The Timber Wolf at Home

The Timber Wolf at Home

The War between Ranger and Canis Lupus Over the Deer of Algonquin Park

By W. Lacey Amy

Illustrated with Photographs by the Author

From Outing Magazine, 1913, Volume 62

The timber wolf has no squatters’ rights. Untold generations of him have roamed Algonquin Park, in Northern Ontario, without hindrance or con­test of his claims, but for fifteen years the forces of the law have been turned to his dispossession. Through the rigors of that Northern winter a score of de­termined men have only to keep warm and wield the hand of Cain against the wolves that find a tidbit in every thicket of the Park, And wolf-hunting in Al­gonquin Park, less than two hundred miles north of Toronto, is too kingly a sport to justify its reservation for the ranger.

The pleasure of wolf-hunting to the ranger is not in the excitement of the chase, but in the stiffened gray body that lies at his feet. Even the fifteen dollars bounty does not change the wolf from enemy to game. I have seen more joy in the face of a ranger at the sight of a bare shank of poisoned venison that would kill a dozen wolves than when he is rolling up the wolf skin to present for his fifteen dollars. The man who lives where the deer look mildly at him over a nearby shrub is apt to think more of his wards than of the Government check.

In the late fall, before the ice is formed, the rangers make their rounds by canoe, fastening their strychnine-filled venison by nails to the fallen timber on the islands. Later they come periodically in pairs across the ice to ex­amine the bait, traveling their ten to twenty-five miles a day on snowshoes and always watching keenly for the snow-covered mound that means a dead enemy. But in these days the “tricks” of commerce have interfered so much with the potency of the white powder that missing bait without the bodies of the diners rouses the suspicions of the rangers.

One old fellow looked in disgust on his fifth bait cleaned to the bone with­out a dead wolf in sight. Seizing the colored bottle, he emptied into his hand enough of the powder to wipe out the wolf species, dipped his tongue into it, and grunted angrily. “Just as I thought,” he growled. “Alum!” As we were twelve miles from the nearest antidote I gave thanks.

There is need for war on the wolves of Algonquin Park. Around parts of three of its sides extend wild lands where they roam unmolested, and the game protection of that two thousand square miles brings them down in packs that grow little smaller as the years pass. When the shooting season opens around the Park the deer turns at the crack of a rifle or the bay of a hound and makes straight for the haven he has learned to trust. Deer will light their way toward the Park in the face of hunters and dogs with a determination and daring that speaks well for law enforcement there. And once inside the Park a revolver would bring them down in scores.

After the deer comes the timber wolf. During the early part of last winter a ranger, in his trail down the west side of the Park, counted the tracks of fifty-two timber wolves going in and but two leaving. The wolf lives on the deer. One ranger alone found last winter the carcasses of thirty-one deer that had been pulled down. Some of these had been partly eaten, but others had not even been bled. A string of dead deer will mark the track of a pack of wolves that have been killing for the lust of blood. And the pursuit of those that escape seriously interferes with the fecundity of the does.

The danger to man of the timber wolf of the Park is not yet decided. Within reservation years no man has been at­tacked, but that is probably because other food is so plentiful and easy to capture. Even the rangers are learning to respect where they hate. The vis­itor to the lone winter-resort hotel shud­ders at the mention of the wolf and hugs the grate or the bedclothes when the dismal howl comes through the darkness. But until last winter the rangers vied with each other in expressions of con­tempt—even while it was noticeable that not one of them would linger afield when the sun was sinking and the ring­ing yelp came over the neighboring hill. One of the oldest rangers admitted to me that he has never got over the shudder that goes down his back when he hears a wolf, and he has poisoned and shot more wolves than any other ranger in the Park.

Early last winter one of the most scornful of the rangers was induced to alter his opinion. Crossing Lost Dog Lake one late afternoon, he saw three wolves coming rapidly toward him across the ice. Being unarmed, but thinking to give them a scare, he dodged behind some brush on a small island he was passing and awaited their approach. His part of the program went off splen­didly. Just as the wolves were alongside he rushed toward them with a ter­rible yell. But the wolves failed to catch the cue. Instead of running wild­ly away, they stood still and waited.

The ranger’s rush slowed down no­ticeably, and one of the wolves, a huge fellow with a limp ear, sat down with ennui. The rush not only slowed down but swerved aside and made for the nearest shore. And the wolves rose and followed. Every now and then the leader seemed to make up his mind to end the thing right away, but his rush toward the ranger was fortunately al­ways stayed by a variety of shrieks and gesticulations that kept the ingenuity of the ranger hard at work until the shore was reached.

By that time the man had worked up such a respect for the timber wolf that he was undecided whether to climb a tree or risk a dash under the darkening branches for the next lake where his shelter-house was. The wolves were evidently as much afraid of him among the trees as he was of them, and after a long, challenging howl, loped off north­wards.

At any rate, the wolf has proved his delight in frightening man. An em­ployee of the hotel, while fishing through the ice of Cranberry Lake, was witness to the pulling down of a deer by a pack of wolves. Filled with the expressed contempt of the rangers, he succeeded in driving the animals from their prey. But when he set off for the hotel the wolves kept at his heels, and through that mile of bush they were never more than twenty yards away, retreating be­fore him, stopping when he stood still, and rushing on as he dashed away. And it was not the length of the walk that soaked his shirt long before he reached the hotel.

On one of our longer trips, during the time I spent with the rangers in the chase of the wolves, we had taken with us the superintendent’s team of Great Danes. As we lay in the shelter-house one night, the howls of the wolves all around us made sleep impossible, and as we hitched up in the early morning light they were so close that the dogs could scarcely be controlled. When we started the wolves collected just over a ridge and kept pace with us through the trees within two hundred yards. After traveling some time in this way, there came an unaccountable silence, and a few min­utes later the howls broke loose a half mile distant. Again for a moment there was only the sound of the harness bells and the scrunch of the snowshoes.

Of a sudden the howls came again with renewed vigor, and this time they were making straight for us at full speed. In a few seconds they were just over the ridge again and still coming fu­riously on. The dogs were tugging madly to be free, for they have learned to hate the wolf as fiercely as the ranger. Obviously it was wise to be prepared. Three of us stood with rifles ready, while the driver of the dogs loosed them from the traces and held them in hand. Thus we faced the oncoming animals. At that moment there was no contempt in our feelings. I think I felt even more than respect.

The hideous howling came through the trees, on and on, climbed the ridge at undiminished speed—and, just as we were sighting for a shot, suddenly ceased. For three uncomfortable minutes there was dead silence, save for the controlled whining of the straining dogs. Then the clamor broke loose again—but at our backs. The wolves had come almost within sight in front and had then passed silently around us to give another scare from behind. Three times that morning they repeated the performance, until we could read in their howls derisive laughter.

At one place we crossed their trail, and to me there was but the one wolf mark. But the rangers read more and by following a few yards we saw it divide into eight or ten. The pack had stepped so accurately in the tracks of the leader that the novice would see but one wolf.

Frequently in our hunts we came across this method of travel. Sometimes the sin­gle trail would break into a half dozen or more without apparent rea­son, and a few yards later merge again into the one. Once we followed for two miles across a lake a track that deceived even the rangers. Only where the pack had started to enter the bush did we dis­cover that four wolves had been travel­ing as one. The largest of the pack had come last and had covered with his huge paw the little unevennesses of the others.

Sometimes the fright instilled into newcomers threatens serious results. Two lumbermen one evening, dropped from the train that passes through a corner of the Park and made through the bush to a lumber camp. The train crew had saturated them with wolf yarns until they were prepared for the worst. When darkness fell and the wolves began to howl they made a rec­ord up the nearest tree and sat for a long time waiting to be surrounded. Forced down by the bitter cold, they ran a hun­dred yards and hit the branches once more. Still there were no glistening eyes from the dark­ness, and at last they became so chilled that a chance seemed worth taking. Drop­ping to the snow, they gath­ered enough birch bark and dry boughs to make a circle of fire in which to stand until daylight. The next morning the first wolf track they crossed was more than half a mile away. A wolf howl is always very close to the ten­derfoot.

One night, as we lay in a shelter-house near the rail­way, the howling of the wolves far up the track was suddenly interrupted by a blood-curdling shriek from the other direction. For five minutes, during which we wondered what new animal had come to visit us, the howls and shrieks kept up an animated dialogue. Recog­nizing at last something hu­man in the sound, we dressed and made toward it, Down the track we found a man huddled against an old shed that did duty in summer as a station, and when we called to him his shrieks only redoubled. He had dropped from the bumpers of a freight train at the ap­proach of a brakeman, and the wolf howls had driven him almost insane with fear.

What reason, other than to frighten, induces them to gather around the shelter-houses where the rangers lie, I can­not determine. On a dark night we were awakened by a single bark as if from someone’s pet dog that had got lonesome. But an instant later came a terrible howl at the very door, and a chorus joined in all around the shack. Three or four had selected a big rock that stood right beside the window, evi­dently with the intention of giving us the full benefit of the music. Without striking a light one of the rangers seized his rifle and stood by while I noiselessly opened the door. On the instant the noise ceased with a sudden “yelp.” only to resume as soon as the cold forced me to close the door again. Twice we tried, but it was no use.

Then the howling started across the stream in an old lumber yard, and, thinking to creep close enough to shoot, we skirted some thin ice and entered the piles of old lumber and slabs. All around us the wolves howled and barked, but in the darkness we could see nothing. For a moment the sky grew brighter, and the ranger’s rifle spoke im­mediately. With the crack every howl ceased, and, the light fading, we re­turned to the shelter-house whence the chorus had drawn us.

The next morning we followed the wolf tracks to the ice. There they had spread out in fear of the thin ice, each one of thirteen making his own track. All around the deserted shanty of a summer camper they had wandered, some of them even jumping to the roof, but not one had entered the open door. In the lumber yard we found our wolf—a bit of rotten slab leaning in the snow. But the huge leaps of the fleeing wolves showed how badly we had frightened them.

In Algonquin Park the cunning of the wolf develops. As soon as he leaves the wilds of Quebec his education begins. There is reason to believe that only the newcomers take the bait. A pack of eight were tracked across the Ottawa River into the Park. They had care­fully skirted a small settlement in their way, but a few miles farther on the pur­suing rangers came upon the entire eight piled dead around a place where bait had been. Not one had gone a dozen yards after eating.

On the other hand, the Park wolf treats the bait and traps with every in­dignity. At one place, evidently a fa­vorite visiting place of wolves, a new ranger set a trap in the snow, carefully prepared with all the precautions of mushed venison and burnt paper. Three days later he found the trap still un­sprung, but around it and right on top the wolves had befouled the spot in a most insulting manner. The trap had taken the place of the rock for the moment.

Frequently we were afforded proofs of their contempt. Sometimes in their travels they would sheer to one side around a bait, not even stopping to look at it, and often they used it as the center for their gambols.

The new wolf will not cross the railway track. I have followed the trails of packs that have stopped at the steel, run alongside for a mile or two to find an opening, and then turned back to the north. But the oldtimer is not above using the beaten snow between the rails for his path.

In spite of the numbers of wolves within the Park they are not often seen. So acute of sight, hearing, and smell are they that it is only when breaking out on a lake that one is apt to catch more than a glimpse of them. The crunch of the snowshoe carries so far in the dead silence of that region that man has little chance. During my trip I saw no more than half a dozen, and all but two were gone as soon as seen.

I fired at one from eleven hundred yards, but only the snow and the ani­mal’s gait were disturbed. Another I saw one morning from the shelter-house, leisurely trotting across the lake, like a good-natured collie. That it deceived me has become one of the local jokes. The ranger I was with jerked his rifle from the wall and fired through the doorway, and the wolf, three hundred yards away, leaped into the air and then began to throw himself around in the snow. Another bullet straightened his course for a neighboring island, where we found him dead with his head resting against a tree.

But while the wolf is seldom seen, he misses nothing. Frequently we would backtrail and find that a pack had been following us within a few yards. Once, after discovering this, we made a circle, and round and round that circle we fol­lowed each other. Finally the wolves leaped into the circle, and although we went around two or three times more we could not see that they had left it. Probably they were watching us from inside in wonder.

After we had returned to the shelter-house one day for the noon meal we started out again within an hour. Just behind a rock within a few yards of the house we saw the marks of several wolves that had followed us and then spent some time gamboling almost with­in touch. Another time, at the begin­ning of a long trail northward to Island Lake, we came upon the trail of a big pack just beyond Joe Lake, tracks “steaming fresh,” as one of the rangers put it. Presently the tracks came to a mysterious end, but we picked them up over a log to one side where every wolf had leaped sideways without previously shifting his feet. Not having time to follow, we passed on.

The next day we returned over the same trail, to find that the pack had fallen in behind immediately after we had passed, had followed us to the place where we had lunched, had waited there while we ate, and then had dropped in behind again when we resumed our way. Where they had leaped the log they had retired only to the top of a rise close by and had stood to watch us over the top of a log. Then they had come straight down and followed our trail.

The old story of the hard lot of the wounded member of a pack is not borne out in Algonquin Park. On the contrary, we had a most striking demonstration of un­selfishness and affection be­tween the members of a pack.

We had made a long round over thin ice to examine some distant baits, and one of the rangers had remained behind at Linda’s Lake shelter-house to dry his clothes after an un­rehearsed dip. When we re­turned at dusk the shelter-house was empty, and, our mate failing to return within a few minutes, we started out along his trail. Before we had gone far we heard his call, and later, in the candle­light of the shelter-house, he told us a story that has made the wolf less repulsive to me.

While he was in the midst of his lunch, sitting where he could see over the lake, a big buck and two does dashed from the woods about nine hundred yards along the shore. A minute later a pack of eleven wolves came slowly along their trail, their noses to the ground and their tails wagging playfully as if en­gaged in a pleasant game. Be­fore the ranger could get his rifle three others broke cover a hundred yards nearer.

At the first shot one big fellow halted suddenly and then commenced to run in a crazy circle. His two mates had leaped into the air and disappeared into the bush, while the first eleven started madly across the lake. Sud­denly the wounded wolf raised his nose and uttered a peculiar, ringing yelp. Im­mediately the whole pack turned and galloped fearless­ly back. The ranger emptied his magazine at them with­out effect—he admits he had buck fever—and the pack did not hesitate until it had sur­rounded its wounded brother. Then, in a compact body, the latter in the center, they trot­ted across the lake.

Thinking the wounded wolf would not last long and that the tracks would be easy to fol­low, the ranger finished his lunch be­fore starting in pursuit. He came upon their tracks into the bush on the far shore, after skirting the treacher­ous ice, and all afternoon, mile after mile, he followed the eccentric curves and circles, evidently the course of the one the pack was protecting. Here and there the snow was trodden as if the wolves had closed up on their injured mate to direct him into a straighter course. As the afternoon went on he knew he was getting closer, although he could hear no sound; at times the wolves had leaped away as if in fear, but had always returned to urge their mate to harder efforts.

Across Owl and Raven lakes the trail led, and then darkness was too close to risk further pursuit. An hour’s steady tramp by compass toward the shelter-house covered the distance that had taken four hours along the winding trail of the blood marks.

Of the strength of the wolf we had a striking example one day after we had followed the trail of dead deer left by a bloodthirsty pack. The largest of the wolves had broken away into the woods, and on its trail we started. While one of the rangers followed the big marks up over the hill two of us proceeded along a ravine toward a nearby lake in the hope that the pack had come around to it. As we went along a sudden scurry ahead directed our eyes to where a deer’s head was slowly sinking to the snow.

When we reached it life was extinct. At the same instant the ranger above us shouted that the wolf had “jumped” a deer there not one hundred and fifty yards away. The latter had been lying down, and when startled by the wolf had at first tried to escape in high leaps, the wolf rapidly overhauling it in long, low bounds. Later the deer had let it­self out. But it was too late. We could read in the snow where the wolf had caught up, had run alongside a couple of leaps, and had then closed in. A splash of blood showed where the deer had been hamstrung at the first gash as clean as a knife. Another bound or two to the side, and then the wolf was on the deer’s back.

In that next bite the backbone of the deer had been broken, the terrible teeth of the wolf sinking so deep that the flesh could be lifted from the kidneys. The throat of the helpless deer had then been attacked, but at that instant we had in­terfered.

With a score of determined, expe­rienced men seeking its destruction there would seem to be little chance for the timber wolf in Algonquin Park. But so cunning does he become, and so simple is escape in that land of wooded hill and hollow, that the warfare is having but slow effect. And however many fall, there are more in the wilds of the North to take their places. For miles their howls carry through the clear silence of that northland; and yet, in their cun­ning, they have pulled down deer within three hundred yards of a hotelful of guests without being heard.

Some day the wolf will be extermi­nated within the Park, but it will never be by the war within its borders. Only thick settlement all around—thick enough to cut off the manless territory to the north across the Ottawa River—will insure protection for the deer that swarm the Government reserve in thou­sands. In the meantime the wolves gambol amidst a never-ending feast, matching their wits against the rangers, the victims of a guerilla warfare, not of sport.

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.