ENGINEER ON THE PRELIMINARY SURVEY
At Sproat's Landing I met an engineer, Mr. B. C. Stewart, who is famous in his profession as the most tireless and intrepid exponent of its difficulties in the Dominion. The young men account it a misfortune to be detailed to go on one of his journeys with him. It is his custom to start out with a blanket, some bacon and meal, and a coffee-pot, and to be gone for weeks, and even for months. There scarcely can have been a hardier Scotchman, one of more simple tastes and requirements, or one possessing in any higher degree the quality called endurance. He has spent years in the mountains of British Columbia, finding and exploring the various passes, the most direct and feasible routes to and from them, the valleys between the ranges, and the characteristics of each section of the country. In a vast country that has not otherwise been one-third explored he has made himself familiar with the full southern half. He has not known what it was to enjoy a home, nor has he seen an apple growing upon a tree in many years. During his long and close-succeeding trips he has run the whole gamut of the adventures incident to the lives of hunters or explorers, suffering hunger, exposure, peril from wild beasts, and all the hair-breadth escapes from frost and storm and flood that Nature unvanquished visits upon those who first brave her depths. Such is the work and such are the men that figure in the foremost preliminaries to railroad building.
Whoever has left the beaten path of travel or gone beyond a well-settled region can form a more or less just estimate of that which one of these professional pioneers encounters in prospecting for a railroad. I had several "tastes," as the Irish express it, of that very Kootenay Valley. I can say conscientiously that I never was in a wilder region. In going only a few yards from the railroad "right of way" the difficulties of an experienced pedestrianism like my own instantly became tremendous. There was a particularly choice spot for fishing at a distance of three-quarters of a mile from Dan Dunn's outfit, and I travelled the road to it half a dozen times. Bunyan would have strengthened the Pilgrim's Progress had he known of such conditions with which to surround his hero. Between rocks the size of a city mansion and unsteady bowlders no larger than a man's head the ground was all but covered. Among this wreckage trees grew in wild abundance, and countless trunks of dead ones lay rotting between them. A jungle as dense as any I ever saw was formed of soft-wood saplings and bushes, so that it was next to impossible to move a yard in any direction. It was out of the question for anyone to see three yards ahead, and there was often no telling when a foot was put down whether it was going through a rotten trunk or upon a spinning bowlder, or whether the black shadows here and there were a foot deep or were the mouths of fissures that reached to China. I fished too long one night, and was obliged to make that journey after dark. After ten minutes crowded with falls and false steps, the task seemed so hopelessly impossible that I could easily have been induced to turn back and risk a night on the rocks at the edge of the tide.
It was after a thorough knowledge of the natural conditions which the railroad men were overcoming that the gradual steps of their progress became most interesting. The first men to follow the engineers, after the specifications have been drawn up and the contracts signed, are the "right-of-way" men. These are partly trail-makers and partly laborers at the heavier work of actually clearing the wilderness for the road-bed. The trail-cutters are guided by the long line of stakes with which the engineers have marked the course the road is to take. The trail-men are sent out to cut what in general parlance would be called a path, over which supplies are to be thereafter carried to the workmen's camps. The path they cut must therefore be sufficiently wide for the passage along it of a mule and his load. As a mule's load will sometimes consist of the framework of a kitchen range, or the end boards of a bedstead, a five-foot swath through the forest is a trail of serviceable width. The trail-cutters fell the trees to right and left, and drag the fallen trunks out of the path as they go along, travelling and working between a mile and two miles each day, and moving their tents and provisions on pack-horses as they advance. They keep reasonably close to the projected line of the railway, but the path they cut is apt to be a winding one that avoids the larger rocks and the smaller ravines. Great distortions, such as hills or gullies, which the railroad must pass through or over, the trail men pay no heed to; neither do the pack-horses, whose tastes are not consulted, and who can cling to a rock at almost any angle, like flies of larger growth. This trail, when finished, leads from the company's storehouse all along the line, and from that storehouse, on the backs of the pack-animals, come all the food and tools and clothing, powder, dynamite, tents, and living utensils, to be used by the workmen, their bosses, and the engineers.
Slowly, behind the trail-cutters, follow the "right-of-way" men. These are axemen also. All that they do is to cut the trees down and drag them out of the way.
It is when the axemen have cleared the right of way that the first view of the railroad in embryo is obtainable. And very queer it looks. It is a wide avenue through the forest, to be sure, yet it is little like any forest drive that we are accustomed to in the realms of civilization.
