In the summer of 1910, a powderman working the south face of a granite cliff above the Skeena River in northern British Columbia drilled a line of holes with a steel drill, holes his partner had begun at first light, then loaded each hole with dynamite in sequence, walking along a flat 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 the powderman stood. He tamped each charge, lit the fuse, and walked back along the ledge to the cleared section. The blast opened a section of the cliff face onto the river and widened the ledge to the extent the engineers’ drawings required.
He moved forward to the new face and began drilling again. The river below was the Skeena. The cliff above was the wall of the Skeena River valley, in the stretch where the outer Coast Mountains squeezed the river into a narrow passage of fast water and sheer rock, a region with no roads and no settlements of the kind the construction sector knew, aside from the villages of Indigenous people who had fished Skeena River 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 carved into cliff faces, extended across tributary creeks on wooden bridges, and punched through mountain formations in short tunnels where the cliff offered no practical shelf at all.
The railway was being built by a company called the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, and the men building it were paid by the piece and by the day by a contracting firm called Foley, Welch and Stewart. The line ran roughly 180 miles along the Skeena River valley and was the most expensive railway construction project in Canada up to that time. The railway company that financed the project went bankrupt before completing its first term of operation. The railway 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 line continuously through 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, at weights and speeds the engineers who located the line and the men who built it could not have absorbed. The valley absorbs the crossing as it absorbed everything the river and the railway and the century threw at it, without visible strain or reaction, as 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 portion of the last transcontinental railway built across Canada. It is the story of immigrant laborers from Italy, Greece, and the Scandinavian countries, and of First Nations men who cut that grade from the valley 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 farther still. It is the story of a railway built on financial expectations that its president privately doubted, a railway he never lived to see completed. The president died in the North Atlantic in April 1912, in the middle of the construction season in the Skeena valley, and the railway he had helped bring into being continued expanding north and west without him until the last spike was driven in 1914 under circumstances no one documented in photographs, because the money had run out and the financiers were beginning to realize it would not return.
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, finance, and push a full transcontinental railway across some of the hardest mountain terrain in North America, based on expectations the region itself would later refute. The Grand Trunk Railway was Canada’s oldest major railway. It was 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 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 giving it access to the American Midwest.
It was a British-financed railway managed from London, with an administrative structure reflecting its shareholders’ priorities: operating efficiency and dividend distribution rather than regional expansion into areas where freight volumes had not yet stabilized. The Grand Trunk’s position in 1900 was strong within the geographic range it served and geographically limited within that range. What changed the calculations in the early twentieth century was the settlement of the Canadian prairies. The Dominion Lands Act and an intensive immigration campaign by the Department of the Interior under Clifford Sifton filled the prairie provinces with settlers from Ukraine, Germany, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe at a pace 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 flow was expected to continue, and the settlers were expected to stay. A railway reaching the prairies from central Canada and extending west to a Pacific port would carry an enormous volume of transcontinental freight, a volume that seemed huge by the expectations of 1903 and sufficient, it was said, to justify the cost of a new transcontinental line through country no railway had ever crossed. At the head of the Grand Trunk Railway was Charles Melville Hayes.
Born in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1856, he came to the Grand Trunk from the Wabash Railroad, where he had restructured the operations of a struggling Midwestern line and restored it to financial health through a combination of cost-cutting and route rationalization, an approach the railway press of the 1890s considered a model of managerial efficiency. He brought to the Grand Trunk the same mixture of operational precision and strategic ambition. He recognized 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 powerful competitor in Pacific trade freight.
That belief was enough to risk the Grand Trunk’s financial standing. The port Hayes chose was Prince Rupert on Kaien Island near the mouth of the Skeena River. Prince Rupert was not an existing city but the site of a deep-water harbor close to shore, geographically closer to Asian ports by roughly 500 miles via the great circle route than the port of Vancouver. A 500-mile advantage at sea, at 1903 shipping rates, was a competitive edge on which one could base a railway.
Hayes believed it, and the bond market accepted that view. The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway was incorporated in 1903 to build a railway linking Winnipeg and Prince Rupert. Work began on the eastern section in 1905 and on the western section, the portion running from Winnipeg to the Pacific, in 1908. The western section ran roughly 1,754 miles from Winnipeg to Prince Rupert, crossing the Rocky Mountains at Yellowhead Pass at 3,717 feet, the lowest pass 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 relatively easy compared with what came later. The interior plateau sections were difficult organizationally, remote, and short on supplies, but the terrain was accommodating. The Skeena valley was not.
The Skeena drains roughly 54,000 square miles of northern British Columbia. It rises near the Continental Divide and runs northwest and west for about 360 miles before reaching tidewater at Prince Rupert. In its upper and middle reaches it is a broad mountain river running through valley bottoms, which made the route suitable on both banks. 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 completely.
The valley walls narrow. The river narrows and quickens through a series of canyons carved over thousands of years into the granite and metamorphic rock of the outer Coast Mountains. The deepest and most continuous of these canyons runs from Kitselas Canyon, where the river has cut through a mountain range, to the tidal flats near the coast, a distance of roughly 80 kilometers. In this stretch, there is no valley bottom, only the river and the rock.
The cliff faces rise from the water’s surface directly to heights of 30 meters or more on both banks. The space between the river and the base of the cliff in flood season is the river itself. A railway wanting to reach the port of Prince Rupert had to pass through this valley. The north bank walls were steeper than the south.
The south bank offered a relatively greater expanse of rock ledge and a relatively greater chance for the blasting crews to work. The difference was not great; it was simply the route the engineers chose because it was the only route available. The Grand Trunk Pacific’s chief engineer was responsible for the western section, working through division engineers who supervised specific segments. Survey parties located the centerline of the Skeena section in the valley during the winters of 1905 and 1906, plotting the route on cliff faces and in snow, marking the locations requiring blasting, recording the tributary crossings that would need bridges, and identifying the rock formations requiring tunnels.
The survey defined what was to be built; the contract with Foley, Welch and Stewart defined who would build it. Work began on the valley sections 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 regions lacking infrastructure.
The Grand Trunk Pacific Western Division was the largest single contract the firm ever undertook, and the Skeena Canyon section was the most expensive per mile, the section whose cost exceeded estimates before it was finished. The workforce Foley, Welch and Stewart assembled for the Skeena Canyon sections came from the population the British Columbia construction industry relied on in 1908 for heavy remote work. The largest group was Italian immigrants. Italian men had been arriving in British Columbia in growing numbers since the 1890s to work on construction, mining, and port projects throughout the region, following the patterns of Italian labor migration across North America in the early industrial period.
They worked through a labor market organized partly around the padrone system, in which a labor 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 company for organizing the labor, plus a portion of the workers’ wages as commission. Men who came through the padrone system arrived at a work camp in northern British Columbia after agreeing 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 higher wages the valley workers earned compared with construction work on the interior plateau reflected the additional risks of working in the valley.
Whether that wage premium was enough to meet the risks is a question the accounts never settled. Greek immigrant workers formed a second significant population in the valley sections. Scandinavian workers, especially Finns and Swedes, were also present in the camps. Part of the general labor force was made up of First Nations men from the Tsimshian and Gitxsan nations, whose territories the railway crossed and whose villages lay along its route.
The Skeena River had been the geographic and economic foundation of the Tsimshian and Gitxsan for thousands of years. The salmon runs the river carried, the largest on the British Columbia coast, were the material basis of an economy and culture that flourished in the valley. The Grand Trunk Pacific cut a grade through the river for longer than the bond market had existed anywhere on earth. The implications of the Skeena grade for the communities the line passed through, in the locations of their villages and fishing grounds, are recorded in the Grand Trunk Pacific’s records to the extent the records of 1910 preserved them.
The men from those communities who worked on the construction appear in labor costs, not as men. This is not a peculiarity of the Grand Trunk Pacific’s records but the structure of the historical record of Indigenous labor in Canadian industrial construction in the early twentieth century. The first problem the construction faced was supply, and it was so fundamental that construction could not begin until it was partly solved. There was no road in the valley.
In 1908 there was no road anywhere in the Skeena River basin that a construction operation of this size could use to move materials 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 interior British Columbia, able to run fast water and gravel bars and meet 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 expertise 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 ascended the Skeena hundreds of times knew things about the river under specific conditions that the construction superintendent scheduling supply runs from Winnipeg did not, and the superintendent’s schedule was adjusted when the river imposed adjustments on it.
Construction camps were established at regular intervals along the river as the supply line extended, each camp serving a section of the river and depending on the steamboat schedule for food, drilling equipment, explosives, replacement tools, and the thousands of other material requirements of a massive construction operation in a place where nothing was manufactured locally. The housing in those camps was what construction companies provided in northern British Columbia in 1908: wooden buildings or canvas-and-timber shelters, adequate to keep workers at the job site and suited to the work required, not designed for winter in northern British Columbia. The Skeena valley in winter is not the Skeena valley in summer. Temperatures in the valley fall below freezing for months.
River ice forms along the channel edges and across the tributary creeks. Snow accumulates on the cliff faces above the work ledges and then releases suddenly when temperature or snow load crosses the avalanche threshold. An avalanche from a cliff face above a work ledge in 1910 was not survivable for the crew on the ledge below. How much the men on the lower ledge could see of the conditions accumulating above them depended on visibility, which was not always sufficient in a valley with walls a hundred feet high in winter cloud to make a timely assessment.
The working season in the valley sections was limited at both ends by the river. The Skeena’s spring flood, fed by snowmelt from a 54,000-square-mile watershed, usually peaked in late May or June. At flood level, the river through Kitselas Canyon ran at speeds 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, itself calculated to keep the railway above the normal flood level, were at or below flood stage 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 valley stopped in the sections the flood reached. The men waited for the river to fall.
The delay was not in the construction schedule Foley, Welch and Stewart submitted to the Grand Trunk Pacific engineering department. The schedule was based on survey data and river gauge records covering the relatively short period for which those records existed, which established an average of flood behavior that may or may not have matched the actual flood in any given year. The 1908 flood exceeded the average; the 1910 flood exceeded the average markedly. Each higher-than-average flood year was a schedule delay for the affected sections, producing cost overruns the contract had no provisions to absorb, and the Grand Trunk Pacific absorbed them because the alternative was stopping work.
The Grand Trunk Pacific’s financial position in 1910 did not allow for absorbing unplanned costs easily, but it absorbed them anyway because building the railway was necessary. Work on the cliff-face sections continued by the methods 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 into 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 while another operated the feed mechanism and watched the air pressure, both standing on a ledge whose width was the product of the previous blast, perhaps exactly eighteen inches or perhaps a little less.
On the Skeena valley cliff faces, unlike a tunnel where three walls provided a stable working platform, the men drilling the next section stood on the surface the last blast had made. The surface was not always level, nor always the specified width; it was whatever the blast had made. The charges used in the valley sections were dynamite and black powder in proportions determined by the powder supervisor based on the nature of the rock at each specific site. The granite of the outer Coast Mountains is a coarse crystalline rock, similar in its behavior under explosives to other hard crystalline rocks.
It resists drilling, is unpredictable in its fracture pattern, and tends to split along crystal boundaries that do not follow the lines the powder supervisor chooses. A blast designed to produce a clean ledge of specified width in homogeneous granite might produce a ragged edge requiring additional excavation, or over-break requiring a second charge to remove, or a section of face staying intact while surrounding material fell away, leaving a projection the next drilling crew had to work around. Experiential knowledge of how a specific section of cliff face behaved under a specific charge was accumulated by the powder supervisor over the construction season as crews worked along the route. Knowledge applicable to the section above the last tributary crossing did not transfer automatically to the section below, because the rock changed and the valley geometry changed, and the relationship between charge and result had to be relearned each time.
A man working on an eighteen-inch rock ledge above the Skeena River, when the adjacent section of cliff face collapsed 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 describe only to the extent those records describe it. The death records of construction workers in the Skeena Canyon section, as available in the archives of the period and published railway histories, do not provide a complete accounting of the men who died or were permanently disabled while working on the cliff face between 1908 and 1914. The labor law requirements governing the documentation of construction worker deaths in British Columbia in that period did not match those of a later era, and the existing regulations were not applied uniformly at remote construction operations at the distance from Vancouver that Skeena Canyon represented. What the records document is the completion of the stage.
What they do not document, in most cases, is the cost of completion in terms of the workers who accomplished it. At the tributary crossings, the construction method shifted from blasting cliff faces to building wooden bridges. The streams running from the interior plateau through the coastal ranges into the Skeena were not large in base flow during the dry season. In flood, fed by the same snowmelt that fed the Skeena itself, they were different streams.
The creeks that were ankle-deep over gravel in August filled their banks and ran fast in June, carrying debris from the upper watershed: uprooted trees, sections of cut banks, material displaced from upper slopes by the same snowmelt that was raising the water level. A bridge crossing designed for the dry-season condition was a crossing that spring flood would test under conditions dry-season measurements had not prepared for. The bridge engineers designed tributary crossings for the flood condition because the alternative was rebuilding them after the first June flood. This meant the bridge heights and lengths, which the base flow in the creek did not indicate, were determined by high-water marks on the valley walls recorded by survey parties and by flood records provided by the Indigenous communities along the river, which were the most detailed and longest-term records available of Skeena flood behavior.
The timber for the bridges was cut from the forest adjacent to the construction site. The Coast Mountain forests of the Skeena watershed were old-growth Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, and western red cedar, trees that had grown in a wet maritime climate over several centuries without significant disturbance. The trees available within hauling distance of the construction camps were large enough to provide the structural elements needed for the bridge work. Falling crews produced the timber as a byproduct of clearing a corridor through the old-growth forest.
Mill operators in each camp processed that timber into sills, caps, stringers, and longitudinal beams specified by the bridge carpenters. The bridge carpenters were a workforce separate from the general grading and drilling crews moving along the line of work, building the crossings in the sequence the grade required. The skills of this crew were specialized enough that they could not be replaced from the general labor force when needed, and rare enough in the valley region that replacing them when they left was not easy. The eleven tunnels in the valley section were driven using the hard-rock tunnel construction methods of 1910.
The drilling crew at the face worked to a pattern set by the powder supervisor based on the geological composition. The patterns included perimeter holes to define the tunnel shape, cut holes in the center of the face designed to break the rock inward toward the void created by those holes, and trim holes to finish the perimeter. The pattern was calibrated to the rock type at each face, meaning the calibration was revised at every face because the rock was not homogeneous over 180 miles of route. After the blast, the mucking crew cleared the debris from the heading using hand tools and small rail cars pushed by hand to the portal and dumped.
The process repeated. Advance rates in the hard granite sections of the Skeena tunnels ranged between 8 and 12 feet per day per tunnel when conditions allowed. When geological formations were irregular, or when the supply of compressed air to the drills was interrupted by a failure in the compressor line from the surface, or when water drainage through the tunnel was worse than usual, the advance rate fell. Men working in 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 for the work.
The silica dust from drilling granite entered the lungs of the drilling crews with every breath. Silicosis, caused by the accumulation of silica in lung tissue, was known to physicians, and its relationship 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 mechanisms that substantially changed the conditions of tunnel driving in the Skeena section. The drillers 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 April 10, 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 expectations had described.
Construction costs on the western section had exceeded original estimates by a margin that grew with each annual accounting. Prairie settlement was proceeding, but traffic projections for a second transcontinental line serving territory also served by the Canadian Pacific had not been revised upward to match the optimism of 1903. Hayes recognized the gap between expectations and reality and had been in London trying to address it. He went into the North Atlantic on the night of April 15, 1912, and the Grand Trunk Pacific continued west without him.
The railway that continued west without its president ran on financial momentum that did not stop with the president’s death, but the line’s underlying economic conditions were against it. Track-laying crews on the western section continued their advance toward Prince Rupert through the 1912 and 1913 seasons. Supply operations on the Skeena sternwheelers continued carrying materials to the forward camps. Tunnel crews finished the last of the eleven tunnels in the valley, bridge carpenters built the last timber-pile crossings and stone masonry piers at the larger spans, and grading crews finished surfacing the ledge sections on the final stretches of cliff face.
The work was done because Foley, Welch and Stewart were bound by a contract that obligated them to do it, and because the workers in the camps along the Skeena were paid at whatever rate and under whatever labor arrangement had brought them to that valley to do that work. The Grand Trunk Pacific’s completion ceremony was held on April 7, 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. Present were Foley, Welch and Stewart management staff and Grand Trunk Pacific officials, whose names appeared in local newspaper accounts of the event, men who understood as they drove the spike that the cost of the railway they were completing had already exceeded any return achievable under any realistic traffic forecast. 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 in the Atlantic of the man who had organized the project, 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 Canadian federal government, which had guaranteed part of the bond issue in the original financing and found itself the de facto owner of an insolvent transcontinental railway, 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 line 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, operated as a public utility rather than a profit-making venture. The line through the Skeena valley became the Canadian National’s main line to Prince Rupert, carrying enough traffic to justify operating it as part of a national system that does not evaluate individual parts on individual financial projections. The port Hayes chose for its great circle route advantages to Asia eventually became what he expected. That development came decades after the projections indicated it would, through operations in which the Grand Trunk Pacific was not present to participate.
Prince Rupert is today one of Canada’s most important 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 Canadian National, 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 take the Yellowhead Highway west from Prince George toward Prince Rupert today, you follow the Skeena through the canyon section for the last 100 miles of the journey. 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 on the far side of the river. The cut rock surfaces have weathered to the gray that Coast Mountain granite acquires after a century of rain, frost, and marine moisture. The wooden bridges crossing the tributary creeks have been replaced by steel and concrete structures on the alignments the bridge carpenters set in 1910.
The rock itself, the ledge surface the powderman’s blast brought out of the cliff face in the summer of 1910, is the surface the trains still run on today. A Canadian National freight train, westbound for Prince Rupert, crosses the valley at a combined load and speed the 1910 drilling crews had no knowledge of, and the grade carries it without any structural stress attributable to the design or construction of the canyon section. The cliff face above the grade has weathered at the rate of Coast Mountain climate on the region’s granite for 115 years. The grade below absorbs the freight trains at the rate the Canadian National has scheduled them 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 valley wall as the survey party laid it out in the winter of 1906. The powderman 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 by the piece for the cliff-face work, at a rate higher than the daily wage for plateau work because the canyon work was considered more dangerous. He was paid according to the time intervals of the Foley, Welch and Stewart camp payroll system, which was not the same in every camp. His name appears in the Foley, Welch and Stewart accounts at whatever level of detail the records preserved. If he had come through the padrone system, his name may appear behind the padrone’s in those records, or not at all below the level of aggregate payments to the padrone.
If he was Indigenous, from the Tsimshian or Gitxsan communities whose territories covered that part of the valley, his name appears in the records at whatever level the 1910 accounts deemed worth recording, a question the published Grand Trunk Pacific histories do not fully answer. The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway is mentioned in history books at the level of history books. Charles Hayes’s name appears in the Titanic’s passenger lists, in railway histories, and in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. His name is preserved in the naming of 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 histories of western Canadian railways. The railway’s route through the Skeena valley is attributed 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 appear in those reports at the level the accounts of that year preserved. The Greek workers who mucked out the tunnel portals appear at the same level.
The First Nations men from the Tsimshian and Gitxsan communities who worked on the construction appear at the level the 1910 accounts deemed worthy of preservation, a lesser level. The man who was on the ledge when the adjacent section of cliff face collapsed under the previous shift’s blast rather than at the fuse burning appears in the Grand Trunk Pacific construction accident records, to whatever extent those records exist and are accessible. The name of the powderman who worked the section above Kitselas Canyon in the summer of 1910, whose blast produced the curve the Canadian National trains still follow, appears in no widely published account. The grade is still there.
The trains still cross it. The blast line the powderman left in the cliff above the Skeena River 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.
