Through New Ontario on a “Jigger”

Through New Ontario on a “Jigger”

By Richard A. Haste.

From The Wide World Magazine  1908. Vol. xxi.—21.

Originally published in 2 parts

Digitized by Doug Frizzle, October 2017 for Stillwoods.Blogspot.Ca

A Railway Tricycle or "Jigger"

An account of an unconventional trip over the new Canadian Northern Railroad, which runs for five hundred miles through what is practically an uninhabited wilderness—a country of magnificent lakes, mountains, and forests, and one of the finest game reserves on the face of the earth.

NEW ONTARIO is the name applied to that portion of King Edward’s dominions lying north and west of Lake Superior, east of Manitoba, and south of Kewatin. It is a region of rivers and lakes and granite hills, wild and picturesque—the haunt of moose and elk a

nd deer. Here, too, are found the large timber wolf and the black bear; while along the creeks of the remoter forests the beaver still builds his home. The region contains workable veins of gold and silver, and is supposed to harbour vast deposits of iron ore; moreover, it is rich in historic incident, for from Lake Superior to Lake Winnipeg lay the route of the Voyageurs and the Courier des Bois of the North.

I had promised myself a canoe trip from Grand Portage, where the international boundary line dips into Lake Superior, to the Lake of the Woods, along the very course blazed by these men of iron. But for one reason and another I had been unable to fulfil the promise. So when, in the summer of 1892, I was asked to secure a photographer and make the trip from Winnipeg to Port Arthur on a “jigger,” over the then new line of the Canadian Northern Railroad, I readily accepted the commission.

This was not exactly the expedition of my dreams. The birch canoe had vanished, and in its place stood the “jigger.” Instead of the broad lakes and winding rivers set with rapids, there were the parallel lines of steel. And a photographer, with tripod and camera, was to take the place of the silent Indian guide. There was, however, one saving circumstance— the railroad line conformed, as closely as a rail­road line can conform, to the Dawson Road, and that did not depart much from the route of the old Voyageurs.

Although the last spike had been driven, the railroad line had not been opened to general traffic—no regular trains were running. The five hundred miles lay mostly through the heart of an uninhabited wilderness. I was to take a camping outfit and do the distance by easy stages, making side excursions to points of interest along the line as my fancy or inclination might suggest.

A “jigger,” in railroad parlance, is a tricycle made to run on the rails when propelled by human power. It is an innocent-looking machine, and most deceiving.

Only one jigger being available, it was fitted with a double seat, and a tray to accom­modate a tent, a “war bag,” and the photographic outfit. Stillwell, the photographer I had engaged, looked the affair over as it was brought from the shops, and asked if I had had any experience with jiggers. When assured that I was as innocent as a tadpole so far as jiggers were concerned he made no comment, but went back to his hotel. We were to start the next morning, but in the morning he was ill —too ill to go. I had my suspicions then, but they were not confirmed until later. That man was not ill; he had crossed the Rockies on a jigger, and he knew the breed. He knew that a bucking broncho can’t be more vicious than an overloaded jigger.

Obviously the expedition could not proceed without a photographer. I appealed to the traffic manager.

Yes, he knew of a first-class photographer— an artist, a man by the name of Forde, living in Port Arthur, at the other end of the line.

“Wait a minute.” He touched a button and the chief clerk appeared.

“Mr. Cooper, is there a special coming West this week?”

“Yes, sir; the general superintendent is expected here on Friday.”

“Wire Forde, Port Arthur, to take first train and meet Mr. Haste at Warroad. Bring complete photographic outfit.” Then, turning to me, he continued: “You can make the run to Warroad alone. There isn’t much to photo­graph between here and there, anyway.”

It was one o’clock in the afternoon when, having loaded my camp-kit and supplies, I moved gaily out of the yards at Winnipeg, across the bridge to St. Boniface, and struck boldly to the south-east over twin lines of steel that led without a curve or a break to the verge of the horizon.

I had scarcely left the outskirts of the city, with its fringe of new-built shacks, when my troubles began.

A strong wind was blowing from the south. Now a jigger is as sensitive to atmospheric movements as an unladen birch-bark canoe; but there the similarity ends. I worked and pumped and perspired, but scarcely held my own. Whenever I stopped for breath the thing would try and sneak back home. I urged and coaxed it, swore internal oaths, and then got off and led the beast with a rope. For three immortal hours I counted the ties and cursed the fiend who invented the infernal machine. And then the wind veered to the west. My load suddenly became light, my tow-line hung slack, and soon the jigger was nipping at my heels. I took the hint, got aboard, and during the next three hours reeled off thirty miles of flat prairie.

In the midst of a grassy reach I passed St. Anne, the hithermost outpost of the Red River Settlement, calmly basking in the sun, much as it was eighty years ago when the foundations of its solitary church were laid, and when the chimes in the single tower broke the primeval silence of earth and sky.

On an open plot within a mile of the forest, that extends in an unbroken reach of two thousand miles to the Atlantic, I made my first camp. My hands were blistered and my muscles sore. I was a physical wreck, but I was happy. I had had my first encounter with a jigger, and was alive to tell the story.

Supper! Was there ever such bacon and fried potatoes? And the coffee! He who has known life and fatigue in the wilderness will understand.

I pitched my tent, spread my blanket, and was soon fast asleep.

At midnight or thereabout I was awakened by a most diabolical serenade. Confused barkings, as of a disturbed kennel of a hundred curs; staccato yelps, ending in screams of rage like the cry of an angry child; doleful howls, long-drawn-out to a weird wail, changing into outbursts of demoniac laughter, seemed to come from every side. There would be absolute silence for half a minute, when a single whimper would set the whole chorus off again.

To admit that the hair on my neck began to creep is to admit nothing unusual under the circumstances. I cautiously opened the flap of the tent and peered out. There, in the light of a waning moon, sat my entertainers—coyotes. I could count only four; there were probably as many more on the other side of the tent, but, had I not relied on the witness of my own eyes, I should have sworn there were forty. For full fifteen minutes I watched them at their antics; the show was well worth the price of admission. I had no gun, and would not have used one if I had. At last I stepped before the curtain, thanked them for the entertainment, and bade them begone. They respected my feelings and vanished instantly. Nor did they return, so far as I know. Later in the night I fancied I heard a sniffing about the tent, but that may have been imagination or the wind. The east was red when I awoke, sore and stiff, to another day. A piece of bacon rind I had left on the outside was gone, and my frying-pan had travelled some distance. There were no other traces of my nocturnal visitors.

Before the sun was up I was on the road, and the click-clack, click-clack of the jigger wheels indicated a pace of ten miles an hour. At that rate I could cover the sixty-seven miles to Warroad with comparative ease before night. There was no wind, but I soon began to feel the drag of an up-grade. The railroad was leaving the bed of ancient Lake Agassiz and rising to the level of the Lake of the Woods. I had left the great Western plains and was enter­ing the forest that extends unbroken from Kewatin to Labrador. Open pine “barrens,” warm in the sun, dark swamps, dank and fragrant with moss and balsam, and ridges of upland covered with poplar and silver birch lined the narrow lane through which I urged my now obedient jigger.

A noonday meal with red raspberries for desert, and a delicious rest amid the soothing silence of an abandoned tie camp, made me forget the toil of the previous day. A leisurely run of four hours through a tangle of sweet-smelling woods brought me to the station at Warroad in time for supper.

Warroad is an American village. The railroad in passing around the foot of the Lake of the Woods is compelled to traverse some fifty miles of the State of Minnesota. The town site is on the lake at the mouth of Warroad River, where there is a natural harbour, recently improved by the expenditure of a forty-thousand-dollar United States Government appropriation.

Warroad has ambitions. It is the only “seaport” on the American side of the Lake of the Woods. And as Mr. Moody, the enthusiastic father of the town, assured me, it occupies the same strategic position in regard to the Canadian North-West that Chicago does to the north-west of the United States.

The name Warroad had its origin in a great event of Indian history.

Before the advent of the white man the lake country of New Ontario and what is now the northern part of Minnesota was the choice hunting-ground of the Chippewas. The woods were full of game, the lakes were full of fish. Moreover, this favoured region was within easy striking distance of the buffalo-covered plains of the Red River. These hunting-grounds the Sioux—the Arabs of the Western plains—had long coveted. With commanding strategy they planned to seize the Lake of the Woods, it being the key to the vast interior region reached by the network of streams and lakes of which Rainy River is the outlet.

The Chippewas, learning of the proposed invasion, determined to force the fight on their own ground. Selecting a position on a river that flowed into the south-west extremity of the lake and directly across the trail which the enemy must take, they erected fortifications and then awaited the approach of the invaders. From this place of ambush to their base on the lake they opened up a broad road to be used in case of retreat. The battle which ensued raged for six days. The invaders were defeated with great slaughter. Five hundred scalps were taken, and for ever after the Chippewas were left in peaceful possession of their lands. The trail along the river from the lake to the battle-ground became known as the War Trail—in English the War Road, after which the river and the town are named.

There is a legend of an ancient chief, not many years dead, who for nearly a hundred years made annual pilgrimages over the War Trail from the Indian village on the lake to the battle-ground, and there, fasting for six days, he fought over again and again this last great battle of his people with their fierce enemy the Sioux.

The Lake of the Woods has a history. It has figured in more treaty stipulations and diplo­matic correspondence than any other portion of our international boundary.

It is not generally known that long before the era of national expansion which opened with the purchase of Alaska—in fact, from the very inception of the original confederation, of States —the United States possessed a section of noncontiguous territory north of the forty-ninth parallel—a territory that could be reached only by passing over foreign soil. This territory is included in what has become known as the North-West Angle.

In the treaty of 1873, wherein Great Britain acknowledged the independence of the United States, it was stipulated that the northern boundary should follow the Great Lakes and the water communications from Lake Superior to the most north-west point of the Lake of the Woods—and thence west to the Mississippi River. This provision was based upon the assumption that the waters from the Lake of the Woods flowed east into Superior, and that the source of the Mississippi was north and west of the “most north-west point” of the Lake of the Woods. This clause, calling for at least one impossible boundary line, opened a veritable Pandora’s box of diplomatic controversy.

The purchase of Louisiana by extending the western boundary line of the United States to the “Stony Mountains,” and the subsequent determination of the source of the Mississippi, simplified to some extent this mathematical puzzle. The forty-ninth parallel was accepted as the dividing line between the possessions of Great Britain and the United States west from the Lake of the Woods to the “Stony Mountains.” But the most north-west point of the Lake of the Woods, the starting base, was found to be about twenty-four degrees north of the agreed parallel. To make the boundary continuous, therefore, it was necessary to provide by treaty that from the most north-west point of the Lake of the Woods a line drawn south to an intersection with the forty-ninth parallel should form the connecting link. Such was the origin of the North-West Angle.

A glance at the map will show the inter­national boundary line extending from the mouth of Rainy River in a north-westerly direction across the southern lobe of the Lake of the Woods to the head of a bay supposed to be the most north-west point of the lake. From here a north and south line intersects the forty-ninth parallel somewhere in the open lake about five miles from shore. This is not the end, but the beginning of the practical complications. This line cuts off and gives to the United States a peninsula containing one hundred and fifty square miles, the only territory of the original domain north of the forty ninth parallel.

On my arrival at Warroad I fell in with a corps of United States surveyors on their way to the North-West Angle, to examine and correct the recent Government surveys of that isolated bailiwick. They were waiting for their canoes and I was waiting for Forde. Why not employ the interim in visiting this historical territory— this piece of the earth’s surface that had been honoured by a distinct clause in nearly a dozen treaties and conventions?

The first difficulty encountered was one of transportation. There were thirty miles of lake to cross, and the only seaworthy craft in the village belonged to a half-breed fisherman, but his shanty was locked and his dog had not been seen on the steps of Big Pete’s saloon since early morning. He might come back and he might not, we were told; he was often away for days. Next morning the hut was still locked and the dog was not sitting guard at Big Pete’s. A brisk wind was blowing from the south-east. There was no time to lose, so we “commandeered” the boat and in ten minutes were out of the harbour. The boat was a thirty-foot, flat-bottomed craft with a centre-board and an abundant spread of canvas. We hoisted every stitch, perched ourselves on the gunwale, and struck out boldly across the “Grand Traverse.” The wind held strong, and before noon we had rounded the eastern elbow of American territory, entered the bay, and were at the hub of the universe—the North-West Angle. All about us was a low swamp, with here and there low islands covered with green caps of spruce and poplar. Here we found the ruins of an old dock, built to accommodate the line of steamers that was to form one of the connecting links in the Dawson Road, the first line of commercial communications between Lake Superior and the Red River Settlement. Here also are the remains of a one-time flourishing Hudson Bay Company’s trading post.

Why so much diplomatic ink was spilled over a few square miles of sand ridges and tamarack swamps, interspersed with low marshes, is explainable only when we remember that those wily diplomats knew less of the physical features of the country about which they were contending than they did about the canals of Mars. The whole one hundred and fifty square miles contained within the North-West Angle is worthless, and interesting only as a geographical curiosity.

Fortunately for us, the wind had changed, and under a fair breeze from the north we left the bay, rounded the peninsula, and headed for Buffalo Point, on the south-west shore of the lake. This point, lying mostly in Manitoba, is high and well wooded. It figures in early history as the place where Verandrye built a fort and established a trading post in 1732. The post was abandoned in 1763, but was known among subsequent fur-traders as “the Old French Fort.” It is now occupied as a reserve by the Powawasson Indians.

It was nearly sundown when we reached Buffalo Point. I should have enjoyed a day instead of half an hour in this historic spot; but twelve miles of wind-lashed water lay between us and the reed-grown harbour at Warroad. We could scarcely expect to reach it before dark—and there were no harbour lights. It was half-past nine when, under a single fore-sail, running before the wind, we struck and threaded the channel and tied up at the little dock. The shanty was dark—French Louis had not returned.

I found a telegram awaiting me, stating that the “special” would not come West until the next Tuesday.

I had become convinced that my jigger, in its most amiable moods, would not carry double without protest. Fifty-four miles farther on was the town of Rainy River, a divisional point, where I fancied it might be possible to obtain another jigger. I concluded to make the run to that place, and intercept Forde as he came through.

The railroad from Warroad east to Rainy River, where it crosses into Canada, traverses a low, level country which was once a part of the lake bed. It rises gradually to the south, and merges into those immense muskeg swamps adjacent to the source of the Mississippi River.

Evidences of the homesteader were on every hand. New board shanties and line fences showed that the American pioneer had followed the steel rails into this wilderness and staked out his claim under the free land laws of the Government.

Although it was scarcely seven o’clock when I started out, I passed groups of berry-pickers— Indian women and children, shy as rabbits, but more curious. An invitation to ride was accepted by a young squaw amid whispered protests and vigorous pantomime on the part of the family, who no doubt took me for an up-to-date Lochinvar seeking the hand of their fair Ellen. A half-mile spin was enough for the young lady, who, in good English, asked to be put down. For this daughter of the wild it was an experience—an experience that would make her the object of special interest in her world for a day. She had been for a brief time an integral part of the “white man’s burden.”

It was three o’clock in the afternoon when I crossed the international bridge and side-tracked myself at the station. Rainy River is a new town, with its streets recently cut through the hardwood forest. Although on Canadian soil the town is decidedly American. It is full of ambition and the smell of pine lumber. I asked for an hotel and was directed to an unfinished building on the edge of the woods. The rooms had been lathed but not plastered. To afford some degree of privacy, paper had been tacked on to the laths. My request for a room with a private bath being ignored, I took my bath in a bowl.

The Indian is much in evidence in the vicinity of Rainy River. On the American side Baudette is in a reservation occupied by the Chippewas, and reserves, as they are called in Canada, occupy the choicest locations along the lakes and rivers.

The influence of the fur-trader and the mission schools have had a marked effect upon the Ontario Indians. They have to a large extent adopted modern dress, and many of the young men can be found at work in the sawmills and as river-drivers. The women, too, manage to keep step with their lords in this march toward civilized appearances. I have seen moccasined feet peeping from beneath the folds of velvet gowns of royal purple. On the bank of Rainy River I came upon a com­munity of wigwams and tepees. About an open fire crouched three old hags, filthy and hideous. But in the door of a tepee not ten feet away stood a young squaw—perhaps a daughter of one of the hags—doing her hair with a curling-iron. The humour of the occa­sion appealed to me, and I paused to watch the process. The dusky Juliet, as if appreciating the incongruity of the situation, gave me a sheepish smile and hid away the implement of civilized vanity.

My first view of Fort Francis, at the head of Rainy River, was of two white buildings against a background of green — the Hudson Bay Company’s post (since burned), standing on the bluff at the head of the last long reach of the river.

Fort Francis is beautifully situated. On the east is Rainy Lake, studded with islands. Then come two miles of beautiful water, half lake, half river, and then the falls boiling and seething at the very feet of the town. To the west, and forty feet below the plateau on which the town stands, is a four-mile sweep of river. To the north for three thousand miles stretches the unsurveyed wilderness.

Immediately across the falls from Fort Francis is the American town, Kouchiching. A more ambitious little hamlet of five hundred souls one must go far to find—and a more wicked one. Here, a hundred years ago, the American Fur Company, the institution that laid the foundation of the Astor fortunes, maintained a post and competed with the Hudson Bay factory across the river for the goodwill of the Indians and the fur trade of the Rainy River district.

For a number of years Kouchiching has had dreams of railroads and future greatness. The railroad dreams are about to be realized, for within a year from this writing two railroads —one from Duluth, another from St. Paul—are likely to have their northern termini at this place with the romantic name—a name which the United States Post Office has changed to International Falls. Notwithstanding the official edict, the original name, with its barbarous grouping of vowels, still stands and will remain.

When the “special” at last arrived, a man with a close-cropped beard and a photographic outfit got out of the superintendent’s private car. It was Forde, my promised photographer. I had secured a requisition for another jigger. Armed with this order, I confiscated one in the possession of a party of linemen, much to their disgust.

“I don’t know how we shall get along, but orders is orders,” was the only comment of the foreman as he delivered over the machine.

It was 1:30 p.m. when the “jigger special,” in two sections, was ready to move. I tried my best to thrust upon Forde the honour of lead­ing, but he modestly, respectfully, though firmly declined. The reason became clear as we pro­ceeded. My neck was of less importance to him than his precious instruments. If one jigger was to be sacrificed in a head end collision with a construction train or a “wild” engine, I was to offer that sacrifice in order that the Kodaks and plates might be saved. I regarded this view of comparative values as most uncomplimentary to me, as well as indicating an abnormal selfishness in Forde.

(To be concluded. End of part 1) (Link to part 2)

Neglected Railway Centenary

A Neglected Railway Centenary

From The Advance Advocate, published by The International Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Detroit, Mich., October 1, 1913  No. 10  VOL. XXII

 

We have been busy of late in celebrating the memory of many events of import­ance in the world’s history, from the birth of great men to the development of great industries. Curiously enough, we seem to have overlooked one event, whose centenary occurs this year, and which was surely second to none in its influence on the development of our civilization. Just one hundred years ago, we are reminded by Railway and Locomotive Engineering (New York, August), the first locomotive to do regular train-hauling was set at work, and we might very properly, therefore, have celebrated in 1913 the centenary of the steam locomotive—if we had not forgotten all about it. Is it possible that the re­cent development of electric traction has caused us to think of steam as a back number? Nobody dreams now of celebrating the invention of the ox-cart, or even of the buggy. Have we come to think of steam-traction also as old-fashioned before it is respectably of age? Says a writer in the paper named above:

“The invention of the locomotive engine, whose successful operation first imparted vitality to railway enterprise, can scarcely be said to belong to one nation, certainly not to one man. The elements which made the locomotive a successful machine have been devised and applied by a great many different inventors and mechanics. The idea of applying steam to the propulsion of land-carriages was discussed in dilet­tante fashion by the philosophers who flour­ished so vaingloriously toward the end of the French monarchy. Some small fruit came from much wordy seed, for about the year 1770 an officer of the French army, named Nicholas Jos­eph Cugnot, built a steam-carriage intended for military purposes. The engine used high-pressure steam and had two cylinders receiving steam from a small boiler about the size of a kitchen chaldron. The machine worked and moved about three miles an hour. His invention was the first automobile. The apparatus is preserved in a Paris museum.

“Following details of attempts to construct a land transportation steam-engine, we find that in 1784 William Murdock, an assistant to Boulton & Watt, the engine-builders, made a working model of a road-engine and ran it about the country roads in England. The development of the high-pressure, high-speed engine was largely due to the labors of Oliver Evans, the well-known American inventor. In 1804 Evans built a dredging scow weighing about two tons, which he mounted on wheels and propelled through the streets of Philadelphia by the power of its own steam engine. While many crude attempts were made from Cugnot’s time on to apply steam propulsion to road vehicles, the first attempt to put into operation a steam-driven vehicle which was designed to run on rails was made by Richard Trevithick in 1803. An engine was constructed to do work in this line, and it pulled some cars, but was too complex for regular work and was abandoned after a few trials.

“For the next ten years after Trevithick’s experiment there was considerable effort made to produce a locomotive that would work satisfactorily. Trevithick’s engine was exceedingly slippery, due to the power being too great for the weight available for adhesion. This led to inventions intended to prevent the slipping of the driving wheels, and much ingenious labor was wasted in overcoming this imaginary defect.

 * * *

“There were in the employ of Christopher Blackett, principal owner of the Wylam colliery, in the north of England, two workmen much above the common mechanics, who took a keen interest in mechanical traction. One was William Hedley, superintendent (viewer was his title), a man who studied scientific problems, and the other was Timothy Hackworth, foreman blacksmith. Hedley superintended a series of experiments to prove the extent of traction of wheels turning on a smooth rail, and found that the ordinary weight carried by a locomotive would prevent slipping. He then designed a locomotive, which was built by Hackworth in the blacksmith shop. That engine was put to work in 1812 and hauled coal cars as far as its capacity went, but it proved deficient in boiler. This was remedied in a second engine which Hedley had constructed in 1813. That locomotive was called the ‘Puffing Billy’ and is now preserved in the South Kensington museum in London.

“The ‘Puffing Billy’ was the beginning of a grasshopper type of locomotive, which, under a variety of modifications, became largely used until, in 1829, the directors of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway offered a prize of £500 for a locomotive which would meet certain requirements. The ‘Rocket,’ built by Robert Stephenson, won that prize and introduced a new form of locomotive, whose principal novelty was a multitubular boiler and cylinders set at an angle, connecting with a single pair of driving wheels.

“The success of the ‘Rocket’ turned the attention of locomotive designers to the simplified form of engine, but before that time hundreds of grasshopper locomotives were at work, the coal hauling connected with most collieries having been done by engines of that character, so it is fair to say that Hedley’s locomotive led to the introduction of steam power upon railways. George Stephenson, who was superintendent of a large colliery, copied one of Hedley’s locomotives and began building similar engines, but they never proved so successful as those turned out by Hedley.

“George Stephenson became chief engineer of the Stockton & Darlington railway, the first line opened for general traffic, which gave him prominence in the railway world and afterward led to his appointment to a similar position on the Liverpool & Manchester railway, now a part of the London & Northwestern railway system. He was a strong-minded, positive man and a warm advocate of locomotives at a time when such engines were far from being popular. On that account he came to be called the Father of the Locomotive, although he never invented a single thing that became a permanent attachment to the locomotive. The ‘Rocket’ engine, for whose construction he received much credit, was built by his son, Robert, the most important improvement, the multitubular boiler, having been the invention of Secretary Booth, of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway Company.

* * *

Through the construction of railroads a vast wilderness on the American continent has been changed from gloomy, untrodden forests, dismal swamps, and pathless prairies into the abode of high civilization. The invention of the locomotive engine brought about this magnificent change, so it seems highly commendable that the people of North America should join in a great celebration of the centenary of the locomotive.”

Snaring the Bohunk

Snaring the Bohunk

How the Man-Catchers of the Northwest Lure the Helpless Laborer to Intolerable Conditions in the End-of-Steel Villages

By W. LACEY AMY, Author of “Finding a Railroad Route O’er the Northern Rockies”

From The Advance Advocate, published by The International Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Detroit, Mich., October 1, 1913  No. 10  VOL. XXII

Notes about this article: First, I preserved the spelling, ‘Employes’ as used in this 1913 magazine. This piece took a long time to locate. The search for the writings of Lacey Amy is now in its second year. The original reference to this story was through Google Books, which has many deficiencies for those of us in Canada, supposedly because of copyright issues…The reference located, indicated the publication The Railroad and Current Mechanics, (R&CM) XVII (May, 1913), 274-84. The terrific magazine index at http://www.philsp.com/ appears to indicate there is no such issue!!! An enquiry at the Library of Congress, resulted in Cheryl Adams of LoC, sending the Table of Contents for May 1913 of the magazine Railroad Man’s Magazine, which presumably indicates that R&CM did not yet exist, again!!! Anyhow, by doggedly using Google search, another magazine appeared, Advance Advocate, with the article and Lori B. Bessler, Reference Librarian with Library Archives of Wisconsin Historical Society, kindly supplied a perfect PDF file, yesterday. Some poking around this morning, showed that some of the issues of Advance Advocate are available on the Hathi Trust website, which sadly again has issues with Canada! Finally, the reader should notice the reference on the last line of this post which confounds! Anyhow here is the article:

Doggedly, dully, despondently, a line of weary men winds eastward along the rug­ged tote road that clings to the mountain­side a thousand feet above the tumbling Frazer River.

In the tar-papered, canvas-roofed hos­pital at Fitzhugh the helpless doctors watch the cold hand of pneumonia grip the unresisting foreigner whose dying wish they cannot interpret.

Beside the railway grade a cross of rough boards at the head of a rudely fenced mound bears only the name, “Rob­ert Mathers. U. S. A.”

Beneath the terrible whirlpools and rap­ids of the Frazer Cañon scores of men sleep forgotten and unnamed.

When the order goes out for the lay­ing of steel it is not the cost in men that is reckoned. When a railway cuts and blasts and digs its relentless way through a mountain pass like the Yellowhead of the Northern Canadian Rockies the pay­ment in human lives is the chapter of con­struction that is never unfolded.

Wandering Americans, derelict English­men, Poles, Swedes, Italians, Hungarians, Bulgarians and Russians who have yielded to the temptation of foreign gold, drop from the lists of the living unnoticed and unmourned.

These are the penalties of construction: the uncounted cost of humanity of the de­mands of commerce; the payment in blood for the gain in gold.

That long chapter of the pitilessness of progress in the history of the construction of the Grand Trunk Pacific through the Yellowhead Pass is not the less interesting because it is unwritten. Danger to human life makes absorbing reading; but the contractor cannot be expected to recognize the whims of the public.

That wonderful “system,” the most com­plete in modern life, that entices the bo­hunk—as the laborer is called—into the mountains and keeps him there under the untrammeled control of his taskmasters, is at its highest point of development in the chloroforming of the public.

Its anxiety for privacy is not neces­sarily an acknowledgment of fault—the contractor has too lofty an idea of his share in the advance of civilization for that—but an appreciation of the suffering bohunk, ignorant, unsophisticated, unversed in the ways of the new country, stolid and uncomplaining, as the ideal object for hys­terical sympathy.

The hands of the contractors are too busy with the vagaries of such a man to allow him the added weight of popular sentiment.

Besides, there is that which the con­tractor dare not publish. Even the callous would cry out at the revelation. Truly, the greatness of the system is in its own con­cealment.

Between the contractor and the bohunk is a constant struggle of wits. The first has all the advantage of brains, experience, dol­lars, and the remoteness of the law, but the second stands almost on a level through his disregard for all restraint save the human fist.

At the first stage of negotiations the bohunk is at a disadvantage. The em­ployment agent is willing to promise any­thing. Agents in the eastern provinces and in the United States, who know nothing of conditions, and care less, pocket their commissions and leave the contractor to settle with a disgusted workman.

At Mile 53, B. C., a lump of a youth wandering hungrily around the cookhouse caught my attention. The day before I had noticed his big shock of fair hair and his face unaccustomed to the razor. This day, as I came from a hearty dinner, his hollow eyes and ravenous face spoke plainly of starvation. I spoke to him and, after he had eaten with the avidity of long hunger, controlled only by the embarrassment of novelty, he told me his story—one of a score I heard.

Boy Helpless in Wilderness.

A week before, full of the idea of get­ting into an engineers’ camp on construc­tion as a start to an engineer’s career, he had approached an employment agent in Edmonton.

Of course the agent had just what the boy wanted, and, after the commission had been paid, the boy was shipped into the mountains.

Only as far as Fitzhugh could the young fellow buy his way, and the next seventy miles he covered on foot or bumpers.

When he arrived there was no posi­tion for him; the contractors have nothing to do with the engineers’ camps. The only thing open to him was work on the grade with the foreigners a hundred miles further on in the wilderness, and this he would not accept.

For a day he had wearily watched us coming satisfied from the cookhouse, but there was no way to slip in unnoticed where a man stood at the door and col­lected tickets.

I bought him several meals, and one early morning, just before the uncertain train left for Fitzhugh, he came to my tent and bade me a shaky farewell. He was going to try to steal a ride out.

He would accept no money. He was in a humor that would make him shoot the man who opposed him. I never saw him again. Perhaps the train-agent had pity on him.

The agent in the employment office at Edmonton, Alberta, is the last public step of the system. The door closes on the bohunk as soon as he leaves the front and, with the shutting off of the outside glare, he passes immediately into the clutch of the man-catcher, a trusted employee who is a vital part of the struggle to keep the grade manned.

How Man-Catchers Work.

The man-catcher is a big personality, strong in mind and muscle, a man whose pay-check calls for diplomacy, daring, bluff, and heavy fists.

At the door of the employment office his hand closes on the bohunk and grips until the end of steel is reached. Alone he must handle thousands of lawless, reck­less foreigners. Alone he must watch their every mood, anticipate every moment of repentence, rush them along to the tune of his own wishes, and finally deliver them to the camps far in the mountains.

Back and forth between the work and civilization he flits, bringing in a half hun­dred men today; turning back a half-dozen deserters tomorrow, and rushing out to the front for another gang before the last has made up its slow mind.

Promising, threatening, wheedling, even fighting viciously, he spends every waking hour in the effort to convince the “hunk” that the work of construction is best for his pocket—or his skin. The man-catcher is a strategist first, but always a slugger and bully.

At Mile 28, B. C., the end of steel at that time, a man-catcher unloaded a crowd of foreigners for the grade many miles beyond. Weighted down with the variety of impedimenta affected by the bohunk, they staggered along the rough grade to Mile 44.

Then, tired and disgusted, they de­termined to turn back. The arguments and petitions of the man-catcher had no effect. Thereupon he promptly backed against a rock, drew a revolver, and fired straight into the crowd.

One man took the bullet in his hip—and the rest trudged terrified on to the end of grade.

Sneered at New Victims.

Later an itinerant constable heard of the affair and arrested the man-catcher. He was fined one hundred dollars. It was a cheap gang at that. Only one man-catcher has been fined for carrying a re­volver—just one—and his estate would draw the first week’s wages of a man-catcher without a revolver.

Arrived a couple of miles from the end of steel and the main construction camp where the train dumps its living load, the bohunk is like a stranger in a great city.

The man-catcher has completed his work at that point and is glad to drop the res­ponsibility.

Two hundred foreigners stepped off the train one night there at the far edge of the Rockies. On a siding about forty box cars poured forth their clamoring occu­pants to meet the crowd that climbed doubtfully from the colonist coaches of the train.

There was no word of greeting, no smile of welcome; only a few sneers and gibes and gapes of frank curiosity at the men who willingly undertook to sell them­selves into the life they were living.

Perhaps the old hands were of a different nationality and knew not how to welcome, but it was more like the sophomore criticising the freshmen with­out the restraint of civilization.

The newcomers dropped stiffly from the platforms, looking hesitating about at their future home, blinking feebly at the cynical workmen drawn up, hands in pockets, to laugh at them as they had been laughed at a month or two before.

Inside the Jaws of Death.

Some of them struck up the track for the first empty cars that offered a roof. The rest wandered into the bush beside the track leading to Sand Creek, an end-of-steel village not far away.

It was the first step in “doing as the Romans do.” For the end-of-steel village is the beginning for most of them—as it is the end of many.

An end-of-steel village is a wart on the face of the earth. It is a blemish no doctor treats; it goes on fostering its own corruption until it spreads to the poor bohunk wild for excitement and relief and forgetfulness.

It settles down just three miles from the very end of steel, for the contractor maintains control of that three-mile radius and does his best to keep the men from the baneful influence.

The score of log shacks that form the village extend along an indefinite street and close in on the visiting bohunk after a wink of invitation.

But inside are jaws of death. Pool-rooms are the most respectable of the buildings, and the entire gamut of crime and debauchery is covered, down to the little hut whose red blind is its advertise­ment.

“Free Bunk House” is the sign over the door of a dirty hovel provided in the end- of-steel village by the contractors with the knowledge that the life of drink and car­ousal there is best met by a place close at hand wherein to sleep it off.

Perhaps the bohunk reports for work next day—perhaps he doesn’t. Some of them make their last report with a doped glass in their hands or a knife between their ribs.

Divekeepers Fleece the Bohunks.

In Sand Creek one night a dozen gam­bling hells were drawing their last cents from some bohunks blind with the glare and blare of the excitement.

A crowd surged out from one bright door. It was following a struggling, tearing pair of men—one the proprietor of the place and the other a bohunk.

“It’s such drunks as you put this place on the bum!” shrieked the proprietor.

The sentiment, not the humor of it, caught the crowd and there was a cheer of applause. A group of men ran from the doors of surrounding shacks. There was a sudden furious mix-up in the mob —and the next minute they were tossing to one side the limp body of the foreign workman.

There is no chance for the poor bo­hunk in an end-of-steel village where all the divekeepers club together for their mutual welfare.

The character of the bohunk himself is largely responsible for the dangers of con­struction.

There in the wilds the foreign nature of him maintains its course unimpeded. His instincts bring his own destruction, his resistance to sanitary control makes him his own victim, his carelessness adds daily to the list of dead and injured.

Civilization is too far distant to force him into conformity with its rules. The contractor has not the power, even if he possessed the wish, to incur the opposi­tion of the foreigner to sensible conser­vation.

The bohunk sees no necessity, except under compulsion, of observing anything but his own untamed desires. He sickens, he dies—it is fate, just fate. He kills him­self or his friend—it is not his business except to revenge.

Late one night last summer the engineers at Mile 47 were awakened by agonized cries from the grade below.

Poisoned by Desperate Tramps.

Rushing down, they found a half-clad bohunk lying on the rocks, evidently in the throes of death. With great difficulty they carried him down the five-hundred-foot cliff to the barracks of the provincial police on the banks of the Frazer River.

Two hours later the man died, but he had managed to unfold a tale that was not uncommon in the Yellowhead Pass.

With two unknown companions he had been tramping out to the front. For sup­per that night he had been given a cake by one of his companions. Its bitter taste was remembered when a terrible pain seized him a few minutes later. When he at­tempted to escape along the grade to the barracks his erstwhile friends stripped him of everything but his underclothing.

The murderers were never caught. Among the thousands on construction two foreigners can too easily escape detection—and no questions are asked of the bohunk.

Force is the only arbiter of their quar­rels. The pistol may be less bright than it was years ago and the knife better con­cealed, but both still flash at slight provo­cation.

When the result is fatal none saw it happen or can speak intelligible English. Many an unmarked grave awaits the ran­dom spade of the years to come. Men with wounds of evident pistol or knife origin conceal them so long as they dare, and then receive medical attention in stolid silence.

The law cannot requite them; some day they will be well enough to hold the knife again.

One Sunday morning, on the irregular train between the end-of-steel and Fitzhugh the railway divisional point of the moun­tain section, a big Swede sat sullenly nurs­ing a bandaged hand.

Driven Insane by Wound.

Suddenly he sprang into the aisle and tore up and down in a frenzy of pain that he bad long been fighting. After a fierce struggle we managed to force him into the baggage car and there unbound his swol­len hand.

A long cut on the back of it, evidently the slash of a knife, had been concealed so long that the poison had driven him momentarily insane. From my medicine case I was able to give temporary relief, but only constant bathing kept the man down during that long ten-hours’ trip through the mountains to the Fitzhugh hos­pital over the seventy miles of unballasted railway.

The Swede stubbornly insisted that he had fallen on a piece of glass, but a friend admitted that his antagonist in the fight was in the hospital with a bullet through his chest.

When the knife cut would not heal the wounded man had first applied soap, then a piece of pork, and at length, when the poison was sealed in the wound, peroxide of hydrogen.

Perhaps he recovered. If he did there has probably been another fight since—if the bullet-hole through the chest resulted as fortunately.

Many of the maddest fights can be laid to the account of the horrible concoctions of liquor surreptitiously served in the Pass.

Bad Liquor Smuggled In.

The laws of construction forbid liquor, but that only adds to the profit of the whis­ky runners. Eight dollars a bottle—more than four days’ earnings, after meals are paid for—is not a prohibitive price for the bohunk to pay.

At the end-of-steel villages the liquor is doped with poisons that sap fear and vitality alike.

Police and contractor combine against the whisky runner, but the cry for more is too insistent, the reward of success too great. Baggage is searched, wandering men are questioned, but the discovered liquor is only a small fraction of what reaches cache near the camps.

Lying one night on the shores of a lake beside the grade I was awakened by a sudden noise from the blackness over the water. An instant later another sound came from a different direction and close along the shore beside me.

Then a deep silence fell. It was broken quickly by the rattle and splash of furious rowing out on the lake, answered close at hand by equally energetic paddling.

For some time the course of the chase could be followed by the noise. It was evident the rowers were drawing away from the lone paddler. The pursuer stopped, a revolver shot rang out, but the rowing continued.

Next morning I learned that another load of liquor had succeeded in slipping past a dangerous point on the grade, a favorite watching place of the police where the mountains crowd tightly down to the water’s edge and passage is possible only by the narrow grade or by water.

Eat Dynamite in Bravado.

The whisky runners had taken to the water far back on the grade, and sailing silently before the wind under cover of the darkness, had been revealed to the watch­ing policeman only by an accidental noise.

Within the next five miles they would be forced to the shore by the rapids of the Frazer, and would creep forward to their cache through the forests of the wider valley.

Where foreigners, rocks, dynamite, axes, and cliffs mingle accidents are bound to happen; but the majority of them come from carelessness. Ignorance and famil­iarity are certain to pay a heavy toll to dynamite and rock slide. The worst dyna­mite disaster occurred in the fall of 1911, when a heedless act blew a gang of eight to the big list of fatalities.

The little shacks sunk in the sides of the mountains far from any camp reveal the care of the contractor* in the storing of that which the “rock-hogs” treat as lightly as a stick of candy—a simile all’ the more appropriate since bits of dynamite are sometimes actually eaten in bravado.

The system of construction is itself a menace to the workmen. The actual work of a mile of grade may be divided among a score of little contractors, many of whom perform their portion with the assistance of a few friends or relatives.

A couple of men will dig or blast through a score of feet only, and since their one idea is to make all the profit pos­sible. there exist conditions that insure the minimum of safety.

Trusting to luck, they neglect precau­tions obviously demanded by the work to be performed. Dynamite is carelessly placed, the distance of retirement for the blast is inadequate, and no time is wasted in waiting for unfired charges.

Dirty Quarters Breed Disease.

Into a huge bank that must be removed they' run a weak crib that may crumple like paper beneath the pressure of the earth. Inefficiently housed and fed, they think to profit at the cost of their bodies; and they fall victims to every disease that threatens.

Pneumonia and typhoid fever are fought single-handed by the contractors. The pen­alties exacted by neglect of sanitary pre­cautions never impress themselves on the men. Inconvenience and momentary dis­comfort are more disagreeable to the bohunk than germs.

The dangers of typhoid are preferable to the bore of cleanliness.

The selection of a camp’s location is an important care. A contractor pitches his camp on a dimpling mountain stream, but the. best of conditions are negatived by the carelessness of the bohunk. He dies with­out self-censure, or recovers without a les­son, recklessly spreading the disease among those who realize the danger.

The stream that seemed so permanent when the camp was located may have been but the irregular flow of mountain rains or uncertain glaciers, and the week after­ward the bed may be dry.

Perhaps a mile above the first camp an­other contractor locates, mindful only of his own convenience. Immediately safety ceases for the camp below.

During 1912 the freedom from typhoid was unusual, but the previous two years had their moments when something like a panic seized the workmen. The number of deaths among the engineers in 1910 proved what a general menace the bohunk can be.

Gang Buried in Slide.

Indigenous to mountain construction are snow and rock slides that sweep away grade or tote road with Little warning. Here and there a thunder of rock from the heights above tears down upon these trails of men and blots everything out be­fore it in a smother of debris—and none can tell of the wandering bohunks who went down with the slide.

Five hundred feet below grade in the shadow of Mount Robson a li^ige gouge a hundred feet deep is torn in the op­posite bank of the Frazer River.

A year ago a mountain lake that had nestled thousands of feet up in the moun­tains unknown to the engineers and con­tractors broke through its banks, rushed down upon the grade, swept it smooth to the last shovel, and bored its countless tons of water and rock into the valley a half mile below.

During the rains of the early spring of 1912 a gang of foreigners was trudging in to work. They were warned by workmen they passed that the tote road was danger­ous. and while still within sight, the warn­ing was verified.

The entire gang was caught helpless in the rush of an immense snow-slide. Only one was rescued alive. The rest smothered before they could be released.

It is not the dread of these dangers that drives the bohunk back through the mountains at the end of his first month’s work. Men pass into the shadows of the hills hopeful for the profit of their hands, but their fickleness and instability seldom allow them to remain to the realization of their hopes.

Still hoping, still unsettled, they wander listlessly back to civilization. Ever the stream of weary workers pours out through the Pass, staggering, lifeless, sick of every­thing behind, the victims of their own vacillation.

Scores of Men Disappear.

Through that four hundred miles to Ed­monton they fight their way or drift down to Port George on the river currents; eat­ing when the chance offers; trudging over tote road or grade, or hugging the bump­ers—all to reach that new life ahead that is ever beckoning.

Unprepared they commence the long trek. Trusting to unsettled mountain passes they may walk for days with no more to eat than the berries beside the trail, or drop exhausted to await the mercies of the tramps who follow.

A gang of engineers in rapid travel down to Fort George came upon a lone bohunk wearily making his way out from construction. With more than three hundred miles of manless wilds before him he had but two pounds of rice in his “tur­key”—no gun, no fishing tackle, nothing but a dogged blindness to the future.

Taking what the engineers offered, he sat down to lighten the load by eating to his capacity.

In the cañons and rapids of the Frazer the Goat and Giscom Rapids, and the great canon, that monster of relentless fury—lie the hidden remains of bohunks who have tried this seemingly easy, down-grade escape from construction.

At every log-jam are piled their crude rafts and broken scows, silent testimony of the scores who have disappeared. Any scowman, any laborer along the banks can tell of the sinking men he has helplessly watched.

The contractors have not been guiltless in this easy method of transportation. One of them sent a boat-load of fifty-three through the cañon, a risk that savored so strongly of attempted manslaughter that it is hard to see the humor in the laughing description of how the Italians prayed and the Swedes cursed as the scow began to stand on end in the whirlpools that line the perilous course.

Another contractor, after starting his en­gine. shoved it, with an Indian aboard, into the currents above the cañon. All the In­dian could do was to hang on, and only the fortunate flooding of the engine below the rapids enable him to paddle ashore. The story is invariably ended with the laughing remark, “or the damned thing would have been going yet.”

To run the scows through these river dangers the contractors keep expert river- men and Indians, but even they sometimes fail to clear the great hole of one danger­ous whirlpool or the rocks that, protrude from the boiling waters.

A rude railway has been built around the cañon, and now all the supplies that admit of it are trans-shipped by this method. Those who realize the danger walk around the point that juts out to form the narrow gulch through which the waters rush, and from the cliffs above look down on the scowmen in their struggle for life.

One has caught in his camera the hope­less fight of four Indians, once as they entered the race of water, and next as they were disappearing to their deaths in the whirlpool; but the pictures will never be published.

The chief engineer of construction looked on as his spinning boat, in the charge of two Indians, whirled its freight of supplies into the water while the Indians hung desperately to the ropes as the boat stood on end in the whirlpool.

The treatment of the bohunk far beyond the end of steel will never be fully known. Along steel the contractor realizes the ne­cessity of meeting the ease of desertion and the possible visits of annoying reformers with conditions that make life worth liv­ing.

But far in on grade, away beyond the reach of visitors, where the bohunk in flight from his work takes life in hand, and where detention may be practiced with immunity—there it is different.

The bohunk who struggles out knows not the ropes of publicity, or imagines the life he left characteristic of the country—and is silent. Or he babbles loudly, extrav­agantly, with the imagination of the excit­able foreigner. And the public is non­plused for a moment—and then turns to the latest scandal.

Away in there life is necessarily severe. The conveniences and comforts of steel are impossible, and frequently the com­plaints arc based on our demands from civ­ilization.

One dollar a month is deducted from the men’s wages and, on grade, most of that dollar is profit. There can be no doubt of the imperfections of the service. Suffering men are often treated with scant con­sideration; innumerable instances of this could be given.

In the wilds there has been found a system that is close to peonage; for the men scarcely dare resist the absolute power of the only authority present, and retreat into the wilds is seriously perilous.

But it is easy to blame too harshly. The bohunk is ignorant and careless, conveni­ences are impossible, the law is very far away, and the work must be performed by reluctant workmen.

The railway is blameless. The construc­tion is solely in the hands of the contrac­tors. In fact, the railway company is as sedulously kept in ignorance as is the public.

Blame attaches to the contractors. While not directly responsible for much that merits criticism, they have the power to stop it.

It is the dearth of men, not inherent heartlessness, that is the trouble.

Along that several thousand miles of un­broken mountain and forest six thousand men cannot perform the work of sixty-thousand without some one suffering.

It is little wonder that the methods em­ployed make theorists rave. Only the con­tractor knows that the strictly legal ways of civilization would provide only a big junket for the foreigner of fuse and shovel.

The government of Canada has not been blind to conditions. Commissions, secret and open, have investigated. The reports would make interesting reading. For rea­sons sufficient these reports have not been made public, nor will they be.

Gradually the government is being forced into a position of inspection over construc­tion. The public of Canada and of the United States is being aroused. The Con­sul-General of the United States at Winni­peg has made formal complaint and further announcements are expected in the near future.

And the reckoning will be complete—

Courtesy Railroad and Current Mechanics.