at the outset in building a railroad, rather than tell what parts of the
undertaking we came upon in passing over the various "contracts" that
were being worked in what appeared a confusing and hap-hazard disorder.
I have mentioned that one of the houses at the landing was the railroad
company's storehouse, and that near by were the tents of the surveyors
or civil engineers. The road was to be a branch of the Canadian Pacific
system, and these engineers were the first men sent into the country,
with instructions to survey a line to the new mining region, into which
men were pouring from the older parts of Canada and from our country. It
was understood by them that they were to hit upon the most direct and at
the same time the least expensive route for the railroad to take. They
went to the scene of their labors by canoes, and carried tents,
blankets, instruments, and what they called their "grub stakes," which
is to say, their food. Then they travelled over the ground between their
two terminal points, and back by another route, and back again by still
another route, and so back and forth perhaps four and possibly six
times. In that way alone were they enabled to select the line which
offered the shortest length and the least obstacles in number and degree
for the workmen who were to come after them.
[Illustration: ENGINEER ON THE PRELIMINARY SURVEY]
At Sproat's Landing I met an engineer, Mr. B. C. Stewart, who is famous
in his profession as the most tireless and intrepid exponent of its
difficulties in the Dominion. The young men account it a misfortune to
be detailed to go on one of his journeys with him. It is his custom to
start out with a blanket, some bacon and meal, and a coffee-pot, and to
be gone for weeks, and even for months. There scarcely can have been a
hardier Scotchman, one of more simple tastes and requirements, or one
possessing in any higher degree the quality called endurance. He has
spent years in the mountains of British Columbia, finding and exploring
the various passes, the most direct and feasible routes to and from
them, the valleys between the ranges, and the characteristics of each
section of the country. In a vast country that has not otherwise been
one-third explored he has made himself familiar with the full southern
half. He has not known what it was to enjoy a home, nor has he seen an
apple growing upon a tree in many years. During his long and
close-succeeding trips he has run the whole gamut of the adventures
incident to the lives of hunters or explorers, suffering hunger,
exposure, peril from wild beasts, and all the hair-breadth escapes from
frost and storm and flood that Nature unvanquished visits upon those who
first brave her depths. Such is the work and such are the men that
figure in the foremost preliminaries to railroad building.
Whoever has left the beaten path of travel or gone beyond a well-settled
region can form a more or less just estimate of that which one of these
professional pioneers encounters in prospecting for a railroad. I had
several "tastes," as the Irish express it, of that very Kootenay Valley.
I can say conscientiously that I never was in a wilder region. In going
only a few yards from the railroad "right of way" the difficulties of an
experienced pedestrianism like my own instantly became tremendous. There
was a particularly choice spot for fishing at a distance of
three-quarters of a mile from Dan Dunn's outfit, and I travelled the
road to it half a dozen times. Bunyan would have strengthened the
_Pilgrim's Progress_ had he known of such conditions with which to
surround his hero. Between rocks the size of a city mansion and unsteady
bowlders no larger than a man's head the ground was all but covered.
Among this wreckage trees grew in wild abundance, and countless trunks
of dead ones lay rotting between them. A jungle as dense as any I ever
saw was formed of soft-wood saplings and bushes, so that it was next to
impossible to move a yard in any direction. It was out of the question
for anyone to see three yards ahead, and there was often no telling when
a foot was put down whether it was going through a rotten trunk or upon
a spinning bowlder, or whether the black shadows here and there were a
foot deep or were the mouths of fissures that reached to China. I fished
too long one night, and was obliged to make that journey after dark.
After ten minutes crowded with falls and false steps, the task seemed so
hopelessly impossible that I could easily have been induced to turn back
and risk a night on the rocks at the edge of the tide.
It was after a thorough knowledge of the natural conditions which the
railroad men were overcoming that the gradual steps of their progress
became most interesting. The first men to follow the engineers, after
the specifications have been drawn up and the contracts signed, are the
"right-of-way" men. These are partly trail-makers and partly laborers at
the heavier work of actually clearing the wilderness for the road-bed.
The trail-cutters are guided by the long line of stakes with which the
engineers have marked the course the road is to take. The trail-men are
sent out to cut what in general parlance would be called a path, over
which supplies are to be thereafter carried to the workmen's camps. The
path they cut must therefore be sufficiently wide for the passage along
it of a mule and his load. As a mule's load will sometimes consist of
the framework of a kitchen range, or the end boards of a bedstead, a
five-foot swath through the forest is a trail of serviceable width. The
trail-cutters fell the trees to right and left, and drag the fallen
trunks out of the path as they go along, travelling and working between
a mile and two miles each day, and moving their tents and provisions on
pack-horses as they advance. They keep reasonably close to the projected
line of the railway, but the path they cut is apt to be a winding one
that avoids the larger rocks and the smaller ravines. Great distortions,
such as hills or gullies, which the railroad must pass through or over,
the trail men pay no heed to; neither do the pack-horses, whose tastes
are not consulted, and who can cling to a rock at almost any angle, like
flies of larger growth. This trail, when finished, leads from the
company's storehouse all along the line, and from that storehouse, on
the backs of the pack-animals, come all the food and tools and clothing,
powder, dynamite, tents, and living utensils, to be used by the workmen,
their bosses, and the engineers.
Slowly, behind the trail-cutters, follow the "right-of-way" men. These
are axemen also. All that they do is to cut the trees down and drag them
out of the way.
It is when the axemen have cleared the right of way that the first view
of the railroad in embryo is obtainable. And very queer it looks. It is
a wide avenue through the forest, to be sure, yet it is little like any
forest drive that we are accustomed to in the realms of civilization.
[Illustration: FALLING MONARCHS]
Every succeeding stage of the work leads towards the production of an
even and level thoroughfare, without protuberance or depression, and in
the course of our ride to Dan Dunn's camp on the Kootenay we saw the
rapidly developing railroad in each phase of its evolution from the
rough surface of the wilderness. Now we would come upon a long reach of
finished road-bed on comparatively level ground all ready for the rails,
with carpenters at work in little gullies which they were spanning with
timber trestles. Next we would see a battalion of men and dump-carts
cutting into a hill of dirt and carting its substance to a neighboring
valley, wherein they were slowly heaping a long and symmetrical wall of
earth-work, with sloping sides and level top, to bridge the gap between
hill and hill. Again, we came upon places where men ran towards us
shouting that a "blast" was to be fired. Here was what was called
"rockwork," where some granite rib of a mountain or huge rocky knoll was
being blown to flinders with dynamite.
And so, through all these scenes upon the pack-trail, we came at last to
a white camp of tents hidden in the lush greenery of a luxuriant forest,
and nestling beside a rushing mountain torrent of green water flecked
with the foam from an eternal battle with a myriad of sunken rocks. It
was Dunn's headquarters--the construction camp. Evening was falling, and
the men were clambering down the hill-side trails from their work. There
was no order in the disposition of the tents, nor had the forest been
prepared for them. Their white sides rose here and there wherever there
was a space between the trees, as if so many great white moths had
settled in a garden. Huge trees had been felled and thrown across
ravines to serve as aerial foot-paths from point to point, and at the
river's edge two or three tents seemed to have been pushed over the
steep bluff to find lodgement on the sandy beach beside the turbulent
stream.
There were other camps on the line of this work, and it is worth while
to add a word about their management and the system under which they
were maintained. In the first place, each camp is apt to be the outfit
of a contractor. The whole work of building a railroad is let out in
contracts for portions of five, ten, or fifteen miles. Even when great
jobs of seventy or a hundred miles are contracted for in one piece, it
is customary for the contractor to divide his task and sublet it. But a
fairly representative bit of mountain work is that which I found Dan
Dunn superintending, as the factotum of the contractor who undertook it.
If a contractor acts as "boss" himself, he stays upon the ground; but in
this case the contractor had other undertakings in hand. Hence the
presence of Dan Dunn, his walking boss or general foreman. Dunn is a man
of means, and is himself a contractor by profession, who has worked his
way up from a start as a laborer.
The camp to which we came was a portable city, complete except for its
lack of women. It had its artisans, its professional men, its store and
workshops, its seat of government and officers, and its policeman, its
amusement hall, its work-a-day and social sides. Its main peculiarity
was that its boss (for it was like an American city in the possession of
that functionary also) had announced that he was going to move it a
couple of miles away on the following Sunday. One tent was the
stableman's, with a capacious "corral" fenced in near by for the keeping
of the pack horses and mules. His corps of assistants was a large one;
for, besides the pack-horses that connected the camp with the outer
world, he had the keeping of all the "grade-horses," so called--those
which draw the stone and dirt carts and the little dump-cars on the
false tracks set up on the levels near where "filling" or "cutting" is
to be done. Another tent was the blacksmith's. He had a "helper," and
was a busy man, charged with all the tool-sharpening, the care of all
the horses' feet, and the repairing of all the iron-work of the wagons,
cars, and dirt-scrapers. Near by was the harness-man's tent, the shop of
the leather-mender. In the centre of the camp, like a low citadel, rose
a mound of logs and earth bearing on a sign the single word "Powder,"
but containing within its great sunken chamber a considerable store of
various explosives--giant, black, and Judson powder, and dynamite.
[Illustration: DAN DUNN ON HIS WORKS]
More tremendous force is used in railroad blasting than most persons
imagine. In order to perform a quick job of removing a section of solid
mountain, the drill-men, after making a bore, say, twenty feet in depth,
begin what they call "springing" it by exploding little cartridges in
the bottom of the drill hole until they have produced a considerable
chamber there. The average amount of explosive for which they thus
prepare a place is 40 or 50 kegs of giant powder and 10 kegs of black
powder; but Dunn told me he had seen 280 kegs of black powder and 500
pounds of dynamite used in a single blast in mountain work.
Another tent was that of the time-keeper. He journeyed twice a day all
over the work, five miles up and five down. On one journey he noted what
men were at labor in the forenoon, and on his return he tallied those
who were entitled to pay for the second half of the day. Such an
official knows the name of every laborer, and, moreover, he knows the
pecuniary rating of each man, so that when the workmen stop him to order
shoes or trousers, blankets, shirts, tobacco, penknives, or what not, he
decides upon his own responsibility whether they have sufficient money
coming to them to meet the accommodation.
The "store" was simply another tent. In it was kept a fair supply of the
articles in constant demand--a supply brought from the headquarters
store at the other end of the trail, and constantly replenished by the
pack-horses. This trading-place was in charge of a man called "the
book-keeper," and he had two or three clerks to assist him. The stock
was precisely like that of a cross-roads country store in one of our
older States. Its goods included simple medicines, boots, shoes,
clothing, cutlery, tobacco, cigars, pipes, hats and caps, blankets,
thread and needles, and several hundred others among the ten thousand
necessaries of a modern laborer's life. The only legal tender received
there took the shape of orders written by the time-keeper, for the man
in charge of the store was not required to know the ratings of the men
upon the pay-roll.
[Illustration: THE SUPPLY TRAIN OVER THE MOUNTAIN]
The doctor's tent was among the rest, but his office might aptly have
been said to be "in the saddle." He was nominally employed by the
company, but each man was "docked," or charged, seventy-five cents a
month for medical services whether he ever needed a doctor or not. When
I was in the camp there was only one sick man--a rheumatic. He had a
tent all to himself, and his meals were regularly carried to him. Though
he was a stranger to every man there, and had worked only one day before
he surrendered to sickness, a purse of about forty dollars had been
raised for him among the men, and he was to be "packed" to Sproat's
Landing on a mule at the company's expense whenever the doctor decreed
it wise to move him. Of course invalidism of a more serious nature is
not infrequent where men work in the paths of sliding rocks, beneath
caving earth, amid falling forest trees, around giant blasts, and with
heavy tools.
Another one of the tents was that of the "boss packer." He superintended
the transportation of supplies on the pack-trail. This "job of 200 men,"
as Dunn styled his camp, employed thirty pack horses and mules. The
pack-trains consisted of a "bell-horse" and boy, and six horses
following. Each animal was rated to carry a burden of 400 pounds of dead
weight, and to require three quarts of meal three times a day.
Another official habitation was the "store-man's" tent. As a rule, there
is a store-man to every ten miles of construction work; often every camp
has one. The store-man keeps account of the distribution of the supplies
of food. He issues requisitions upon the head storehouse of the company,
and makes out orders for each day's rations from the camp store. The
cooks are therefore under him, and this fact suggests a mention of the
principal building in the camp--the mess hall, or "grub tent."
This structure was of a size to accommodate two hundred men at once. Two
tables ran the length of the unbroken interior--tables made roughly of
the slabs or outside boards from a saw-mill. The benches were huge
tree-trunks spiked fast upon stumps. There was a bench on either side of
each table, and the places for the men were each set with a tin cup and
a tin pie plate. The bread was heaped high on wooden platters, and all
the condiments--catsup, vinegar, mustard, pepper, and salt--were in cans
that had once held condensed milk. The cooks worked in an open-ended
extension at the rear of the great room. The rule is to have one cook
and two "cookees" to each sixty men.
While I was a new arrival just undergoing introduction, the men, who had
come in from work, and who had "washed up" in the little creeks and at
the river bank, began to assemble in the "grub tent" for supper. They
were especially interesting to me because there was every reason to
believe that they formed an assembly as typical of the human flotsam of
the border as ever was gathered on the continent. Very few were what
might be called born laborers; on the contrary, they were mainly men of
higher origin who had failed in older civilizations; outlaws from the
States; men who had hoped for a gold-mine until hope was all but dead;
men in the first flush of the gold fever; ne'er-do-wells; and here and
there a working-man by training. They ate as a good many other sorts of
men do, with great rapidity, little etiquette, and just enough
unselfishness to pass each other the bread. It was noticeable that they
seemed to have no time for talking. Certainly they had earned the right
to be hungry, and the food was good and plentiful.
[Illustration: A SKETCH ON THE WORK]
Dan Dunn's tent was just in front of the mess tent, a few feet away on
the edge of the river bluff. It was a little "A" tent, with a single cot
on one side, a wooden chest on the other, and a small table between the
two at the farther end, opposite the door.
"Are ye looking at my wolverenes?" said he. "There's good men among
them, and some that ain't so good, and many that's worse. But
railroading is good enough for most of 'em. It ain't too rich for any
man's blood, I assure ye."
Over six feet in height, broad-chested, athletic, and carrying not an
ounce of flesh that could be spared, Dan Dunn's was a striking figure
even where physical strength was the most serviceable possession of
every man. From never having given his personal appearance a
thought--except during a brief period of courtship antecedent to the
establishment of a home in old Ontario--he had so accustomed himself to
unrestraint that his habitual attitude was that of a long-bladed
jack-knife not fully opened. His long spare arms swung limberly before a
long spare body set upon long spare legs. His costume was one that is
never described in the advertisements of city clothiers. It consisted of
a dust-coated slouch felt hat, which a dealer once sold for black, of a
flannel shirt, of homespun trousers, of socks, and of heavy "brogans."
In all, his dress was what the aesthetes of Mr. Wilde's day might have
aptly termed a symphony in dust. His shoes and hat had acquired a
mud-color, and his shirt and trousers were chosen because they
originally possessed it. Yet Dan Dunn was distinctly a cleanly man, fond
of frequent splashing in the camp toilet basins--the Kootenay River and
its little rushing tributaries. He was not shaven. As a rule he is not,
and yet at times he is, as it happens. I learned that on Sundays, when
there was nothing to do except to go fishing, or to walk over to the
engineer's camp for intellectual society, he felt the unconscious
impulse of a forgotten training, and put on a coat. He even tied a black
silk ribbon under his collar on such occasions, and if no one had given
him a good cigar during the week, he took out his best pipe (which had
been locked up, because whatever was not under lock and key was certain
to be stolen in half an hour). Then he felt fitted, as he would say,
"for a hard day's work at loafing."
[Illustration: THE MESS TENT AT NIGHT]
If you came upon Dan Dunn on Broadway, he would look as awkward as any
other animal removed from its element; yet on a forest trail not even
Davy Crockett was handsomer or more picturesque. His face is
reddish-brown and as hard-skinned as the top of a drum, befitting a man
who has lived out-of-doors all his life. But it is a finely moulded
face, instinct with good-nature and some gentleness. The witchery of
quick Irish humor lurks often in his eyes, but can quickly give place
on occasion to a firm light, which is best read in connection with the
broad, strong sweep of his massive under-jaw. There you see his fitness
to command small armies, even of what he calls "wolverenes." He is
willing to thrash any man who seems to need the operation, and yet he is
equally noted for gathering a squad of rough laborers in every camp to
make them his wards. He collects the money such men earn, and puts it in
bank, or sends it to their families.
"It does them as much good to let me take it as to chuck it over a
gin-mill bar," he explained.
As we stood looking into the crowded booth, where the men sat elbow to
elbow, and all the knife blades were plying to and from all the plates
and mouths, Dunn explained that his men were well fed.
"The time has gone by," said he, "when you could keep an outfit on salt
pork and bacon. It's as far gone as them days when they say the Hudson
Bay Company fed its laborers on rabbit tracks and a stick. Did ye never
hear of that? Why, sure, man, 'twas only fifty years ago that when meal
hours came the bosses of the big trading company would give a workman a
stick, and point out some rabbit tracks, and tell him he'd have an hour
to catch his fill. But in railroading nowadays we give them the best
that's going, and all they want of it--beef, ham, bacon, potatoes, mush,
beans, oatmeal, the choicest fish, and game right out of the woods, and
every sort of vegetable (canned, of course). Oh, they must be fed well,
or they wouldn't stay."
He said that the supplies of food are calculated on the basis of
three-and-a-half pounds of provisions to a man--all the varieties of
food being proportioned so that the total weight will be
three-and-a-half pounds a day. The orders are given frequently and for
small amounts, so as to economize in the number of horses required on
the pack-trail. The amount to be consumed by the horses is, of course,
included in the loads. The cost of "packing" food over long distances is
more considerable than would be supposed. It was estimated that at
Dunn's camp the freighting cost forty dollars a ton, but I heard of
places farther in the mountains where the cost was double that. Indeed,
a discussion of the subject brought to light the fact that in remote
mining camps the cost of "packing" brought lager-beer in bottles up to
the price of champagne. At one camp on the Kootenay bacon was selling at
the time I was in the valley at thirty cents a pound, and dried peaches
fetched forty cents under competition.
As we looked on, the men were eating fresh beef and vegetables, with tea
and coffee and pie. The head cook was a man trained in a lumber camp,
and therefore ranked high in the scale of his profession. Every sort of
cook drifts into camps like these, and that camp considers itself the
most fortunate which happens to eat under the ministrations of a man who
has cooked on a steamboat; but a cook from a lumber camp is rated almost
as proudly.
[Illustration: "THEY GAINED ERECTNESS BY SLOW JOLTS"]
"Ye would not think it," said Dunn, "but some of them men has been bank
clerks, and there's doctors and teachers among 'em--everything, in fact,
except preachers. I never knew a preacher to get into a railroad gang.
The men are always changing--coming and going. We don't have to
advertise for new hands. The woods is full of men out of a job, and out
of everything--pockets, elbows, and all. They drift in like peddlers on
a pay-day. They come here with no more clothing than will wad a gun. The
most of them will get nothing after two months' work. You see, they're
mortgaged with their fares against them (thirty to forty dollars for
them which the railroad brings from the East), and then they have their
meals to pay for, at five dollars a week while they're here, and on top
of that is all the clothing and shoes and blankets and tobacco, and
everything they need--all charged agin them. It's just as well for
them, for the most of them are too rich if they're a dollar ahead.
There's few of them can stand the luxury of thirty dollars. When they
get a stake of them dimensions, the most of them will stay no longer
after pay-day than John Brown stayed in heaven. The most of them bang it
all away for drink, and they are sure to come back again, but the
'prospectors' and chronic tramps only work to get clothes and a flirting
acquaintance with food, as well as money enough to make an affidavit to,
and they never come back again at all. Out of 8500 men we had in one big
work in Canada, 1500 to 2000 knocked off every month. Ninety per cent.
came back. They had just been away for an old-fashioned drunk."