The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (28 page)

When winter set in, he set off on snowshoes for New Westminster, a distance of more than four hundred miles, as casually as if he were heading off on a pleasant Sunday hike. He went straight over the top of the glacier-capped Selkirks, seeking a practical pass, and was almost buried by an avalanche en route. New Year’s Day, 1872, found him all alone, in an abandoned trapper’s hut, scrawling in his diary: “I think it … one of the most wretched and dreary places I
ever saw … this was the most wretched New Year’s Day I ever spent.” But he did not find what he was seeking: “I found there was not any practicable pass through the Selkirk Range,” he reported to Sandford Fleming.

When Moberly emerged from the mountains, he had so convinced himself that his route was the only conceivable one that he determined to take it upon himself to push forward immediately locating the actual line through the Howse Pass. He would get permission later – he “never doubted for a moment” that Fleming would see it his way; going to Ottawa to discuss the matter would only be “a useless waste of time.”

He did, indeed, have some communication with his superior, but in his single-mindedness, he misread it. Fleming agreed that a trial line should be run through the Howse Pass, to see if it were at all practicable for a railway. Moberly had already planned something far more ambitious: “a careful location survey,” which is the detailed kind that engineers make when they have finally, through exploration and trial lines, decided on the eventual route. Moberly, who had made the most cursory investigation of the pass from its summit to the Columbia, was hopelessly seduced. He seized on Fleming’s telegram, “which led me to infer that the line I had taken so many years to explore and discover, and which I was quite confident would be the best to adopt for the proposed transcontinental railroad, would be adopted.” He set about hiring extra men, engaging trains of pack animals and buying thousands of dollars worth of supplies, great quantities of which he had cached at Eagle Pass since he reckoned his men would spend two seasons locating the line and would stay out all winter.

Four hours before Moberly and his party were scheduled to leave Victoria for the hinterland, he received a staggering blow. The Lieutenant-Governor, Joseph W. Trutch, whose brother John was a colleague of Moberly’s, had a telegram for him. It was literally the eleventh hour, since Moberly’s boat was scheduled to leave at 3 a.m. Moberly hurried to Carey Castle and tore open the message. His head must have reeled: it was from Fleming, announcing that the Yellow Head Pass had officially been adopted for the route of the Canadian Pacific Railway and that the Howse Pass survey was to be abandoned. He was to move his survey parties north by way of the Athabasca Pass and then take charge of and make a survey through the Yellow Head. All of Moberly’s dreams dissolved at that moment. “His” route was not to be
the
route, after all.

Bitterly disappointed, the surveyor rushed to Portland, Oregon, where he tried to buy his way out of his costly contracts. But most of the supplies had already been dispatched to remote mountain areas where they could never be used. Seven thousand dollars worth were abandoned forever at the Eagle Pass.

There was another problem: Moberly needed to hire pack trains to move men and supplies from the Columbia north to the Athabasca country. It was late in the season; most trains were engaged far in advance when there was a buyer’s market in renting pack animals. If the packers knew of his dilemma they would charge extortionate rates. Moberly would have to outflank the packers, who were moving toward Kinbasket’s Landing at the foot of the Howse Pass, race ahead of them, intercept them and re-engage the horses for the Yellow Head survey before their owners learned about the official change of plans.

He set off, first through Oregon by stagecoach (which broke down) and by steamboat (which sank), and then up through the state of Washington on horseback. He re-entered British Columbia in the Kootenay country, successfully intercepted the packers on the way, hired them all, together with four hundred horses, and then, hacking a trail as he went, reached the Columbia. With a heavy heart, he began moving his survey parties north to the Athabasca country and the despised Yellow Head Pass where Fleming had arranged to meet him on his trip with Grant from ocean to ocean. “Move” is scarcely an adequate verb to describe Moberly’s transit: the pack trail had to be carved, foot by foot, out of the tangle of fallen cedars that barred the way up through the cavernous valleys of the Columbia, Thompson and Albreda rivers.

By early September (election day had come and gone in Canada; Allan had made the fatal pact with Cartier) Moberly had reached the Yellow Head. One day, a few miles west of Jasper House, he came upon some fresh tracks, which the Indians sneered at as those of
Moneasses –
“men of the east.” A short time later, he ran into the Reverend Dr. Grant, “a long stick in his hand, driving some worn-out and very dilapidated pack animals.”

In Grant’s
Ocean to Ocean
there is no hint of the disagreeable encounter that took place that week between the Engineer-in-Chief and his errant British Columbia deputy. Moberly’s “was the first face we had seen since leaving St. Ann’s,” Grant wrote. “To meet him was like re-opening communication with the world.… How welcome he was, we need not say!” That evening Fleming treated the group to a
glass of punch and a cigar. Toasts were drunk to Queen and country and Moberly put Grant in a high good humour because he had some oatmeal and the minister could, for the first time in many days, enjoy a Sunday breakfast of porridge.

Fleming waited until after the Sunday service before his interview with Moberly. The twenty-one men from both sides of the mountains – English, Scots, Irish and Indians – representing every one of the six Canadian provinces, joined in singing Old Hundred. Grant preached a sermon, “not very short, on the plea that the majority of the congregation had not heard a sermon for six months.” Then Moberly made his report to his chief.

The interview must have been a painful one. Fleming was taken aback at the slow progress made on the surveys and by Moberly’s reckless spending. Tons of supplies left forever at Eagle Pass! “It seemed to me as if some country store had been bought out when I first saw the account,” Fleming later recalled. And four hundred pack horses! The chief engineer could not understand the need for so many. At that point his impulse was to fire Moberly. He could not afford to: somebody had to take charge at the Yellow Head and push the surveys forward. But Fleming made no secret of his dissatisfaction.

Moberly’s attitude to Fleming’s verbal spanking was one of disgust, not with himself but with Fleming for his own “unpatriotic action” in abandoning his pet line. To Moberly, the decision to use the other pass was little short of treason. By his own account, he was on the point of leaving the service, “which I should have done there and then had I not known the very critical position my men and animals were in on their way via the Athabasca Pass and how much they relied on me to see them safely through.”

A decade later, the embittered Moberly came very close to suggesting, publicly, that his chief had tried to starve him to death in the Yellow Head by ordering all purchases stopped. “Had such an order ever reached me I should simply not have gone to the Yellow Head Pass, for I would not have taken a number of men into the mountains to starve to death when winter set in.”

As Moberly took his leave of the Fleming party, he was himself plagued by worry over the slow progress of the surveys under his command. Ill fortune seemed to dog his footsteps; the survey parties were taking an unconscionable time to arrive from the Howse Pass. Actually, with Moberly so long gone they had simply settled down to wait out the winter. Moberly got them moving again: it would be
touch and go if they could get through the high Athabasca Pass before the blizzards blocked it and cut them off from their work at the Yellow Head.

Another party, under a veteran British Columbia surveyor, Edward Mohun, had lost six precious weeks because its supplies had unaccountably failed to reach him from Victoria. The men, reduced to a diet of bread and tea, refused to work; the party became disorganized and spent a month and a half hunting game, at a cost of nearly eighty dollars a day in wages. “I can only say,” Moberly wrote in his diary, “there has been some shameful mismanagement somewhere.” Fleming, on discovering the situation, packed Mohun and his men off to Victoria. It later turned out that the purveyor and accountant there – another political appointee – was incompetent. There were drafts on the department for $130,000 and vouchers for less than one-fifth of that amount. Moberly, as the man in charge, took most of the blame.

By this time Fleming had lost all confidence in Moberly. He sent him a message by Indian runner ordering him back to Kamloops. He had changed his mind, he said, about the surveys of the line: Moberly was to place the supplies and pack animals in the charge of another man in whom Moberly later related he had no confidence. Fleming was convinced that this raw tactic would force Moberly to quit the service but his stubborn deputy decided simply to ignore the order and press on with the survey of the Yellow Head come hell or blizzard. His later explanation was that “the instructions conveyed in the letter were too childish to be followed.” He would carry on the work according to his own best judgement and would obey orders “when I could see they were sensible but not otherwise … I went on the survey for business, not to be made a fool of.”

Fleming tried again after the new year. In another message, delivered by half-breed runner, he informed Moberly that Marcus Smith had superseded him and would be in charge of all exploratory surveys in British Columbia. To Moberly “this was joyful news … for I saw the way clear to get out of the distasteful occupation of making useless surveys.” He did some further work for Marcus Smith, who wanted to see if there was a suitable pass up the North Thompson. Moberly reported (one suspects with a certain amount of glee) “an impenetrable wall of rock, snow and ice.” Then he quit the service and left for Ottawa where he was “very coldly received by the Engineer-in-Chief.” He lingered in the capital waiting for Fleming
to sign his expense accounts. Fleming rejected the first audit and passed the accounts on to a second auditor who went over them again. They were passed at last, but not until the frustrated Moberly had been forced to borrow money to pay for his room and board.

Disheartened by his experience, Moberly moved to Winnipeg where, presently, he busied himself at the comparatively prosaic job of building the city’s first sewers. For all of his life he complained bitterly about the treatment he had received at the hands of Fleming. Eventually the railway did go south, as he said it should, but to Moberly’s disgust the railway builders discarded the Howse Pass in favour of the Kicking Horse.

As the years went by Moberly began to insist that he and not the American engineer Major A. B. Rogers had discovered the pass in the Selkirks that bears the latter’s name. But his journal entries, written on the spot in 1865 and 1866, are explicit: neither he nor any of his party saw or explored the Rogers Pass. Still, it became an enduring legend among Canadian engineers, repeated in print as late as 1970, that the damned Yankee had cheated one of their number out of his rightful accolade. Moberly’s vituperation against Rogers grew fiercer as his memory grew dimmer. In 1915 he went so far as to tell his biographer, Noel Robinson, that Rogers had not even gone over the pass until after the railway was built. But it was Moberly who first saw the Rogers Pass from a train window.

There was one triumph, however, of which he could not be deprived. Twenty years after he discovered the Eagle Pass, the last spike of the
CPR
was driven at Craigellachie, almost on the very spot where Moberly, in a moment of clairvoyance, had chalked on a blazed tree his prophecy that the overland railway would have to come that way.

3
Ordeal in the mountains

For Moberly, a surveyor’s life might have been disappointing but it was at least stimulating. For the men under him – axemen, packers, chainmen, levellers, rodmen – it could be pitiless.

One such man, who left a record of his feelings, was Robert M. Rylatt, a former sergeant with the Royal Engineers, who had been hired by Moberly to take charge of the commissariat and pack train
for Party “S” to survey the Howse Pass in the Rockies in the summer of 1871.

Rylatt had won three medals fighting with the Turkish army under Omar Pasha on the Danube and later in the battle of Inkerman during the Crimean war. He arrived in Canada as part of the engineering detachment under Col. R. C. Moody, who laid out New Westminster, the first capital of the new colony of British Columbia. For all of his five years in Canada his wife had been a hopeless invalid and Rylatt badly needed money. Not without misgivings, he signed on for the ordeal of his life.

He was to be gone a year and his description of “the painful hour of parting” is heart-rending: how his wife Jane, rising from her pillow, cried, “Oh, Bob, I shall never see you again”; how he hastened away “fearing each step to hear her cries”; and how, on the steamboat, “as every stroke of the paddles bore me further from her, I felt as if I had ruthlessly abandoned her.”

If Rylatt had known what lay ahead he would never have signed a contract with the Canadian Pacific Survey; but there was no way in which he could quit once he began. He was virtually a prisoner, walled off by a five-hundred-mile barrier of mountain and forest which few men could dare to penetrate alone. The job, he thought, would take a year but Rylatt, who left New Westminster in July of 1871, did not return until June of 1873.

Party “S” was under the charge of E. C. Gillette, an American engineer of good reputation whom Moberly had known for many years. It consisted of four officers, who were surveyors, and sixteen men – mainly axemen – together with eight Mexican and Indian packers and one hunter. The forty-five pack animals carried almost seven tons of food and equipment.