In the summer of 1910, a powder worker on the southern face of a granite cliff above the Skeena River in northern British Columbia opened a line of holes with a steel drill, holes his partner had started at dawn. He loaded dynamite into each hole in sequence, moving along a flat rock ledge about eighteen inches wide between the cliff face and the drop. The ledge fell away forty to eighty feet to the river below, depending on where he stood on it. He tamped each charge, lit the fuse, and walked back along the ledge to the cleared area.

The blast opened a section of the cliff face to the river and widened the ledge to the engineers’ specifications. He moved forward onto the fresh face and began drilling again. The river below was the Skeena. The cliff above it was the wall of the Skeena River canyon, the stretch where the outer Coast Mountains squeezed the river into a narrow passage of fast water and vertical rock, in a region with no roads and no settlements of the kind the construction trade knew, apart from the villages of Indigenous people who had fished Skeena chinook salmon for thousands of years before any surveyor saw the valley.

The structure taking shape along the Skeena’s south bank in the summer of 1910 was a railway cut into cliff faces, carried across tributary streams on timber bridges, and driven through mountain formations in short tunnels where the cliff offered no practical shelf at all. The railway was the Grand Trunk Pacific. The men building it were paid by piecework and by the day by a contracting firm called Foley, Welch and Stewart. The line ran roughly 180 miles along the Skeena valley, and it was the most expensive railway construction project in Canada up to that time.

The railway company that financed it went bankrupt before completing its first term of operation. The line through the Skeena valley still stands, and trains still run on it. It became the main line of the Canadian National Railway, which took over the bankrupt Grand Trunk Pacific in 1920 and has operated the route continuously for the past century. Container trains cross the Skeena valley today on the road that powder crews carved into those slopes above the river in 1910.

They cross at weights and speeds the engineers who located the line and the men who built it could not have absorbed. The valley absorbs the passage the way it absorbed everything the river, the railway, and the century threw at it, without visible strain or reaction, the way any properly built structure absorbs what is placed upon it. This is the story of how the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway built its western line through the Skeena River valley in northern British Columbia between 1908 and 1914. It is the story of the most isolated and technically demanding stretch of the last transcontinental railway built across Canada.

It is the story of immigrant workers from Italy, Greece, and Scandinavia, and of First Nations men who cut that slope from the canyon walls above a river that flooded suddenly and without warning, in a region where the nearest supply depot was three days upstream by steamboat and the nearest hospital was farther still. It is the story of a railway built on financial expectations its own president privately doubted, a president who did not live to see it finished. He died in the North Atlantic in April 1912, in the middle of the Skeena construction season, and the railway he had helped create continued to extend north and west without him until the last spike was driven in 1914 under circumstances no one documented with photographs, because the money had run out and the financiers were beginning to understand it would not come back. To understand why the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway built a line through the Skeena River valley in 1910, one must understand what the Grand Trunk Railway was, what it believed about the future of western Canada, and why that belief was reasonable enough in 1903 to organize an entirely new transcontinental railway, finance it, and drive it across some of the hardest mountain terrain in North America, on the basis of projections the region itself would later disprove.

The Grand Trunk Railway was the oldest major railway in Canada. It had been built across southern Ontario and Quebec in the 1850s and 1860s with British capital seeking a return in the colonial transport market. By the turn of the twentieth century it was the dominant carrier in central Canada, running from Portland, Maine, through Montreal and Toronto to the Michigan border, where it connected with American lines that gave it access to the American Midwest. It was a British-financed railway managed from London, with an administrative structure reflecting the priorities of its shareholders: operating efficiency and dividend distribution rather than regional expansion into areas where traffic volumes had not yet stabilized.

The Grand Trunk’s position in 1900 was strong within the geography it served and geographically limited within that range. What changed the calculations in the early years of the new century was the settling of the Canadian prairies. The Dominion Lands Act and the intensive immigration campaign run by the Department of the Interior under Clifford Sifton filled the prairie provinces with settlers from Ukraine, Germany, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe at a rate that strained the Canadian Pacific Railway, then the only transcontinental line. Wheat exports through the Great Lakes grew in volumes that indicated prairie settlement was not a passing agricultural experiment but a permanent transformation of the interior.

The wheat would keep coming, the settlers would stay. A railway that reached the prairies from central Canada and extended west to a Pacific port would carry an enormous volume of transcontinental freight, a volume that seemed vast by the expectations of 1903, large enough, it was said, to justify the cost of building a new transcontinental line through country no railway had ever crossed. Charles Melville Hayes was president of the Grand Trunk Railway. Born in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1856, he had come to the Grand Trunk from the Wabash Railway, where he had reorganized the operations of a struggling Midwestern line and restored it to financial health through a combination of cost cutting and route rationalization that railway trade press in the 1890s held up as a model of managerial efficiency.

He brought to the Grand Trunk the same mix of operational precision and strategic ambition. He saw that the Grand Trunk’s position in central Canada was strong but geographically boxed in. A transcontinental extension, built on the most technically logical route through the lowest mountain pass, with a new Pacific terminus at a port better positioned than Vancouver on the great circle route to Asia, would transform the Grand Trunk from a regional Canadian carrier into a serious competitor in Pacific trade. That belief was enough to stake the Grand Trunk’s financial standing on it.

The port Hayes chose was Prince Rupert, on Kaien Island near the mouth of the Skeena. Prince Rupert was not yet a city. It was the site of a deep-water harbour close to shore, geographically about 500 miles closer to Asian ports by the great circle route than Vancouver. Five hundred miles of ocean, at 1903 shipping rates, was a competitive advantage on which one could build a railway.

Hayes believed it, and the bond market accepted the view. The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway was incorporated in 1903 to build a line connecting Winnipeg and Prince Rupert. Work began on the eastern section in 1905, and on the western section, the part running from Winnipeg to the Pacific, in 1908. The western section ran roughly 1,754 miles from Winnipeg to Prince Rupert and crossed the Rockies at Yellowhead Pass at 3,717 feet, the lowest pass through the Rockies available to a transcontinental railway in Canada.

West of the Rockies, the line descended through the interior plateau of British Columbia along the valleys of the Nechako and Bulkley rivers before turning northwest toward the Skeena. The Yellowhead crossing was comparatively easy. The interior plateau sections were difficult to supply, remote, and short of provisions, but the terrain was manageable. The Skeena valley was not.

The Skeena River drains about 54,000 square miles of northern British Columbia. It rises near the Continental Divide and runs northwest and west for roughly 360 miles before reaching tidewater at Prince Rupert. In its upper and middle reaches it is a broad mountain river flowing through valley bottoms, making the line’s route practical along either bank. In the stretch where it cuts through the outer ranges of the Coast Mountains, about 100 miles from the coast, the river’s character changes entirely.

The valley walls close in. The river narrows and accelerates through a series of gorges carved over thousands of years into the granite and metamorphic rock of the outer Coast range. The deepest and most continuous of these gorges runs from Kitselas Canyon, where the river has cut through a mountain range, to the tidal flats near the coast, a distance of roughly eighty kilometres. In this section there is no valley bottom, only river and rock.

The cliff faces rise from the water’s edge on both sides of the valley to heights of thirty metres or more. The space between the river and the base of the cliff at flood season is the river itself. A railway that wanted to reach Prince Rupert harbour had to pass through this canyon. The north bank walls were steeper than the south.

The south bank offered relatively more rock shelf and a relatively better chance for blasting crews to work. The margin was not large. It was the route the engineers chose because it was the only route available. The chief engineer of the Grand Trunk Pacific ran the western division through division engineers who supervised specific sections.

Survey parties locating the centre line of the Skeena section worked the canyon during the winters of 1905 and 1906, tracing the line on cliff faces and in snow, marking the locations that required blasting, recording the tributary crossings that would need bridges, and identifying the mountain formations that would need tunnels. The survey determined what had to be built. The contract with Foley, Welch and Stewart determined who would build it. Work on the canyon sections began in 1908 and continued for four construction seasons until grading was complete.

Foley, Welch and Stewart was the leading railway contracting firm in western Canada in the first decades of the twentieth century. John Whitfield Foley and his partners had built large portions of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s branch line network in the prairie provinces and developed the organizational capacity to move men and equipment through country that lacked infrastructure. The Grand Trunk Pacific Western Division was the largest single contract the firm ever took. The Skeena Canyon section was the most expensive per mile, the section whose cost exceeded estimates before it was done.

The workforce Foley, Welch and Stewart assembled for the Skeena Canyon sections came from the population the British Columbia construction industry drew on in 1908 for heavy work in remote country. The largest group was Italian immigrants. Italian men had been arriving in British Columbia in growing numbers since the 1890s, working on construction, mining, and harbour projects throughout the province, following the patterns of Italian labour migration across North America in the early industrial period. They worked through a labour market organized partly around the padrone system, in which a labour contractor, usually a man fluent in Italian and English with established ties to construction firms, recruited men from Italian immigrant communities in eastern cities or directly from Italy and contracted them in bulk to the construction company.

The padrone was paid by the construction firm for organizing the labour and took a share of the men’s wages as commission. Men who came through the padrone system arrived at a work camp in northern British Columbia having agreed to terms negotiated on their behalf by the padrone in a language they did not speak, with a company operating under laws they had not had time to learn. The premium paid to canyon workers over construction work on the interior plateau reflected the additional risk of working in the canyon. Whether the premium was sufficient for the risk was a question the accounts never settled.

Greek immigrant workers formed a second significant presence in the canyon sections. Scandinavian workers, particularly Finns and Swedes, were also in the camps. Part of the general labour force came from First Nations men of the Tsimshian and Gitxsan peoples, whose territories the railway crossed and whose villages lay along its route. The Skeena had been the geographic and economic base for the Tsimshian and Gitxsan for thousands of years.

The salmon runs the river carried, the largest on the British Columbia coast, were the material foundation of an economy and culture that had flourished in the valley. The Grand Trunk Pacific drove a grade along the river for longer than the concept of a bond market had existed anywhere on earth. The significance of the Skeena grade for the communities the line passed through was recorded in the locations of their villages and fishing grounds in the Grand Trunk Pacific’s records, to the extent those records of 1910 preserved it. The men from those communities who worked on construction appear in the labour costs, not as men.

That is not a peculiarity of Grand Trunk Pacific records; it is the structure of the historical record of Indigenous labour in Canadian industrial construction in the early twentieth century. The first problem of construction was supply, and it was so fundamental that construction could not begin until it was partly solved. There was no road in the canyon. In 1908 there was no road anywhere in the Skeena watershed that a construction operation of this size could use to move material from the coast inland.

The river was the road. Sternwheel steamboats had worked the Skeena since the 1890s, carrying supplies to interior trading posts, missions, and occasional mining operations, navigating a channel that changed with every seasonal flood and required local knowledge of details that could not be read from a map. The boats serving the Skeena construction were flat-bottomed, shallow-draft vessels with a stern paddle wheel, built specifically for the river conditions of the British Columbia interior, capable of running fast water and gravel bars and facing the submerged hazards of a system fed by ice that rearranged its channel every spring. The captains of the Skeena sternwheelers during the construction years relied on experience accumulated over years of individual river navigation.

The channel a captain knew in August at low water was not the channel he would face in June at flood. Hazards that were passable in one season might not be passable in the next. A man who had gone up the Skeena hundreds of times knew things about the river under specific conditions that the construction manager scheduling supply runs from Winnipeg did not know, and the construction manager’s schedule was revised when the river imposed revisions on it. Construction camps were set up at regular intervals along the river as the supply line extended, each camp serving a section of the river and each depending on the steamboat schedule for food, drilling equipment, explosives, replacement tools, and the thousands of other material requirements of a large construction operation in a place where nothing was made locally.

The housing in those camps was what construction firms in northern British Columbia provided in 1908: timber buildings or canvas-and-frame shelters, adequate to keep men at the work site and suitable for the work required. They were not designed for a northern British Columbia winter. The Skeena valley in winter is not the Skeena valley in summer. Temperatures in the canyon fall below freezing for months.

River ice forms along the channel edges and across the tributary streams. Snow accumulates on the cliff faces above the work ledges, then releases suddenly when temperature or snow load crosses the threshold of failure. An avalanche from a cliff face onto a work ledge in 1910 was not something the crew on the ledge below survived. How much the men on the lower ledge could see of the conditions building above them depended on visibility, which was not always sufficient in a canyon with walls a hundred feet high in winter cloud to make a timely assessment.

The working season in the canyon sections was bounded at both ends by the river. The Skeena’s spring flood, fed by snowmelt from the 54,000-square-mile watershed, usually peaked in late May or June. At flood level, the river through Kitselas Canyon ran at velocities and volumes that endangered any fixed surface within reach of the current and raised the water surface against the cliff faces far above the normal water line. The rock ledges cut at the required elevation, which had been calculated to keep the railway above the normal flood level, sat at or below the flood surface when the June peak arrived.

The blasting and drilling crews working those ledges in May were working toward a river that would reach their elevation within weeks. When the flood came, they left the ledges. Work in the canyon stopped in the sections the flood reached. The men waited for the river to drop.

The delay was not in the construction schedule Foley, Welch and Stewart had submitted to the Grand Trunk Pacific’s engineering department. The schedule had been built on survey data and river gauge records covering the period for which such records existed, a relatively short period, which produced an average of flood behaviour that might or might not match the actual flood in any given year. The 1908 flood exceeded the average. The 1910 flood exceeded the average markedly.

Every year with a higher-than-average flood was a delay to the schedule in the affected sections, producing cost overruns the contract had no provision for absorbing and the Grand Trunk Pacific absorbed anyway, because the alternative was stopping the work. The Grand Trunk Pacific’s finances in 1910 did not comfortably absorb unplanned costs, but it absorbed them because building the railway was necessary. Work on the cliff face sections continued by the methods that large-scale rock excavation required in 1910. A pneumatic rock drill, powered by compressed air from portable compressors brought up the river on sternwheelers, drilled holes in the cliff face to the depth required to form a ledge of the specified width when the charge was fired.

The drill worked in pairs, one man holding and turning the drill steel, another operating the feed mechanism and watching the air pressure, both standing on a ledge whose width was the product of the previous blast, exactly eighteen inches or a little less. On the Skeena canyon cliff faces, unlike a tunnel where three walls provided a fixed working platform, the men drilling the next section stood on the surface the last blast had made. The surface was not always level and not always the specified width. It was what the blast had made.

The charges used in the canyon sections were dynamite and black powder in proportions set by the powder supervisor according to the character of the rock at each specific location. The granite of the outer Coast range is a coarse crystalline rock, resembling other hard crystalline rocks in its behaviour under explosives. It resists drilling, is unpredictable in its fracture pattern, and tends to split along crystal boundaries that do not follow the lines chosen by the powder man. A blast designed to produce a clean ledge of specified width in homogeneous granite might produce a ragged ledge requiring additional excavation, or overbreak requiring a second charge to remove, or a section of face that held while surrounding material fell away, leaving a knob the next drilling crew had to work around.

Empirical knowledge of how a particular section of cliff face would behave under a particular charge accumulated with the powder supervisors over the construction season as they worked along the line. Knowledge that applied to the section above the last tributary crossing did not transfer automatically to the section below it, because the rock changed and the geometry of the canyon changed, and the relationship between charge and result had to be relearned each time. The man working on an eighteen-inch ledge above the Skeena when the adjacent section of cliff face gave way under the previous shift’s blast rather than at the moment of fuse ignition was in a position the Grand Trunk Pacific’s accident records detail only to the extent such records detail it. The casualty documents for the Skeena Canyon construction workers, as available in the archives of the period and in published railway histories, do not provide a complete accounting of the men killed or permanently disabled working the cliff face between 1908 and 1914.

The industrial legislation governing documentation of construction worker deaths in British Columbia at that time did not meet the requirements of a later era, and existing regulations were not uniformly applied at a remote construction site the distance from Vancouver that Skeena Canyon represented. What the records document is the completion of the phase. What they do not document, in most cases, is its human cost. At the tributary crossings, construction shifted from blasting cliff faces to building timber bridges.

The streams running from the interior plateau through the coastal ranges into the Skeena were not large in their base flow during the dry season. In flood, fed by the same snowmelt that fed the Skeena itself, they were different streams. Streams that were ankle-deep over gravel in August ran bank-full and fast in June, carrying the debris of the upper watersheds: uprooted trees, sections of cut banks, material shifted from upper slopes by the same snowmelt that was raising the water. A bridge crossing designed for the dry-season condition was a crossing the spring flood would test under conditions dry-season gauging had not prepared for.

The bridge engineers designed the tributary crossings for the flood condition because the alternative was rebuilding them after the first June flood. That meant the heights and lengths of the bridges, unindicated by the base flow, were set by high-water marks on the canyon walls observed by survey parties and by flood records supplied by the Indigenous communities along the river, the most detailed and longest-term records of Skeena flood behaviour available. The timber for the bridges was cut from the forest adjacent to the construction site. The Coast Mountain forests of the Skeena watershed are old-growth Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, and western red cedar, trees that had grown in a wet maritime climate over centuries without significant disturbance.

The trees available within hauling distance of the construction camps were large enough to provide the structural members the bridge work required. Felling crews produced the timber as a by-product of clearing a path through the old growth. Mill operators in each camp processed the logs into sills, caps, stringers, and longitudinal girders specified by the bridge carpenters. The bridge carpenters were a separate workforce from the general grading and drilling crews that moved along the line of work, building crossings in the sequence the grade required.

The skills of this crew were specialized enough that they could not be replaced from the general labour force when needed, and rare enough in the canyon region that replacing them when they left was not easy. The eleven tunnels in the canyon section were driven using the hard-rock tunnel methods of 1910. A drilling crew worked the face on a pattern set by the powder supervisor according to the geological composition. The patterns included perimeter holes to define the tunnel shape, cut holes in the centre of the face designed to break the rock inward toward the void created by those holes, and trimming holes to finish the perimeter.

The pattern was calibrated to the rock type at each face, which meant recalibration at every face, because the rock was not homogeneous across 180 miles of line. After the blast, a mucking crew cleared the debris from the heading using hand tools and small rail cars pushed by hand to the portal and dumped. The cycle repeated. Advance rates in the hard granite sections of the Skeena tunnels ranged from eight to twelve feet per day per tunnel when conditions allowed.

When geological formations were irregular, or when the compressed air supply to the drills was interrupted by a fault in the compressor line from the surface, or when water drainage through the tunnel was worse than usual, the advance rate fell. The men working a tunnel heading in 1910 worked in air dense with rock dust, powder smoke from the blast, and the exhaust of the carbide lamps that provided the light to work. The silica dust from drilling granite entered the lungs of the drilling crews with every breath. Silicosis, caused by silica accumulating in lung tissue, was known to physicians, and its connection to hard-rock tunnel work was documented in the medical literature of the period.

The mechanisms legally binding on construction companies engaged in tunnel work in British Columbia in 1910 were not of a kind that materially changed the conditions of tunnel work in the Skeena district. The men breathed what was in those headings, which was what hard-rock tunnel work in 1910 produced. By the end of the 1912 construction season, the grade through the Skeena valley was substantially complete. Charles Melville Hayes did not see it.

He sailed from Southampton on the RMS Titanic on 10 April 1912, returning from a trip to London and Paris, where he had been meeting with the Grand Trunk’s British shareholders to discuss the railway’s finances. The finances were not what the 1903 projections had described. Construction costs on the western division had exceeded the original estimates by a margin that grew with every annual accounting. Prairie settlement was proceeding at full pace, but the traffic projections for a second transcontinental railway serving territory already served by the Canadian Pacific had not been revised upward to match the optimism of 1903.

Hayes saw the gap between expectation and reality, and he was in London trying to address it. He sailed into the North Atlantic on the night of 15 April 1912, and the Grand Trunk Pacific continued west without him. The railway that continued west without its president ran on financial momentum that the president’s death did not stop, but the underlying economics of the line were against it. The track-laying crews on the western division kept advancing toward Prince Rupert through the 1912 and 1913 seasons.

The sternwheel supply boats on the Skeena kept carrying material to the forward camps. The tunnel crews finished the last of the canyon’s eleven tunnels, and the bridge carpenters completed the last timber trestle crossings and the stone masonry piers at the larger spans. The grading crews finished surfacing the ledge tops on the last sections of cliff face. The work was done because Foley, Welch and Stewart was bound by a contract that required it, and because the men in the camps along the Skeena were paid at whatever rate and under whatever labour arrangement had brought them to that canyon to do that work.

The completion ceremony for the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway was held on 7 April 1914 at Fort Fraser, British Columbia, where the eastbound and westbound construction crews drove the last spike. No nationally prominent press photographer attended. No federal cabinet minister attended. No gilded ceremonial spike was placed.

The ceremony was attended by Foley, Welch and Stewart’s management staff and Grand Trunk Pacific officials, whose names appeared in local newspaper accounts of the event, and who understood as they drove the spike that the cost of the railway they were completing had already exceeded any return that could be expected under any realistic traffic projection. The spike was driven on a Tuesday morning in April 1914, four months before the outbreak of the First World War, two years after the death of the man who had organized the project in the Atlantic, and an unspecified number of years before the bond market formally acknowledged what the operating results were already showing. The Grand Trunk Pacific declared bankruptcy in 1919. Five years of revenue-producing operation against the debt obligations the construction had generated produced a deficit that no adjustment in operating costs could close.

The federal government, which had guaranteed part of the bond issue in the original financing, found itself the effective owner of an insolvent transcontinental railway. It created the Canadian National Railway in 1920 to consolidate the Grand Trunk Pacific and the other troubled lines the government had accumulated through its construction obligations. The Grand Trunk Pacific became part of the Canadian National Railway. The Grand Trunk Railway itself, the parent company, was absorbed in 1923.

The railway Charles Hayes had built to compete with the Canadian Pacific was nationalized into a system that included its competitor, and operated as a public utility rather than a profit venture. The line through the Skeena valley became the Canadian National main line to Prince Rupert. It carried what it carried, enough freight to justify operating the line as part of a national system that does not evaluate individual segments on individual financial projections. The port Hayes had chosen for its great-circle advantages to Asia eventually became what he expected.

It came decades after the projections indicated, through operations in which the Grand Trunk Pacific had no part. Prince Rupert is today one of Canada’s major bulk shipping terminals, handling containers, coal, and grain in volumes that have grown markedly in the twenty-first century as trans-Pacific trade has grown. It is served by the Canadian National line, which reaches Prince Rupert through the Skeena valley on the grade cut from the cliff faces above the river between 1908 and 1914. If you drive the Yellowhead Highway west from Prince George toward Prince Rupert today, you follow the Skeena through the canyon section for the last hundred miles of the trip.

The highway, built in the 1950s, runs along the north bank. The railway runs along the south bank where the blasting crews opened the ledge from the cliff face in 1910. You can see the grade from the highway across the river. The cut rock surfaces have weathered to the grey that Coast Mountain granite acquires after a century of rain, frost, and marine humidity.

The timber bridges crossing the tributary streams have been replaced by steel and concrete structures on the alignments the bridge carpenters set in 1910. The rock itself, the ledge surface the powder worker’s blast produced from the cliff face in the summer of 1910, is the surface trains still run on. A Canadian National freight train heading west to Prince Rupert crosses the canyon at a total weight and speed the 1910 drilling crews had no knowledge of, and the grade carries it without structural stress attributable to the design or construction of the canyon section. The cliff face above the grade has been weathering at the rate Coast Mountain climate weathers the region’s granite for 115 years.

The grade below it has been absorbing freight trains at the rate the Canadian National Railway sets for 105 years. The schedule is sufficient for the port of Prince Rupert, which handles the traffic Charles Hayes believed it would handle, traffic the Grand Trunk Pacific was not in existence to carry when it arrived. Near Kitselas Canyon, in a section where the original blast line is still visible as a change in the weathering pattern on the cliff face, the track makes a slight curve following the contour of the canyon wall as the survey party plotted it in the winter of 1906. The powder worker who worked that section in the summer of 1910 followed the survey line as he drilled, loaded, fired, and moved forward.

He worked his way along that curve over the number of shifts the section required. He was paid piecework for the cliff-face work, higher than the daily wage for interior plateau work because the canyon work was considered more dangerous. He was paid according to the pay periods of the Foley, Welch and Stewart camp payroll, which were not the same in every camp. His name appears in the Foley, Welch and Stewart accounts to the degree of precision the records preserved.

If he had entered through the padrone system, his name may appear behind the padrone’s name in those records, or not at all below the level of the padrone’s total payments. If he was Indigenous, from the Tsimshian or Gitxsan communities whose territories included that part of the canyon, his name appears in the records at whatever level the 1910 accounts deemed worth recording, a question the published histories of the Grand Trunk Pacific do not fully answer. The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway is mentioned in history books at the level history books mention things. Charles Hayes’s name appears in the Titanic accounts, in railway histories, and in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

His name is attached to Port Edward, near Prince Rupert, and in the institutional memory of the Grand Trunk. Foley, Welch and Stewart are named in construction records and in the history of western Canadian railway companies. The railway’s route through the Skeena valley is credited to the Grand Trunk Pacific’s engineering department in the technical construction reports. The Italian workers who ran the pneumatic drills on the cliff faces above the Skeena in 1910 are mentioned in those reports at the level the accounts of that year preserved.

The Greek workers who mucked out the tunnel portals are mentioned at the same level. The First Nations men from the Tsimshian and Gitxsan communities who worked on construction are mentioned at the level the 1910 accounts considered worth preserving, which was a lesser level. The man who was on the ledge when the adjacent section of cliff face gave way under the previous shift’s blast, rather than at the fuse burn, has his name in the Grand Trunk Pacific’s construction accident records, to whatever extent those records exist and are accessible. The powder worker who worked the section above Kitselas Canyon in the summer of 1910, whose blast produced the curve the Canadian National trains still follow today, is named in no widely published account.

The grade is still there, and the trains still cross it. The blast line the powder worker left in the cliff above the Skeena in the summer of 1910 can be seen from the highway on the opposite bank, for those who know what they are looking at. It has been there for 115 years.