By Lacey Amy
From The Wide World magazine, Vol. XL, November 1917. Digitized by Doug
Frizzle, October 2014.
When men set
out to drive a railway through virgin territory they find themselves confronted
with all sorts of difficulties and dangers, and almost every mile of the steel
pays a toll of human life. In these absorbing articles Mr. Amy describes the
construction of the Grand Trunk Pacific, the second great transcontinental line
to pierce the Canadian Rockies. The road had to be carried across practically
unknown country, through hundreds of miles of mountains that had never been
named, never even been seen save by a few daring explorers and Indian hunters.
The Author gives us a vivid idea of the human side of this great achievement,
and the countless perils that swelled the casualty lists before the work was
finally accomplished.
FROM Fitzhugh
we slowly and laboriously climbed the Yellowhead
Pass along the Miette River Rockies on the new transcontinental railway, the Grand
Trunk Pacific, then under construction. In front were three cars of “bohunks,”
and at the rear three private cars, one belonging to the Government, one to the
superintendent of the division, the third—an overlong affair for such an
untried railway—contained a canoe, supplies for a month, and the fishing and
hunting outfit of my own little party of three.
That night,
after the engineers and officials had departed on the motor-boat down the
Fraser to inspect an engineering difficulty that was the reason for their
presence, I crept back two miles from the construction camp to the engineers'
camp pitched close to the end-of-steel village for that section of line—Mile
51, as it was termed officially; Sand Creek, as it was called by the citizens
and “bohunks.”
Soon after
darkness fell, in company with an engineer, I clambered down the gravel bank to
the village in search of new experiences. I was not disappointed!
The night life
of the place was only just commencing. “Bohunks” were wandering in by scores
from the end of the street nearest the construction camp, and the “merchants”
were busy hanging out their lamps and extending the word of greeting that would
entice their prey within. As we approached a brightly-lighted “restaurant,” a
small crowd was leisurely gathering before the door. Just as we reached its
edge two madly-fighting men came plunging and staggering out, biting, tearing,
and kicking, in wilderness fighting the vanquished stands a good chance of
never being able to fight again.
There was no
interference from the crowd, and no undue excitement, although it was composed
of the mates of one of the combatants, a “bohunk,” while the other—the owner of
the restaurant—was one of the human vultures who preyed on them all. For a
couple of minutes the pair struggled on the steps of the store, panting,
cursing, trying by every means, fair and foul, to disable one another. Suddenly
the restaurant proprietor heaved his opponent aside, reached swiftly inside the
door, and drew out a piece of wood resembling a rough chair-leg. The “bohunk”
saw his peril too late. With a crash that seemed to be the expression of every
ounce of strength in the wielder’s arms, the heavy club descended on the
“bohunk’s” head, and he sank to the ground without a murmur. The victor merely
shook his disturbed clothing into place, and stepped calmly back into his
store, while the unconscious “bohunk’s” friends carried him silently and
dispassionately across the street to a foul-looking shack with a sign reading,
“Free Bunk House.”
My engineer
friend took me by the arm with a short, nervous laugh and led me away.
“You’ll have
to get used to it,” he warned me, “if you’re going to make the acquaintance of
the end-of-steel village. I’ve seen uglier things than that many a time. To
interfere would be your death, and not a man of the crowd but would say it
served you right.”
Next morning I
wandered down into the village with my camera. Never was there a quieter, more
respectable hamlet. Scarcely a sign of life showed in the streets, and most of
the windows were covered with heavy cloths to exclude the light. Sand Creek, by
day, was asleep—getting ready for the night’s operations. The “bohunks” were
somewhere miles away, yawning over their picks and shovels, but looking forward
to the coming night’s revelry.
A cowboy
cantered up the almost trackless street—a strange sight in the mountains,
hundreds of miles from the nearest ranch. He pulled up beside me, and I learned
that he was one of the cattle contractor’s men, occupied with the care of a
herd of five hundred cattle, which he and his mates had driven in over four
hundred miles of prairie trail and mountain “tote road” to feed the railway
workers.
That night I
determined to obtain a closer acquaintance with the village life. At its
farther end stood one of the usual restaurants, a mere blind for what went on
inside. Mingling in the darkness with a group of “bohunks,” I entered a side
door and found myself in a large room filled with men seated at card-tables. As
inconspicuously as possible, I slid into a chair near the door and looked about
me. For a minute I seemed to be unnoticed. There were a dozen tables in the
room, and the air was already thick with smoke, the abrupt words of men who
must play together though ignorant of one another’s language, harsh laughter,
and the clinking of bottles. The tables were home-made, the cards inconceivably
filthy, and before most of the men stood bottles or tin cups.
A silence had
fallen on the table nearest me, but it was the entrance of the proprietor with
a tray of bottles that seemed to direct general attention to me. I recalled
immediately that whisky was forbidden in the Pass, and no one had yet given me
a passport to the confidence of these men. Low murmurs began to cut off the
loud talk and laughter, and, looking about as carelessly as I could, I noted
that every eye was on me. The proprietor was standing with the loaded tray,
staring at me malignantly. Abruptly he turned and passed back to the unseen
regions whence he had come. Instantly voices were raised in a dozen languages.
Not a man was playing. I began to feel the barometer falling ominously, and
mentally calculated the distance to the door.
From a distant
table a burly “bohunk” rose impetuously and ploughed angrily towards me,
upsetting a couple of chairs on the way. Somehow, even in the menace of the
moment, his movements seemed theatrical, exaggerated. Then I saw that he was a
Pole whose wounded leg I had the day before bound up. With violent
gesticulation and thunderous talk—not a word of which I understood, of
course—he towered over me. The others in the room were adding to the hubbub. In
the midst of it the Pole managed to mutter anxiously, “You go! you go!” Dropping
his hand heavily on my shoulder, he pushed me with seeming roughness to the
door, and a moment later I was out in the dark, only the lights farther up the
street reminding me that I was in uncongenial surroundings.
The next day I
discovered a different atmosphere greeting me throughout the village. Someone—I
suspect the engineer, subtly assisted by the Pole—had spread the word that I
was safe, and the first merchant I met revealed that my mission in the Yellowhead Pass
The
end-of-steel village is, I suppose, known nowhere else in the world except America , and nowhere else in America except where
a railway is cutting its way through untracked wilds. The real end-of-steel
village in all its glory cropped up only along the grade of the Grand Trunk
Pacific. Its predecessor, the Canadian Pacific Railway, was constructed at a
different period in Canadian history, and in the time of the Canadian Northern,
which closely followed the Grand Trunk Pacific, the law had had sufficient
experience to cope with the evil.
As its name
intimates, the end-of-steel village is built at, or near, the “end of steel,”
the phase of railway construction where the rails end for the time being until
the grade ahead is prepared for a further extension. The grade which precedes
the laying of steel advances much more slowly, of course, than the rails
themselves. A stretch of twenty to twenty-five miles of grade may occupy
thousands of men six months—I refer to the work through the Rocky
Mountains—while the steel, when the time comes, will overtake it by modern
methods in a fortnight.
The rails are
laid by a mechanical tracklayer known as the “pioneer.” This consists of a
train that lays its own rails as is advances, sometimes at the rate of three
miles a day.
The “pioneer”
is a crude-looking but really wonderful mechanical invention. The car which
does the major part of the work is at the front of a train on which is carried
every piece of material necessary, from the sleepers to the “shims” that
temporarily level the rails and the spikes that fasten them in place.
With a
sufficient stretch of completed grade ahead of it to justify its operations,
the “pioneer” takes up its work, and when it has overtaken the labouring gang
ahead it lies up for five or six months until another stretch of grade calls it
again into action. Where the “pioneer” rests there springs up the end-of-steel
village.
Somewhere
within a few miles is the construction camp that houses the thousands of
“bohunks” working on the grade—the source of patronage for the village.
Canadian law dictates that the head contractors shall have complete
jurisdiction in wild lands over everything within a mile radius of their camps,
and the end-of-steel village, therefore, establishes itself somewhere as close
to the limits of that area as conditions of water and other surroundings
permit.
Ostensibly
made up of stores or legitimate amusements only, the sales of merchandise are
trifling to the amount of money expended in the village. Three or four general
stores may make a very good living from the sale of boots and clothing, cheap
confectionery, and tobacco, always at extortionate prices; but the score of
other places of business are almost always ‘‘restaurants.” I put the word in
quotation marks because the sale of food is but an advertisement for the front
eighth of the space within. Behind a rough, oil-clothed counter is a limited
array of leathery pies and a few cups for recklessly brewed tea, but the real
business is done farther back.
Sand Creek,
for instance, boasted of three general stores, half-a-dozen announcing the sale
of tobaccos, candies, and “soft” drinks, and twelve “restaurants.” There was
also a bath house—“Larson’s Bath House, Price 50c.,” and later reduced to
twenty-five—but bathing does not figure extensively in the life of the “bohunk,”
and the bath house finally closed through lack of patronage. Larson must have
been an optimist.
The small area
of the shacks devoted to the restaurant business was always backed by a pool or
card room, sometimes by both. In Sand Creek there were eight “pool halls,” the
total number of tables in the village being something like forty. Six of the
restaurants were merely entrances to pool halls, three to card rooms, the other
three were careful to offer no opportunities for examination.
There was one
common offering of every building in an end-of-steel village. Anyone known to the
proprietor, or obviously a “bohunk,” could poison himself with the vilest
alcoholic beverage human ingenuity ever concocted. It was prepared not so much
for deception—the “bohunk” was too experienced to be deceived— but to provide
in the least amount of liquid all the sensations of a glorious “spree.” After
results were immaterial. The “bohunk ” entered the shop, threw down a handful
of money on the counter, and proceeded to incapacitate himself and ruin his
constitution. After a very few glasses, before the stock in hand was seriously
depleted, he was beyond the worries of this life.
At this stage
began the usefulness of the only other structures in the village—the “Free Bunk
Houses." These were Samaritan efforts on the part of the contractors to
sustain the “bohunk” for further work on the grade. There were two in Sand
Creek—mere piles of logs roofed with earth, and fitted inside with straw-covered
bunks. Into these, when the “bohunk" became incapable of imbibing or
paying for more liquor, he was carried by his less helpless mates. Usually he
was in condition to imitate a labourer in the morning, for his interior had
been calloused by a life of such risks. The contractors acknowledged their
inability to deal with the situation in any other way, and the “bohunk” saw no
reason for a change. There was nothing else in all the wide world of his
experience but to spend his money on that which gave him momentary sensations
that seemed pleasant, and nobody was to blame if these sensations were certain
to make a physical wreck of him in a few years.
The appearance
of an end-of-steel village is illuminating as to its character. Simplicity is
the keynote—simplicity meaning neglect of every convenience that it is possible
to do without. Trees grew everywhere in the Yellowhead Pass Rockies
there were three end-of-steel villages of the lawless type—one at Mile 5, five
miles beyond the summit, the next at Mile 29, and the one I knew in its prime,
at Mile 51. Each deserted one stood as it was left, save for the canvas roofs.
Of course
there were end-of-steel villages before the summit was reached, but the mounted
police of the prairie provinces
saw to it that the law was decently observed. At the summit, the boundary of British Columbia , the
jurisdiction of the mounted police ended, and thereafter the end-of-steel
village flourished and grew fat.
The one at
Mile 29 is reputed to have been the worst of the lot. When I was in the Pass it
was still operating, but the business had passed along to Sand Creek, and Mile
29 was dying a slow death. What reason there was for its continued existence
was not apparent its only open trade was with a near-by engineers’ camp, and
with the wandering “bohunk” on his way in or out. Its real trade was
underground, and it died hard. I visited it first on a Sunday afternoon. A
number of young fellows lounged before a store, and a few were tossing a
baseball about the street. A quarter of a mile from its outskirts a lonely
police hut edged the path, an indolent policeman yawning in the doorway as a
memory of days when life was swifter and more exciting.
There was,
however, another village that sprang from a combination of conditions. It was
not, strictly speaking, an end-of-steel village, for it did not owe its origin
to the “pioneer.” But it included every other characteristic to its worst form,
and was sufficiently near to the main construction camp at Mile 53 to provide
counter-attractions to Sand Creek. Indeed, on Saturday nights Sand Creek almost
closed up to move over to Tête Jaune Cache to join in the fun.
Tête Jaune
Cache—pronounced locally “T. John”—was an offspring of the old Indian village
of that name which had been located in the Tête
Jaune Valley ,
between the Rockies and the Selkirks, long
before the coming of the white man. The collection of tepees invited the
advances of the early white man looking for a location whence he could prey on
the “bohunk," and there arose a new village bordering the Indian one. It
was practically a one-night-a-week place. Its “mayoress”—self-appointed, of
course—was a stalwart negress. The village was more than a mile from grade, but
its location on the tote road brought it custom long before the steel arrived,
and the promised coming of the next transcontinental, the Canadian Northern,
close by its doors, gave it reason for continuing in active operation even when
the best trade from the Grand Trunk Pacific had passed.
The weekly
event that drew every “bohunk" almost every human being within ten miles
who could secure the means of getting there—was the Saturday night dance. For
this every conveyance in the camps was called into service, and those who could
not ride started early on foot. The fare by wagon from Sand Creek, only two
miles away, was two dollars, a sum willingly paid by many times the number who
could be accommodated. The female portion of the gathering consisted of the
dance-hall girls and the few other women of the surrounding camps and villages.
There was no class distinction there; now and then even the engineers went. The
affair lasted from eight at night until weariness came with daylight, something
like six o’clock the next morning.
The mistress
of ceremonies was the negress, and her income for the night must have run into
hundreds of dollars from the dancing alone. In addition she ran an open bar and
other things that give such a village its reputation. Usually she was capable
of handling the uproar and riot without more than the consequences to be
expected, but sometimes her art failed.
I heard from a
variety of sources the story of a fight that must have been a record even in
the Yellowhead Pass. McLellan River
One Saturday
night he secured a seat in the Sand Creek rigs and joined the crowd at the Tête
Jaune Cache dance. I suppose his handsome face and easy manner won him any
partner he wished; at any rate, the “bohunks,” egged on by the negress, began
to feel the pangs of jealousy. He was the man to revel in it, recklessly,
laughingly, and revenge came swiftly. Someone sneaked up behind him and banged
him over the head with a weapon too thick for his skull, and he went down
unconscious. In that condition they kicked him out.
The following
Saturday he was on hand again, this time with a powerful engineer friend as
companion. The row commenced early. Then, back to back, the only two “white men”
in the room faced the mob of murderous “bohunks.” Their salvation, counted on
beforehand, was that the very density of the crowd prevented the use of guns,
and they were prepared for anything else. One after another they laid out the
attacking “bohunks” with their fists, both being experienced boxers and
possessed of enough muscle and weight to make one blow sufficient for each
opponent. Against the one or two knives that appeared they used their feet, but
some sense of fair play held back weapons of that kind.
Seeing her
business interfered with, the negress with a scream of rage hurled herself
against the bridge foreman. It seemed that he was waiting for that. He caught
her round the waist, threw his muscles into the heave, and slammed her up
against the board partition at the side of the room. With a crash the whole wall
fell, and in a minute the room was empty save for the two victors and the
groaning negress. The two men trudged home satisfied. The “bohunk” requires his
lesson periodically.
Spite of the
hideous nature of the life they led, the citizens of the end-of-steel village
retained for it a peculiar affection and loyalty, as well as a frank pride in
the notoriety they assisted in winning for it. That it shifted its location
every six months did not lessen the feeling. The proprietor of the largest
store in Sand Creek grew sentimental when recalling past glories and the
imminent completion of the railway. For two years he had been reaping the
inordinate profits of his trade among the “bohunks,” and his little family had
grown and increased since he had come up from a western American town. The big
sign that fronted his store—painted away back in civilization for a store of
more pretentious proportions—was a matter of personal pride to him. Neglecting
no opportunity for augmenting his earnings, he had attached in conspicuous
places about the doorway additional evidences of varied aptitude and offerings,
the laborious products of his own uneducated hand: “Cider,” “Shooting Gallary,”
“Resturant,” “Shoes Repared Here." With kindly pride he begged me to call
upon him for anything I wanted. The limit of his fraternity came when his
little boy brought to the engineers’ camp for me a specially baked blueberry
pie, with the scrawled dedication,
“Four the nu
man. John S—.” But these things happened in the light of day, when the
end-of-steel village was just like any other hamlet of such modest pretensions.
There will
never be another end-of-steel village in Canada worthy of the name. The
smuggling of liquor is now more difficult in a country that has “gone dry”
almost from coast to coast, and Governments have learned that something more
than law enforcement by trust or proxy is necessary where thousands of the most
undisciplined races of the world are shut off from the subduing influence of
civilization and thrown on their own resources. And soon the most lurid
chapters in Canadian development will be but a memory to those well-intentioned
officials who were forced to accept conditions as they found them, as well as
to those few of us from the “outside” who unofficially looked on in the
feverish days that started and ended with one of the greatest works of railway
construction in history.
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