APPENDIX.
Nearly twenty years ago we began to talk of building a railroad across the continent of North America to lie wholly within British territory, and we are still talking about it.
Meantime our cousins have built their inter-oceanic road, and having opened it and run upon it for six years: they are also talking much about their work. But of such things it is, perhaps, better to speak after the work has been accomplished than before it has been begun.
The line which thus connects the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans bears the name of the Union Pacific Railroad. It crosses the continent nearly through the centre of the United States, following, with slight deviation, the 42nd parallel of latitude. Two other lines have been projected south, and one north of this Union Pacific road, all lying within the United States; but all have come to untimely ends, stopping midway in their career across the sandy plains of the West.
There was the Southern Pacific Railroad to follow the 30th parallel; there was the Kansas Pacific line following the Republican valley, and stopping short at the city of Denver in Colorado; and there was the Northern Pacific Railroad, the most ambitious of all the later lines, which, starting from the city of Duluth on the western extremity of Lake Superior, traversed the northern half of the State of Minnesota, crossed the sandy wastes of Dakota, and has just now come heavily to grief at the Big Bend of the Missouri River, on the borders of the “Bad Lands” of the Yellowstone.
In an early chapter of this book it has been remarked that the continent of North America, east of the Rocky Mountains, sloped from south to north. This slope, which is observable from Mexico to the Arctic Ocean, has an important bearing on the practical working of railroad lines across the continent. The Union Pacific road, taken in connexion with the Central Pacific, attains at its maximum elevation an altitude of over 8000 feet above the sea-level, and runs far over 900 miles at an average height of about 4500 feet; the Northern Pacific reaches over 5000 feet, and fully half its projected course lies through a country 3000 to 4000 feet above ocean-level; the line of the Kansas Pacific is still more elevated, and the great plateau of the Colorado River is more than 7000 feet above the sea. Continuing northward, into British territory, the next projected line is that of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and it is with this road that our business chiefly lies in these few pages of Appendix.
The depression, or slope, of the prairie level towards the north continues, with marked regularity, throughout the whole of British America; thus at the 49th parallel (the boundary-line between the United States), the mean elevation of the plains is about 4000 feet. Two hundred and fifty miles north, or in the 53rd parallel, it is about 3000 feet; and 300 miles still farther north, or about the entrance to the Peace River Pass, it has fallen to something like 1700 feet above the sea-level.
But these elevations have reference only to the prairies at the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains. We must now glance at the mountains themselves, which form the real obstacle to inter-oceanic lines of railroad.
It might be inferred from this gradual slope of the plains northwards, that the mountain-ranges followed the same law, and decreased in a corresponding degree after they passed the 49th parallel, but such is not the case; so far from it, they only attain their maximum elevation in 52° N. latitude, where, from an altitude of 16,000 feet, the summits of Mounts Brown and Hooker look down on the fertile plains at the sources of the Saskatchewan River.
As may be supposed, it is only here that the Rocky Mountains present themselves in their grandest form. Rising from a base only 3000 feet above the ocean, their full magnitude strikes at once upon the eye of the beholder; whereas, when looked at in the American States from a standpoint already elevated 6000 or 7000 feet above the sea, and rising only to an altitude of 10,000 or 12,000 feet, they appear insignificant, and the traveller experiences a sense of disappointment as he looks at their peaks thus slightly elevated above the plain. But though the summits of the range increase in height as we go north, the levels of the valleys or passes, decrease in a most remarkable degree.