In the autumn of 1884, a carpenter worked on a timber bridge above Loop Creek in the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia, driving spikes into a deck plank at a height that left no practical option if he lost his footing. The creek below was not far, but it was far enough in the way that mattered from a raised construction platform. The platform was not level; its planks were green softwood, newly sawn, their surfaces not yet dried to the roughness of seasoned timber underfoot. Below the platform, the wooden bridge he and his crew had spent the previous days building and raising stretched across a succession of bents, caps, and sway braces down to timber sills set on the creek bank and bed.
The bridge was not yet complete, and it was one of several still needing to be finished before the structure could carry the railway. The railway had to get through, and it was coming from the east. The men stringing telegraph wire were somewhere behind him on the Rogers Pass route, and the schedule William Cornelius Van Horne had set for completing the Canadian Pacific Railway’s main line through the Selkirks allowed no delay. The Selkirks are not the Rockies.
The two ranges are separated by the Rocky Mountain Trench, a long north-south valley that forms the structural divide between them. Crossing British Columbia from east to west, a traveler meets the Rockies first, drops through Kicking Horse Pass to the trench at Golden, then climbs straight into the Selkirks via the Illecillewaet River valley toward the summit at Rogers Pass. The two crossings differ in character. The Rockies at Kicking Horse are steep and open, with peaks rising above timberline and a valley floor wide enough in places to give a sense of room beneath the rock walls.
The Selkirks at Rogers Pass are steep and walled in. The slopes are forested to their upper reaches with Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir. The peaks rise above 10,000 feet. The valleys between them are narrow and shadowed.
The snowpack that accumulates in the Selkirks during the winter months is among the deepest in North America. The Illecillewaet valley above Glacier receives snowfall measured in meters, not inches, between November and April. And that snowpack does not melt on a fixed schedule. Spring in the Selkirks is not a season of gradual warming but of competing processes: snow building at higher elevations while meltwater runs in the valley bottoms.
The stability of the snow on the steep slopes above the valley deteriorates through the winter, then lets go in sudden events that carry no advance warning and follow no timetable anyone standing below them can read in advance. Building a railway through Rogers Pass had been under consideration since CPR survey parties began studying possible routes through the Selkirks in the late 1870s. The Canadian Pacific Railway had been incorporated in 1881 to fulfill the political commitment the Dominion government made to British Columbia as a condition of joining Confederation in 1871. British Columbia entered Canada on the promise of a transcontinental railway to the east within ten years.
By 1881, ten years had passed without a railway, and British Columbia had long since run out of patience. The CPR charter required a main line from central Canada to the Pacific coast. The route through the mountains required crossing both the Rockies and the Selkirks. Kicking Horse Pass through the Rockies had been identified by the Palliser expedition in 1858.
No pass through the Selkirks had been identified by any government survey. Major Albert Bowman Rogers, a CPR survey engineer tasked with covering the interior, found the pass in 1881 during a journey through the Illecillewait drainage, a trip he documented in survey records and his own account as a grueling exploration through rough terrain. The pass that now bears his name sits at 4,534 feet above sea level, on the divide between the Illecillewaet and Beaver drainages to the east. It is not a low pass and not an easy one.
It was the only pass in the Selkirks reachable by the CPR’s transcontinental line. The decision to route the railway through Rogers Pass rather than Howse Pass to the north, which earlier surveys had explored and which offered a lower crossing, rested on the engineering of the transcontinental route as a whole. The CPR main line was designed to serve not only the coastal terminus at Vancouver but also the prairie agricultural settlements and the commercial development of the interior. A route through Howse Pass would have required a much longer line and a different relationship to the prairie settlement corridor.
The Rogers Pass route was shorter but harder. Van Horne, the general manager brought from American railroading to drive CPR construction at a pace matching the company’s financial situation, understood both the difficulty and the necessity. The line would go through Rogers Pass, and whatever that required would be done. Work on pushing the line through Rogers Pass began in earnest in 1884.
Contract arrangements for the British Columbia section of the CPR main line were organized under Andrew Onderdonk, an American contractor from a New York engineering family who had won government construction contracts for the western sections starting in 1880. Onderdonk held the contract for the hardest mountain section of the line: from the coast up the Fraser Valley and into the interior. By 1884 his operations extended through the valley to the mountain pass into the Selkirks, and work had begun on a bridge over the Illecillewaet stream at Rogers Pass. The problem of the timber bridge at Rogers Pass was not simply the distance between supports.
Crossing the Illecillewaet valley above Glacier was no small matter. The valley was narrow, and the slopes on either side of the pass were so steep that the line’s engineers worked under grade constraints that dictated where and how the track could be laid. The CPR main line across Rogers Pass was built to a maximum grade of 2. 2 percent westbound, a rise of 2.
2 feet for every 100 feet of horizontal distance. It was not the grade engineers preferred. It was the grade the terrain imposed on them: no flatter option existed for crossing the pass at the elevation required to clear the valley walls without a tunnel that the 1884 construction schedule and budget would not allow. A 2.
2 percent grade was one locomotives of 1884 could manage with an appropriate consist. It also limited the weight and length of trains operating over the pass. As long as the line operated at that grade, and it did for the first thirty years of service, the operating accountants recorded the cost in every train movement over the mountain pass. The loop at Rogers Pass was an engineering response to a specific problem in the alignment of the Illecillewaet valley.
The valley floor rose sharply over a short horizontal distance on the approach to the summit. The track had to climb through this section while holding to the 2. 2 percent maximum the engineers had set as the limit of practical operation. A straight line up the valley floor would exceed that limit.
The solution was to increase the horizontal distance over which the climb was spread by curving the railway into a full circle: a loop that carried the track over itself on a bridge structure, gaining elevation on the outside, then turning back over the inside and continuing toward the summit on the required alignment. The circular route added distance, which reduced the effective grade over the climb. The structure carrying the outside of the loop over the inside, and over Loop Creek in the valley bottom, was the timber bridge the carpenter was building in the autumn of 1884. It was not a large structure by the standards of the mountain crossings the CPR would later build.
It was what the grade required at the location required. Without it, the track through the loop was not feasible. Without the loop, the grade through Rogers Pass exceeded the capacity of the locomotives of 1884. The timber bridge over Loop Creek was a wooden trestle of the type North American railway builders had been constructing in the mountain west since the 1860s.
The building technique drew on the standard carpentry of the era: timber frames, sill plates, mud sills, posts, caps, sway braces, and deck beams, the basic vocabulary the railroad construction industry had carried through a generation of mountain crossings in Nevada, Utah, and the Sierra Nevada, and now into the Selkirks. Timber was available in the surrounding forest. Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir grew to large diameters at the valley elevations where the construction camps sat. Trees cut by clearing crews to make way for the right of way supplied part of the timber for the bridge.
The structural design followed the standard arrangement of posts and bracing used in railroad trestle building since the transcontinental crossings of the 1860s, adapted to the height and span requirements of the Loop Creek site. The foundation conditions at Loop Creek were not those of the temporary dikes of a major river crossing. The creek ran clear and cold over a bed of gravel and sand in the valley bottom. Bedrock in the Selkirks lies close to the surface at most valley sites.
The sills of the bridge bents rested on a timber grid laid on the load-bearing material the construction crews had excavated. The creek passed under the structure through an opening within the trestle frame. Foundations were a problem that could be handled. The height above the creek bed and the grade the track had to hold through the loop were the dimensions that determined everything else.
The construction crews raised the bridge bents by hand, using long poles and ropes. Building a timber bent for a trestle of Loop Creek’s height was heavy work. The posts were large timber, squared to 12 inches or more, cut from the surrounding spruce and pine to length and roughly dressed to dimension. The sill plates joining the bases of the posts and the cap plates joining their tops were of similar cross section.
The sway braces between posts were of lighter material, but in total, a single bent weighed enough that lifting it from the ground to vertical required organized force applied at the right points in the right sequence. Block and tackle provided mechanical advantage at the critical moments of rotation, while prying poles guided the bent through its path from horizontal to vertical. Men at the base set the heel on the intended pivot point while the lifting crew raised, and the crew above guided the top of the bent into the vertical. When the bent stood upright, it was secured in place and the crews moved to the next one.
The trestle rose from the valley floor in the order the bents were raised, each one adding incrementally to the height that had to be accounted for on the platforms above the creek. The men doing this work were Chinese. The majority of the construction labor force on the British Columbia section of the CPR main line was Chinese. Onderdonk’s labor records for the mountain section show a workforce of roughly 6,000 Chinese workers at peak employment on the Rogers Pass approach alone.
The men arrived at the work site through a labor organization structurally parallel to the padrone system. Recruiters working within the commercial networks of Victoria and San Francisco, who had connections to labor migration networks from Guangdong province in southern China, recruited the workers, arranged transportation, negotiated contracts with the construction company, managed the labor camps, and supplied the camp stores where the men bought food and necessities at the construction site in the Selkirks. The wages paid by the construction company went to the contractor. What reached the worker was what remained after the contractor ran his organization, housed his men, and supplied his camp at the price the camp store could command.
Chinese workers on the Rogers Pass section were paid one dollar a day for ordinary labor. White workers doing comparable physical labor on Onderdonk’s contracts earned between $1. 50 and $2. 50 a day, depending on classification and season.
The difference was not a secret; it was the published wage structure. Chinese workers were classed in a separate labor classification the contracting authority established and maintained. The wage assigned to that classification was what Chinese workers were paid in the British Columbia labor market of 1884. The men who built the timber trestle structures above Loop Creek, set the sills, laid the deck planking, and drove the spikes that held the rail above a creek in the Selkirks were paid one dollar a day for their work.
The men who came to Rogers Pass from Guangdong to British Columbia did so for the same structural reasons that would bring men from southern Italy and Sicily to the Susquehanna valley a generation later. The agricultural economy of the Guangdong delta had been under sustained pressure since the 1840s: population growth on a fixed land base, crop failures in bad monsoon years, the disruptions of the Taiping Rebellion through the 1850s and 1860s, and the structural poverty of a rural economy integrated into the world market in ways that drained value without returning it. These conditions had been pushing migration from the Pearl River delta toward the Pacific for thirty years before CPR construction began in British Columbia. The men came looking for wages.
The wages paid in British Columbia in the 1880s for railway, mining, and logging work, to men willing to do labor the market classified as unskilled, were what able-bodied men who spoke no English and had no Canadian capital could earn. They were barely above subsistence. Enough to live on, and in good years to send something home to the village in Guangdong where the family remained. Not enough to save meaningfully while the body was spent in the work.
Conditions at the Rogers Pass construction site in the autumn of 1884 matched the Selkirks in late October and early November as they were. The high mountain snowpack that would accumulate in the Illecillewaet valley over the following months was beginning to build on the peaks above the construction pass. Temperatures in the Selkirk valley dropped below freezing at night with regularity in October, and hovered near freezing in the afternoons on days when clouds gathered on the ridges and the sun did not reach the valley bottom. The Chinese workers in the construction camps along the Rogers Pass route were housed in accommodation provided by Onderdonk’s contracting firm: wooden bunkhouses suitable for keeping men on site and fit for work, not designed for the coming winter.
The railway’s schedule required completing as much of the Rogers Pass section as possible before the winter of 1884–85 shut down the work. What was built before the snow fell would stand after it melted. What was not built would need to be built in the next season, and the next season was the one in which the transcontinental railway was supposed to be finished. The provision of the men’s needs through that winter was a matter of the contract system.
The company store run by the Chinese contractor near the construction camps sold food at prices the store could charge at a site with no competing supply. Rice, dry goods, and the staples the workers depended on were available at the store. Medical care for injured or sick workers on site was available at the level a construction camp budget provided, which in 1884 on a mountain section of the CPR was not a high level. Scurvy, the nutritional deficiency disease that develops when the diet draws on a limited range of sources, was documented among Chinese workers on the British Columbia sections of the CPR.
A camp store on a CPR mountain construction site in 1884 was not equipped to fight scurvy. It was equipped with what the contractor could profit from supplying. The problem of avalanches at Rogers Pass was not one the CPR engineering department fully accounted for in the original construction design. Survey records logged snowfall and terrain slope.
They did not include systematic documentation of avalanche paths, because the survey parties had passed through the region in summer and early autumn and recorded what they saw in those seasons. Avalanche paths on the slopes above the Illecillewaet valley at Rogers Pass do not show clearly in summer. But the terrain that forms them is clear: the slope, the aspect, the elevation, and the absence of old-growth timber on the tracks where avalanches periodically clear the forest. The survey parties of 1881 and 1882 were working to find a route through the mountains, not to document the behavior of the snowpack above the route they found, in winter.
The avalanche behavior showed itself in the first operating season. Snow slid off the steep slopes above the railway, crossed it, buried it, and struck train cars and track crews. In the hard winters of the late 1880s and early 1890s, avalanches on the Rogers Pass line killed a documented number of CPR employees, recorded in company accident records at the level of incidents and fatalities, and in some cases by name. The winter of 1899 saw a series of avalanches that killed a number of company workers at Rogers Pass, prompting a formal engineering review of protective measures on the line.
The company’s response was to build snowsheds: timber structures, roofed constructions built over the track in known avalanche paths, designed to deflect the sliding snow mass over the roof and down the slope on the lower side, rather than through the track and whatever was on it. The Rogers Pass snowsheds were a sustained construction and maintenance project from the earliest operating seasons through the end of the century and into the first decade of the next. At their peak, more than thirty separate snowsheds protected different sections of the Rogers Pass line. They were timber structures built and rebuilt as avalanches damaged or destroyed them, and as the CPR’s understanding of the most active paths developed through accumulated operating experience.
The men who maintained the snowsheds on the Rogers Pass line through the winters were maintenance workers in the CPR’s track department, working on the most avalanche-prone section of any active main line in North America. The Loop Creek bridge carried the CPR’s main-line traffic from its completion in 1885 until the end of the original Rogers Pass line’s life. The trains that crossed it in the early years of CPR operation were the trains of the railway’s first decade: the passenger service between Montreal and Vancouver the transcontinental line had been built to provide, and the freight service generated by prairie settlement and the early development of the interior economy. The locomotives of 1885 that first crossed the Loop Creek bridge were the CPR’s initial motive power, machines whose axle loads the bridge structure had been designed to carry at the operating speeds the mountain grades allowed.
As locomotive weights increased through the 1890s and into the new century, and train lengths and weights grew, the demands on the bridge exceeded those the structure was originally designed to bear. The CPR’s bridge engineering department inspected the timber structures on the Rogers Pass line as locomotive development outpaced the original design loads. Structures were reinforced and rebuilt where engineering analysis required it. The Loop Creek structure was maintained throughout the operation of the surface line, the railway managing what could be managed.
The operating problem on the Rogers Pass line was not any single structure but the grade, the curvature, and the avalanche danger that characterized the entire original track over the pass. The 2. 2 percent grade that the terrain forced on the engineers of 1884 required helper locomotives on heavy westbound freight movements and cautious handling in the eastbound descent. The cost of helper service accrued with every train movement over the pass in every year of operation, recorded consistently by the operating accountants and periodically reviewed by the general manager’s office.
The avalanche danger required continuous investment in snowsheds and maintenance labor to keep them safe through the winter. The combination of the difficult grade and the avalanche risk made the surface Rogers Pass line an operating burden the CPR management was aware of from the first operating season, and one the engineering department studied a permanent solution for over twenty years. The solution was a tunnel. The Connaught Tunnel, a single-track bore through the heart of the Selkirk range at a lower elevation than the Rogers Pass summit, eliminating the highest slopes and the most avalanche-prone ground by passing beneath them, opened for traffic in December 1916.
The tunnel is 5. 02 miles long. At completion, it was the longest railway tunnel in North America. It reduced the maximum grade on the Rogers Pass line from 2.
2 percent to 1. 0 percent westbound, a change that transformed the operating economics of the mountain crossing. It also eliminated most of the avalanche danger the original surface line had faced. After the tunnel opened, the trains that had crossed the original track over the Loop Creek bridge and the other timber structures the Chinese workers built in 1884 and 1885 shifted to the tunnel route.
The original surface line over the pass went out of main-line service. Abandonment removed it from the CPR’s operating jurisdiction. The rail was lifted. The bridge structures along the abandoned right of way, including the one at Loop Creek, ceased to receive railway maintenance.
The forest that had been cleared for the line in 1884 began to reclaim the disturbed ground. The timber structures, no longer carrying traffic and no longer maintained, began the process of returning to the material they were made from. The Selkirks are not a dry environment. Wood decays in the Selkirks at the rate wood decays in a wet mountain climate with the freeze-thaw cycle of the subalpine zone, faster than in a dry climate.
The Loop Creek bridge was built in the autumn of 1884 from timber cut in the surrounding forest, carried traffic for 31 years, and was then left to the climate and the fungi it favored. The last-spike ceremony for the Canadian Pacific Railway was held at Craigellachie in Eagle Pass on November 7, 1885. The photograph taken at Craigellachie that morning shows Donald Smith, the CPR’s principal investor, driving the last spike into the final joint of the transcontinental main line. It also shows railway officers, investors, and invited guests gathered around the spike site, and the locomotive of the train that had carried the official party to the ceremony.
The image has been published in every account of the CPR’s construction since it was taken, representing the moment the transcontinental line was completed. The Chinese workers who built the hardest sections of the line through British Columbia, who dug the tunnels in the Fraser Valley with hand drills and nitroglycerin, who cleared the route through the Selkirks in the seasons before the construction crews arrived, who built the bridge bents above Loop Creek, raised them, and set the rails on the deck, do not appear in the Craigellachie photograph. They were not present at Craigellachie because they were not invited. The completion ceremony was organized for the railway’s senior officers and their guests.
The construction workers who built the line were not among those invited. And beyond their absence, many of the Chinese workers had already left the construction district by the time of the ceremony. The work was done, the contracts were settled, and the labor the contract system had arranged for the construction season was no longer needed. The men returned to the labor market they had come from, to Victoria and New Westminster and San Francisco, looking for whatever work was available to Chinese laborers in the Pacific coast economy of 1885.
The Chinese workers who built the British Columbia sections of the CPR worked under a contract that provided no benefits, no injury compensation beyond what the contractor chose to provide, and no recognition of the physical effort of the work beyond the set daily wage. When the Canadian government passed the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885, the same year the transcontinental railway was completed, imposing a head tax of $50 on every Chinese person entering Canada, the men who built the railway were among the categories the tax was designed to restrict. Fifty dollars was the equivalent of fifty days’ pay at the rate paid on the Rogers Pass section. The relationship between the completion of the work and the restriction of the workforce that completed it was not a coincidence requiring analysis to understand.
The men who built the line understood it, and so did the Chinese community organizations in Victoria and Vancouver that documented the head tax and organized campaigns against it. Ownership of the original Rogers Pass right of way passed to Parks Canada when Glacier National Park was established and its boundaries expanded to include the historic pass. Today the original line is maintained as a hiking trail through the park. The grade of the original railway remains visible in the terrain, and the locations of the original structures are documented in the park’s interpretive materials.
Loop Creek is there. The location of the Loop Creek bridge can be identified by the grade, the course of the creek, and the interpretive documentation of the original route. The bridge itself does not exist. What exists is the bridge site, the grade that necessitated it, and the creek still running below the level where the bridge timbers stood.
The CPR operates the Rogers Pass crossing today through the Connaught Tunnel, and since 1988 through the Mount Macdonald Tunnel. A second tunnel was completed to provide capacity for the double-stack container trains that modern intermodal traffic requires. The current Rogers Pass route carries some of the heaviest and largest freight traffic on the North American rail network. The mountain that resisted the railway for thirty years now carries trains through 14.
7 miles of combined tunnelling. The grade the Chinese workers worked around in the bridge curves at Loop Creek, helping the original line hold 2. 2 percent, is now handled underground at 1. 0 percent through the tunnel that replaced the surface line.
If you follow the abandoned railway right of way from the Illecillewaet campground in Glacier National Park, you walk on the grade of the CPR’s original main line. The trail follows the original alignment west toward Rogers Pass. You are walking where the Chinese construction crews graded the roadbed in 1884. The loop is a defined section of that route, where the trail curves around on itself at the place where the original line crossed over itself to gain elevation above the creek without exceeding the maximum grade the engineers had set.
Below the loop, Loop Creek runs over the gravel of the Selkirk valley as it ran when the timber bridge stood over it. The timber is gone, but the trail remains, the creek remains, and the mountains remain. Snow accumulates on the slopes above the old line every winter as it accumulated in the winters when the line was in operation and trains crossed on the surface built by Chinese carpenters in the autumn before the CPR’s first winter in the Selkirks. There is no monument at Loop Creek identifying the Chinese workers who built the timber bridge.
The interpretive sign at the trailhead identifies the original CPR route, records the construction period, and explains why the surface line was replaced by the Connaught Tunnel. The engineering achievement is recorded on the sign. The Chinese workers who set the sills, raised the bents, drove the spikes, and laid the deck in the autumn of 1884 are recorded in the CPR’s records at the level those records were kept for tracking the costs of the Onderdonk contract. They are recorded in the 1885 head tax records, those who remained in Canada and paid the $50, at the level those records were kept for tracking payments.
They are recorded in the records of the Chinese Benevolent Association and community organizations in Victoria and Vancouver at the level those organizations kept membership records. But they are not named on the interpretive sign. The CPR freight train crossing Rogers Pass today through the Mount Macdonald Tunnel carries shipping containers between the port of Vancouver and the interior markets of North America. The locomotive leading it weighs more than the entire train the company’s first engine hauled across the Loop Creek bridge in 1885.
The mountain above the tunnel is unchanged, and the creek below the old right of way still runs. The bridge is gone. The men who built it are recorded in the records of the contract system that required tracking the cost of their labor. Their names are not in those records at a level that identifies them.
The last spike exists in the photograph at Craigellachie, and they are not in the photograph. The line they built through the Selkirks is now a hiking trail in a national park. The trains that replaced it run 600 feet below the valley floor through the mountain, which the men in the construction camps of 1884 crossed the only way the season, the budget, and the schedule allowed. They built it in the autumn before the first winter.
Winter came. The bridge held. The trains crossed. Winter came again.
Thirty-one winters. Then the tunnel opened, the line closed, and the timber returned to the forest. The creek runs as it always did.
