Rossland

STEEP AND CROOKED … by Late Writer, Artist & Castle Builder Bill Laux – Chapter X

/ Peter Klopp / 2 Comments

STEEP AND CROOKED: THE MINING RAILROADS OF THE CANADIAN BORDER

 By Bill Laux

Rossland, BC 1910 – Photo Credit: wikimaedia.org

CHAPTER TEN

EUREKA CREEK 1896 – 1902

Responding to the urgings of Spokane mining men, the American Congress opened the north half of the Colville Indian Reservation to mineral entry on February 21, 1896.   Among the prospectors quietly leaving Rossland for the newly opened lands in the Colville Indian Reservation, were Phil Creaser and Tommy Ryan, both grubstaked by James Clark.   By grub staking the prospectors, Clark would receive a half interest in whatever the prospectors should find.

Creaser and Ryan bought horses and supplies at Bossburg, on the SF&N line, the jumping off place for the Boundary country.   They traveled up the Kettle River trail into Canada, and west to Carson, where the Kettle flowed out of the U.S.   Here, beside the river, they found the Welty Brothers, George and John, who had come north from their illegal camp in the Reservation to get news of the expected mineral opening.   Creaser and Ryan gave them the welcome news and were invited to join the Weltys who now could stake the mineralized outcrops they had found near the headwaiters of the San Poil River.

On February 28, 1896, Creaser and Ryan, following the Weltys, came into an area of rolling hills covered with ponderosa pine. Here they found long, dyke-like outcrops of a crumbly, white rock they identified as “porphyry,” a massy rock enclosing many small rocks of differing composition.   Veins of quartz ran through these crumbly outcrops, and in the quartz veins, tell-tale black streaks of some heavy mineral.   Creaser and Ryan knocked off some chunks, licked the samples shiny, and brought out their hand lenses.   Through the lenses they could see gold in minute specks in the black streaks.   All around them were more outcrops and all of them showed gold.   Creaser and Ryan, picking what looked to be the richest of the outcrops, staked the Iron Mask, the Copper Belle, and Lone Pine, and took samples from each. John Welty, naming the draw he was prospecting, Eureka Creek, staked the Black Tail.

The men continued to prospect the ground around Granite and Eureka Creeks. On March 5, Creaser and Ryan staked the Republic and Jim Blaine, and then headed back to show their samples to James Clark and have them assayed.

In Rossland the assays were disappointing.   Only a trace of gold in most of them, just $ 2.06 in their best specimen.   Clark sent Creaser and Ryan back to Eureka Creek to begin digging on their claims and bring back deeper samples.   The two men dug on the Republic, the Iron Mask, and the Lone Pine. This time the assays turned out much better: $4.00 to the ton from the Iron Mask, and $35.00 from the Lone Pine.   As they went deeper, the values continued to increase.   In August, James Clark came himself.   He looked, he approved, and went away convinced that a significant mining district had been discovered.   He went to Spokane and shared the news with his brother, Patrick, or “Patsy” as he was called.

Patsy Clark came to the Eureka Camp at once and began developing the Republic claim, the biggest of the visible ledges.   Soon it began to show values in hundreds of dollars per ton from a large vein fifteen feet wide.

With the Republic producing paying ore and shipping it out by wagon to the Northport smelter, Patsy Clark incorporated the Republic Gold Mining Company and bought out Creasers and Ryan’s interests for $55,000, while investing $70,000 of his own money.   Creaser and Ryan used the money to develop their Lone Pine and Iron Mask mines.   They were successful and a few years, as the town of Republic began to take shape on the low hog back ridge across Granite Creek from the Republic mine, Phil Creaser built the Hotel Creaser there.

When rich pockets of ore were discovered at 60 feet, James Clark came to take over the Republic mine while brother Patsy went to Toronto to negotiated the sale of their War Eagle mine in Rossland to the Gooderham-Blackstock syndicate for $700,000 cash.   With that money, he came back to the Republic Camp in 1897 to develop the Republic mine into a property equally valuable.

Patsy Clark was the monarch of the camp.   He was a popular man, running the biggest mine, a mill, and a boarding house where he played accordion for the miners’ dances.   At his urging, a townsite was platted on the low ridge opposite his mine, to be called Republic with its main street named Clark Avenue. Still, in 1898, most of the miners lived in the Eureka Creek camp at the mouth of that creek.   It was a wild place in those early years when the district was not organized. Legally, it was still the Colville Indian Reservation and the nearest sheriff was in Colville, two days away by horseback.   This allowed a certain amount of lawlessness.   An entry in the Boundary Creek Times of Greenwood, B.C.., dated January 8, 1898, reads:

“Bad whiskey, the absence of officers of the law and the general looseness which  prevails in the vicinity of Eureka, Wash., were responsible for a serious shooting affray in the mining camp on Friday last.   Three men were wounded, and one of them, Frank Gottfriedsen, is in the Greenwood hospital with his elbow splintered by a rifle bullet and a  flesh wound in the other arm.   Gottfriedsen was brought to the hospital in Sunday.  “It is a difficult matter to learn the particulars, but it appears that early Tuesday  morning Gottfriedsen, La Fleur and others were in Bennett’s saloon in Eureka.   Bennett and  Gottfriedsen got into a dispute about claim jumping and words led to blows.   Bennett got the better of the fight, and then Gottfriedsen pulled out a six shooter and opened fire. Before the gun could be taken from him he succeeded in wounding his antagonist in the cheek.  Bennett went off to get the wound dressed and Gottfriedsen left the house at the same time.   Later in the day Gottfriedsen returned for his coat and the quarrel was started  anew.   This time Bennett used a repeating Winchester, and opened fire.   Gottfriedsen grabbed the barrel of the the Winchester, but Bennett continued firing and almost shot the clothes off Gottfriedsen’s body.   He appeared to have a charmed life, however, for he escaped with the two wounds mentioned.   La Fleur tried to stop the shooting and was  rewarded with a bullet from the Winchester.   His wound is not dangerous.”

The ores from the Eureka Camp were not free milling.   The gold and silver they contained were encapsulated in lime and silica, and required treatment in a mill to break down that coating.   Costly processes were tried in Clark’s “Big Red Mill” and the Mountain Lion Mill, north of town.   None were entirely successful.   The coarse particles of gold and silver were recovered, but the fine ones were lost.   As well, the lack of cheap transportation was a serious drawback.   The wagon haul to the Spokane Falls and Northern was costing $25 per ton.   Rail freight to the Northport smelter was another $6.00, and the smelter charges were $10.00 per ton.

This meant that only $40.00 ore ore better could be sent to the smelter. The Republic had such ore, and their shipments ran as high as $12,000 per carload at Marcus, with an average of $4,000 per car. Railroads were projected.   One was to come up the Columbia and San Poil Rivers from Jim Hill’s Great Northern at Wenatchee.   Another was to come down the Spokane and Columbia Rivers from Spokane and turn up the San Poil to Republic. Everyone with a map and a pencil played at paper railroads, but investors could not be found.

Patsy Clark went to Montreal again in 1899 and negotiated the sale of the Republic mine and mill, plus the Surprise and Lone Pine mines, for an extraordinary $3,500,000 to a Canadian syndicate.   The Canadians moved in, bringing their own bank with them, the Halifax Trust and Guarantee (later the Royal Bank).   This was to last as long as the Republic mine operated, the only American branch of the Royal Bank outside of New York at that time.

Patsy Clark was extremely fortunate in selling the mines.   The Petalan-Clerici process he was using in his mill to release the fine gold from the ore was costly and only partly successful.   It involved a preliminary roasting of the ores to break down the silica coating on the gold and silver.   Wood was the only fuel and the Republic Mill was firing six boilers of 500 total horsepower.   The hills around the Eureka Camp were being rapidly depleted of firewood.   Patsy Clark had build a five mile flume up Granite Creek down which firewood was floated to the mill, and the water used to generate electricity.   Up at the headwaiters of Eureka Creek, the Mountain Lion Mill, firing three 100 horsepower boilers, had strung a half mile cable across the Swamp Creek valley and was bringing in wood on this overhead cable tram from the mountains beyond.   The camp could not last long with these pioneer methods.   If a railroad would build in, the costly milling procedures could be dispensed with, and the ore could go directly to the Granby smelter.     Jay Graves in Phoenix realized this, and bought into a number of Eureka Creek mines, developing his plan for a custom smelter in Grand Forks to treat non-Granby ores.

As the new Century began, the town of Republic took shape, Ferry County, Washington was organized, and a sheriff and deputies hired to keep the peace.   As well, a railroad was surely coming.   Jim Hill had promised one.   But so had an unknown, Tracy Holland, a bank manager in Grand Forks.   Two railroads building to the mines.   It began to sound like Red Mountain all over again.

 

STEEP AND CROOKED … by Late Writer, Artist & Castle Builder Bill Laux – Chapter IX

/ Peter Klopp / 1 Comment

STEEP AND CROOKED: THE MINING RAILROADS OF THE CANADIAN BORDER

 By Bill Laux

CHAPTER NINE

  GRANBY 1895 – 1902

Granby-Smelter

Jay P. Graves at the California mine on Red Mountain had held his breath in 1895 and taken the plunge.   He bought into a pair of copper prospects on Knob Hill in the Boundary range of the Monashee Mountains a few miles north of the border.   An old and trusted acquaintance, H.P. Palmerston, had come to him with a proposal.   Palmerston had been offered one quarter of their claims on Knob Hill by the Greenwood prospectors, Henry White and Matthew Hotter, on a promise that he would raise development money.   Palmerston was ill and unable to interest anyone in these remote claims.   He sold his interest in them to Jay Graves.

Graves put his Spokane boarder, Aubrey White, a bookseller, to peddling stock in these claims to Spokane mining speculators in 1896.   White could get no more than 10 cents a share; on the Spokane Mining Exchange they traded for just 5 or 6 cents.   This was failing to raise enough capital to begin work, so Graves sold his house and moved his family into the Spokane Hotel. With the money from this sale, he hired Henry White, the original locator, to begin to clearing the forest from the claims and digging a trench to expose the top of the ore body.   When the extent of the deposit had been established by trenching the shallow overburden of soil, Graves bought a boiler, a steam powered hoist and a steam pump to begin sinking a shaft into the ore. This machinery had to be hauled by wagon from Bossburg on the SF&N line to Grand Forks.   Then a road had to be brushed out up to Knob Hill on the ridge top west of town. The claims that Graves had bought did not contain the rich, narrow veins plunging steeply into the mountain, as at Rossland.   The trenching had showed that the copper was a large, saucer-shaped ore body just below the surface.   How thick it was, no one knew.   It was only 1 or 2 percent copper, but there was a great deal of it, and it contained minor amounts of gold and silver.   A pit could be opened and the ore quarried cheaply out of the hillside.   Still, more development money would have to be raised to determine the full extent of the ore body.

Graves had incorporated the two claims with 1,500,000 shares for the Knob Hill and 1,000,000 shares for the Old Ironsides.   In 1899 he sent out Frank Hemmenway, a Spokane bank teller who doubled as a miner in the summer, to work with Henry White, trenching and taking samples for assay.   Hemmenway had a sound reputation with Spokane mining investors, and his favorable report boosted the stock price on the Spokane Exchange. It also started a rush of prospectors and promoters to the Knob Hill discoveries.   All those who had been too late to cash in on the Red Mountain bonanza now swarmed over Knob Hill, and claims were staked for several miles in all directions. The trenching White and Hemmenway had done on Grave’s Knob Hill claims suggested the presence of a very large ore body, much large than the original 600 by 1500 foot claims.  Graves used the money stock sales were bringing in to buy the adjoining claims and acquire the entire ore body.   Encouraged by reports of other ore bodies in the district, other serious investors were moving in.   In 1897 the Dominion Copper Company was formed to acquire the Idaho, Brooklyn and Stemwinder claims across the valley of Twin Creek from Graves’ developments.   All of the deposits found, while large and close to the surface, were of low grade.   None of them would pay for the long wagon haul to the railroad at Bossburg or Marcus.

Railroads were coming; Dan Corbin was surveying his line from Marcus to Greenwood.   Fritz Heinze was surveying his route over Mc Rae Pass.   The CPR was, with agonizing slowness, creeping in from Alberta.   The railroads had made Rossland, and Jay Graves was confident that when one reached his mines, there would be a boom bigger than had yet been seen.   A smelter would be required.   To raise money for it, Graves and Aubrey White went east to enlist Montreal investors.   Their pitch to the Montreallers was that it was a patriotic duty for Canadians to invest in these British Columbia mines, and not let them fall into the hands of the greedy Americans. The spectacle of a couple of Americans, Graves and White, glibly promoting Canadian patriotic sentiment was a replay of Captain Ainsworth’s arguments to the B.C. Legislature, twenty years before.   Graves and White were helped by the fact that Canada was in the midst of its great Free Trade Election and the issue of American domination of Canadian business was being fought out at the polls.   The anti Free Trade forces won and so did Graves. He enlisted the support of Stephen Miner, a Quebec industrialist with connections to the Montreal banking community.   Miner wanted a recognized mining engineer to submit a report on Graves’ to circulate to his wealthy friends.   Graves sent out another Spokane Colonel, Nelson Linsley, the head of the Spokane Mining Bureau, and a respected mining engineer, to assess the value of his claims on Knob Hill.

The report was favorable.   In Montreal, Stephen Miner showed it to his friends, and introduced them to Graves who, with his tongue stuck solemnly in his cheek, warned them of the dangers of Americans getting control of this valuable Canadian resource.   Might not even political annexation follow? he asked with a melodramatic shiver.   Miner’s friends were impressed.   The combination of patriotism plus profit was irresistible.   There is something embarrassingly familiar about this to Canadians.   It seems it always takes an American to arouse Canadian patriotism.            With a group of wealthy Montreal investors behind him, Graves went across town to the CPR.   He began lobbying the CPR directors to lay rails to his mines.   The directors were skeptical.   Three mountain ranges would have to be crossed, and they doubted that Grave’s low-grade copper would pay for the construction costs.   Jay Graves was at an impasse.   The railroad was essential to his mines.   Without a firm promise of one, he and Miner could not sell stock in the Old Ironsides and Knob Hill.   And until his mines demonstrated their profitability, the CPR would not move.            And just as it was the threat of American control that brought the Montreal investors into Graves’ scheme, it was Dan Corbin, lobbying for a charter for a railroad to the Boundary mines, that aroused the CPR.   They easily blocked his charter application in Parliament, but when Jim Hill bought Corbin’s railroad, the CPR had to act.   Almost in a panic, they sent their engineers and surveyors into the Monashee snows to rush a line to the Boundary Copper camps.

The arrival of Canadian Pacific rails in Grand Forks in 1899 was marvelous luck for Jay Graves and Stephen Miner.   With the CPR laying track toward their new mining camp of Phoenix, the future of their Granby Company was assured.   However, Graves knew very well the CPR’s intention to create a transportation monopoly in the Boundary district, just as they had attempted in the Kootenays.   And with the knowledge that only a second and competing railroad could bring the CPR ore hauling rates down to the lowest possible figure, Graves went to Jim Hill in St Paul.   He showed him Colonel Linsley’s reports on the Old Ironsides and the Knob Hill.   Would Mr. Hill build Dan Corbin’s line to the Boundary?   Jim Hill said nothing.  His game was bigger.   If Grave’s ore body was as big as Colonel Linsley said, and as cheap to mine, a rail haul, while profitable, would not be enough.   Jim Hill wanted the mines and the smelter as well.   Very quietly, he began buying stock in Graves’ and Miner’s companies. Graves and Miner had organized three companies in 1899, the Old Ironsides, the Knob Hill, and Granby, to control the properties they owned on the ridge between Grand Forks and Greenwood.   Graves brought Yolen Williams over from the California mine at Rossland, made him a director, and hired him to work out plans to extract the ore. Then, at the head waters of Twin Creek, just below their claims, Graves and Miner preempted a town site, called it Phoenix, built a water system, and began selling lots to merchants, saloon keepers, hotel men, and others moving to the new camp.            The town site was a huge success.   Buyers flocked in, scenting a new Rossland.   Within 24 hours of going on sale, nearly every lot was sold for between $500 to $600.   It was said that the town site sale brought in $100,000 to Granby.   Graves and Miner now had enough for a down payment on a smelter, and began to build one on the North Fork of the Kettle River, just over Observation Mountain from Grand Forks. Breathlessly, miners, businessmen and investors, watched the CPR’s branch line to Phoenix being graded around the eastern slopes of Deadman’s Hill toward the mines.   With the CPR laying tracks to their ore, and with directors, Miner and Gault, handling stock sales in Montreal, Aubrey White moved to New York and began selling shares there.   They began moving briskly in the range of 80 cents.   This was delightful news to the Spokane speculators who had bought their shares for a nickel.   And at 80 cents, Jay Graves was now a rich man.

The Guggenheim brothers at that time dominated American metal smelting and refining.   Walter Aldrige at Trail had served in one of their Colorado operations.   Now Graves hired another one of Guggenheim’s smelter engineers, Abel Hodges, to put up a first class smelter on the North Fork site.   With all this activity, the CPR queried Walter Aldridge, whether the Phoenix development was serious. Aldridge, who badly wanted the Phoenix ores for his Trail smelter, told President Shaughnessy that it was quite serious, and that the Old Ironsides held enough ore to support a small smelter.   Shaughnessy was asked by Graves to build a 2-mile CPR spur into the smelter site from the C&W main line at Ward Lake.   It was needed as quickly as possible, Graves emphasized, as the smelter machinery to be installed would be much too heavy for freight wagons.   Aldridge and Shaughnessy wanted the Phoenix ore for the Trail smelter, and were in no mood to facilitate a competing smelter.   They told Graves Granby would have to pay for the smelter spur itself, but the cost would be refunded if the smelter production should reach 100 tons per day.   Aldridge underestimated Granby.   The Phoenix ores were lean, averaging only 1-1/4 percent copper, and would require several smeltings to concentrate them enough for refining.   Abel Hodges assured Jay Graves that he could smelt 150 tons of Phoenix ore a day, and that the spur cost would be recovered. 

The CPR’s Phoenix branch left the main line at the Eholt summit and climbed up Coltern Creek on a 3.4 percent grade.   At the head of the creek a small side hill cut, exposed a mass of chalcopyrite, a sulfide of copper and iron.   An alert workman quickly drove stakes on it and sold it to the Dominion Copper Company as the Emma Mine.  Aldridge and Shaughnessy were in no hurry to serve Jay Graves’ interest, and at this spot they abandoned the climb to Phoenix and ran a 2-1/2 mile spur out to the B.C. mine.   Aldridge urgently wanted that mine’s ore, almost pure copper pyrites, for his Trail smelter, as its high sulfur content would only require enough coal to ignite it in the smelter furnace.   From then on the burning sulfur itself would smelt the ore.    Graves was furious.   The CPR was hauling Boundary ore to Trail before putting rails into his deposit.   If Jim Hill were only on the scene, the CPR would not be trifling with him in this way.   Angrily, he had to send his first ore shipments down the mountain by wagon to the Granby Smelter for its opening on April 11, 1900, exactly as the Le Roi had had to do from Rossland, four years previously.            Finally, the CPR sent its crews back to the Emma mine, and began grading up the east side of Deadman’s Ridge toward Phoenix.   Not a quarter mile from the Emma, their grading exposed another mass of copper ore, and with no Trail engineer present, it was staked as the Oro Denoro, and sold to the Dominion Copper Company.

From that point the graders carefully examined every stone for traces of copper, but no further bonanzas were uncovered in the steep climb to the ridge top flat at the Wellington Camp (later Hartford).   At the chaotic Wellington Camp the ground was covered with stores, tents and cabins whose owners demanded exorbitant prices for a right of way.   The CPR hastily put in a switchback on perfectly level ground rather than pay for the land needed for a loop.   (Later on, when the Wellington Camp declined, a loop was built.)   The switchback reversed the line north where it climbed through the Rawhide, Gold Drop, Curlew, and Snowshoe claims, and turned into a shallow pass at an elevation of 4500 feet to enter the head waters of Twin Creek, the new town of Phoenix and the Granby Company’s mines.

In June of 1900, the rails were spiked down, and the line was complete.   On July 11, the first trainload of ten 30-ton cars of ore from the Old Ironsides mine departed Phoenix behind CPR L class Consolidation No. 317.   At Smelter Junction, the train was split, with five cars set off to be forwarded to the Trail smelter, while the remaining five cars were trundled down the 2 mile spur to the to the Granby Smelter. They arrived at 5:30 PM and were received with elaborate ceremony. Jay Graves and his family, together with C.H.S. Miner, Abel Hodges, and their families, were present.   A local brass band played, and the whistle cords of the engines were tied down to express the jubilation of all present.   It had been a tremendous gamble, but Jay Graves had won.            The two smelter furnaces were fired up the next day, and another trainload of ore arrived, the beginning of daily shipments from Granby and the other mines in the region.   Jay Graves at once ordered two Thew steam shovels on flanged wheels for 36” gauge track.   Quarry faces were blasted into the ore bodies at the Old Ironsides and the Knob Hill, 36” track was laid, and the two shovels began digging out the broken ore and loading it into 4 ton mine cars.   Davenport 0-4-0 saddletanker locomotives hauled the mine cars out of the quarries to a loading platform where they were dumped into the CPR 30 ton ore gondolas below.   At least one of the Davenport saddletankers was a special model for underground use, cut down to a five foot height, and requiring its engineer to operate it and fire it from a sitting position.   This squat steamer could enter the caverns blasted into the quarry walls and pull out ore from underground.

All this mechanization was wonderfully efficient.   Jay Graves boasted accurately to reporters that the Granby ores moved from quarry to smelter untouched by human hands.   Dumping the mine cars was mechanized a few years later when a Granby employee invented the self-dumping Granby mine car.   A wheel on the outside of the car would ride up on a slanting rail fixed to a vertical bulkhead in the dumping shed and tip the car as the Davenport pushed it over the chute.   This “Granby Car” was sold all over North America in subsequent years. As soon as the CPR tracks reached the mines at Phoenix, production went on a six-day week.   The ores rolled in short trains down the steep 12 mile grade to Eholt where they were made up into trains for the Granby smelter and cuts of cars for Trail to be picked up by the next way freight.   A second Shay locomotive, No. 112, identical to the 111 working the Rossland hill, was ordered and put to work on the Phoenix line hauling ore down the hill, and bringing coal and freight up to Phoenix.

With the completion of the Phoenix line, the CPR shifted its crews to Greenwood to build another steep and crooked branch up Motherlode creek to serve the Deadwood, Sunset and Motherlode mines.   The branch left the main line just a few hundred feet north of the C&W station, and climbed the rock bluff above Boundary Creek on a 3.8 percent grade to enter Motherlode Creek above the new smelter being built by the B.C. Copper Company.   From the smelter, the line climbed the left bank of Motherlode Creek to the town of Deadwood, and the Greyhound and Deadwood mines, also open quarries like the Phoenix mines.   From Deadwood the line was built on that same 3.8 percent grade up Castle Creek to a switchback (later replaced with a loop) which reversed it out of Castle Creek and up Motherlode Creek again to the huge Sunset open pit, or “glory hole,” as they were then called.   A quarter mile farther on it reached the Mother lode mine and its even bigger glory hole.   Shay 113 was purchased in 1903 to work this branch.

The CPR surveyors had continued past the Motherlode mine, locating a line winding in and out of creek valleys and looping around the noses of ridges to Dan Corbin’s King Solomon mine.   This location was known as Copper Camp, at 4400 feet elevation, with the King Solomon and Enterprise as the major producing mines.   The line past Motherlode, however, was never graded or built.   Probably because the CPR demanded the mine owners pay for it, with reimbursement after a certain tonnage had been shipped.     Agreement was evidently never reached, and the end of track remained at Motherlode with the King Solomon and Enterprise ores coming down to that point on wagons.

From the Canadian Pacific’s point of view, the building of the Columbia and Western with its spurs and branches was more a defense against Jim Hill than a profitable investment.   They had spent an estimated 7 million dollars to put rails into the Boundary country from Robson West, and yet the mining companies had spent but 4 millions in their developments.   Worse, the startling news came that Jim Hill had bought the supposedly defunct charter of the Vancouver, Victoria and Eastern and his surveyors were staking grades into the Boundary country and up into Phoenix itself.

The CPR built a further spur from the Eholt-Phoenix line to serve the Jackpot and Athelstan mines, and surveyed two more grades long the spine of the Midway range across the border to reach the City of Paris and No. 7 mines at White’s Camp, and the Washington and Lone Star at the head of Big Goosmus Creek in Washington.These two last branches were never built; again, the owners would not pay, and found they could build a 5-mile aerial cableway to transport their ore back across the border into Canada and down to a second Boundary Creek smelter being erected by the Dominion Copper Company.   It went into operation in 1901.   With three smelters competing against him for Boundary copper, Walter Aldridge was finding it difficult to obtain sufficient ore for his Trail smelter.   His Canadian Mining and Smelting Company was obliged to buy or lease producing mines to secure a dependable supply of smelter feed.

By 1902 the Granby smelter was operating at capacity, and still more ore was coming down from the huge Knob Hill and Old Ironsides pits.   Graves and Miner merged all their Companies into Granby Consolidated Mining, Smelting and Power Company, Ltd. and issued $15 million in stock.   $11 million went to the stockholders in the old syndicate; the rest was put on the market to raise funds for enlargement of the smelter, the installation of a converter to produce nearly pure copper, and for a hydroelectric plant at Cascade, on the Kettle River, to furnish additional power for the smelter and to electrify the mines at Phoenix.   This enormous capitalization looked suspicious to many.   No one knew how deep the Old Ironsides and Knob Hill ore bodies were.   Did they really have $15 million dollars worth of ore?   Neither Graves nor Miner could answer this question definitively.   Speculators wondered if Graves and Miner were preparing to sell out at this inflated value before the ore bottomed out.

For his part, Graves had a new scheme.   This minor real estate developer from Spokane was going to try to play the two hostile railroad barons against each other for his own interests.   Graves was never shy; he approached Thomas Shaughnessy,  President of the CPR, with a plan to keep Jim Hill out of Phoenix.   He proposed that Granby should continue to smelt its own ores in its own smelter.   But since there was more ore now coming out of the ground on the heights around Phoenix than the Granby smelter could handle, and the cost of transporting ores to Trail over McRae pass was uneconomic, the CPR could build a second Grand Forks smelter, a custom smelter to handle all the ores from the mines not owned by Granby, B.C. Copper, or Dominion.   These ores could not stand the shipping charges to Trail and were going begging for treatment.   If the CPR would build this custom smelter, Graves promised he would offer as security for loans to build it, 28 options he held on mines in both the Phoenix area and also down in Republic, Washington in the new Eureka Creek mines.   If the CPR accepted his offer, he would guarantee them the haul from all these mines to the custom smelter as well as the Granby haul to its smelter.   Graves estimated revenue from these hauls to be $800,000 per year.   It was not unreasonable; CPR was already getting $380,000 a year from its haul to the Granby smelter alone.   It was a clever scheme; by using the capacity of a second Grand Forks smelter to contract for all the Boundary ores offered, nothing at all would be left for Jim Hill to haul.   He might run his rails up to Phoenix if he wished, but when he got them there, there would be nothing to load into his cars.

If the impetuous Van Horne had still been in charge, he might well have agreed.   But the cautious, conservative Shaugnessy was now President.   He sought advice from Walter Aldridge.   Aldridge told him the Boundary mines were overrated, that they were shallow deposits that would soon play out, that Graves could not demonstrate proven reserves of ore.   Shaugnessy turned down Graves’ offer.   As it turned out, this was a spectacular mistake.   Copper prices would soar during World War I making even the poorest Phoenix ores profitable.

Undismayed, Graves turned around and sounded out Jim Hill.   His new scheme, which he put to Hill, was nothing less than a proposal that the two of them should buy Granby outright.   He asked Jim Hill for a loan of $2 million to buy 500,000 shares of Granby at $4.   With the 150,000 shares he owned or controlled through relatives and employees that would give Hill and himself control. With control of Granby, Hill, when his rails reached Phoenix, could then take all of the Granby traffic and the CPR would be starved of ore.   After promising funds, Hill had second thoughts.   His suspicious nature which George Stephen had played upon so successfully, asserted itself.     He could not bring himself to participate in another man’s scheme.   When Graves got to Montreal to make his stock purchases, there was no money waiting for him.   He found the Granby directors ready to sell, as he had predicted to Hill.   They thought the future for copper was speculative, and wanted to get out while the stock price was favorable.   They were selling, however, to William H. Nichols, a New York copper refiner.   Frantic letters to Hill produced no result. Graves’ scheme was slipping away from him.   When the other directors, unaware of Graves’ intentions, invited him to go along with them and sell to Nichols, he had to agree.   Hill eventually sent him a stingy $25,000 in New York in case Nichols should change his mind, but it was too late.   Nichols and his New York associates had bought Granby outright.

One has to wonder at the eagerness of the Canadian stockholders to sell out to the Americans when it had been appeals to their patriotism that had brought them into Granby in the first place.   Emotionalism is probably much more a factor in business than most will admit. In 1902 Jim Hill’s men crossed the border into Canada at Cascade and began grading toward Grand Forks.   There they were halted by an injunction obtained from the court by one of the most preposterous railroads ever to run a train, Tracy Holland’s “Hot Air Line.”   Jim Hill had encountered his newest and most pestiferous adversary.

 

STEEP AND CROOKED … by Late Writer, Artist & Castle Builder Bill Laux – Chapter VII

/ Peter Klopp / 1 Comment

STEEP AND CROOKED: THE MINING RAILROADS OF THE CANADIAN BORDER

 By Bill Laux

sc9-1-edited

  CHAPTER SEVEN

RAIL OPERATIONS, TRAIL TO ROSSLAND  (1896 – 1929)

On the narrow gauge line to Rossland, three freight trains ran daily, bringing ore down to the smelter, and hauling coal, machinery and supplies to the Rossland Camp from barges on the Columbia.   At the riverfront, a steep track ran diagonally down the riverbank to a switchback, and reversed down to the extreme low water line.   A steamer or a barge moored alongside the track at any stage of the river allowed transfer of freight or passengers directly to the little cars of the Trail Creek Tramway.

Dispatching was from the Tramway office at Smelter Junction, a two story building, with operations on the first floor. The second floor was comfortably fitted up as accommodations for Fritz Heinze where he spent one week of every month in Trail looking after his Canadian enterprises.  The freight schedule had one train loading at the ore bunkers above Rossland, while another was on the line, and a third unloading at the smelter. The ore cars were the 12 ton wooden coal gondolas that had come from Alberta.   They had link and pin couplers, hand brakes, and typically ran in trains of seven cars with no caboose.   Upgrade, the little Hinkleys would have been taxed to their tractive limit by eight empties, or fewer if a car of coal was in the uphill consist. The Tramway ran several passenger trains daily between the Trail waterfront station and Rossland.   Passenger service began on June 5, 1896, with a morning and an afternoon train each way.   The fare was $2.00.   As the Tramway had no proper passenger cars as yet, three freight cars had windows cut in their sides, wood stoves installed, and a double bench was run down the length of the car, the passengers facing outward, back to back, and bracing their feet against the sides of the car for the rough ride up the hill.

The afternoon train of these improvised coaches left Trail at 5:00 PM, and , according to the Trail Creek Times, regularly carried a hundred or more passengers, local people, and travellers disembarking from the sternwheelers down at the riverfront.   At times space in the train was fully occupied and passengers sat on the car steps, on the roofs, and even on the locomotive pilot.   Frequently, in those early days, extra cars had to be added to handle the baggage off the boats, and a second locomotive had to be coupled onto the train to haul it up the steep grades to Rossland.    These were bonanza times, and in their eagerness to get to the golden promise of the mines, travellers were undeterred by such inconveniences; the more overcrowded the trains, the more wonderful the mines above must be.   Miners, promoters, salesmen, saloon keepers, gamblers, prostitutes: everyone was frantic to get in on the roaring days while they lasted.   Farmers and ranchers from the surrounding district rode the Tramway as well.   They made regular trips to Rossland to solicit restaurants, hotels, grocers, for contracts for their produce, fruit and meat.   Many of the orchardists along the Arrow Lakes would contract their entire crop to a retailer in Rossland and ship the fruit, as it came ripe, on the daily CPR sternwheelers that would pause at every rural wharf where boxes of fruit were stacked.   Taken off the steamer that same day at Trail, these perishables would ride the cars up the steep and twisting rails to Rossland.   With this coordinated boat-rail service, strawberries, cherries, raspberries, apples and pears, could be in the Rossland grocers’ windows the day after being picked.   It is deceptively easy for us to dismiss the 19th Century as crude and rustic.   A look at the wilted produce at the market today should remind us that we often grossly overestimate the fruits of progress. Similarly, in the cold months of the year, when lack of refrigeration was no problem,. fresh killed pork, beef and lamb rode the boats and rails to the mines.   Retired farmers and orchardists assert that the golden days of the Rossland Bonanza were the making of their homesteads.   The Red Mountain mines made millionaires out of the Spokane Colonels, but more importantly, it kick-started a brand new Kootenay agriculture which flourished in those years as it has not done since.

The Spokane passenger train left that city at 8:45 AM daily, and its Northport connection on the Red Mountain Railway did not get into Rossland until 4:10 PM, too late to catch the last passenger train down the hill.   They would likely have taken the stage down the steep, twisting wagon road the last eight miles to Trail.   The 10:00 AM Red Mountain Railway departure from Rossland got its passengers into Spokane at 5:35 PM, making the 147 mile trip at and average of 19 miles per hour.   Chartered private trains, not obliged to make station stops, probably made the journey in two thirds of that time.

The timetable above shows that the passenger schedules on the Rossland hill left two daylight windows for freight operations, one from 9:15 AM to 11:00 AM, probably for a run of empty ore cars up to the mines, and another from 1:30 PM to 3:00 PM, to bring down the first loads of ore.   Nighttime was open, and the other two freight runs were certainly made in the dark.

Motive power on the narrow gauge consisted of the two Hinkley 2-6-0 locomotives bought second hand from the Alberta Railway and Coal Company, successors to the Northwest Coal and Navigation Company, when they standard gauged their “Turkey Trail” line to Great Falls, Montana. Hinkleys No. 1 and No. 2 were construction numbers 1780 and 1781 respectively, with 12 x18 cylinders and tiny, 31” drivers which gave them 13,000 pounds of tractive effort.   The Hinkleys were built as 0-6-0 machines with the pilot truck added later.   They probably handled the passenger runs on the narrow gauge with the more powerful Brooks locomotive making the freight runs.   The Brooks was construction number 578, with 14 x18 cylinders, 42 inch drivers, and weighed 20 tons.     Two more moguls were reportedly obtained in 1899.   No. 4 was a Mogul of unknown origin, and No. 5 was a 2-6-0 from the Canadian Locomotive Company of Kingston.   No photographs are known to exist.   Possibly one or both were bought for spare parts. On December 6, 1896, the refurbished private car made its first trip up the line to Rossland with Heinze and a party of contractors who had come to bid on the C&W line to Robson West.

The Trail Creek Tramway from the outset was worked as hard as its diminutive equipment would allow, to bring down the tonnage Heinze required for his smelter.   In the summer of 1896 a new blast furnace was installed at the smelter and capacity was raised to 500 tons per day. This was more than the little 12 ton cars could handle.   In the middle of August, 1896, the tramway was delivering 200 tons a day.   50 tons came from Le Roi, 50 from the War Eagle and a hundred tons from other mines.   A further 50 tons of very high grade ore in sacks was brought down daily and taken to the riverbank to be put aboard the Lytton for Northport and rail shipment from there to the Tacoma smelter. Heinze boasted his tramway was earning $25,000 a month.   In October of 1896, fourth freight run was instituted and the tramway was able to bring down 325 tons daily.   About half this ore was was coming from the stockpiles accumulated at the mines during the years before the railway had come.   The mines themselves were not producing more than 175 tons daily, all told.  When the tramway should have caught up with this backlog, the smelter would need new ores or have to cut back to a reduced capacity.   This prompted Fritz Heinze to go after those Slocan silver-lead ores with his C&W line to Robson West.

The Trail Creek Tramway did not keep its employees long.   The pay was low, only $1.75 per day, from which $1.25 was deducted if one used the company boardinghouse.   As well, the operation was a difficult and hazardous one, bringing heavy trains down one of the steepest railroads in the West at night and without air brakes.   Brakemen had to ride between the cars, with a foot on each, and twist down the brake wheel, with a pick handle for leverage, at whistle signals from the engineer.   In winter the job was particularly brutal.   Most men stayed only long enough to earn a grub stake, then moved on.

In one instance, remembered by freight conductor, Tom Peck, the entire train crew rebelled.   During the obligatory stop at the Tiger switchbacks to let the wheels and brake shoes cool, the grumbling men discovered that they were of one mind: Fritz Heinze could have his damned railroad in a place that would cause him severe discomfort.   Led by conductor, “Lean Dog” McLean, they took a sight on a lighted window in Anable and walked off in a body, leaving the train to look after itself.  For such a steep and difficult line, accidents were surprisingly few.   A passenger train demolished an ore car which had somehow strayed onto the main line in July of 1896.   In August of 1897, the second loaded ore car of a ten car train left the rails on the Davis Street curve in Rossland, just above the Spitzee mine. Conductor Abercrombie and his crew made two unsuccessful attempts to re-rail the car with track frogs.   On the third try, Hackett, the impatient engineer,. took slack, threw the Johnson bar over and opened the throttle wide.   The sudden jerk, instead of pulling the car up onto the frog, threw it over on its side, tumbling it down the embankment, and pulling the first car and the locomotive with it.   Engineer Hackett, Fireman Harkness, and another man leapt free from the locomotive as it rolled, and scrambled away, uninjured.   No. 3, the Brooks Mogul, came to rest upside down, its drivers still turning until someone closed the throttle.   The wreck came at the wrong time, as No. 2 was in the shop for repairs, and Hinkley No. 1 was left to run the Tramway by itself.   Tragedy came during the efforts to right the wreck, and get No. 3 back up on the rails.   The company’s blacksmith, trying to loosen a bolt, had his wrench slip, and falling backward, crushed his kidney on a tree stump.   The injury proved fatal, the first casualty of the little line.

After three years of operation as a narrow gauge line, the Canadian Pacific, when it took over, standard gauged the line in 1899.   The loops at Warfield were widened from 25 to 20 degrees, and at Tiger, the alignment was changed.   The switchbacks could not be dispensed with, but the line linking them was lengthened to reduce the grade.   All but one of the line’s tight curves were eased to 20 degrees, but still the standard CPR Mikado locomotives were never able to be used since their trailing trucks lacked the swing necessary to negotiate a 20 degree curve.   The grade on the line after standard gauging was still 4 percent with short stretches of 4.6 percent, and two sections of 4.8 percent, one at Anable and the other on Le Roi Avenue in Rossland.

In the process of conversion, standard gauge ties were slid under the rails, and the old six foot ties were sent down to the smelter to be used as fuel.   60 pound rails replaced the old 28 pound steel, but one 28 pound rail was left in place so that the narrow gauge traffic could continue uninterrupted during the changeover.   60 pound rail for all the standard gauge switches was cut and set out, and on June 15, 1899, a hundred men, in six gangs, replaced the 14 narrow gauge switches with standard gauge, and the changeover was complete.   By 3:15 PM, on that same day, the first standard gauge train, following the changeover crews up the hill, arrived in Rossland.

The narrow gauge equipment was sold by the CPR.   Hinkley No. 1, went in November, 1899, to Mc Lean Brothers, contractors working on the C&W extension to Midway.   It worked at Bulldog tunnel, on the long fills above Dog Creek and doubtless at other locations as well.   It was reported in 1905 at Midway, working on the abortive Midway and Vernon grade.   In 1907, a locomotive of identical appearance shows up in a photograph as No. 2 of the Belcher Mine Ry, an 8 mile narrow gauge line serving the Belcher mine up Lambert creek near Karamin in Ferry County, Washington.   This may have been Trail Creek Tramway No. 1 or a sister locomotive from the Turkey Trail in Alberta.

Master Mechanic Garlock, left Trail to work in Seattle for the White Pass and Yukon Railway.   He was charged by them with the job of finding narrow gauge equipment for the new line.   He bought Hinkley No. 2 in October, 1900 and shipped it to Skagway where it worked on the White Pass as its No. 64.   It was scrapped there in 1918.   No. 3, the Brooks Mogul, was also bought by Garlock in July,1900, and shipped north to become WP&Y No. 65.   When it was replaced some years later by heavier locomotives, the White Pass sold it to Tanana Mines in Alaska to become their No. 51. It was scrapped by the Alaska Railroad, probably in 1917, when it standard gauged the Tananna Mines line. The fate of Mogul No. 4 is unknown; some reports have it sent back to the Alberta Railway and Coal Company.   No 5, the C.L.C. locomotive, went to McDonnell and Gzowski, contractors, and was put to work on the construction of the spiral tunnels above Field as No. 15.   Its ultimate fate is unknown. There are reports in Trail that Garlock sent the first class passenger coach and Heinze’s private car to the WP&Y as well.   However, there are no records in Skagway to bear this out.

The early coaches on that line have been thoroughly rebuilt and no evidence of origin remains.  However, early photos of the WP&Y show a “duckbilled” roof Billmeyer and Smalls coach, which could have come from either the Trail Creek Tramway or the Coeur D’Alene Railway which was standard gauged about the same time. In 1900, the CPR bought the first of three large three truck Shay locomotives to work the Rossland Hill.   No 111, the first of the Shays, was a 90 ton machine, (120 tons in working order with a full boiler and tank) with three 15 x 17 inch cylinders and 41” drivers.   The big Shay had greater tractive power than any other locomotive the Canadian Pacific possessed at that time.   As the CPR intended to run mixed trains on the Rossland hill, the Shay was fitted with an elegant wooden cowcatcher as the law required for a passenger locomotive.   Wooden cowcatchers were favored by the CPR for mountain districts in the early years of the century.   It was noted that on encountering a boulder on the track at speed, a wooden cowcatcher would disintegrate into splinters, while a steel pilot would be mangled into mass of bent metal, which, passing under the wheels, would frequently derail the locomotive.   But Shay 111, though powerful, was slow, and it is doubtful that the mandated cowcatcher was ever able to overtake a cow in good health.

The Shay could bring eight steel gondolas up the hill, while the light Consolidations assigned to the branch could bring up but four.   Capacity of the Shay on the hill was 213 tons, the Consolidations, 184 tons.   For winter service it was found necessary to sheathe that elegant wooden pilot with steel to throw the snow, and to also extend steel sheathing outside the front truck to keep wet snow from balling up in the gears.   The curves on the Rossland line were too tight to permit a standard snowplough to operate; its long wheelbase caused it to overhang the sharp curves and derail when pushing snow.   A special short coupled plough was built for the Rossland line, and a tiny flanger was constructed on a single truck, weighted with lengths of rail.

The CPR bought two more Shays to the same pattern as 111, for the Motherlode and Phoenix branches, and these locomotives probably worked the Rossland hill as well.   No 112 came in 1902, and was scrapped after a wreck in 1911.   No 113 arrived in 1903.   In 1913 it was sold to become No. 5 on Dan Corbin’s coal line in the East Kootenay.   It was sent to Contractors’ Machinery in Seattle the same year in trade for a lighter Shay, and disappears from the record.   Probably it served out its time on some Northwest logging line.

Winter brought special problems at the ore receiving pockets at the smelter.   All of the Red Mountain ores came out of the mines wet, and in the winter whole train loads of ore would come off the hill frozen solid.   A special thawing house was built at the smelter into which the cars of frozen ore would be shunted and the doors closed.   Stoves would lit to raise the temperature, and steam lances employed in the wooden cars to loosen the ore. Later, when steel ore jennies were introduced, oil fired torches would be played against their sides and workers with sledge hammers would pound the cars until the ore could be broken up.   The scorched and battered sides of these cars testified to dozens of combats with frozen ore.   Finally, the engineering department built a car shaker to break up frozen ore.

Other problems abounded on the steep and crooked line, even in summer.   T.L. Bloomer, who worked on the Rossland hill, remembered, “One of the most trying difficulties on the Rossland Hill in the old days was bad rails caused by smoke from the smelter combining with dew or mist from the heavens.   All sorts of schemes have been tried for overcoming this combination — steam jets to blow it off and different methods of sanding.   I have seen it so bad that the train crew had to get shovels and throw dirt from the side of the track onto the rails, and still the engine would slip.” As the smelter stack was belching tons of sulfur dioxide, the oxygen of the air and the dew on the rails, converted it into sulfuric acid, an oily liquid. Another slippery rail problem was caused by caterpillars in the summer, which, Bloomer reported, “…would cluster on the rails for warmth when the sun went down.   And how they would smell!”

Acid rain, shivering caterpillars, unremarked on a normal railroad, became serious on the 4.6 percent grades, stalling trains and magnifying the trivial into the serious.            Bloomer, and other engineers on the Rossland hill, noted that a light day snow gave ideal traction on the tight curves.   It held the sand on the rail and provided just enough moisture to lubricate the flanges. The trains always ran better through the loops, the crews found, when the outer drivers had just the right amount of slippage on the super-elevated outer rail.   The Rossland hill was a challenge for engineers and train crew, winter and summer.

Coming down the hill with a loaded train or ore, a stop had to be made .4 miles below the old narrow gauge wye for a safety switch.   Here retainers were set up to hold 15 pounds of air on the brakes, the switch was thrown, and the train proceeded down the hill.   The switch was normally lined for an old quarry and if the descending train was unable to stop, the switch would divert it into a pile of loose rock in the quarry.

Freights were limited to 10 miles per hour downhill, passenger trains to 20.   At the Tiger switchbacks, freights had a mandatory stop of ten minutes, to allow brakes and wheels to cool before proceeding down to Warfield.   Most tricky of all, was bringing down a light engine.   The engine brakes in that case could be used only sparingly, for if the steel driver tires overheated, they would expand and come off the drivers, derailing the locomotive.   Engineers put the Johnson bar in the second notch of reverse and open the cylinder cocks slightly and came down on compression, rather than on brakes.

Up above Rossland, the Highline leading to the War Eagle and Le Roi ore bunkers crossed Acme Creek (Centre Star Gulch) on a high trestle built on a 26 degree curve.   Only the Shays and rod engines with blind second and main drivers could negotiate it.   Later, new ore bunkers were built down on the lower line and the ore sent down to them by cable trams to eliminate this awkward spur.

The Canadian Pacific operating department never did like the Shays bought for the steep mine branches.   With their limited speed, they were not interchangeable with rod engines for mainline service.   In 1910, with the coming of the heavy Consolidations of the M4 class, these engines were assigned to the Rossland hill and the Shays confined to the the Phoenix and Motherlode branches in the Boundary district.   The M4 3400s and 3500s were rated at 184 tons on the Rossland hill, and could when required, work the line to Castlegar and Nelson, or wherever else they might be needed. The Shays could out pull them, but that was all.   Later, the N2 class Consolidations worked the hill, the heaviest engines permitted on the line.

With the standard gauging of the line in 1898, passenger connections to Nelson, where all court and government business had to be transacted, and to the outside world, were greatly improved.   A 1905 timetable shows daily except Sunday departures from Rossland at 6:55 PM, dropping down to Trail to pick up passengers, and then climbing back to Smelter Junction to take the line to Castlegar.   The train arrived at the dock at Robson West at 9:00 PM, and passengers would board the sternwheeler “Rossland,” “Kootenay,” or “Minto,” leaving at 11:00 PM for the sixteen hour run up the lakes to the rail connection at Arrowhead.   Arrival at Revelstoke was at 5:30 PM to make connections with trains to Vancouver or Calgary and the East.

On the inbound trip, passengers would leave Revelstoke at 8:15 AM on the branch line train to Arrowhead where they would board whichever one of the three sternwheelers was running that day at 9:15 AM for a 10:15 AM departure.   Arrival at Robson West was at 8:30 PM, after a fast ten hour run down the lakes.   Waiting at the dock would be the Rossland-Trail train, departing at 8:50 PM, and reaching Rossland at 10:50 that evening.   The Nelson and Grand Forks trains would be at Robson West as well, for passengers bound to those destinations.

Robson West was a busy place with a twice daily interchange of steamer and three trains.   At 9:24 AM the Rossland train arrived, followed six minutes later by the arrival of the Nelson train.   After transferring passengers, the train from Rossland departed for Grand Forks and Midway.   At the same time, the train from Midway which had been standing all night, departed for Nelson, and a third train departed for Rossland.

At 8:30 in the evening, the Revelstoke steamer would arrive and ten minutes later, trains began arriving.   First, the Nelson train, then five minutes later,the train from Grand Forks, Greenwood and Midway. Fifteen minutes later, the Rossland train would pull in.

Passengers from the boat boarded their trains; train passengers boarded the boat, and at 8:45 all three trains departed, for Rossland, for Nelson and for Midway.   The steamer took on coal, and at 11:00 PM she departed up lake.   Nothing remains of Robson West today but a double line of rotting piles where the trains used to back down the long, sloping ramp to lie alongside the steamers to transfer freight and passengers.   Directly across the river was the terminus of the Columbia and Kootenay line to Nelson and in the early years, after the steamer had discharged its passengers, it would barge rail cars across to the line on the other side.   In 1902, the CPR bridged the Columbia at Castlegar and the Robson terminus was abandoned.   Robson West continued to function as the rail-boat transfer point until the last sternwheeler, the “Minto,” was withdrawn in 1954.

All of the trains from Rossland, bound for Nelson, or Grand Forks, or Robson West, stopped at Smelter Junction, (now called Tadanac) and backed down the switchback line to Dublin gulch, took the switchback, and proceeded down Trail Creek to the Trail City Station on Cedar Avenue.   Passengers and express would be loaded and the train would back up the gulch to the switchback and then up the 3.9 percent grade to Smelter Junction.   In the 30s trim Ten Wheeler D10g class locomotives were assigned to the Trail- Nelson run.   Gibson Kennedy reports that some engineers with their light, two car train, would work the grade with a short cutoff which yielded a satisfyingly sharp bark from the stack, but produced a surge in train motion with every revolution of the drivers.   This caused the clerks in the mail and baggage car to lose their footing while trying to sort mail. They registered a complaint to the company and engineers were subsequently ordered to moderate their efforts to save fuel on this particular grade.

 

STEEP AND CROOKED … by Late Writer, Artist & Castle Builder Bill Laux – Chapter VI

/ Peter Klopp / Leave a comment

STEEP AND CROOKED: THE MINING RAILROADS OF THE CANADIAN BORDER

 By Bill Laux

 

Loading Cattle on the Rossland at Fauquier

Loading Cattle on the Rossland at Fauquier

CHAPTER SIX

THE COLUMBIA AND WESTERN  (1896 – 1900)

Fritz Heinze let his first contract for the first section of his new railway on December 9, 1896.   It was to be a standard gauge line, 21 miles long, from Smelter Junction to the foot of the Arrow Lakes at Robson West.   A dock, to be built there, would put his rails a short barge trip across the Columbia from the CPR’s Columbia and Kootenay terminal at what was called “Low Water Landing.”   The C&K’s original dock at Sproat’s Landing, at the confluence of the two rivers, had been abandoned because of the difficulty of docking sternwheelers there during low water periods. The new terminal was built three miles upstream where year round deep water was available.   This “Low Water Landing” became the town of Robson, and Heinze named his C&W terminal on the other side of the river “Robson West.”

Heinze had his original C&W charter, which called for a line running west from Rossland, amended.   By building north from Trail to Robson, instead of west from Rossland, Heinze avoided the double summit crossing to the Kettle Valley, and its 5000 foot pass.   At Robson West, his line would be in a position to connect to the CPR line from Alberta when it should be completed.   That he intended such a connection, is clear from his half interest with a Canadian, Albert McCleary, who had preempted the 320 acres which now forms the townsite of Castlegar.   McCleary’s preemption included the best site for a Columbia River bridge, and Heinze, in buying an interest, secured it for his C&W.    From his new terminal at Robson West, his amended charter authorized him to continue his line west to Dog Creek, and to ascend it to McRae Pass.   From the pass, it would be relatively easy construction down McRae Creek to the Kettle River Valley at Christina Lake.   This, of course, would preempt the CPR location for the line to Penticton Van Horne had promised to build. .   It was a shrewd move.   Heinze had the charter and the lowest pass into the Kettle Valley.   Van Horne was now blocked at the Columbia.

The Columbia and Western was received with extreme disfavor by the Canadian Pacific.   It was building its line in to the Kootenays from Lethbridge, Alberta, and planned to link up with its subsidiary, Columbia and Kootenay at Nelson.   To build its line west from the Columbia, the CPR would now have to buy Heinze out.

The Robson West line was laid with 56 pound rail lifted from the Northern Pacific’s Columbia and Palouse Railroad in Washington. The C&W grade followed a bedrock bench a few hundred feet above the the river.   At China Creek, the line had to descend from the bench to cross the creek on a 3.6 percent grade and climb out on the other side at 2.85 percent.   These two grades were to require doubling of heavy trains until a new alignment and a steel trestle was constructed in the 1940s.   C&W construction was done with leased CPR 2-8-0 No. 351 and some leased CPR flats. The work was bid in by a Butte, Montana contractor at $600,000, and work began on January 1, 1897

Heinze could not afford to buy equipment for his new line. His trip to England to raise money for it, with Lt. Governor Dewdney in his party, had been a complete failure.   No one wanted to invest in a railroad between two places which could not be found on any British map.   Heinze had to build the C&W using his own money, until on completion he should receive the land grants.   In these difficulties, he would not be able to continue his C&W west over Mc Rae Pass unless he could obtain further subsidies.   His engineers had reported to him that the line to the Boundary over McRae Pass would cost him $30,000 per mile.   His land grant of 20,000 acres per mile would bring in but 25 cents per acre at the prevailing prices: $5,000 per mile.   He went to the B.C. legislature to present his engineers’ estimates and request assistance.   The members were forthcoming, and granted him a cash subsidy of $4,000 per mile for that part of the line between Robson West and Greenwood.   For the remainder of the line, where it was thought construction would be easer, he could have the land grant or the cash subsidy, but not both.   He next tried the Dominion government for further assistance.

On June 8, 1897, he appeared before the parliamentary Railroad Committee in Ottawa to solicit a federal subsidy of $8000 per mile.   However, to his consternation, appearing the same day was Dr. Milne, of Victoria, for the Vancouver, Victoria and Eastern Railway, seeking a subsidy for that line.   The committee testily pointed out that Heinze was asking for a subsidy for a line west to the Coast from the Columbia River, and that Dr. Milne was asking for a subsidy for what would be a parallel line running east from the Coast to the Columbia.   They suggested that the two men should join their separate lines somewhere in the middle, and ask for a single subsidy for a joint line.   Milne and Heinze very reluctantly agreed to collaborate.   On the 16th, they reappeared before the committee with a hastily cobbled up joint proposal.   But in discussing it before the members, a dispute broke out between the two of them: Heinze would let the VV&E build its line, but he wanted the subsidy for himself.

The argument grew heated, and the committee, in disgust, adjourned for its summer holidays.   The matter could not be reopened until the committee sat again the following year.   When it considered the matter again in 1898, it granted a Federal charter for the C&W but no subsidy.   Interestingly the Federal charter proposed, in addition to the line to Penticton, a line from Trail to Columbia Gardens.     This location was also known as Sayward, where Heinze could join his line, as promised, to Daniel Corbin’s Nelson and Fort Shepherd line.   Without the Federal subsidy Heinze would be obliged to mortage more of his Montana mines to begin construction.   But at this very moment a concerted attack on his Butte copper properties was begun by the Rockefellers whose Amalgamated Copper now dominated Montana by aquiring both Marcus Daly’s and W. A. Clark’s holdings.   Only Heinze’s United Copper stood in their way of owning all the significant Butte mines and smelters. The Rockefellers, having created a Standard Oil monopoly in oil, were now goingto attempt it in copper.   To fight them off, Heinze would need every bit of cash he could raise..     He decided to cash out his Canadian enterprise to finance the 7 year legal battle with the Rockefellers that followed.

Back on the Columbia, the C&W line to Robson West was nearly complete, when, on September 10, 1897, the sternwheeler, Nakusp, grounded broadside to the current on a gravel bar at Kootenay Rapids, 17 miles above Trail.   The Nakusp was firmly stuck, blocking all river traffic.   The Lytton and the Kootenay were at once dispatched to try to pull her off.   They put lines to her and churned their great sternwheel furiously, but the Nakusp would not budge.   It was September, and every day the river level was dropping.   Soon the Nakusp was high and dry; no boat could move past her, and the smelter needed its coal deliveries.   The railroad was frantically rushed to completion and opened on the 27th, hauling passengers and the urgently needed coal to Trail. The unfortunate Nakusp eventually had to be jacked up onto an improvised launching ways and relaunched into the river.   It was November before she could be put into service again.

To operate the new line, Heinze leased four CPR 2-8-0 locomotives, Nos. 401 to 404, a single coach and some freight cars, and had them barged down from Revelstoke.   Three rail track was laid in the smelter yards, and by the end of 1897 a third rail allowed standard gauge service down to the Trail city station and the waterfront landing.   Leased Consolidation 404 had been built with blind second and main drivers, as did the others.   Once Heinze chose standard gauge for his C&W extension to Penticton, it was his intention to standard gauge the Rossland Hill as well.   The leased CPR Consolidations with blind drivers, would have been able to run through those tight curves above Anable and Warfield and handle the Rossland passenger runs.

With the completion of the C&W to Robson West, there was no long any need to run steamers down the Columbia from Robson to Trail.   And, except for the occasional summer excursion boat to Deer Park or Syringia Creek, this river service was discontinued.   Since the Red Mountain Railway now handled the passengers and freight from Northport, the boat service below Trail was also withdrawn, and the waterfront station closed.   A new Trail city station was built near the corner of Cedar and Farwell, the site of the present Super Valu market.   A wye was laid just east of the station, extending to Victoria Avenue, to enable engines to be turned.

With the whole Kootenay district developing mines, and two Canadian smelters operating, at Trail and at Nelson, the CPR was determined to establish its transportation monopoly in the district, and shut out the American competition.   It planned its own smelter at Blueberry Creek, and a line west to the new copper-gold discoveries in the Monashee Mountains.   Closely tied to the Federal Government, it sought to preserve the entire Kootenay mining industry for Canada, British investors, and itself.

Its first move was to buy out the independent Columbia and Kootenay Steam Navigation Company which operated the largest fleet of sternwheelers on the Columbia and on Kootenay Lake.   The strictly neutral CKSN boats had been calling at everybody’s wharf, delivering and accepting traffic from all. Once the CPR took over, however, orders went out that they were no longer to serve Dan Corbin’s Nelson and Fort Shepherd rail to steamer transfer at Five Mile Point, and to discontinue their run up the Kootenay River to Jim Hill’s railroad dock at Bonner’s Ferry.   Heinze’s connection at Trail, and later at Robson West, was still to be served, since he possessed that valuable and generous C&W charter which the CPR needed   to build west to Penticton and the Coast.

If the CPR thought that they had shut the Americans out by refusing to serve their docks, they did not know James J. Hill.   As soon as the CPR boats ceased running up the Kootenay to his Bonner’s Ferry transfer dock, Hill bought up a parcel of land on the southern end of Kootenay Lake called Kuskonook, and chartered a branch line to run down the Kootenay River Valley from Bonner’s Ferry to this new steamer landing and transfer point.   The American portion of the line was called the Kootenai Valley Railway, the Canadian section was the Bedlington and Nelson.   To counter the CPR boats, which would, of course, be forbidden to serve his new branch, he bought up the International Navigation and Trading Company which had been operating sternwheel steamers on Kootenay Lake in competition with the CPR.   Now, with his own boats, Hill competed at every lake point , and as soon as he could get his rails to Kuskonook, the CPR would face a mighty rival for Kootenay trade.

Hill’s Great Northern was not the only American railroad making a move on the Kootenays.   Dan Corbin was in Greenwood in the fall of 1897 buying the King Solomon mine, and had his surveyors locating a route from Marcus, Washington, up the Kettle River into Canada and following the river west to Grand Forks, dipping into the U.S. at Carson, and continuing to Midway.   From there, the line was to follow Boundary Creek upstream to Greenwood and the mines.   From its headquarters in St Paul, the Northern Pacific was watching developments in the Kootenays and Boundary country, and wanted an entry into these rich mineral lands north of the border.   It began surreptitiously buying up shares in Corbin’s Spokane Falls and Northern Railway.   Dan Corbin soon became aware that someone was buying into his railroad; he suspected the CPR.     He wired financier J. P. Morgan in New York to buy up all the SF&N stock he could, lest the CPR gain control of his line and enter Spokane.   Morgan did, but as financier to the Northern Pacific, he knew very well that they were behind the stock purchases, not the CPR.   However, he did not tell Corbin, and continued to accumulate shares in the expectation that when the time came, he would decide who got the SF&N.

The results of this rivalry of the transcontinentals were exciting for Kootenay Lake residents.   Sternwheel steamers raced each other regularly to see which boat and which company could get its passengers from Kaslo or Riondel to Nelson in the shortest time. On the Arrow Lakes the CPR built a powerful new sternwheeler, the Rossland, with huge, 22 x 96 inch cylinders and a more deeply molded hull shape.   The new design was intended to produce a sternwheeler that could make the 256 mile round trip from Arrowhead to Robson West and back in one day.  She was launched in August, 1897, 183 ft. long by 29 ft. wide, and 884 tons.   The Rossland was the fastest boat on any of the lakes, capable of 22 miles per hour, an astonishing speed for a sternwheel steamer.   However, her deeper hull, which made her more stable in a crosswind, could not clear the sandbars in the winter low water season.   So, while she raced her passengers up and down the lakes all summer long, she had to lie idle during the winter months while the shallower draft Kootenay or Minto took over the run.

Though he had finished his first section of C&W line, and had surveyors out locating a route from Robson West to Penticton, the new copper war in Butte, drew Fritz Heinze back to Montana.   H.H. Rogers and William Rockefeller, of Standard Oil wished to duplicate that successful monopoly in oil with a new one in copper.     They formed the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company, bought up all the major copper operations and all but one newspaper in Montana ( Heinze’s Butte Reveille).   With that power they began to manipulate the price of copper, by withholding large quantities from the market to drive up the price.

The adversaries they could not crush were Fritz, Arthur and Otto Heinze and their two companies, Montana Ore Purchasing and United Copper Company.   The savagery of the contest was unparalleled, culminating in an attempt by Amalgamated to bribe a judge to testify that Fritz Heinze had bribed him.   Heinze, as the lone Butte holdout against a corporation with unlimited power, had the support of the miners and won victory after victory in politics and the law courts.   Underground his miners fought Amalgamated miners in the dark, dangerous galleries with picks, clubs and dynamite.   The Amalgamated lured away to their side Heinze’s Butte manger with his confidential papers and maps.   This was a serious blow.   Heinze had 27 lawyers simultaneously fighting Amalgamated lawsuits, and needed huge amounts of money for these court battles.   He would have to cash out his B.C. holdings.

As a last effort to secure a federal subsidy, the only hope for completing his Columbia and Western, he sent out Colonel Topping to canvas the Okanagan and Boundary districts for signatures to a petition to Parliament to grant him the Federal subsidy he urgently needed.   Colonel Topping’s trip was a disaster.   The Boundary Creek Times of January 29, 1898, gives a detailed account of the Colonel’s appearance before the assembled citizens in Rendell’s hall in Greenwood.

“Colonel Topping came down from Vernon, having visited Fairview, Camp McKinney and other points.   When he reached Greenwood he had about 75 signatures to the petition, and when he left Greenwood he had the same number of signatures.”

It was not a warm reception.   The people of the Boundary were outraged at the subsidies and grants Heinze had already extracted from the Provincial legislature and had not yet built so much as a mile of track in the direction of Greenwood.   The line to Robson West, was, in their view, but a device to connect his works to the CPR.   They voiced their distrust of Heinze in blunt terms.   Mayor Wood opened the meeting.

“What we want is a competitive railway and we should do everything to assist Corbin and getting a charter. (Applause.)   He failed to see” the paper reported, “what claim Mr.  Heinze had on the people of Boundary Creek. (Hear, hear.)   He never built an inch of road for us.   He does not think Mr. Heinze ever intended to build a road. He boasted about how he had ‘flim-flammed’ the Victoria government, but, said, Mayor Wood, don’t let him ‘flim-flam’ us. (Loud applause.)

There was considerable prejudice against Fritz Heinze, as his Amalgamated enemies in Montana had given out in their newspapers that he was Jewish, which was untrue. Three years later, Mayor Wood would charter a railway from Midway to Vernon and attempted to “flim-flam” the legislature and public that he was actually “prosecuting continuous construction,” as his charter required, by hiring a foreman and man with a wheelbarrow to dig some few hundred feet of grade south of Vernon.

In Rendell’s hall that winter night, Alderman Galloway took up the attack on Heinze.

“He doubted that Heinze intended to build.   He first asked for a charter only, then a grant, then a cash subsidy, and now he is asking for another cash subsidy, and if he  gets this he will simply be in a position to sell out at a higher figure.   (Hear, hear.)”

A resolution was then introduced enjoining the people of the Boundary district to refuse to sign Colonel Topping’s petition.

Colonel Topping then rose before them and opened his remarks by saying, “It was indeed a pleasant thing to face a meeting thoroughly hostile, fearfully hostile…”

Topping went on to present Fritz Heinze as their champion against the the CPR, which he painted as, “…a monopoly, no more cruel one existed… The fight was between Heinze and the CPR… If the CPR was supported it would crush any other road that attempted to get into this district.   He had no quarrel with Mr. Corbin; he was entitled to his charter. (Hear, hear.) The Columbia and Western was not antagonistic to Mr. Corbin…the Columbia and Western was an all-Canadian road… He had the assurance that Mr. Heinze intends to build it if granted a subsidy.”

The crowd was unimpressed.   The miners and businessmen of the district had already put 700 of their names to a petition favoring Dan Corbin’s Kettle River Valley Railway.   Corbin was popular in Greenwood.   He owned mining properties west of town.   He had come personally and assured the citizens that, “…the time has come when it is not necessary that the government should give away more money or land in this direction and I do not intend to ask for either.”

Alex Wallace, a prospector, spoke for the majority when he said,  “…he had heard of Mr. Heinze before.   The people of Boundary Creek were a long suffering humanity.   He would like to see Mr. Heinze visit this district — the Commander in              Chief –but he sends only his Colonel: that was good enough for the people of Boundary Creek.   The Columbia and Western was a gigantic humbug.   (Hear, hear.)   The people should oppose such a subsidy to any such boodling scheme…   He was only prospector, but he was tired of being humbugged and therefore wished to give expression to his opinions. (Applause.)”

The assembly voted, “without a dissenting voice,” a resolution to be forwarded to Parliament, “…that the residents of the Boundary Creek District urge upon the Dominion Parliament to grant said charter to the Kettle River Valley Railway Company.” (Corbin’s line).

Faced with this united hostility, and the accusation that Heinze would only use the cash subsidy to raise his selling price to the CPR, Colonel Topping became heated and unwisely remarked to the assembled citizens that, “…he hoped they realized the gravity of the position they had taken.   Mr. Heinze is a strong friend or a strong enemy.   He is going to build into this district and the chances are he will reciprocate for this.”

With accusations of making threats, and promises to let Parliament know that “General Heinze” was trying to intimidate the population via his “Colonel,” the meeting broke up in anger.

Colonel Topping did not know it, but Fritz Heinze was already in Montreal negotiating the sale of his B.C. assets to the CPR.   The CPR wanted the railroad and its charter with those generous land grants, but not the smelter which they considered crude and jerry built.   They intended to build a modern and efficient smelter at Blueberry Creek and dominate the Kootenay mining industry.   Brash and impulsive, Fritz Heinze was not an easy man to deal with.   If the CPR wanted the C&W, they would have to take his smelter as well.   At this all or nothing insistence, the negotiations stalled, and the CPR hired Walter Aldridge to deal with Heinze and become manager of what they proposed to call their Canadian Smelting Works which was to be built at Blueberry Creek.   Walter Aldridge was also a Brooklyn boy, had been a classmate of Heinze at Columbia, and knew him well.   From his post as a smelter manager in Colorado, Aldridge had followed Heinze’s career in Butte with interest.   He unbluffable by his former classmate was the ideal man to deal with Heinze.

But while Aldridge hurried to Trail to inspect Heinze’s holdings and estimate their fair value, Fritz Heinze was in Montreal, dealing personally with CPR President Thomas Shaughnessy, and asking two million dollars, cash for his Canadian holdings.   Out in Trail, Aldridge was furious.   His inspection had convinced him that such a price was much too high. He wired Shaugnessy to stall Heinze while he prepared a device worthy of Fritz Heinze himself.   He telegraphed the Fraser and Chalmers Company in Chicago for quotations on a complete smelter delivered to Robson, B.C.   He next optioned a plot of land at Blueberry Creek for a smelter site, and began negotiating for ore contracts with the Red mountain mine owners.   He was sure Fritz Heinze would be informed of these preparations.   The actions had the expected effect.   From Montreal, Shaughnessy wired Aldridge that he had now been able to close a deal with Heinze for half of what the American had been previously asking.

Having thus acquired Heinze’s C&W charter Shaughnessy began to rush a railroad into the Boundary country.   On February 1, the first CPR surveyors landed at Renata on Lower Arrow Lake and headed up Dog Creek for McRae Pass.   Shaughnessy had learned that someone was buying heavily into Dan Corbin’s SF&N stock, and he suspected the Northern Pacific.   It was essential to get rails into the Boundary and preempt it for the CPR before Corbin, or whoever was buying his stock, could get there.

In Trail, Aldridge was annoyed that the purchase of Heinze’s holdings had been settled over his head.   Suspicious that Heinze had bamboozled Shaughnessy, he asked to see a copy of the contract.   He found what he had expected.   The document failed to transfer Heinze’s mining interests, the rolling stock of the two C&W lines, and the smelter machinery.   Without these vital components, the CPR could operate neither the smelter nor the railroads.

When an outraged CPR Board of Directors confronted Heinze with these omissions, he blandly informed them that they could have those items for another $300,000.   The Directors wired Aldridge in Trail.   He told them to hold up payment on the original contract, and give him full authority to deal with Heinze in Trail.   This was done, and Aldridge, knowing from his contacts in Butte, that Heinze was pressed for cash, simply sat tight and waited for Fritz Heinze to come to him.   Heinze did.   He came to Trail on February 10, and asked Aldridge why the CPR had not honored its contract with him.   Aldridge told him the company had no intention of paying his extortionate demands.   Heinze could sue if he wished, but the Company would not budge, and a Canadian judge was not likely to sympathize with Heinze’s violating the spirit, if not the letter of the original contract.   Heinze was uncertain that Canadian judges were to be bought as easily as Montana judges, and after remonstrating with Aldridge to no effect, he finally suggested that the two of them sit down together and play a hand of poker for the Canadian holdings not mentioned in the contract.   Aldridge refused, saying that there were too many Methodists on the CPR Board for the Directors to countenance any such arrangement.

The suggestion of a hand of poker convinced Aldrige that Heinze was at last ready to compromise.   Aldridge suggested the matter be submitted to J.S.C. Fraser, manager of the Rossland branch of the Bank of Montreal, for arbitration.   Fraser had the full confidence of both men, Heinze insisted that the matter be settled without delay, so a buggy was called and a driver to take them on a midnight ride up the mountain to Rossland.     On their arrival, Fraser was wakened out of bed, and sat down at his desk to arbitrate.     By dawn, on February 11, 1898, a deal had been struck.   The CPR paid $600,000 for the C&W railway and its rolling stock, plus $200,000 for the smelter and $6,000 for smelter supplies on hand, for a total of $806,000.

Heinze, however, kept one very valuable asset.   He retained a half interest in all of the C&W land grants (which would amount to 307,000 acres), to be transferred to him when the grants were earned by construction of a railroad to Penticton.  Heinze left B.C. and never returned.   With his $800,000, he won all of his Montana lawsuits, quite possibly “sweetening” a number of judges in that process. Though winning his suits against the Amalgamated Copper trust, that corporation used its ultimate power.   Complaining that Heinze’s lawsuits had prevented it from operating its mines, it closed all of its operations in Montana, throwing 3/4 of the wage earners in the state out of work.   Though partisans of Heinze, whom they regarded as one of themselves, the Montana miners could not live on enthusiasm.   Their need to go back to work eroded their support for Heinze. He saw himself in an untenable position and sold out to Amalgamated for twelve million dollars. Leaving Montana, he moved to New York, and against the advice of this brothers, bought a bank, planning to expand it to a nationwide chain of banks which would lend to small businessmen and tradesmen.   His bank was overextended when the panic of 1907 stuck and the hostile New York bankers forced him from its presidency. Fritz Heinze died in disgrace, of cirrhosis of the liver, at the age of 42, a lifelong boozer and womanizer, but a man who faithfully wrote his mother a letter every week.

Dan Corbin, confident that J.P. Morgan was looking after his interests, went ahead with his proposed line to the Boundary mines.   On March 19, he incorporated the Kettle River Valley Railway in Washington State to bridge the Columbia at Marcus and build up the Kettle River into Canada at Cascade.   He then went to Ottawa to secure a federal charter for the Canadian portion of his line.   He brought lengthy petitions from the citizens of Grand Forks and Greenwood supporting his application.   The parliamentarians were favorable, especially when an opposition member accused the CPR’s telegraph department of fabricating telegrams opposing Corbin’s application.   The Railway Committee approved the application and sent it to the full house.   But there, on April 15, a telegram arrived from the British Columbia Government vigorously opposing Corbin’s charter.   This swung the undecided votes against Corbin; his application was defeated.   This defeat, which was thought to have been engineered by the CPR, aroused fury in the British Columbia interior.   The CPR, from distant Montreal, was again pulling the strings in B.C. politics to protect its monopoly.

The CPR, under President, Shaughnessy, had made a location survey west from the Columbia.   The river would be bridged at Castlegar, a line run up the bluffs on the south side of Arrow Lake, Bulldog Mountain would be tunneled to enter Dog Creek which would be followed upstream to Mc Rae Pass.   From the pass, the line would go down Mc Rae Creek to the Kettle River and then west to Grand Forks.   From Grand Forks, the line would either go over the mountain to Greenwood, or dip into the U.S.., following Corbin’s route, to Midway and Rock Creek.   From Rock Creek, the line was to climb over the Okanagan Highlands at Anarchist Summit, and descend into the Okanagan Valley at Oliver to run up to Penticton.   The CPR operated the Columbia and Western as a subsidiary company, leased in perpetuity to the CPR.   While the activities of the C&W will be described under that title, it should be remembered that it was always the creature of the CPR.

The people of B.C. were willing to back whomever, American or Canadian, would tie the Kootenays to the Coast.   Vancouver businessmen, however, opposed Corbin’s Kettle River Valley scheme as an American grab for Kootenay and Boundary business.   They opposed the CPR plan as well.   It looked to them like a dark plot to draw off the business of Southeast B.C. for the hated East.   Neither Corbin, nor the CPR, they noted, had given any but the most vague declarations to continue their lines past Penticton to the Coast.   Vancouver, therefore, supported the Vancouver, Victoria and Eastern scheme to build from Vancouver east to the Kootenays on the route of the Dewdney Trail.   But the VV&E was a paper railroad, with a charter, but no money, and no tracks.   As well, the Dewdney Trail route, with its succession of summits to be climbed, might suffice for mules, but would be an engineering nightmare for a railroad, as the CPR was later to find.   Still, in hopes that someone would build it, the charter had been sold for $75,000 to McKenzie and Mann, reputable railroad contractors.   However, in 1898, with the Klondike excitement at its height, McKenzie and Mann stuffed the VV&E charter in a drawer, and began promoting their own creation, a railway from Vancouver to the Klondike.

Now British Columbia politics stepped firmly into the railroad situation in the southeast and began shaking it vigorously.   Politics in B. C., in 1898, was railroad politics.   Party politics did not come to the province until 1903.   Until that year, the members of the legislature were either “The Government” or “The Oppositionists.”   The election of 1898 was largely concerned with railroads.   Premier Turner promised the electorate a “Coast to Kootenay” railroad, and a line to the Yukon as well.   That respected team of McKenzie and Mann would build both.   McKenzie and Mann took the Premier aside and informed him of the realities.   The VV&E, they told him, would be formidably expensive to build through the Cascade Mountains on the Dewdney Trail route.   They would not undertake it unless they could be guaranteed exclusive rights to the Boundary copper traffic. If Corbin was allowed to build his line in from Marcus to haul out copper, they would absolutely not build the VV&E.   Further, they assured him, that if Corbin was allowed to build his line, the CPR would surely build in as well to block him.   The B.C. Government’s choice, they explained, was to either back Corbin, and have the CPR in as well, or refuse him his charter, which would make it unnecessary for the CPR to build west of the Columbia.   In that case, and only in that case, with the absolute assurance of a monopoly of Boundary traffic, would they build the VV&E.   Premier Turner deliberated, decided to back Mc Kenzie and Mann, and then sent the famous telegram to Parliament in Ottawa opposing Corbin and destroying his hopes for a charter.   Now, Turner told the electorate, McKenzie and Mann could build the VV&E.

Suddenly, the news came, stunning everyone, that Jim Hill had bought out Corbin’s SF&N.   The Northern Pacific had indeed bought a majority of SF&N stock.   But Jim Hill invoked a prior agreement he had had with J. P. Morgan.   Morgan, as financier to both the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific, had insisted, as a condition to supporting them, that both railroads refrain from invading one another’s territories with branch lines.   Everything from Hill’s Great Northern north to the Canadian border was agreed to be Great Northern territory; the NP was not to trespass.   Hill now demanded that Morgan enforce the agreement, and require the Northern Pacific to turn over all of its shares in the SF&N to Hill at the price they had paid for them.   This was done.   In British Columbia, the railroad situation was instantly changed.

The CPR, facing this threat from its implacable rival, J.J. Hill, made a midwinter rush to get rails to the Boundary before Hill.   Mc Kenzie and Mann told Premier Turner that their deal was off.   There was no way that they would build the VV&E in competition with both the CPR and Jim Hill.   Premier Turner was desperate; he had an election coming up, and could lose it if he could not promise that the VV&E would be built.   He called a conference between himself, Shaughnessy of the CPR, and Mc Kenzie and Mann.   The parties stated their positions.   Mann said that since the CPR was already grading toward Penticton, he was not in a position to build a parallel VV&E.   Shaughnessy replied blandly that the CPR had promised Parliament it would save the valuable Kootenay – Boundary traffic for the people of Canada.   (He meant, of course, the CPR.)   Premier Turner suggested a shaky compromise: the CPR should build to Midway only, and the Province would consider that would fulfill its obligation to save Boundary traffic for Canada.     At the same time, the VV&E would build east from Vancouver to Midway to meet the CPR rails.   Mann objected.   What guarantee was there that the CPR would turn over Kootenay traffic bound for the coast to the VV&E at Midway, when it could carry it back on its own lines to Calgary and from there to the Coast?   Turner suggested, that with their rails in Midway, the VV&E could counter any such CPR move by turning its Kootenay bound traffic over to the Hill lines which the VV&E could easily reach down the valley of the Kettle.   A perfect standoff, the Premier suggested; both lines would have to play fairly with each other.   The principals pretended to be satisfied with this, and signed the agreement.

Premier Turner then drew up three contracts with McKenzie and Mann. The first was to grant a subsidy of $4,000 per mile for the VV&E to begin building at once from Penticton to Midway.   The second was for the section from Penticton to the Coast, and the third was for the Yukon railway.   Turner insisted that the VV& E forces be seen on the ground building railway, particularly in the Okanagan where his support was weak, while he fought the election.   At the end of June, a force of nine men and a team of horses, much ridiculed by the opposition, was indeed on the ground, grading roadbed south from Okanagan lake through Penticton on what is now Main Street.   This was probably mere window dressing. McKenzie and Mann were too experienced to commit substantial resources to the VV&E until the crucial election had been won.   This was prudent.   Turner lost the election.   The incoming government canceled all the contracts.   The “nine men and a mule” were paid off, and the VV&E was as dead as any political promise could be.

Up in the snowbound Monashees, the CPR worked frantically.   In deep snow, sixteen survey parties spread themselves along the route to stake a grade from Robson West to Grand Forks and on to Greenwood and Midway.   Location surveys had been made by both Heinze and the CPR on this route, but this was a construction survey.

A location survey merely located the most feasible route which would avoid costly obstacles, rock bluffs which might require tunneling, and canyons which would need bridges.   It would be carried out by a single party. A construction survey had to examine every hundred foot section of the located route (called a “station”), and from each, estimate the number of cubic yards of earth to be moved, the volume of rock to be drilled and blasted.   From these figures, a cost estimate could be made for each station. With this information, bids could be advertised and awarded.

In the Monashees that winter each survey party was led by an assistant engineer, and comprised an instrument man with his transit, a chain man with his hundred foot chain, an axe man to clear sight lines, and that most essential fifth, a cook.   It must have been brutal work with the soft February snows silently cascading off the firs at the least disturbance of the air.   They must have had to rig up some sort of portable shelter to protect the instrument from the heavy clots of snow falling from sixty feet or more above them, a sudden blow that will knock a man to his knees as the author knows from experience.   The record shows a hundred pairs of snowshoes worn out by the time spring arrived.

There was need for haste.   The C&W charter required completion of the line by 1900, or the $50,000 bond would be forfeited.   There was also Jim Hill.   He had taken over Dan Corbin’s Kettle River Valley surveys and was preparing to build on that   line to Greenwood.

By midsummer, 1899, the C&W construction estimates were complete, the bids were let, and 3000 men were at work grading.   The engineers’ estimate was an alarming $40,000 per mile. There were 101 miles to build to reach Midway.   The subsidies would return them 20,000 acres and $4,000 per mile, but only on completion of the track.

The climb out of Robson West was blasted through the granite bluffs along the south shore of Lower Arrow Lake on a 2.2 percent grade.   At Bulldog Mountain, a long tunnel had to be driven to get the line into Dog Creek.   To avoid delaying the work, a series of twelve switchbacks, six to a side, was built over the ridge while the miners tunneled underneath.   Narrow gauge Hinkley No. 1, from the Trail Creek Tramway, had been bought by the contractor, Mc Lean Brothers, to haul waste rock out of the tunnel and cuts and distribute it in the fills.   A new development, compressed air drills, were being used in the Bulldog Tunnel.   These required a boiler and steam powered air compressor to be hauled up the steep and difficult wagon road from Brooklyn, the construction camp on the lake.   As well, a full complement of woodcutters were employed to keep the boiler fed.   Six shorter tunnels were drilled in the old way, with hand steel and sledge hammers.   The construction town of Brooklyn comprised hotels, saloons, restaurants and stores.   It lasted only until the tunnels and grades were done.   In 1900, abandoned, its buildings were carried off, board by board to nearby Renata and Broadwater by the settlers to build houses and barns.

Track was laid as fast as the grade could be completed, beginning in November, 1898.   By the time winter shut down the work with continuous snow slides, ten miles of steel were in place.   When the snow had melted in May, 1899, the crews returned to the grade.   By July, the steel crews had laid the switchbacks over the tunnel, passed the summit at Farron, and were descending past Gladstone (later Coryell) toward Christina Lake.   A rock and snow shed was built at Orion Creek where a long, high talus slope shed boulders on the right of way with every summer rainstorm and avalanches in winter. West of Coryell, another snowshed shielded the track from a perennial avalanche chute.

Descending Mc Rae Creek, the line emerged above Christina Lake on a high granite ledge. This ledge was widened by blasting and stabilized with retaining walls of cut stone, each block three feet long by 1 foot wide and 1 foot deep.   They were laid without mortar with the walls reaching ten to forty feet high in sections up to 1409 feet long.   They are an impressive sight today, looking up from the highway below.   This was not the quick and flimsy construction of Heinze’s or Dan Corbin’s lines, where an improvised crib of logs or a quick and shaky trestle would have sufficed.   This was CPR mainline construction, built for the centuries, and fearfully costly, as was being discovered, back in Montreal.   The author has inspected a culvert, at the Coryell water tank, drilled and blasted through solid rock, rather than risk a softening of an earth fill during spring freshets.   No one else built like the CPR, and the grade will be there long after people forget what it was.

The line reached the valley bottom and the Kettle River just a few hundred feet short of the U.S. boundary.   Here, at the foot of the grade, it curved out on an enormous trestle of 62 bents (supporting timber frames) and two Howe truss bridge spans 80 feet above the river.   A further 19 bent trestle carried the line to solid ground at Cascade.   Two million board feet of timber went into that crossing.

Two more crossings of the Kettle were required to bring the line into Grand Forks, the hub of the Kettle Valley.   The CPR was a tough negotiator with the municipalities on the route.   The Grand Forks Miner of November 18, 1900, observed,  “Not being satisfied with receiving one of the largest land grants ever known in the history of the Province and a cash bonus of $4,000 per mile, they sent representatives to visit every town.   Unless they would turn over a large portion of their holdings to the  C.P.R.., the names of the towns would not be on the C.P.R. map.   These threats proved successful in most cases.”

Grand Forks was not such a case.   The town gave no concessions, and the CPR punished it by building its Grand Forks station in the small settlement of Columbia, a mile to the west.   Columbia organized itself around the depot, and solicited the businesses of Grand Forks to move out to Columbia where it suggested the action would be.   Grand Forks scornfully declined. They were thinking of building a railroad of their own, they said, with a downtown depot.   This acrimonious rivalry, with newspapers, the Miner in Columbia and the Gazette in Grand Forks, each black guarding the other community, and rejoicing in whatever disasters befell it, lasted until amalgamation in 1903.   Rail passengers, however, were doubtless puzzled to find the Grand Forks station in the town of Columbia.

The first C&W train entered Grand Forks on September 18,1899.   From there the route west would run either beside the Kettle River into the U.S. on Corbin’s route, or over the Boundary Range at Eholt’s pass. That the C&W surveyed the route though the U.S. is clear from British Columbia Mineral Reference Map No. 6.   This shows a located C&W grade running west from the Grand Forks station (in Columbia) and approximately on present highways 3 and 21 to the border at Carson.   The CPR was barred by its charter from building into the U.S.A., but its subsidiary, the C&W, was not, and could have built this easy, water level grade.   However, such a line would have by-passed the mining centers of Phoenix and Greenwood, and Aldridge badly needed their copper-gold ores for his Trail smelter.   The output from the Red Mountain mines was dwindling; they were never able to hoist more than 300 tons per day; Aldridge needed 500 tons to keep his furnaces running at full capacity.

The urgent need to get rails to the mines on Montezuma Ridge and Knob Hill before Jim Hill showed up, decided the CPR to have the C&W build over the Boundary Range to Midway instead of around it.   The 1400 foot climb was difficult and the grade, much of it blasted from rock bluffs, was costly.   The C&W graded on a 2.2 percent grade up Hardy Mountain northwest of Grand Forks with more cut stone retaining walls and a tunnel to enter Brown’s Creek .   At the head of Brown’s Creek, the range was crossed at Eholt’s ranch, 3100 ft.   It then descended Eholt Creek to Greenwood at 2500 feet, and down Boundary Creek to Midway at 1900 feet.   By the end of November, service was extended to Greenwood, and Midway was reached by the deadline, the end of the year.   Here the C&W stopped.   The cost had been appalling, $4 million, but they had beaten Jim Hill.

Construction crews were sent to Eholt and to Greenwood to begin grading two steep and crooked mine branches, one to Phoenix, and one to Motherlode. The CPR would have to recoup its costs from hauling Boundary ore before it would build any farther toward the Coast.   It stuck to its agreement with former Premier Turner; it was obliged to go no further.   The VV&E was to meet them at Midway. But the VV&E was dead.   Or so everyone thought.

In June the anti-VV&E Semlin government which had canceled the contracts, was defeated.   Dunsmuir, the new Premier, offered government aid to the C&W to complete a Coast to Kootenay Railway.   Shaughnessy, of the CPR, dreading more expensive construction, replied that the CPR would not be able to proceed “for some years.”   With that, die-hard VV&E supporters sprung once more to life, and in October Mc Kenzie came to Vancouver to suggest that he would build the VV&E if ex- Premier Turner’s aid package were reinstated.   This offer raised instant suspicions that J.J. Hill was behind it.   The suspicions were correct.   Hill had begun to negotiate with McKenzie and Mann for an interest in the VV&E charter.

On December 24, 1900, Premier Dunsmuir reinstated the $4,000 per mile VV&E subsidy.   The dead railway was now very much alive.    In March of 1901, the VV&E supporters were able to announce that J.J. Hill was now an equal partner with Mc Kenzie and Mann in the VV&E.   The CPR countered this by pointing out that the VV&E charter had lapsed, and was no longer legal, since the promised construction had never taken place, and the deadline had not been met.   Further, Laurier, the Prime Minister, announced definitively that no Coast to Kootenay Railway could expect any subsidy from the Federal Government.   At this, McKenzie and Mann lost heart and sold the questionable charter outright to J.J. Hill on June 16.

Just five days later, Hill’s American charter for the Washington and Great Northern Railway was granted.   He sent his crews at once to begin grading on Dan Corbin’s route from Marcus up the Kettle River to Canada.   On July 12, his men crossed the border into Canada and began slashing a right of way west along the Kettle River under the possibly illegal charter of the Vancouver, Victoria and Eastern Railway.

In Trail the sale of Heinze’s smelter was a disaster for the town.   Walter Aldridge closed the smelter which he deemed to be hopelessly inefficient.   All its machinery had been run with old time rope drives from a central Corliss steam engine with the moving ropes running overhead on a multitude of sheaves from building to building.   Aldridge prepared to convert all this to electricity from the new West Kootenay Power and Light dam at Bonnington Falls.   He ordered 2 million bricks with which to build a new 175 foot stack with 48 roasting stalls venting into it.   This was to end the notorious outdoor ore roasting heaps and dissipate the noxious fumes into the surrounding mountains.   He would use the old stack to vent the new lead smelter he was planning, since now, with CPR ownership, he could smelt those Slocan silver-lead ores denied to Heinze.

Aldridge promised to reopen in a year, but smelter men could not live on air, and many of them departed.   To keep some of them in Trail, and to deal with ore still coming down the tramway from the Centre Star, War     Eagle and Iron Mask, he fired five outdoor roasting heaps that summer.   Still, the population of Trail was dwindling.   With more and more of the Red Mountain ores going to Northport, many of the residents followed.

Aldrige and his men worked as speedily as possible.   New water cooled furnaces were installed, and a lead smelter was erected.   In addition, work began, converting the narrow gauge tramway to Rossland to standard gauge.   In Rossland, the yards were moved west to a flat between Second and Third Avenues and a large new station and freight shed built there.   When the standard gauge rails were in place, an oversight came to light: the CPR had no ore cars at all, and the little 12 ton narrow gauge cars were inadequate, even if put on standard gauge trucks.   Hastily, wooden ore boxes were built on standard flat cars at Trail, little more than staked sides and sloping ends.   Capacity was 20 tons.   An order to the East finally produced a number of all wood 22 foot cars with an outside braced box, sturdy and serviceable.   Capacity was 30 tons. With their arrival, the improvised boxes on flats were shifted to the Boundary mine branches where they ran for years. Later, a group of 50 ton all steel cars showed up and served until mid century.

With a standard gauge ore haul and a modern, electrically powered smelter, the pioneering phase was over.   Financed from Montreal and London, the bankers were now in charge of Trail, Rossland and the Red Mountain mines.     Sourdough Alley was razed and rebuilt on a sober, rectangular grid.   Most of the miners had married, and now lived with their families in small bungalows, going to work like anyone else. The gaudy days were over, the all-night saloons and gambling halls closed down, and the Rossland began to look like any other British Columbian. mountain town.

 

STEEP AND CROOKED … by Late Writer, Artist & Castle Builder Bill Laux – Chapter V

/ Peter Klopp / 3 Comments

STEEP AND CROOKED: THE MINING RAILROADS OF THE CANADIAN BORDER

 By Bill Laux

Please note if you are interested in reading an action packed adventure story, but don’t have the time to read the entire chapter, scroll down to the first word in blue and bold letters and read from there.

train-at-mine

CHAPTER FIVE

TWO RAILROADS — TWO SMELTERS 1896 – 1898

With the completion of Heinze’s Trail Creek Tramway, the future of the two communities, Trail and Rossland, seemed assured.   On June 19, 1896, editor Thompson of the Trail Creek News, rhapsodized, “It is marvelous — the amount of tonnage arriving at Trail this spring, with three steamers running into Trail, yet the C&KSN Co. cannot keep the consignments of freight to Trail cleaned up. In two days last week, the steamers of the C&KSN Co. landed in Trail 500 tons of coal, coke and lime rock and general merchandise.   Every day sees the steamers of this company in Trail loaded down to their full capacity.   Yesterday, the steamers, “Nakusp,” “Trail,” and “Lytton, ” and the train of the Columbia and Western Railway were all in Trail at one time, and the aggregate number of passengers served by the three boats and the train was over 400, while the tonnage handled in that day amounted to over 250 tons.   And this is a town not yet a year old, and the season has just begun.”

This was June, with a full river, and even steamers drawing a full four and a half feet of water, as did the Nakusp, could make it down the difficult channel from Robson to Trail.   In December the low stage of the water would hold the big boats at Robson, with the little Lytton relaying their cargoes down across the sandbars, and through the shallow riffles.   A smelter had to have uninterrupted supplies of coal, coke, and flux (lime and silica rock), to operate.   With winter steamer operations interrupted by ice and low water, Heinze had to find a better way to bring in his fuel. He could, of course, have Dan Corbin bring in Roslyn coal and coke to Rossland, and then have it hand shoveled into his narrow gauge cars.   But this would put him into Corbin’s hands, an unacceptable situation.   His trip to England to raise money for his Columbia and Western extension was a failure.   He therefore mortgaged some Montana properties and let bids on the first section of the new railway.   It was not to run through the mountains from Rossland.   Instead, it would run up the right bank of the Columbia from his smelter to Robson West. This would give him year round access to the deep water of the Arrow Lakes and an assured coal supply.

Although the new town of Trail was growing and prospering, things were not well with the three companions who had founded it.   Success had had an unfortunate effect on Frank Hanna.   He and Mary Jane became estranged over his increasingly blatant immorality.   He owned two brothels in Trail and his own daughter, Olive, complained of her father’s sexual misconduct with a Mrs. Crossman in the same bed in which Olive was sleeping.   Mary Jane applied to the court for sole custody of her children, and on the grounds alleged, it was granted.   In the interests of propriety, Colonel Topping found it best to move out of the Trail House hotel and set up living quarters behind his office.

With the new Le Roi Company smelter at Northport in operation, the Le Roi mine was paying a dividend every month, and its owners were rapidly growing very rich.   Le Roi stock, which the Colonels had bought up for 25 cents a share, was now selling for over $5.00.   The Rossland mines and in particular, the Le Roi, were becoming well known all over the world for their extraordinary richness.   In London, speculators begin to consider the Red Mountain mines for investment.

Whittaker Wright, one of the more successful of those speculators, had formed the British American Corporation to invest in B. C. and Alaska mining properties.   Wright was one of those flamboyant mendacities that flashed like meteors across the financial heavens at the end of the Victorian era, occasioning awe, moral outrage, and corrosive envy in the British public.   H.G. Wells was so fascinated by him as a symbol of the absolute sovereignty of the money power, as to use him as a model for Edward Ponderovo in his novel, Tono Bungay.

An Englishman, Wright came to the United States, worked in the Pennsylvania oil fields, and was present at the Leadville, Colorado silver boom.   He was in Philadelphia in the 1880s, forming companies to buy Colorado and New Mexico mines, and to market their stock to Pennsylvania investors.   Learning the techniques of stock jobbing, Wright moved to London in the 1890s and began floating mining companies based on the West Australian gold mines around Kalgoorlie.   Wright’s game was not to mine gold, but to organize the mine company and then to sell stock in it, a greater value of stock than there was gold in the ground.   This was enormously successful as long as he could pay huge dividends, most of which came out of stock sales, rather than from whatever bullion was being produced.   As long as new companies could be floated, with their stock sales covering the dividends of previous companies, the game could go on.

Wright’s ostentatious mode of living was legendary with the British public.   They could not hear enough of his private yacht, his private stable of fifty horses, his private observatory, his private velodrome, his private theatre, and his private hospital. He had built an artificial lake on his Surrey estate, and, at the bottom of it, had constructed an underwater billiard room with a glass ceiling through which his guests could view his private fish.

Such an obvious command of large sums of money seemed to signify to the British investors a soundness of his financial empire, which it did not deserve.   To keep on grossly overcapitalizing his mines, Wright required continuing press reports of bonanza finds and sensationally rich mines which he could market.   The Rossland mines were being reported in the London press in 1897 as being the richest in the world. It did not matter whether they were or not; the perception was enough to bring investors running. Wright needed to own these mines to inflate the value of his stocks. He capitalized his British America Corporation at 1,500,000 pounds sterling, and sold its stock at an unprecedented 5 pounds sterling par value.   Its prospectus boldly stated that the Corporation was acquiring the Le Roi and other Rossland and Alaska mines. The well publicized Le Roi name brought the investors crowding in; they bought up more than a million shares at the first offering.

As his managing director and confidence inspiring “Guinea Pig,” Wright brought in a man with Canadian connections, the Hon. Charles Mackintosh, retiring Lieutenant Governor of the Northwest Territories.   He then sent Mackintosh to Rossland by private railway car to acquire the mines his investors were told they owned. Mackintosh was an imposing figure, with all the social skills of the British upper class, but he knew next to nothing of practical mining.   The British Columbia Review commented,  “…of his many social qualities we are well aware, but there is no mining man in Canada but would laugh at the idea of ‘Charlie Mackintosh’ having any idea of the value of an ore body.”

In Spokane the Le Roi Colonels were astonished. They had not heard their mine was being bought. Colonel Peyton remarked quite accurately, “To my mind it looked much as if the people who drew that prospectus used the name of the Le Roi Mine to attract the attention of the English investing public.”

Mackintosh arrived in his private railway car, had it run up the steep Red Mountain line to Rossland, and, flush with Whittaker Wright’s money, began buying mines. He purchased the Josie, the Great Western, the Poorman, the Columbia and Kootenay, and the Nickel Plate mines. He then sent a pompous telegram to London, which Whittaker Wright read to the assembled B.A.C. investors to loud applause. “The British America Corporation has secured and holds the key to a majority of the golden treasure houses of British Columbia. We will practically control the mineral resources of this Province.”

This bombast, while applauded in London, was greeted with derision in British Columbia, and with wicked glee in Spokane. The Colonels now knew that Mackintosh had to make good on his boast; he was obliged to buy their Le Roi, whatever the price. What followed can be interpreted in two ways: either an honest disagreement, or a very clever hoaxing of Charlie Mackintosh and Whittaker Wright.   Historians have tended to accept at face value a bitter disagreement dividing the Le Roi directors, as reported in the press; mining men have tended to smile knowingly.   The author sides with the mining men; believing that Mackintosh, in what followed, was gloriously hoaxed.

Two of the Le Roi Company’s directors, Colonel Peyton and Judge George Turner, went to London to entertain offers for their company.   This is odd; Mackintosh was in Rossland, ready to buy their mine.   Apparently they wanted to see what other tenders might be made.   Colonel Peyton went directly to the B.A.C. and Whittaker Wright.   He was offered three million dollars cash, and accepted, pending agreement by the other directors in Spokane.   But Judge Turner, independently negotiating, reported that a mysteriously unspecified source had offered him five million.

On their return to Spokane, a director’s meeting was convened on June 27, 1898, and Colonel Peyton displayed a check for $500,000 as a down payment on their mine. By the rules of the company, the three principal directors had to agree on any action.

Colonels Peyton and William H. Turner (not the Judge, but the Colonel) accepted the check, but Judge George Turner refused it on the grounds that they could get more than the B.A.C. was offering.   The directors now split into two camps, the majority, led by Colonel Peyton, and Judge Turner’s minority, including Colonel Ridpath, Major Armstrong, Bill Harris, the flamboyant hotelier and Le Roi mine manager, and Frank Graves.   Ostensibly, the sale was blocked by the disagreement between the two groups.   While they argued, Le Roi mine manager, Bill Harris, halted all development work (tunneling for new deposits), and put his miners to work stripping the veins of what high grade ore was in sight, and shipping it to the Northport smelter.   The mine was going to be sold; the only dispute was about the price.   The more ore that could be removed before the sale, the more profit for the owners.   The longer the sale could be delayed, the more they would make.

At a second meeting, this time with Charles Mackintosh in attendance, the two groups displayed a mutual enmity for his benefit.   Colonel Peyton, of the majority group, revealed that he had already tendered the 284,000 shares of his group to Mackintosh at $6.00 per share.   Those shares constituted a majority interest, and Mackintosh then declared that under British law, the B.A.C., as majority stockholder, now had the right to control the company.   But Judge Turner rose for the minority, and pointed out that the Le Roi Company was a Washington Company, and governed by the laws of Washington State.   And further, that the laws of Washington held that aliens could not own real estate within the State of Washington.   Since the Le Roi Company’s Northport smelter was in Washington, the B.A.C., as alien, could not control it, although it could control the mine in Canada. On this basis, Judge Turner secured a court injunction restraining Colonel Peyton from making a legal transfer of his group’s shares.

At this point affairs took on a momentum of their own and events moved swiftly.   The following account is taken from the newspaper reports of the day in the Rossland Miner and Spokane Spokesman Review.   The author is responsible for the probable dialog hinted at in the press reports.

L. F. Williams, secretary of the Company and a member of Colonel Peyton’s group, realized that Judge Turner, using the Washington law was in an unassailable position, and made a quick call to Austin Corbin, President of the Spokane Falls and Northern Railway.   He ordered a fast special train to be made ready for a dash to Canada.   In haste, he gathered all the Le Roi Company records plus its official seal from the Spokane office, and jumped into a horse cab for the depot. The one car train whistled off, and Williams inside, relaxed, convinced he was removing the company records from beyond the reach of Judge Turner and U.S. law.   But, the cunning Bill Harris had not been deceived.   Suspecting Williams might attempt precisely this, he had taken the precaution of removing the Le Roi Company’s official seal from its accustomed hook above Williams’ desk, and substituted the seal of another company.   On his arrival in Rossland, Williams discovered to his horror, that he had the wrong seal, and that no company business could be transacted until a duplicate seal could be made.            Judge Turner’s group, in possession of the precious seal, now hired deputy sheriffs to enforce the Washington Court’s injunction against Mackintosh and the B.A.C. people.   Mackintosh decided that the whole matter of the sale of the Le Roi had best be taken out of the State of Washington where Judge Turner appeared to have the advantage, and moved to Canada where British law would prevail. He had his private railway car coupled to Austin Corbin’s fastest locomotive, No. 7, a 4-4-0 with 63 inch drivers and capable of forty miles an hour on good track. He invited the majority directors, including the three trustees of the pooled Le Roi shares, to accompany him to Rossland, where, with a majority of the directors present and voting, the sale of Colonel Peyton’s shares could be ratified, and company business conducted — as soon as a duplicate seal could be obtained.

Mackintosh, with his majority directors, boarded his private car, and gave the signal to depart.   But Spokane County deputy sheriff Bunce entered his car to display a County Court order obtained by Judge Turner, and to tell Mackintosh that he must not proceed.   Armed deputies, he told the Governor, were waiting at the city limits, with legal authority to stop any train headed for Canada.

Mackintosh, quite baffled by the machinations of the American Law as expounded by Judge Turner, was now in his element as a British gentleman. Calmly lighting a cigar, he offered the deputy one.   With exquisite politeness, he explained to deputy Bunce that under the Common Law of both Britain and the United States, “A man’s home is his castle,” and that a gentleman’s private railway car is just as much his castle in the eyes of the law, as any monument of ancestral English stone.   That being the case, would not the deputy, as a gentleman bound to be scrupulous in his observance of the law, realize that his presence here without a warrant was an unfortunate trespass?

Deputy Bunce, awed, backed himself out the door, which was locked behind him.   Then he descended, went forward to the engine, boarded it, and ordered the crew not to move the train.   The train crew referred the matter to Austin Corbin, president of the line.   Corbin came down from his office and explained to Bunce that his injunction was against foreigners, the B.A.C. Company, and not against a law-abiding American railroad.   Bunce might order the gentlemen in the car behind, not to leave the United States, but his injunction gave him no right to prevent a railroad not named in the order, from running its trains where so ever it chose.

Deputy Bunce boarded the platform of Mackintosh’s private car once more and pounded on the locked door.   The engineer whistled off and the train began to move.From inside the car Mackintosh shook his head reprovingly at Bunce; the door remained locked.   As the train gathered speed, deputy Bunce climbed up on the tender and standing uncertainly on top of the pile of coal, drew his revolver.   He pointed it at the engine crew and ordered them to stop.   His shouts were lost in the sharp exhaust of the accelerating locomotive.   He clambered down into the locomotive cab and gestured with his drawn pistol.   The engine men shook their heads.   Holding his gun on the two men, Bunce pointed to the group of deputies blocking the track ahead and ordered the engineer to halt.   In response, the engineer pulled the whistle cord and threw the throttle wide open.   Down on the track the deputies scattered for the lives, and the train raced out onto the prairie ahead.

No. 7 was running wide open on the rough track, the private car lurching and swaying behind.   Deputy Bunce, with pistol in hand, was no doubt reflecting that the engine crew belonged to the Rail Brotherhoods.   It had been that group, but a few years before, in the Coeur D’Alene mines, he had dragged Tom Kneebone off his job and shot him dead for testifying against a railroad engineer in the Frisco Mill bombing.   It was a period of extreme union militancy in the West, and the Brotherhoods’ contempt for the law was well established.   Bunce prudently holstered his revolver and climbed back across the coal pile in the tender to Mackintosh’s private car.   Standing on the platform in a shower of cinders and soot from the stack, he pondered what to do.Inside the car, he could see whiskey decanters passed around, and the directors, in wicker chairs, puffing on their cigars.   Bunce knocked.   The directors turned their backs to him.   He held his court order against the glass and pounded the door.   No one paid him any attention.

It was a hot June day across the grasslands of Stevens County.   The train raced on.   Back in Mackintosh’s car, the windows were opened to catch the breeze and fragrant fumes of the Governor’s best Havana tobacco streamed out across the farmlands and stump ranches.   Bunce, on the platform, turned up his collar against the rain of cinders from No. 7’s stack.

It was 147 miles, Spokane to Rossland.   Seven hours, 25 minutes by timetable.   The men in the private car had promised the engine crew a champagne dinner at the Allen Hotel in Rossland if they made the run in under five hours.   Loon Lake, Chewelah and Colville came up.   The scheduled trains were waiting in the sidings as the Special flashed by.   Past Colville, Number 7 screamed down the long grade to the Columbia at Marcus, and began the long series of S curves as the rails followed the east bank of the river.   Grimly, Deputy Bunce, coattails flying, clung to the swaying platform of Mackintosh’s private car, still determined to do his duty.   At mile 130, Northport came into view.   Here the engine would have to stop to take on water for the final, steep climb to Rossland, 2400 feet above.   Bunce swung down from the platform, as the engineer spotted the tender under the waterspout. Bunce planted himself in front of the locomotive, displayed his court order to the gathering crowd, and drew his revolver.   With the crowd as witnesses to his lawful act, he announced, the train would move again only over his dead body.

But here, in full frock coat and embroidered vest, his shiny silk hat on his head and gold watch fob bouncing on his paunch, came the sometime Lieutenant Governor of a Canadian Territory, which, though scantily populated, was still fully as big as the entire United States minus Alaska.     Mackintosh offered the deputy another cigar.   Bunce had to holster his pistol to accept it.   Mackintosh then explained, with that same charitable politeness, that the Canadian border was but eight miles ahead, and if the deputy persisted in his attempt to stop a lawful train by force of arms, he would be arrested at the border for carrying a deadly weapon into Canada, an offense that carried a severe penalty under Canadian law.   “A word to the wise, Sir,” His Honour remarked amiably, and with a friendly pat on the shoulder, made his way back to his private car.

The fireman raised the waterspout as the tender overflowed, and shouted at Bunce, still planted in front of the locomotive, “Well, what’s it going to be, deputy?   You going to shoot a Brotherhood man or get out of our way?” Deputy Bunce flourished his weapon, the crowd of small boys and station loungers looked on in fascination.   A few quick wagers were made.   The engineer blew three blasts, shoved the Johnson bar into its top notch, and opened the throttle. The train, to deputy Bunce’s great relief, backed away, backed toward Spokane.   Then the deputy holstered his pistol with a grin to the onlookers.   But why were they laughing?   What was the joke?   Bunce peered down the track. The train was still backing.   At the far end of town it disappeared around a curve.   An idler in the crowd remarked, “You sure stopped ‘em, mister.   Only you was at the wrong end.”   The crowd burst out laughing.   They were laughing at him, deputy Bunce realized.   What had happened?

Then, from down at the far end of town, came two derisive whistle blasts.   Bunce saw the train come into view again on the distant trestle, leading, he now realized, to the great Columbia River bridge.   The stop at the station was merely for water. The line to Rossland branched off a half mile south.   The engineer had backed his train to the switch and taken the line for Canada.   In the distance, the little one car train rumbled over the bridge, whistled once more and headed up Sheep Creek for Canada.       Bunce walked to the station platform, sat down, and lit up the Lieutenant Governor’s cigar.   To the assembled crowd he muttered contemptuously, “God damned foreigners, anyway!”   He puffed for a moment.   “Not a god damned thing to do with me,” he said, blowing smoke into the air. But the station platform was empty.

With the dispute now transferred to Canada, Mackintosh tried to settle it under Canadian law.   A directors’ meeting was called for July 3, in Rossland.   SF&N No. 7 was washed and polished, hitched to a parlor car, and then the Turner minority group came up to Rossland by special train.   At the meeting, Judge Turner managed to have the $500,000 check returned to the British America Company as premature.   Beyond that, there was stalemate, and No. 7 trundled the minority directors back down the loops of Little Sheep Creek to the U.S. A. and Spokane.

A second meeting was called for Spokane.   Another special train ran up to Rossland to bring the majority group down.   They were, as they reminded themselves, the owners of the richest gold mine in the world, and must travel as such.The railroad performed these services as perfectly as its rough track would permit, but the meeting was a total deadlock.

In Rossland, Mackintosh tried a new tactic.   Bill Harris, the mine manager, and member of the minority group, had had his men stripping the stopes of all the high grade ore they could find, and shipping it to Northport to be converted into dividends for the owners.   The delay in consummating the sale was not only embarrassing to Mackintosh; it was depleting the mine of valuable ore.   The Governor determined to get rid of Harris.   Lacking a company seal, and unable to perform official acts, the Governor applied to Judge Spinks, of the Kootenay County Court, to have the Le Roi Company placed in receivership.   The Judge agreed and W. A. Carlyle, a former Provincial Geologist, was appointed receiver.   Carlyle dismissed Bill Harris and appointed a new mine manager with instructions to reinstitute development work and reduce ore shipments to a minimum in order to starve the smelter of ore, and the owners of dividends, while the sale was still pending.

Bill Harris had been shipping 350 tons of the Le Roi’s best ore every day; the majority group had been obliged to watch this high grading before their eyes.   Their anger had become physical as Judge Turner and Colonel Peyton found themselves both occupying the same hotel, the Allen, in Rossland.   Accidentally meeting in the lobby, a scuffle took place, with Judge Turner attempting to bodily eject Colonel Peyton from the hotel.   Peace was restored; the combatants, or play actors –it is impossible to be sure which — were parted.

The minority group, with their manager removed from the mine, then went to Victoria, B.C. to institute a suit against Colonel Peyton, the B.A.C., Mackintosh, and Whittaker Wright, to recover $780,000 for an alleged conspiracy to buy Le Roi shares at less than their real value.   While this suit dragged on, the group were able to get a Victoria court to overturn Judge Spinks’ receivership.   Bill Harris was reinstated as mine manager, and at once he resumed stripping the Le Roi of its best ore.            This was intolerable to the B.A.C.   Their best ore was being removed out of Canadian jurisdiction, smelted at Northport, and the bullion recovered held in the U.S. for the owners.   The owners were making roughly $6,500 each day the sale was delayed.   To try to get the receivership reinstated by Washington law, the B.A.C. sent its lawyers down to Spokane — by special train, of course.   This time, the minority completely reversed its previous bellicose behavior.   They met their Canadian colleagues with profuse apologies for past incivilities, and solicitous concern for their comfort and well-being.   This they accompanied by a continuous series of toasts to amity and international cooperation.   So alcoholic was the fellowship, and so long continued, that the B.A.C. lawyers, in a boozy haze, completely lost track of time and missed their appointment at court.   With their non-appearance, the court dropped the case from the docket, and the rivals were once again plunged into teeth gnashing rage, real or feigned.

The news of these scandalous proceedings was gleefully reported in the mining papers, and reached London, where the effect was to depress the value of B.A.C. shares.   Soon they dropped below par.   Whittaker Wright was compelled to find some way to conciliate the minority directors, and complete the sale, or his B.A.C. would be in serious trouble.   Judge Turner was reporting he had received an offer from Wright of $8.12-1/2 for his shares.   This the B.A.C. vigorously denied.   The Judge responded by suggesting that another British consortium had offered him $8.50.   True or false, the publicity was becoming painfully embarrassing for Whittaker Wright. He would have to compromise.

Finally, on November 22, 1898, all the shares in what had been the world’s richest gold mine, changed hands at $7.40, plus payment for ore en route to the Northport Smelter.   The last of the minority hold-outs, Bill Harris, had to come down from Rossland to Spokane to sign the agreement.   He made the trip, as might be expected, by special train.

It is impossible to know whether or not the whole affair was a charade played out for the benefit of the pompous and gullible Mackintosh.   For 130 days, during the time the sale had been held up, Bill Harris had been Le Roi manager, stripping the mine of its best ore.   $845,000 of ore had been removed, smelted and sold, and monthly dividends paid, while Mackintosh was stalled.   This amounted to $1.69 per share realized from the high grading, while the compromise with Whittaker Wright added only an additional $1.40 per share.   The figures powerfully suggest that the protracted dispute played out in the courts, on special trains, and hotel lobby tussles, may have been a gigantic, profitable, and hilarious hoax.

With the final agreement and sale, the B.A.C. got full control of the mine and smelter, but the dubious look of the affair made Whittaker Wright’s mining empire look shaky in London.   The success of any stock jobbing operation depended on its shares rising in value.   Should they begin to fall, as had those of the B.A.C., the price of the stock could only be supported by the company’s assets.   B.A.C. investors now began to query just what were the Le Roi Company’s assets.   An answer was not forthcoming.

The B.A.C., on purchasing the Colonels’ Le Roi Company for $4,000,000, had formed a new British company, the Le Roi Mining Company, and sold the mine and smelter to it for $4,750,000.   Wright chose a former anti-union thug, Bernard Mc Donald, who had worked for him in the New Mexico mines, as Le Roi manager.  But now manager Mc Donald, began sending alarming reports to London.   The mine had no more high grade ore in sight.   Bill Harris had indeed stripped the mine.   The British investors who had bought up all 200,000 shares in the new Le Roi Company at $25 each, in just three days, wanted their dividends.   Monthly, they had been promised.

In Rossland, manager Mc Donald was obliged to report the shattering news that the mine was actually operating at a loss.   In 1899, the ore coming out of the Le Roi was netting $12.50 a ton, but mining, smelting and shipping costs totalled $15.14 a ton.   With the huge value of the shares outstanding, and an operating loss, the mine could pay no dividends at all.   Worse, after purchasing the mine from the B.A.C. for $4,750,000, the new Le Roi Company had but $250,000 left in its treasury for working capital, not nearly enough for a vigorous program of development to find new high grade ore bodies in the network of veins it owned.

At this time similar discoveries were coming to light in Whittaker Wright’s Western Australian mines, and a bear attack on his stocks began in London.   Furious investors, finding themselves to have been duped, lobbed the British Parliament for redress.   An official investigation of Whittaker Wright’s financial and mining empire began.

In Spokane, the Colonels, congratulating themselves on their coup, having sold their mine just as it was going barren, retired to their clubs and began to invest in other mining properties in B.C., notably the St Eugene mine on Moyie Lake.   Perhaps the game could be played again. Colonel Ridpath, and Judge Turner, no longer adversaries, bought the Sullivan mine in Kimberly, B.C., and planned a smelter there to handle its lead-zinc-silver ores.

Half way around the world, Whittaker Wright went on trial for frauds unrelated to the Le Roi affair.   He was found guilty, and sentenced to seven years imprisonment. He did not go to jail.   Immediately after the sentence was read, he conferred briefly with his lawyers over some last arrangements, then stepped into a side room and swallowed a capsule of cyanide.   Returning, he collapsed on the floor and died.   A loaded revolver was found in his pocket.

The collapse of Whittaker Wright’s stock jobbing empire damaged the reputation of the mining industry in the London market for years, but for a future American president, it presented a golden opportunity.   Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer, only 23 years years of age, was sent out to Western Australia by the engineering firm of Bewick-Moreing to see what could be done to rescue the mines that went down in the Whittaker Wright scandal.   There, Hoover met with the new chairman of the Lakeview mine.   Convinced that the Lakeview had an unrealized potential, Hoover convinced Bewick-Moreing to take over its management.   The Lakeview proved to be a solid success, and launched young Mr Hoover on an impressive career in mine engineering.   By 1928, he was President of the United States.   By 1985, Bewick-Moreing was boring the Channel Tunnel.            The sale of the Le Roi brought to an end the period of gaudy unreality in Rossland.   The mines were still there, but the ore was becoming leaner as they went deeper. For Rossland, the bonanza days were over. Conservative, scientific management was in charge, and profits could henceforth only be made from volume of ore shipped, not spectacular finds.

Down in Trail, Colonel Topping continued to insist that he expected to find another Le Roi very soon, and that in the meantime he had some very promising mining claims to sell.   He was planning a trip, he announced, to the newly formed mining districts in the Colville Indian Reservation to investigate some remarkable gold properties there. Deputy Bunce was looking for work.   A furious Judge Turner had seen to it that he was a deputy no longer.


 

STEEP AND CROOKED … by Late Writer, Artist & Castle Builder Bill Laux – Chapter IV

/ Peter Klopp / Leave a comment

train

STEEP AND CROOKED: THE MINING RAILROADS OF THE CANADIAN BORDER

 By Bill Laux

CHAPTER FOUR

THE RED MOUNTAIN RAILWAY

1896 – 1922

Daniel Corbin’s Columbia and Red Mountain Railway was chartered to run from Northport to the Canadian border at Frontier. A Canadian charter covered the rest of the line from Patterson, on the Canadian side of the border, to Rossland under the title, Red Mountain Railway. The line was operated by Corbin, and later by the Great Northern, as a branch of the Spokane Falls and Northern. Red Mountain mileage are figured from the Northport station, which adds .6 miles to the actual distance, since trains departing from Northport had to back .6 miles to the junction, south of town. There, taking the switch, the trains climbed out on a long trestle approach to the Columbia bridge.

The construction of the great, six span Columbia bridge delayed completion of the line. To get a share of the Rossland ore traffic, Dan Corbin began operations before the bridge was complete. For the first six months, from December, 1896, the trains were run down a steep track from the Northport station to the water’s edge and a reaction ferry. There, the cars would be ferried across, two or three at a time. On the right bank the cars were hauled off the ferry and up a steep track to the permanent line near the southeast end of the present Lowry landing strip. A curving section of macadam pavement from the present gravel river road, leads to the original ferry landing which was also used briefly for an auto ferry in 1947 after the bridge collapsed.

Coming off the west end of the bridge, the Columbia and Red Mountain grade climbed on a 2-1/2 percent grade across the delta of Big Sheep Creek . A mile and a half (2.4 km) from the river it entered Big Sheep Creek canyon on its west wall, opposite the St Crispen mine. The tracks clung to a narrow ledge, sometimes 100 feet above the water, and passed above Sheep Creek Falls at mile 3 (km 4.8). A half mile (.8 km) farther upstream, Upper Sheep Creek Falls poured through a narrow cleft in the rocks. Here at the falls, the line crossed the creek on a single Howe truss span, 75 feet above the tumbling water. This was a favorite spot for photographers, the train pausing while they exposed their glass plates.

On the left (east) bank of the creek the grade steepened to 3 percent, and the line crawled out of the dark canyon to enter the valley of the tributary, Little Sheep Creek, at mile 6 (km. 9.6). At Velvet, mile 7(km. 11.2), a water tank was built and a siding laid out to receive ore from Olaus Jeldness’ Velvet mine. A wagon road led from the siding up Big Sheep Creek to Jeldness’ mine, across the border in British Columbia.

At the border, mile 8 (km. 12.8), the Great Republic and the Double Standard mines were developing ore on the slopes just above the track. Their waste dumps can be seen today, immediately south of the U.S. Border Station. On the Canadian side, at mile 8.4 (km. 13.4), was Patterson, with a depot and a 26 car siding for customs inspection. Ahead the valley steepened, so engineer Roberts had to swing his grade in a wide loop to the east to gain enough elevation to reenter Little Sheep Creek canyon at Silica, mile 13 (km.20.8). The OK mine, just beyond Silica, had ore ready to ship when the rails arrived. Here, for a short time, a transfer station existed where Rossland freight and Le Roi ore, coming down the wagon road, could be put on the cars while the slow work of blasting a grade through the granite bluffs ahead proceeded. Back of Silica, quarries were opened in a quartz deposit, and the product shipped as flux to the smelters at Trail and Northport.

In 1898, the imposingly named British Columbia Bullion Extraction Company built a large mill stepping down the slope from the Red Mountain rails north of Silica to Little Sheep Creek. Its developers planned to use the power from the West Kootenay Power and Light Company’s lines which crossed the canyon at this point, to extract gold from the Rossland ores by a patented electrochemical process. This was just one of the “secret gold saving devices” being hawked to naive investors. All promised to recover the gold and silver the smelters were allegedly “losing.” Like most “secret processes,” the B.C. Bullion Company’s process was not commercially successful, and the great mill was eventually closed.1

Past Silica, at mile 13.5 (km. 21.6), the line crossed the canyon to the west wall on a high, 21 bent trestle at the Midnight mine. The grade, even at 3 percent, could not stay above the even steeper grade of the creek, and Roberts was obliged to reversed it on a 22 degree loop over Little Sheep Creek to ascend the east wall of the canyon. Just above the stream-spanning trestle at the Midnight mine, the line crawled out on another high, curving trestle of 26 bents to loop around a handy granite knob and head upstream again. From here a ledge to carry the rails had to be blasted out of the sheer granite wall of Deer Park Mountain. This ledge brought the rails around the nose of the mountain and into the shallow pass leading to Trail Creek and Rossland.

With the extensive blasting and rock-work, the track layers did not get into Rossland until December, 1896. A box car was set off at mile 17 (km. 27.2) as a temporary station from which the first passenger train departed on the 19th. In the pass, two spurs were run into General Warren’s White Bear mine and mill. Warren could now ship his lower grade ores which he had been stockpiling, awaiting the railroad. Originally, Corbin planned to have the White Bear spur extended around to the east slope of Deer park Mountain and the “South Belt” of the Rossland mines. But with the Trail Creek Tramway already in place, and serving those mines, this line was never built.

Across the flat from the White Bear was the Black Bear mine. Sidings, loading tracks and a wye were laid here. The Le Roi was high above the Black Bear, but the workings were interconnected, and Le Roi ores could come out through the Black Bear tunnel. From the wye at the Black Bear, the track was run diagonally northeast through the upper part of Rossland with a spur to the Nickel Plate mine and a trestle across Centre Star (Acme) Gulch ( the two railroads could not agree on a name). A station was built on the flat at Spokane Street and Third Avenue. The track continued northeast to the Great Western mine at the top of St Paul Street. A water tank was put up here and a short spur served the town wood lot. As the Trail Creek Tramway (Columbia & Western) was still narrow gauge, no connection could be made. Freight had to be transferred by hand and dray wagon from one railway to the other.

Down at Northport the great Columbia bridge was built at the south end of town. Its east approach climbed on a long trestle to carry the line to the height required to clear steamers on the river at high water. The bridge was of composite construction, two 3/4 inch iron plates bolted between three 4 x 16 inch wood timbers. The iron carried the tension loads, the wood the compression loads. The bridge was 1200 feet long, six Howe truss spans, supported on iron cylinder piers filled with rocks and concrete. The cylindrical filling of these piers lies on the beach today, the iron casings having been sold as salvage. During construction the high water of spring, 1897, swept away some of the false work, and completion was delayed until October, 1897. At its west end, the track was carried off the bridge by a short trestle to the top of a gravel bench where several summer homes are now located.1

During the eleven months while bridge was under construction,the small reaction ferry carried locomotives, and freight and passenger cars across the river. The ferry was slung from an overhead 1-1/2 inch steel cable, 1500 feet long, that was made fast to wooden towers on each side of the river. Cables, from bow and stern ran up to a sliding sheave on the overhead line. By slacking or tightening these cables with a hand winch, the hull of the ferry would assume an angle to the current, and the fast running water would push the vessel across the river. Rail traffic on this ferry began on September 3, 1896.1

The Red Mountain Railway owned one locomotive, possibly two. No. 9, the engine most often seen on the line, was a powerful Baldwin 2-8-0 of 1896, with 19 x 24 inch cylinders and 47 inch drivers. It weighed 56 tons and was able to exert 26,000 pounds of pull. After the Great Northern takeover, it was classified GN Class F-4, and renumbered 1094. In 1925 the GN sold it to the McGoldrick Lumber Company of Pe Ell, Washington, and it disappears from the record.

In addition to No. 9, one passenger coach and twenty box cars were lettered for the Red Mountain Railway. All other locomotives and cars were leased from the parent Spokane Falls and Northern. To judge from early photos, SF&N 4-4-0 No.7 frequently worked passenger traffic on the line. No. 7 was the SF&N’s fastest engine. It was an 1883 Baldwin machine with 63 inch drivers, 18 x 24 inch cylinders, and was capable of 14,000 pounds of pull. 2

With the Red Mountain boom in full flower in 1900, the wealthy mine owners persuaded the Great Northern to put on a first class sleeping car service to Spokane.

The train left Rossland at 11:00 PM, just after the CPR train from Grand Forks and Robson West arrived at the CPR station a block away, down Second Avenue. The sleepers got into Spokane at 6:00 AM. Travelers had a full day for business, and an evening for recreation. They could then board the departing sleepers for Rossland at 1:00 AM, and arrive at the mountaintop city at 7:00 AM, jut in time to catch the departing CPR train for Trail, Robson West, Grand Forks and Greenwood. The extra fare for the sleeping car berths was $1.50, and, at the request of the passengers, speed was slowed to ten miles per hour over the rougher sections of track so that travelers did not need to be strapped into their beds.

James J. Hill bought the Spokane Falls and Northern Railway with its Red Mountain subsidiary in 1898, and dismissed Daniel Corbin. In 1907 Hill folded the SF&N, the N&FS,and the RMR into the Great Northern, with all equipment renumbered and re-lettered for the GN. D. C. Corbin went on to build another railroad with CPR financing, the Spokane International, to give the Canadian Pacific an entry into Spokane.

By 1909, the majority of Red Mountain mines had passed into Canadian/British ownership, and ore traffic to the Northport smelter was dwindling. It sought ore from Phoenix, B.C. and from Republic, Washington to make up the shortfall, bu it was not enough. With six smelters operating in the great Boundary-Kootenay boom before WWI, competition was vigorous. But at the end of the war metal prices slumped and in 1921 it was closed. As Rossland and its mines gradually became more and more Canadian, the important and bibulous comings and goings of the Yankee Colonels and the Canadian Honourables ceased, and the night train was withdrawn. Still, the families and ordinary working residents of Rossland and Trail took the day train to Spokane on regular shopping trips. Until the completion of the Kettle Valley Railway in 1916, linking the Kootenays with Vancouver, Spokane continued secure as the metropolis of the Kootenay – Boundary country.

After the Great Northern’s takeover of the SF&N with its Red Mountain branch, GN Class D-5, No. 471, a Brooks Mogul of 1896, usually handled the passenger run. F-4, No 1094 (ex RMR No. 9) which was the heaviest locomotive permitted on the increasingly shaky trestle loops, continued to take the freight runs, often with a snowplow on its pilot.1 Traffic up to Rossland included coal from Jim Hill’s Crowsnest Pass mines, coke from Michel, and limestone flux from the Evans quarry south of Northport for the Trail smelter.

In 1897 the morning freight of fifteen cars, leaving Rossland for Northport, derailed two of the cars on the trestle at the OK/Midnight mines. Luckily the cars did not fall off the trestle and a crew of men unloaded the heavy ore with shovels enabling the cars to be re-railed again.

After the Trail Creek Tramway (C&W) was standard gauged by the CPR in 1898, the lack of a physical connection between the two lines in Rossland was frustrating for the local population. Although the two stations were just a block apart, the unremitting hostility between Jim Hill of the GN and Shaughnessy of the CPR, prevented any joining of the tracks until the Rossland business community and mine managers forcibly agitated for one. The CPR did not want a connection that would permit mines on its rails to ship their ore out via the GN. And, the GN, of course, had identical considerations. Finally, after persistent public outcry, the two corporations gave in, and a single line of track was laid down Third Avenue from one station to the other. When the Northport smelter got contracts from some of the mines along the CPR “Highline, ” the GN laid a pair of switchbacks up from present Jubilee Park to connect with the CPR line on Mc Leod Avenue. Ore then came down the connecting switchbacks, avoiding the passenger stations.

Corbin’s Red Mountain line had cost him half a million dollars to build, a quarter of which went for the big Columbia bridge. When the Northport smelter went into operation on January 1, 1898, more and more of the ore traffic began to move out via Corbin’s line, attracted by J.J. Hill’s lower freight rates. High grade ore could be contracted to the smelters at Butte, and at Everett and Tacoma as well, and moved on GN rails. With horses and mules rawhiding the ore down the snowy trails in 1894, the mines had shipped 2000 tons. In the following year, with the wagon roads open, they shipped 19,600 tons. With the Tramway open for just half of 1896, 38,000 tons went down to the smelter. When both railroads were operating in 1897, 60,000 tons went out. The next year, shipments soared to 111,000 tons.