be recorded. The historical records of the Canadian Pacific are distributed among the company archives, the holdings of Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, and the institutional collections that absorbed portions of the railway’s documents during the twentieth-century institutional transitions.

Whether the construction accounts for the 1893 Stoney Creek bridge replacement still exist at a level of individual detail below the level of headman—whether the daily time sheets, the workers’ rosters, the names of the men who were on the platforms above the gorge on specific days and in specific seasons—is a matter that the published engineering histories of the Rogers Pass construction address at the level of structural and institutional narrative, not at the level of individual labor. The bridge over Stoney Creek gorge has been rebuilt three times since the original timber trestle of 1885. Each rebuilding was driven by the same logic. The loads on the main line grew beyond what the existing structure was designed to carry, and the Canadian Pacific engineering department determined that replacement was necessary.

The logic that produced the rebuildings was the logic of a living railway on an active main line. Loads do not stop increasing, and structures must absorb them or be replaced. The present arch above Stoney Creek will carry the traffic as long as the Canadian Pacific operates a main line through Rogers Pass. The main line through Rogers Pass is the route across the Selkirks that Major Rogers found in 1881, that construction crews reached in 1885, and that 15,000 Chinese workers built under conditions the British Columbia labor laws of that year obliged no one to document for the sake of the men who endured them.

The arch is still there. The stream still runs 290 feet below it. The granite walls are the same walls the abutments of every version of the Stoney Creek crossing have been seated in since 1885. The timber of the original bridge is gone.

The men who built it exist in the Canadian Pacific construction records at the level the records required to account for them as a cost of construction. They are not in those records as people.