The bridge worker stood on a timber bent one hundred and forty feet above the floor of Clearwater Canyon, driving a wooden peg through a pre-drilled hole in the beam above him, seating it with a hammer in a motion he had repeated thousands of times since the crews had moved into this stretch of the canyon in the spring. The bent beneath him was Douglas fir cut from the forests of northern Idaho, hauled by wagon teams to the construction site on the canyon rim above. The Clearwater River ran below, fast and green, carrying snowmelt from the Bitterroot Mountains sixty miles to the east. He could hear it.

He could not see it from where he worked. He would keep repeating that motion until the light failed in the canyon. In Clearwater Canyon during the summer of 1908, the light failed early. The canyon walls rose more than a thousand feet on both sides of the river.

The sun cleared the eastern rim late in the morning and disappeared behind the western rim in mid-afternoon. The workday in the canyon was shorter than the workday above it. The supervisor knew this and built the schedule around it. The structure taking shape in Clearwater Canyon in the summer of 1908 was one of several timber bridges being built by the Camas Prairie Railroad on its line running from Lewiston, at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater rivers, up to the agricultural plateau of Camas Prairie, three thousand feet above and forty miles to the southeast.

The railroad was a joint project of the Northern Pacific and the Union Pacific, the two largest railroads in the Pacific Northwest, building together what neither had wanted to build alone, and their agreement on the structure of that joint ownership would have consequences for the timber bridges of Clearwater Canyon that the bridge worker seating pegs in the summer of 1908 could not have foreseen. The bridge he was building would carry loaded grain trains from Camas Prairie down to Lewiston for decades to come. It would carry wheat and barley grown on some of the most productive dryland farmland in the American West across a canyon that no road had ever successfully threaded. That work would be done by the Douglas fir he was fastening with the wooden pegs he was driving with the hammer in his hand, until the structure was replaced or failed.

Which of those outcomes occurred was tied to the ownership agreement between the Northern Pacific and the Union Pacific as much as it was tied to the structural properties of old-growth Douglas fir in the canyon climate of central Idaho. This is the story of how the Camas Prairie Railroad built its timber bridges across Clearwater Canyon during the construction period of 1906 to 1909. It is the story of a railroad built to serve one of the richest unserved agricultural regions in the American West, jointly owned by two competing railroads that had agreed to share construction costs and operating revenues but had not settled what that agreement meant when the structures they built together needed expensive maintenance, so the question of who would pay first became the question neither wanted to answer. It is the story of the Italian, Greek, and Japanese workers who drove the pilings, raised the bents, and laid the track in a canyon where the working season was dictated by the rock walls above them.

It is the story of the Nez Perce people, whose ceded lands the railroad right-of-way crossed, and who appear in the records of the Camas Prairie Railroad exactly as the landowners crossed by any American railroad appear across lands that were taken: as a legal matter settled before the construction crews arrived, not as participants in what the construction produced or beneficiaries of what it became. The workers’ names are in the payroll records of the Camas Prairie Railroad to the extent those records survive. The Nez Perce are in the records of land cessions to the federal government that preceded the railroad right-of-way filing by a full generation. To understand why the Northern Pacific and Union Pacific agreed to build a railroad they did not agree on how to maintain, one must understand what Camas Prairie was and what it was worth, and why both companies wanted access to it while neither wanted to grant the other access first.

Camas Prairie is a basalt plateau in north-central Idaho, lying between the Clearwater River to the north and the Salmon River to the south, bounded on the east by the Bitterroot Range and sloping westward toward the lands of the Snake River valley. The plateau surface rises roughly thirty-five hundred to four thousand feet above sea level. The soil covering the basalt is deep wind-deposited loess, laid down over thousands of years from the same volcanic activity that produced the Columbia Plateau basalt across the Pacific Northwest. That soil, combined with the precipitation pattern of north-central Idaho, where rainfall is sufficient to grow grain without saturating the fields, produced an exceptionally fertile region for wheat and barley.

By 1900, Camas Prairie had been farmed for two decades by settlers who arrived after the Nez Perce War of 1877 opened reservation lands to settlement. The wheat they grew had to get off the plateau to reach markets. Getting off the plateau meant crossing one of the canyon systems that gashed its edges: Clearwater Canyon to the north, the Salmon River canyon to the south. These canyons were steep river gorges cut by drainage water through basalt over millions of years.

The rims dropped from the plateau surface to the river through near-vertical rock walls eight hundred to two thousand feet high, reachable by wagon only via limited switchback routes that turned impassable in the mud season and were difficult in every season for loaded wagons. The farmers of Camas Prairie hauled their wheat to market over routes that the plateau rim topography had been specifically designed to obstruct. The cost of wagon hauling to railheads at Lewiston or Grangeville was the difference between farming Camas Prairie profitably and farming it at a bare subsistence level. A railroad reaching the plateau would reduce the shipping cost to whatever the railroad chose to charge.

The railroad tariff might be higher in absolute value than the cost of owning a wagon, but it was lower in practical impact than the cost of hauling a ton of wheat forty miles over a road that climbed three thousand feet in each direction through a canyon. The Northern Pacific had a main line through Lewiston, which sat at the confluence of the Clearwater and Snake rivers at 738 feet above sea level on the floor of the canyon system separating the river valleys from the plateau above. The Union Pacific had its own connections to the region from the south and east. Both companies recognized that a line reaching Camas Prairie would capture the grain traffic of one of the most productive unserved agricultural regions in the Pacific Northwest.

The railroad that got there first would dominate the region. The problem was the canyon. Climbing from Lewiston required raising the railroad from 738 feet at the river to about 3,500 feet at the plateau surface, across a horizontal distance that made it impossible, under canyon geometry, to exceed a grade that ordinary steam locomotives could handle without additional helper operations that would add cost to every trip. Clearwater Canyon on the climb up from Lewiston was not a canyon in which one could build a railroad by following the valley floor.

The valley floor was the river itself. The river ran fast and cold and filled the canyon floor from wall to wall during flood season. The climb up through the canyon required the railroad to cling to its walls, cross the side streams on trestles, maintain a grade within locomotive capability, and work within the constraints of a geological formation designed over millions of years to prevent exactly the kind of crossing the railroad was attempting. The men who organized the Camas Prairie Railroad solved the political problem before the engineering one.

The Northern Pacific and Union Pacific agreed to form a jointly owned subsidiary, the Camas Prairie Railroad, with each company holding a 50 percent share. Each contributed half the construction costs. Each received half the operating revenues. The joint company was managed by a board with equal representation from both parent companies.

The agreement was designed to prevent either railroad from gaining an advantage over the other in accessing Camas Prairie traffic, while ensuring that the construction costs neither company wanted to bear alone were shared in a manner acceptable to both. The structural consequence of this agreement, which mattered for the timber bridges, was that any expenditure on the Camas Prairie Railroad required agreement between two parent companies whose commercial interests in the Pacific Northwest were competitive in other respects. The Northern Pacific and Union Pacific competed for traffic throughout the region. Their agreement to cooperate on the Camas Prairie Railroad did not eliminate that competition.

It suspended it for the purposes of this one line while preserving it in everything else. When the line was profitable, the 50-50 split was acceptable. When the line needed capital expenditures on aging infrastructure, when the timber bridges of Clearwater Canyon required replacement or major maintenance, the 50-50 split produced negotiations between two companies each of which preferred that the other pay first. The engineering work was assigned to the crews of the parent companies, working with construction contracted out.

The main engineering challenge was the climb from Lewiston up the canyon wall to the plateau. The solution was a series of switchbacks on the canyon wall, with timber bridges crossing the side streams that fed the Clearwater from the plateau above. The switchbacks allowed an acceptable grade by running the track back and forth across the canyon wall, gaining elevation with each leg, but they required trains to stop, reverse direction, and proceed up each leg of the switchback. It was a slow and operationally expensive system, requiring extra crew and extended running times on every train movement.

It was also the only system the canyon terrain permitted. The bridges at the side stream crossings were the structures that required the bridge workers in the canyon. A side stream crossing on a switchback railroad climbing a canyon wall is not a simple span over a creek. The side streams cut their own way from the plateau through smaller canyon systems of their own, steep and deep before they reached the main canyon.

The railroad track had to cross each side stream at the mid-height of the main canyon wall, at whatever elevation the track had reached at that point, which on a switchback climb from 738 feet toward 3,500 feet could mean crossing a side stream one hundred or one hundred forty feet or more above the stream floor. There was no way to reduce those heights without changing the grade requirements imposed by the locomotives, and the locomotives imposed what they imposed. The defining material of the canyon bridges was Douglas fir, because northern Idaho supplied that timber in sufficient quantity to feed a major construction project and in sufficient dimensions to form the bents and beams a bridge of this height required. The Douglas fir of northern Idaho in 1908 came from forests not yet subjected to major logging.

The trees were old growth, large in diameter, straight-grained, and structurally dense in the way that slow-grown timber from a mountain climate produces. A Douglas fir trunk from the Idaho forests of 1908 was a tree that had taken two to three centuries to reach the dimensions the loggers harvested. The structural properties of that old-growth timber were not identical to those of second-growth Douglas fir, planted and harvested on a commercial cycle. The men who built the bridges did not discuss this distinction.

They worked with what the lumber market supplied to the construction site, and what the market supplied in 1908 from the Idaho forests was timber of a quality that would not be available from the same source by the time the structures needed replacement. The timber had to be moved from the forest to the construction site in the canyon. The canyon had no roads suitable for hauling heavy logs. The logs were moved through a combination of skid roads cut along the canyon wall, wagon teams where the terrain permitted, and in some sections gravity-based logging flumes that used the canyon’s own slope to move material to the work site without powered equipment the terrain could not accommodate.

Timber sliding was a controlled fall. The men handling the loads at the bottom of the slope were dealing with material that had descended several hundred feet of canyon wall under its own weight, and it was not moving slowly by the time it arrived. The bridge construction method used on the canyon sections of the Camas Prairie Railroad in 1908 was the method American railroads had adopted over sixty years of building timber trestles across gorges and stream beds on western mountain railroads. The foundation of each bent was a grouping of piles or frame legs depending on the ground conditions and the height the bent had to reach.

For the lower portions of the tall bridges, where the ground was accessible, timber piles were driven with a pile driver. A weight was lifted and dropped through a guide frame powered by steam. The force of each blow drove the pile a fraction of an inch into the ground. The number of blows required to drive a pile a given distance told the crew the bearing capacity of the soil at that depth.

When the blows came hard and the pile barely moved, the ground had taken the load required of it. The pile driver at the canyon sites was a machine that had to be placed on terrain never designed to accept machinery. The walls of Clearwater Canyon were not level platforms for equipment. They were rock and talus and drift at angles ranging from difficult to impassable.

The pile-driving crews worked from platforms built out from the canyon wall on timber bents, extending the work space away from the rock face to accommodate the equipment while the canyon fell away below the platform edge. A pile-driving crew at the Clearwater Canyon bridge sites in the summer of 1908 worked with heavy machinery on a platform built of the same material as the bridge itself, suspended from a rock wall above a river they could hear and sometimes see below them. To get beyond the bearing capacity of driven piles on the upper sections of the bridges, where piles could not be driven deep enough to carry the load, the structures were designed with heavy timber frame bents set on footings. The frame posts were fir, twelve by twelve inches or larger in cross-section, cut to the required height and connected with cross-bracing and diagonal bracing designed to hold the structure rigid against the lateral forces the canyon terrain imposed: the winds coming up off the river below, the vibration of the pile drivers and later the trains, the thermal expansion and contraction of the timber across the canyon seasons.

Each bent was capped with a cap, a heavy timber running horizontally across the top of the frame posts to carry the longitudinal stringers. The stringers ran lengthwise along the bridge, transferring the load from the deck surface down to the bents below. The deck was made up of timber ties carrying the rails, the same rail configuration used on the main line, but carried here on ties rather than ballast. When a freight train crossed the timber bridge, the weight of the locomotive and cars passed through the rails to the ties, from the ties to the stringers, from the stringers to the bent caps, from the cap to the posts, then to the pile heads or footings below, and from there to the floor of the canyon wall.

The entire load path depended on the condition of every element in it. A stringer with rot at its bearing point on a bent cap transferred the load through sound timber on either side of the rot. If the sound timber was sufficient, the stringer carried the load. If it was not, the stringer failed under the load.

A pile with rot at its head, hidden beneath the cap resting on it, transferred the load through whatever sound timber remained. A post cracked and split by the freeze-thaw cycles of an Idaho winter had its effective cross-section reduced to the uncracked portion. The sum of these individual material conditions represented the structural capacity of the bridge at any moment of its operating life. The capacity at construction was the capacity the designer specified.

The capacity after twenty years of Clearwater Canyon climate was the capacity the maintenance program had preserved. The men who built the timber bridges of the Camas Prairie Railroad in Clearwater Canyon came from the labor force that the Pacific Northwest railroad construction economy depended on in the first decade of the twentieth century. This was not the same workforce that built the Thomas Viaduct in 1834 or the Memphis bridge in 1891. The wave of Irish immigration that supplied labor for the canals and railroads of the mid-nineteenth century had largely merged into the American industrial workforce by 1908.

The Pacific Northwest labor markets of the new century drew on different immigrant groups. Italian workers arriving in the United States in large numbers between 1880 and 1915 formed a mobile labor force on western railroad projects, occupying a position comparable to that of the Irish in the mid-Atlantic construction economy of the 1830s. Labor contractors, the padroni, recruited men from the Italian-speaking regions of southern Italy and Sicily and assigned them to construction companies under arrangements that shared structural features with earlier systems of labor contracting. The padrone received a fee from the construction company for supplying a crew of the specified size, and served as intermediary between the company and the workers, giving him authority and influence over the men he recruited and employed.

The Italian workers who came to build railroads on the Camas Prairie worked through padrone arrangements, under conditions negotiated by the padrone and at rates he accepted, in a system that skimmed a portion of their wages as a hiring fee. Greek workers followed a similar path into western construction labor markets during the first decade of the century. Japanese workers had been present in Pacific Northwest railroad construction since the 1890s, when the Canadian Pacific, Northern Pacific, and Great Northern had relied on Japanese labor for track maintenance and new construction. The Chinese workers who had built the Central Pacific across the Sierra Nevada in the 1860s and the Canadian Pacific across British Columbia in the 1880s were present in diminishing numbers in western railroad construction by 1908, restricted by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred the new immigration that had previously replenished their numbers in the western labor market.

What these labor groups shared on the Camas Prairie construction was the working conditions on structures being built in a canyon whose terrain allowed no second chance. The canyon did not grant a second chance to a man who lost his footing on a timber frame sixty feet above the drainage floor. It did not grant a second chance to a man standing beneath a load raised by a gin derrick when the lifting tackle failed. The gin derrick used in canyon construction in 1908 was the same tool used long before: a timber mast, a boom, a block-and-tackle system, and a horse winch below, in use since the building of the Thomas Viaduct in 1835, with refinements in detail but the same principle.

The four-horse gin, in 1908, lifting a timber frame to working height above the canyon floor, was a machine that lifted what it could lift and dropped what exceeded its capacity, and the men guiding the load above knew the difference between what the lifting rig could bear and what it could not. Clearwater Canyon in the summer of 1908 was a heat trap for the crews working on the lower sections of the timber bridges. The canyon walls absorbed the sun and held the temperature above the river. The ambient moisture from the river below, a river fed by Bitterroot snowmelt and running fast in July and August, held humidity in the canyon air at a higher level than on the exposed plateau above.

The men working on the timber structures under direct sun above the canyon rock in an Idaho summer worked in conditions unlike those facing crews on the wind-swept prairie plateau. The water supply in the canyon during construction came from the river itself that made the canyon hot. The distance from the work platform to the water depended on the height the structure had reached. The Idaho winter attacked the canyon from the other direction.

The Clearwater froze along its edges in hard winters. The canyon walls channeled the wind. A construction crew working on a timber bent in January in Clearwater Canyon worked on timber that had been below freezing since October and would not rise above it until April, on surfaces that had accumulated ice from condensation of the river air and runoff from the canyon walls, on platforms where any misstep on ice-sheathed timber sixty feet above a frozen stream was a step with a consequence that needed no explanation. The construction schedule for the canyon sections was governed from start to finish by weather, exactly as it had been for the men who built the piles of the Thomas Viaduct on the Patapsco River seventy years earlier.

What was built was built in the time windows the climate allowed. The construction injury records of the Camas Prairie Railroad from 1906 to 1909 are not complete in any form publicly available in the accounts on which this history draws. The labor law requirements governing the documentation of deaths on Idaho construction jobs in 1908 were not those of later eras. What the records show is that the structures were built to the specified dimensions and that the line opened to traffic in 1909.

What the records do not show in detail is the price the men who built the canyon bridges paid personally for that work. The Nez Perce people, over whose ceded lands parts of the Camas Prairie Railroad route passed, did not participate in the construction of the structures on their former land. The Clearwater River and the country above it had been Nez Perce land, central to their way of life and their history, until the treaty reductions, the war of 1877, and the allotment policies of the following decades shrank the land base available to them to a fraction of their original territory remaining as reservation land. Camas Prairie took its name from the camas plant, a blue-flowered lily whose bulbs were a staple food the Nez Perce harvested on the plateau for centuries.

The dispute over camas grounds on Camas Prairie was one of the direct causes of the Nez Perce War of 1877. The railroad that opened in 1909 to carry settler wheat across the plateau named for the plant the Nez Perce once harvested carried no camas. The Nez Perce, mentioned in the records of the Camas Prairie Railroad construction era, appear as they appear in the records of every American infrastructure project built on land taken under a legal status settled before construction began, not as an entity benefiting from what that construction produced. The opening of the Camas Prairie Railroad to traffic in 1909 confirmed that what the construction crews had built in the canyon met specification.

The first loaded grain trains, descending from the plateau to Lewiston, crossed the canyon bridges without incident. The bents held, the stringers carried the loads, the caps stayed fixed above the posts. The locomotives, of the Prairie and Consolidation types that marked the early twentieth century, each heavier than anything a railroad worker of 1850 would have known, hauling strings of loaded freight cars down a grade the switchbacks had made operationally complex, crossed the structures the bridge workers had raised in the canyon in the summer of 1908, and the structures did not move in any way that indicated distress. The wheat crops of Camas Prairie began to move.

The farmers who had hauled grain by wagon over the exhausting canyon roads received rail shipping rates no wagon road could match. The plateau towns, Craigmont, Nezperce, Cottonwood, and Grangeville, gained rail connections to the larger commercial network of the Pacific Northwest. The grain elevators that rose beside the station platforms in the plateau towns in the years after the railroad opened were built to handle volumes that only rail could move. The Camas Prairie Railroad, jointly owned by two companies that had not wanted to grant the other first access to the plateau, was moving the traffic both had known the plateau would generate.

The structural condition of the canyon bridges in the years after 1909 was the condition of any timber structure exposed to the climate of a mountain river canyon. The canyon climate at Clearwater heights delivered moisture in four forms: rain in spring and autumn, snow in winter, humidity held in the canyon air by the river below, and runoff from the plateau passing through the side drains every spring and falling as condensation on the timber surfaces year-round. Timber rots if kept in continuous contact with moisture. The rate of rot depends on the species, the dimensions of the structural members, the degree of protection of exposed surfaces by paint or preservative treatments, and the extent to which water drains away from the bearing surfaces rather than pooling at the points where structural members meet their bearings.

Douglas fir resists rot better than many softwoods. Old-growth Douglas fir, with its dense, slow-grown cellular structure, resists rot better than Douglas fir grown in second-growth forests. The Clearwater Canyon bridges were built of old-growth Douglas fir from the Idaho forests of 1908. That material had structural advantages that faded over time as the old-growth forests were cut, and could not be replaced by the second-growth trees that succeeded them.

The bridges required maintenance from their first year: painting and preservative treatment of exposed surfaces, inspection of pile heads and footing areas where moisture concentrated, replacement of members that had deteriorated past their load-bearing limits before the weight of trains revealed it in the worst possible way. The maintenance the canyon timber bridges required was not a secondary option. It was a necessity for the bridge structure to continue performing the purpose for which it had been built. Who would undertake that maintenance on the Camas Prairie Railroad was the dilemma the joint ownership agreement between the Northern Pacific and the Union Pacific had not settled in a way that made the answer easy.

The Northern Pacific, in the years after 1909, regarded the Camas Prairie Railroad as a revenue-producing asset and a capital expense center. The Union Pacific regarded the same railroad the same way. Both railroads received 50 percent of the operating revenues. Both railroads were committed to paying 50 percent of the capital expenditures required to maintain the line.

The commitment was not the problem. The problem was the sequence of action. When a bridge in the canyon section required major maintenance expenditure, the question of who would raise the spending request and who would approve it first entered the joint management structure of the subsidiary and encountered the usual negotiation dynamics of two parties with equal votes and conflicting underlying interests. Each company preferred that the other acknowledge the maintenance need first, because acknowledging it first carried an implicit burden of identifying a problem in infrastructure both owned.

Each railroad’s engineering staff evaluated bridge condition and reported to their parent company management. When the two evaluations agreed, the spending process went forward. When they diverged, when Northern Pacific engineers rated a structure as requiring immediate attention while Union Pacific engineers rated it serviceable, the disagreement had to be resolved through the joint board, whose equal representation meant a disagreement could only be resolved by one party conceding a position it had committed to in advance. The timber bridges of Clearwater Canyon did not care about the organizational dynamics of the joint board.

The moisture in the canyon kept working on the timber. The freeze-thaw cycles of the Idaho winter kept cracking the structural members. The grain trains kept crossing. Replacing the timber bridges with earth fills or steel structures was the ultimate solution to both the maintenance and the organizational problems.

Earth fills required no maintenance beyond that of the track surface on top of them. A steel bridge deteriorated more slowly than timber and by different mechanisms. The capital cost of replacement was larger, larger than the maintenance cost the timber structure required in any single year, but smaller when compared to the accumulated maintenance costs over the remaining lifespan of the timber structure the replacement would eliminate. The railroad engineering staffs understood this calculation.

The financial officers of the railroads understood it as well. The question was always timing, funding, and, in the case of the Camas Prairie Railroad, the additional question of who would pay their 50 percent share first. The program of canyon bridge replacement proceeded in stages through the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Some structures were filled with earth.

Approach bridges where the track crossed a side drain at a height that could be handled by fill, rather than requiring a permanent bridge. Other locations required steel replacement structures where the depth of the crossing made fill impractical. The timber bridges that were filled ceased to exist as structures when the fill covered them. The timber of the bents and stringers remained inside the fill, rotting at the rate imposed by buried moisture conditions, and no longer a maintenance concern because it was no longer a structure.

The fill was permanent. The men who built those bents inside the fill were not. The Camas Prairie Railroad continued to operate through the mid-twentieth century under the joint ownership structure established in the early years of the century. Its traffic changed with the changing agricultural economy of the plateau.

Wheat remained the staple commodity. Lentils, becoming an important crop on Camas Prairie in the mid-twentieth century, added to the agricultural tonnage. Timber from mills in the canyon and plateau communities moved over the line. The switchback operation on the climb from Lewiston remained an operational efficiency obstacle for the entire service life of the line.

A train that stopped and reversed direction several times on the climb from the river to the plateau required more time and more crew hours than a train climbing on continuous track, and the cost of operating the switchbacks was a cost the railroad bore on every trip, in every season, for as long as the line operated. The Northern Pacific merged into the Burlington Northern in 1970. The Union Pacific remained the Union Pacific. The Camas Prairie Railroad continued as a jointly owned subsidiary for a time after the corporate entity of the Northern Pacific had ceased to exist, with the Burlington Northern inheriting the Northern Pacific’s 50 percent share.

The line was ultimately rationalized through the changes in railroad corporate structure produced by the 1970s and 1980s in the American railroad industry, when mergers and line abandonments consolidated the system and eliminated routes whose traffic volumes no longer justified their maintenance costs. The timber bridges built by the bridge workers of Clearwater Canyon in the summer of 1908 were, by the time the operating history of the line reached the late twentieth century, no longer the timber bridges of 1908. They had been replaced in succession over the preceding decades. First by fill, then by more durable structures.

Each replacement had been funded through the joint maintenance negotiations of the parent companies, each with a 50 percent commitment, each preferring the other to acknowledge the need first. Some of the original timber remained inside the earth fills. Some of the original bents were dismantled when the structures were condemned and replaced. The canyon that required the bridges in 1908 remained unchanged.

The canyon walls still rise more than a thousand feet above the Clearwater River. The river still runs fast and cold below. The side streams still cut their way from the plateau through their own canyon systems to join the main canyon at the points where the railroad track had to cross them. If you drive south from Lewiston on Highway 12 and follow the Clearwater upstream into the canyon, you are following the approximate route of the railroad that the Camas Prairie construction crews carved into the canyon wall in 1907 and 1908.

The canyon is narrow. The highway runs along the river on one side, and the railroad right-of-way, where it still exists, runs on the other side or above it on the canyon wall. At the points where the original timber bridges crossed the side streams, you can in some cases see the structures that replaced them, steel bridges or concrete structures carrying the track across the stream at the height the switchback grade required when it reached that point. The canyon today is the canyon of 1908.

The rock is the same, the river is the same, the gradient of the side streams is the same, and the height above the stream floor at which the railroad grade holds each crossing is the same number it was when the bridge workers set the bents in the summer of 1908. The mathematics of mountain railroad engineering does not change with the century. What changed was the material of the structures. The Douglas fir the bridge worker was fastening with wooden pegs in the summer of 1908 is not in the structures carrying the railroad across the canyon today.

The forest that produced that timber in the Idaho mountains above the construction site in 1908 is not the forest standing there now, not in the form of old-growth Douglas fir of the dimensions construction required. Dimensions that had taken two to three centuries to produce, removed by logging in the following decades from the Idaho forests in a fraction of that time. The Italian workers who came through the padroni appear in the payroll records at the level the contracting system recorded: as numbers of men, as total crew sizes, as amounts paid to the contractor who employed them. Their individual names entered the records in many cases only to the extent the padrone’s accounting preserved them, and the padrone’s accounting was organized around his own revenue, not around the identities of the men he employed.

The Greek and Japanese workers appear in the records at whatever level of detail the Camas Prairie Railroad payroll accounting maintained for classes hired through labor contractors versus classes hired directly. The Nez Perce, whose land the railroad crossed, who were displaced from the camas grounds and the plateau the railroad served, are not in the payroll records of the Camas Prairie Railroad construction. They are in the records of the land cessions that preceded the settlement that preceded the agricultural economy the railroad was built to serve. The sequence is clear in the records.

What precedes does not appear in the records that follow. The National Register of Historic Places contains entries for structures associated with the Camas Prairie Railroad. They mention the railroad’s name. They mention the dates.

They mention the engineering significance. The bridge worker who drove the timber pegs in the canyon in the summer of 1908 is not in those entries. The contractor who hired the Italian crew he worked with is not in those entries. The Nez Perce whose plateau the railroad crossed are not in those entries.

The payroll records of the Camas Prairie Railroad, to the extent they survive, are held in the archives of the successor corporations and the institutions that received railroad history collections from the Northern Pacific and Union Pacific lines. Whether those records preserve the names of the individual construction workers below the level of the labor contractor, whether the bridge worker who framed the Clearwater Canyon bridges can be identified by name, is a question the published histories of the Camas Prairie Railroad answer incompletely. The canyon is still there. The river still runs below.

The grade the switchbacks climbed in 1908 is still cut into the canyon wall where the construction crews placed it. The timber bridges that required men to work at height above the drainage floors are structures now built of different materials by different men in a different era. But the drainage crossings are the same, at the same elevations, requiring a bridge at the same level above the same canyon floor, where the same river runs as it ran before any railroad, before any railroad engineer, before any bridge worker came to the canyon with a hammer and a wooden peg and a Douglas fir bent, to seat it into a structure he would never name and would never be named by. The timber is gone.

The men who cut it are gone. The canyon keeps neither.