A carpenter stood on a timber platform above Loop Creek in the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia, driving tree nails into a plank, a plank that had to hold, because there was no practical option if he lost his balance. The creek below was not far down, but it was far in the way that mattered from a high, unfinished building platform. The platform was not level. Its boards were green lumber, newly sawn, wet wood that would shrink and roughen underfoot.

Below the platform, the timber bridge he and his crew had spent the previous days raising and framing stretched across a series of bents, caps, and sway braces down to mudsills set on the creek bank and the creek bed. The bridge was not finished. It was one of the spans that still had to be completed before the structure could carry a railway, and the railway had to come. It was coming from the east, where men were stringing wire somewhere back along the Rogers Pass wagon road, and the schedule William Cornelius Van Horne had set for completing the Canadian Pacific 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. Travelling west across British Columbia, one meets the Rockies first, descends through Kicking Horse Pass to the Trench at Golden, then climbs straight into the Selkirks up the Illecillewaet valley toward the summit at Rogers Pass. The two crossings differ in character.

The Rockies at Kicking Horse are steep and open, the peaks rising above timberline, the 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. Slopes are covered in dense forest to their upper limits, Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir. The peaks rise above 10,000 feet.

The valleys between them are narrow and shadowed. The snow that accumulates in the Selkirks through the winter months is among the deepest in North America. The Illecillewaet valley above Glacier receives snowfall measured in metres, not inches, between November and April. And that snowpack does not melt on a schedule.

Spring in the Selkirks is not a season of gradual warming but a season of competing processes: snow building at altitude while meltwater runs in the valley bottoms. The stability of the snowpack on the steep slopes above the valley deteriorates through the winter, then releases in sudden events that carry no warning and follow no timetable any man standing below could read in advance. Running a railway line 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 had made to British Columbia as the price of its entry into Confederation in 1871.

British Columbia had joined 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 exhausted its patience. The CPR charter required a main line from central Canada to the Pacific coast. The route across the mountains had to pass through 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 assigned to cover the interior, found the pass in 1881 during a journey through the Illecillewait drainage, a journey recorded in survey records and in Rogers’s own account as a hard exploration through rugged, difficult terrain. The pass that now bears his name sits at 4,534 feet above sea level, at the divide between the Illecillewaet and Beaver drainages to the east.

It is not a low pass. It is not an easy pass. It was the only pass through the Selkirks that the CPR transcontinental could reach. The decision to route the line through Rogers Pass, rather than through Howse Pass to the north, which had been explored in earlier surveys and offered a lower crossing, rested on the engineering of the transcontinental line 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 and harder. Van Horne, the general manager brought in from American railroading to drive the CPR to completion at a pace matching the company’s financial position, understood both the difficulty and the necessity of the route.

The line would go through Rogers Pass. Whatever that required would be done. Work on laying the line through Rogers Pass began in earnest in 1884. Contractual 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 held government construction contracts for the western sections since 1880.

Onderdonk was responsible for the hardest mountain contract on the line, laying track from the coast up the Fraser valley to the interior. By 1884 his operations had extended up the valley to the mountain approach to the Selkirks, and work had begun on bridging the Illecillewaet drainage at Rogers Pass. The problem of a timber bridge at Rogers Pass was not only the distance between supports. Crossing the Illecillewaet valley above the Glacier was not casual work.

The valley was narrow, and the slopes on both sides of the pass were so steep that the line engineers worked under grade constraints that determined where and how the track could be laid. The CPR main line through Rogers Pass was built to a maximum grade of 2. 2 percent westbound, a rise of 2. 2 feet per 100 feet of horizontal distance.

This grade was not the engineers’ preference. It was the result of terrain that offered no flatter option for crossing the pass at the altitude required to clear the valley walls without a tunnel that the 1884 construction schedule and budget did not allow. A 2. 2 percent grade was a grade the locomotives of 1884 could climb with a suitable consist.

It was also a grade that limited the weight and length of trains operating over the pass. The line would run at that grade for as long as it operated, a constraint the CPR operating department recognized from the first season of service, and one the operating accountants recorded in every movement of every train over the mountain for the next thirty years. The loop at Rogers Pass was an engineering response to a specific problem in the alignment of the Illecillewaet valley. The valley floor rose steeply on a short horizontal distance in the approach to the summit.

The track had to rise through that section while holding the adopted 2. 2 percent grade. A straight line up the valley floor would have exceeded the limit. The solution was to increase the horizontal distance over which the rise was distributed by laying the track in a full circle: a curve that carried the line over itself on a bridge structure, gaining elevation on the outside, then curving over the inside, continuing toward the summit on the required alignment.

The circular route added distance, reducing the effective grade over the rise. The structure that carried the outside portion of the loop over the inside portion, and over the bed of Loop Creek, was the timber bridge the carpenter was building in the fall of 1884. It was not a large structure by the standards of the mountain crossings the CPR would later build. It was the structure required for the grade at the required location.

Without it, the track through the loop would not work. Without the loop, the grade over Rogers Pass exceeded the capacity of the locomotives of 1884. The timber bridge over Loop Creek was a wooden trestle of the type that North American railway builders had been constructing in the mountain west since the 1860s. Its construction technique followed the prevailing carpentry of the day: timber frames, sill plates, mudsill foundations, posts, caps, sway braces, and deck stringers, the standard terminology of a railway building industry that had refined its methods over a generation of mountain crossings in Nevada, Utah, and the Sierra Nevada, and now in the Selkirks.

The timber was available in the surrounding forest, where Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir grew to large diameters at the higher elevations where the construction camps stood. Trees felled by construction crews to clear the right-of-way supplied part of the bridge timber. The bridge’s structural design followed the standard arrangement of posts and bracing used in railway trestles since the continental 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 trestles thrown across a major river.

The creek ran clear and cold over a bed of gravel and sand in the valley bottom. The bedrock of the Selkirks lies close to the surface in most valley locations. The mudsills of the bridge posts rested on a timber grillage laid on the bearing material the construction crews had excavated. The creek passed under the structure through a culvert opening within the bridge frame.

The foundations were a problem that could be handled. The height above the creek bed, and the grade the track had to maintain through the loop, were the dimensions that governed everything else. Construction crews raised the bridge posts by hand, using long poles and ropes. Raising a timber bent for a trestle the height of the Loop Creek bridge was heavy work.

The posts were large-dimension timbers, squared to 12 inches or more, cut from the surrounding spruce and pine to length and roughly dressed to specified dimensions. The sill plates joining the post bases, and the cap plates joining the post tops, were of similar cross-section. The sway braces between posts were of lighter material, but in total, a single bent weighed enough that raising 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 critical moments of rotation, while pike poles guided the bent through its arc from horizontal to vertical.

Men at the base set the heel on the intended pivot point while the raising gang lifted, and the gang on top guided the top of the bent into vertical. When the bent stood upright, it was braced into place, and the two gangs moved on to the next bent. The trestle rose from the valley floor in the order the bents were raised, each one adding a height that had to be accounted for on the platforms above the creek. The men who did this work were Chinese.

The majority of the construction labour force on the British Columbia section of the CPR main line was Chinese. Onderdonk’s labour records for the mountain section show a workforce of about 6,000 Chinese workers at peak employment on the Rogers Pass approach alone. The men arrived at the construction site through a labour organization that was structurally parallel to the padrone system. Pennsylvania railroad contractors would use Chinese labour contractors twenty years later at the Rockville Bridge, though through different populations and different geography.

Men working within the commercial networks of Victoria and San Francisco, who had established connections with the labour migration networks coming out of Guangdong province in southern China, recruited the workers, arranged transportation, negotiated contracts with the construction company, managed the labour camps, and supplied the camp stores from which the workers bought their food and living supplies at the Selkirk construction site. The wage 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 labour.

White men doing comparable physical work on Onderdonk’s contracts were paid between $1. 50 and $2. 50 a day, depending on classification and season. The difference was not secret.

It was the stated wage structure. Chinese workers were classified in a separate labour category that the contracting authority had established and maintained. The wage assigned to that category was the wage paid to Chinese workers in the British Columbia labour market of 1884. The men who built the timber trestles over Loop Creek, set the timbers, laid the deck planks, and drove the spikes on the track above the creek in the Selkirks were paid one dollar a day.

The gap between that figure and the physical conditions and physical risks of the work is not a gap that requires documentation. Documentation records the wage. The wage is what is recorded. The men who came to Rogers Pass from Guangdong to British Columbia came 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 against a fixed land base, crop failures in years of bad monsoon rains, the disruption of the Taiping Rebellion in 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 driving emigration from the Pearl River delta toward the Pacific for thirty years before CPR construction began in British Columbia. The men came for wages. The wages paid in British Columbia in the 1880s for railway, mining, and logging work, for men willing to do the work the labour market classified as unskilled, were the wages strong men who spoke no English and held no Canadian capital could earn.

They were wages barely above subsistence. Enough to live on, and in good years to send a little money to the village in Guangdong where the family remained. Not enough to save meaningfully while the body was being spent in the work. The conditions at the Rogers Pass construction site in the fall of 1884 were the conditions of the Selkirks in October and early November.

The high mountain snowpack that would accumulate in the Illecillewaet valley over the following months had begun to build on the peaks above the construction camp. Temperatures in the Selkirk valleys in October fall below freezing regularly at night, and approach freezing in the afternoon on days when cloud gathered on the hills and the sun did not reach the valley floor. The Chinese workers in the construction camps on the Rogers Pass road were housed in accommodation provided by the Onderdonk contracting company, timber buildings adequate to keep men on site and fit for work, not designed for the coming winter. The CPR schedule required getting as much of the Rogers Pass section done as possible before the winter of 1884–85 closed the work down.

What was built before snow fell would stand after the thaw. What was not built would need to be built again in the next season. The next season was the season the transcontinental was supposed to be complete. Provisioning the workers through that winter was what the contracting system provided for.

The company store run by the Chinese contractor near the construction camps sold food at the prices a store could charge at a site where there was no competing supply. Rice, dry goods, and the staple foods 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 was not a high level in 1884 on a mountain section of the CPR. Scurvy was documented among Chinese workers on the British Columbia sections of the CPR, a disease of nutritional deficiency that occurs when food comes from limited sources.

The camp store at a CPR mountain construction site in 1884 was not stocked against scurvy. It was stocked with what the contractor could profit from supplying. The avalanche problem at Rogers Pass was not a problem the CPR engineering department had 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 fall, recording what they saw in those seasons. Avalanche tracks on the slopes above the Illecillewaet valley at Rogers Pass are not clearly visible 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 paths where avalanches periodically clear the forest. The survey parties of 1881 and 1882 had been working to find a route through the mountains, not documenting the behaviour of the snowpack above the route they found in winter.

The avalanche behaviour revealed itself in the first operating season. Snow slid off the steep slopes above the track, crossed it, buried it, and struck train crews and work gangs on the line. In the severe winters of the late 1880s and early 1890s, avalanches on the Rogers Pass line killed a significant number of CPR employees, a toll documented in the company’s accident records at the level of accident counts and fatalities, and in some cases at the level of named victims. 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 the protections on the line.

The company’s response to the avalanche problem was the construction of snow sheds: timber structures, roofed buildings built over the track in known avalanche paths, designed to divert the sliding mass of snow over the roof and down the slope on the lower side, rather than through the track and whatever was on it. The Rogers Pass snow sheds were a sustained construction and maintenance program that ran from the first operating seasons through the end of the nineteenth century and into the first decade of the twentieth. At their peak, more than thirty separate snow sheds protected different parts of the Rogers Pass line. They were timber structures, built and rebuilt as they were damaged or destroyed by avalanches, and as the CPR’s understanding of the most active paths developed through accumulated operating experience.

The men who maintained the snow sheds on the Rogers Pass line through the winter were maintenance workers in the CPR’s track department, working on the most avalanche-prone section of an active main line in North America. Their names appear in CPR employee records, at the level those records were kept for section workers. The names of avalanche victims appear in accident records, and in some cases in local newspaper reports. The names of the Chinese construction workers who built the timber trestles the snow sheds would later be built to protect appear in construction accounts, at the level those accounts were kept for tracking the costs of the Onderdonk contract.

The Loop Creek bridge carried the CPR main line’s traffic from its completion in 1885 until the end of the original Rogers Pass line’s life. The trains it carried in the CPR’s first years were the trains of the railway’s first decade: the passenger service between Montreal and Vancouver, which the CPR transcontinental had been built to provide, and the freight service generated by prairie settlement and the early development of the interior economy as the years passed. The locomotives of 1885 that first crossed the Loop Creek bridge were the CPR’s initial equipment, machines whose axle loadings the bridge structure was designed to carry at the operating speeds the mountain grades allowed. As locomotive weights increased through the 1890s and into the new century, and as trains grew longer and heavier, the demands placed on the bridge exceeded the loads the structure had been designed to carry.

The CPR’s bridge engineering department inspected the timber structures on the Rogers Pass line as locomotive development outpaced the original design loadings. 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 of the Rogers Pass line was not any single structure.

It was the grade, the curvature, and the avalanche hazard that characterized the entire original route over the pass. The 2. 2 percent grade imposed by terrain on the 1884 engineers required helper locomotives on heavy westbound freight movements and careful handling on the descending eastbound run. The cost of helper service accumulated with every movement of every train over the pass in every year of operation, a figure the operating accountants recorded consistently and the general manager’s office reviewed periodically.

The avalanche hazard required continued investment in snow sheds and in the maintenance labour to keep them sound through the winter. The combination of the difficult grade and the avalanche hazard made the surface Rogers Pass line an operating burden the CPR management recognized from the first operating season, and one the engineering department had been studying a permanent solution for over twenty years. The solution was a tunnel. The Connaught Tunnel, a single-track bore driven through the heart of the Selkirk range below the summit of Rogers Pass, eliminating the highest and most avalanche-prone sections of the line by passing beneath them, was completed and put into operation in December 1916.

The tunnel is 5. 02 miles long. At completion, it was the longest railway tunnel in North America. The tunnel reduced the maximum grade on the Rogers Pass line from 2.

2 percent to 1. 0 percent westbound, a reduction that transformed the operating economics of the mountain crossing. It also eliminated most of the avalanche hazard that had threatened the original surface line. After the tunnel was completed, the trains that had crossed the original route over the Loop Creek bridge and the other timber structures built by the Chinese workers in 1884 and 1885 were diverted to the tunnel route.

The original surface line over the pass went out of main-line service. Abandonment of the original Rogers Pass route removed it from CPR operation. The track was lifted. The bridge structures along the abandoned right-of-way, including the structure at Loop Creek, ceased to receive railway maintenance.

The forest that had been cleared during the 1884 construction of the right-of-way began to reclaim the disturbed ground. The timber structures, no longer carrying traffic and no longer maintained, began their return 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 under the freeze-thaw cycle of the subalpine zone, which is faster than in a dry climate.

Loop Creek bridge was built in the fall of 1884 from timber cut from the surrounding forest, carried traffic for thirty-one years, and was then abandoned 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 officials, investors, and invited guests gathered around the spike site, along with the locomotive of the train carrying the official party to the ceremony.

The photograph has been published in every account of the CPR’s construction since it was taken, standing for the moment of transcontinental completion. The Chinese workers who built the hardest sections of the line through British Columbia, who drilled 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 trestle bents over Loop Creek, raised them, and spiked the rails on the deck above, do not appear in the photograph at Craigellachie. They were not present at Craigellachie because they were not invited. The completion ceremony was organized for senior railway officials and their guests.

The construction workers who built the line were not among the invitees. The Chinese workers were additionally absent because many of them had left the construction area by the time of the ceremony. The work was done, the contracts were completed, and the labour force the contracting system had arranged for the construction season was no longer required. The men returned to the labour market they had come from, to Victoria and New Westminster and San Francisco, looking for whatever work was available to Chinese workers 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 compensation for injury beyond what the contractor determined, and no allowance for the physical exertion of the work beyond the stated daily wage. When the Canadian government passed the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885, the same year the transcontinental 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. The sum of $50 was equal to 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, as did the Chinese community organizations in Victoria and Vancouver that documented the head tax and organized campaigns against it. The scholarship on the labour history of the CPR over the past century has not missed this. Title to the original Rogers Pass right-of-way passed to Parks Canada when Glacier National Park was created and its boundaries were extended to include the historic pass. Today, the original line is maintained as a walking trail through the park.

The grade of the original railway is still visible in the terrain, and the locations of the original structures are documented in the park’s interpretive material. Loop Creek runs there. The site of the Loop Creek bridge can be located by the grade and the creek course, and through the interpretive documentation of the original right-of-way. The bridge itself is not there.

What is there is the site, the grade that required it, and the creek still running below the level where the deck stringers were set. The CPR operates the Rogers Pass crossing today through the Connaught Tunnel, and since 1988 through the Mount Macdonald Tunnel. A second bore was completed to provide capacity for the double-stack container trains required by modern intermodal traffic. 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 a combined 14. 7 miles of tunnelling. The grade the Chinese workers worked around with the curve of the bridge at Loop Creek, helping the original line make it up at 2. 2 percent, is handled underground at 1.

0 percent through the tunnel that replaced the surface line. If you follow the abandoned railbed from the Illecillewaet campground in Glacier National Park, you walk on the grade of the original CPR main line. The trail follows the original alignment westward toward Rogers Pass. You are walking where the Chinese construction crews graded the roadbed in 1884.

The loop is a specific part of that route, the trail curving back on itself at the point 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 timbers are gone. The grade remains.

The creek remains. The mountains remain. Snow accumulates on the slopes above the old right-of-way every winter, as it accumulated in the winters when the line was in operation and the trains crossed on the deck built by the Chinese carpenters in the fall 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 right-of-way, records the period of construction, and gives the reason the surface route was replaced by the Connaught Tunnel. The engineering achievement is recorded on the sign. The Chinese workers who set the bents, raised them, spiked the rails, and laid the deck in the fall of 1884 are recorded in CPR records at the level those records were kept for tracking the costs of the Onderdonk contract. They are recorded in the head tax records of 1885, those who remained in Canada and paid the fifty dollars, 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 records of their members. They are not recorded on the interpretive sign. A CPR freight train crossing Rogers Pass today through the Mount Macdonald Tunnel carries container traffic between the Port of Vancouver and the interior markets of North America. The locomotive at its head weighs more than the entire train carried by the first CPR train across the Loop Creek bridge in 1885.

The mountain above the tunnel is unchanged. 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 contracting system that required the tracking of their labour’s cost.

Their names are not recorded at the level required to identify them. The last spike is in the photograph at Craigellachie, and they are not in the photograph. The line they built through the Selkirks is now a walking 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 fall before the first winter. The winter came. The bridge held. The trains crossed.

The winter came again. Thirty-one winters. Then the tunnel opened, the line closed, and the timber went back to the forest.

The creek still runs.