Trail

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 IV

/ Peter Klopp / Leave a comment

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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.

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

/ Peter Klopp / 4 Comments

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STEEP AND CROOKED: THE MINING RAILROADS OF THE CANADIAN BORDER

 By Bill Laux

CHAPTER THREE

THE TRAIL CREEK TRAMWAY

1895 – 1896

Rossland was a rough, muddy, woman-less, mining camp of just 75 miners when the year 1895 opened.   Then, in January, all over Red mountain the digging began to pay off.   First, the War Eagle, under the Clark brothers, struck the main vein. The ore was rich and the mine began to pay monthly dividends starting February First.   Soon after, the Centre Star found high grade ore, and it too became a paying mine. Following closely, came bonanza strikes in the Black Bear, the Josie, the Nickel Plate, the Iron Mask, and others. The mining world began to take notice of these remote diggings, and Rossland’s population jumped to 3,000 by the year’s end.   It was then a sprawling camp of shingle shacks, log cabins, and canvas tents, stretching across the head waters of Trail Creek, and to the astonishment of Coastal residents, the fifth largest city in British Columbia.

Frederick Augustus Heinze, of New York and Butte, had been invited to come to Trail to duplicate his success in Montana.   One of three sons of a prosperous Brooklyn dry goods importer, he had been educated in Germany and the Columbia School of Mines.   He had come to the Montana copper camp as a young mining engineer of 19, to work for Boston mining corporation.   The Butte copper mines were then the site of a bitter struggle between W. A. (later Senator) Clark, and Marcus Daly for control of the major mines.   Operating quietly between these two giants, Fritz Heinze saw that there was an opportunity for a custom smelter, which, using the new cupola furnace technology he had learned in Europe, would smelt the ores from the small independent mines at a lower charge than Clark’s and Daly’s works.   With the backing and participation of his brothers, Arthur, a lawyer,and Otto, a financier, the three of them founded the Montana Ore Purchasing Company and built their smelter.   Shortly, Heinze’s investigation of inactive and abandoned mines suggested that ore bodies remained in them which had not been developed.   The Montana Ore Purchasing Company put a down payment on the Rarus mine and quckly turned it into paying entrprise, feeding their smelter.   Heinze’s ability to locate ore bodies in supposedly worked out properties made him famous in Butte; he was either the luckiest or the most knowledgeable of its mining enginers.

British Columbia mining men had heard of his remarkable success in Butte and invited him to British Columbia in 1894.   A quiet examination of the Rossland mines persuaded him that here was an opportunity for a smelter. His brothers raised the $300,000 required, largely from the Heinze family, and he approached the Spokane Colonels offering to buy the Le Roi.   But when he could not produce the substantial down payment they insisted on, the deal fell through. He then sucessfully negotiated a contract to smelt the Le Roi ore. Using Rossland’s A.E. Humphries as his agent, he secured a site for his smelter and an association with Colonel Topping in the Trail townsite company.

As soon as the agreements were signed, he got underway at once, ordering 25,000 cords of firewood for roasting the ores, and 50,000 bricks to be made locally for the chimney and furnaces. The tramway to the mines had to be built as quickly as possible.   If D. C. Corbin should get his rails to Red Mountain, Heinze would have to bid against him for those Red Mountain ores.

Smelter construction got underway on September 13, 1895.   With the lack of adequate transportation facilities to bring in smelting coal at a reasonable price, Heinze prepared to roast his ores with cord wood on open piles and then smelt the mix of iron, copper and sulfur in a single furnace with charcoal.   It was not efficient, but the ore was rich and the process cheap.   Speed was essential, for a month after Heinze began building his smelter, the Hall Mines Syndicate began construction of its copper smelter at Nelson, where coal and coke could be delivered cheaply from U. S. sources on Corbin’s Nelson and Fort Shepherd line.

Quickly, Heinze bought up Peter Larsen’s proposed tramway company with its charter to give him the right to acquire right of way through public lands and give himself uncontested access up Trail Creek Gulch an ownership of Larsen’s pile of rails down on the beach.   An once he set his railroad superintendent, F. P. Gutelius, to surveying a scratch narrow gauge tramway up Trail Creek to the mines.[i]

Down at Northport, Daniel Corbin, stalled by the prohibition to enter the Colville reservation, was running out of time.   The Canadian charter he had obtained for the 9-1/2 miles of his line in Canada had a time stipulation: construction must commence immediately or the charter would be canceled.   He appealed to the government for a time extension.   It was denied.   He appealed for permission to build his line as a cheaper narrow gauge. The citizens of Rossland protested this niggardly maneuver. Trail was building a narrow gauge line; they insisted on standard gauge, as the charter specified. The government agreed and denied this request as well.

Frustrated and desperate, Corbin sent his engineer, E. J. Roberts, and a grading crew to Rossland in the summer of 1895 with instructions to begin grading out of Rossland down Little Sheep Creek toward the border.[ii]

Heinze was not deterred.   By November 9, 1895, the surveys for his Trail Creek Tramway were finished, and and on the 16th grading got underway with Nelson Bennett’s firm of Tacoma the successful bidder.   Bennett had built the Stampede Pass switchback line for the Northern Pacific and was experienced in this sort of pioneer construction.   He sent Charles King to Trail to take charge of the work.[iii]

As the news of Heinze’s invasion of the Kootenays spread, Van Horne of the Canadian Pacific, had to move, even though the company was short of cash.   In September, 1895, just a month after Fritz Heinze had announced his plans for a smelter and tramway, Van Horne proclaimed his railroad’s interest.   It was a defensive move for the CPR.   His first concern was to keep James J. Hill and his Great Northern feeder lines out of B.C. and strengthen the CPR’s transportation monopoly into the Kootenays.

That monopoly had suffered two defeats, the first in 1893, when Dan Corbin built to Kootenay Lake at Five Mile Point and began serving Nelson and the Toad Mountain mines with his Nelson and Fort Shepherd line.     Van Horne bought Colonel Baker’s B.C. Southern charter, the same that Dan Corbin had burnt his fingers on, but with the country in recession, there was no money to build the 200 mile line from Alberta that the CPR needed to secure the Kootenay traffic.   Until the CPR could negotiate land grants and cash subsidies for the line, Van Horne had to bluff. To counter Heinze and Corbin at one stroke, he announced a new line, the Robson – Rossland Railway, to be built by the CPR.   It would start directly across the Columbia from the Robson docks of the Columbia and Kootenay, and would run down the right (west) bank of the Columbia to Sullivan Creek.   From there it would begin a 3 percent climb to Rossland, contouring around the mountains, and entering the town from the east, to link all the producing mines in one, wide loop.   As an insulting afterthought, five miles north of Rossland, a minor spur would be run down to Heinze’s smelter to supply his works with Crowsnest Pass coal and coke.[iv]  Once the CPR line was built in from Alberta to connect with this line, he would cross Hill’s and Corbin’s lines with his own, and counting on government support, would freeze them out.

The second defeat came sureptitiously in 1894, when the locally chartered 29 mile narrow gauge line, the Kaslo and Slocan, building west from Kaslo to the silver- lead mines at Sandon, obtained quiet backing from Jim Hill.     Hill did not want to add the narrow gauge to his Great Northern lines, but he did want those ores to move out of the Kootenays over his Bedlington and Nelson branch to Bonner’s Ferry and his main line.   Financial control of the little K&S ensured this.

Fritz Heinze rightly assessed Van Horne’s Robson – Rossland line as a bluff. It would be several years before the CPR could bring a line in from Alberta.   But when it did, he knew he would be in a desperate squeeze between two hostile railways, the CPR and Dan Corbin’s SF&N.   In a bid to create his own outlet, he announced, on December 21, with his graders at work on the tramway, that he intended to apply for a provincial charter to extend his narrow gauge railway out west from Rossland all the way to Penticton in the Okanagan valley.[v]

Then he went to work on Dan Corbin, whose men were blasting their way around the narrow granite ledges southwest of Rossland.   Posing as a sworn enemy of the CPR, Heinze wanted Corbin to abandon his plans for his Red Mountain Railway.   The CPR was hostile to them both, he told Corbin.   See what it was doing to keep his N&FS out of Nelson. It was in both their interests to combine in order to be strong enough to resist the CPR when it came. If, instead of building his difficult Red Mountain Railroad from Northport up Big and Little Sheep Creeks, Corbin would build a branch from his Nelson and Fort Shepherd Railway at Sayward up the east bank of the Columbia to a point opposite Trail, his cars could be ferried across to Heinze’s tramway.   He would three rail his Trail Creek Tramway, Fritz Heinze promised, so that Corbin could supply him with the coal and coke he would need.   It sounded eminently reasonable; the Trail Times trumpeted its advantages.   Trail would have a direct, standard gauge connection to Spokane and the two transcontinentals there.   The smelter would have inexpensive coal and coke from Roslyn on the NP line, rather than the costly CPR coal from Vancuver Island, a supply that could be shut off by the Columbia freezing in winter.[vi]

Dan Corbin was not persuaded.   Heinze was keeping the ore haul from the mines exclusively for his own line, he observed.   Heinze upped his offer.   He would have Gutelius run a 3 rail line down Bay Avenue to a rocky bluff, the best site for a Columbia River bridge (in fact the site of the present Yellow Bridge). Here Corbin could bridge the river, a shorter and easier crossing than at Northport.   Corbin still refused.[vii]   Well, he would build the bridge himself, Heinze offered.   Dan Corbin still refused.

As Corbin continued hostile, Fritz Heinze knew that by the time the Red Mountain Railway and the CPR line from Alberta were complete, he would have to have his own rail connection to coal and to the markets for copper, or his adversaries would crush him.   In mid construction, he changed the name of his Trail Creek Tramway to the Columbia and Western Railway and prepared to win the backing of those Vancouver and Victoria merchants who were still agitating for a “Coast to Kootenay” rail line.

In March, 1896, the news came that the American President had signed the bill giving Dan Corbin the right to cross the Colville Reservation with his rails.   Corbin at once assembled his crews, and using a ferry to cross the Columbia at Northport until his bridge could be built, he had them begin grading up Big Sheep Creek.

Heinze pushed on. He announced bombastically in the Trail Creek News that,

“The smelter will start up in about a month and and will handle the entire ore supply             of this district, taking the whole output from the Le Roi and Iron Mask.   We now have 45,000 tons of Le Roi ore on hand valued at $30 a ton and will have 125,000 to 150,000 tons of ore in the smelter constantly.   We keep on hand supplies of 100,000 cords of wood and   $50,000 worth of coke of which we use three carloads a week.   We use from two to three       hundred cords of wood daily, the production of which will give employment to a small           army of men. We propose to do custom work and the poor man can bring his one ton              of ore and have it treated as cheaply as can the rich man with his thousands of                         tons.” [viii]

After this boast, Heinze had Herman Bellinger, his smelter manager, begin an outdoor roast of Le Roi ores brought down from the mines by wagon.   His graders were nearly half way to Rossland.   The sternwheeler Arrow brought a barge down from the Canadian Pacific at Revelstoke on March 26, 1896, with a used narrow gauge locomotive and four wooden coal cars from the Alberta Railway and Coal Company.   At the mouth of Trail Creek, where Larsen’s rails were lying, the locomotive was carefully levered off the barge and onto a hastily built line of Larsen’s rails and hand hewed ties. A team of horses pulled the fifteen ton locomotive and the cars up to a small yard Gutelius had improvised under the Bay Avenue bridge over the Trail Creek delta.

Before it could be operated, No. 2, a fat boilered Hinkley 2-6-0, had to be converted to wood firing.   No. 2 was turned out by Hinkley in Chicago in 1879 as an     0-6-0, with 12 x 18” cylinders and tiny, 31 inch drivers, giving it a tractive power of 13,000 pounds. No 2 was converted to a Mogul by the Alberta Railway and Coal Company with the addition of a pilot truck.     It ran on the Great Falls and Canada ern narrow gauge line, hauling Alberta coal down to the smelter at Great Falls, Montana.   This line, known as “The Turkey Trail,” was bought by Jim Hill when his Great Northern, pushing west, encountered it. In the 1890s it was standard gauged and its 3 foot equipment was being peddled all over the Northwest to the Kaslo and Slocan, the Trail Creek Tramway, and other narrow gauge lines.

In Trail a big Radley and Hunter stack with its wide spark arrestor netting was applied to No.2 . This was obligatory for all wood burning locomotives to reduce the hazard of sparks setting wildfires along the line. Wood burning grates replaced the coal grates in the firebox, and high sideboards were built on the tender to carry enough wood for a thirteen mile trip up to the mines.   The bearings needed to be checked as well, since the machine had been out of service for some time.

In the small yard a section of track was greased and steam was raised in No. 2 by fireman, Sam Stingley.   The Hinkley, in charge of W.H. Garlock, former Master Mechanic of the Seattle, Lakeshore and Eastern RR., was then run onto the greased rails and chained securely to two yellow pine tree stumps still present in the townsite.

To the intense interest of the idlers and small boys lining the rail of the bridge above, the throttle was opened and No. 2 spun her drivers on the slippery rails, lunging at the restraining chains and shooting a plume of steam and blue wood smoke high into the pale April sky.   Mechanic Garlock bent close to the churning drivers and listened for the pound of a loose bearing.   The throttle was closed. He pulled the cotter pin from an adjustment nut and tightened it just a fraction of an inch, then replaced the pin.   He signaled for power; the drivers spun again, and Garlock bent to listen.   Another adjustment was made.   When all was well, he went through the same procedure on the other side.   Bearings were tightened, the drivers spun, the valve settings checked, and checked again.   In the days before roller bearings, the brass journals of the locomotive axles were coated with a film of anti-friction metal known as Babbitt, a low melting point alloy of tin, antimony and copper.   Under load, this soft metal between the steel of the axle and the brass of the journal, formed a nearly frictionless metal film on which the locomotive rode.   The bearings needed to be tightened to the point where the Babbitt was snug against the brass of the journal, but not so tight that the soft metal would overheat, melt and throw out.   It was a delicate adjustment and could be made only by judging the sound and temperature of the bearing by ear and feel, as the wheels spun.

The tests went on most of the day.   Superintendent Gutelius was laying out a steep and crooked railroad, and only a locomotive in perfect condition was going to be able to operate it.   By late afternoon, No. 2 had passed all inspections, and the four wooden coal cars had had their coal boxes removed and been refloored by the carpenters as flats.   Locomotive and cars were now ready to move ties and rails up the line to the track laying crews.[ix]

On April 1, 1896, after posing for photographs with Colonel Topping, Superintendent Gutelius, Frank Hanna and the Hanna kids, Trail Creek Tramway No. 2, with her four cars, was ready to begin laying track, following the graders up the hill at the rate of a quarter mile per day with Gutelius’ improvised tracklaying machine.   A temporary track was first run up into the townsite from the beach where the barges would off-load more rails from Alberta and ties from the tie hackers up the river.  From near the present intersection of Farwell and Cedar in Trail, the permanent track was begun, laid with standard gauge ties, and with the rails offset to allow for a third rail to be spiked down later, as Heinze had promised Dan Corbin.   The grade ran up the right (south) side of Trail Creek on a 3 percent grade.   At a collection of shacks known as Dublin Gulch, the grade of the creek exceeded a practical grade for a railway and the first switchback was laid at mile 0.8.   The line reversed across the the creek and climbed its north bank on a 3.9 percent grade until it reached the top of the level bench where the smelter was under construction. Here Gutelius’ crews laid a wye and a small yard at mile 1.5.   This was to be the headquarters of the Trail Creek Tramway, now officially the Columbia and Western Railway.   An office was begun here with its second floor reserved for accommodations for President Heinze during the one week each month he spent in Trail.

The line reversed at the smelter wye, and now with six foot narrow gauge ties and no provision for a third rail, headed up the north bank of Trail Creek.   At Annable, at mile 3.1, the creek rose to meet the little line and Gutelius’ grade crossed it on what has been measured today as a 4.8 percent grade.   Gutelius, instructed by Heinze to get tracks up to those mines ahead of Dan Corbin, was building to the limit of his small locomotives’ capacity.   The line crossed the creek above Annable on a 25 degree loop, reversing direction to climb out of the creek onto the second bench at Warfield, mile 4.   A 25 degree curve is one on which a 100 foot chord along the curve intercepts a 25 degree central angle.   This awkward method of designating the sharpness of a curve comes from the way curves are laid out by the engineers.   A “hub” or center is chosen and lines of equal length run to every 100 feet of track to ensure the curve will be uniformly circular.   Common practice on main line standard gauge railroads is to limit curves to under 5 degrees.   A 25 degree curve on a grade severely limited a locomotive’s pulling ability. On a full half circle, and there were three of these 180 degree loops on the Trail Creek Tramway, the outside drivers of the little Hinkley had to turn nine feet, five inches farther than the inside drivers.   This meant nine and a half feet of wheel slippage in negotiating the loop.   On the following cars, the outside wheels had to slip as well, increasing the drag on the engine.   To compensate for this, Gutelius reduced the grade on the sharp curves .04 percent per degree of curvature.   This effectively reduced the grade on the 25 degree loops to 3 percent to keep up-bound trains from stalling.

At Warfield bench a second 25 degree loop reversed the line up Trail Creek again and it proceeded as it had from the smelter, up the north bank on a 4 percent grade until the creek rose to meet it at Tiger, mile 6.5.   Here Gutelius crossed the creek and laid a switchback on a 25 degree curve. The line then backed around the granite nose of Lake Mountain into Tiger Creek on a 4.6 percent grade.   Below the waste dumps of the Tiger and Crown Point mines, another switchback was set at mile 7.5 and called Crown Point.   Reversing here, the line swung back around the nose of Lake Mountain again with two levels of track below it, and proceeded up the south side of Trail Creek.

At Carpenter’s, mile 8.8, it crossed Gopher Creek and the old Dewdney Trail, climbing through Joe Moris’ Homestake claim into lower Rossland at the Spitzee Mine, mile 10.5, where a mine spur was laid out.   A passenger shelter was to be built here at Union Avenue for the residents of lower Rossland.   At Cook Avenue, the line looped across Trail Creek for the last time and climbed east between Kootenay and Le Roi Avenues through the steepest part of town, to curl around Rossland in a counter-clockwise spiral.   Author Peter Lewty, former Rossland resident, reports having found 12 x 12 timbers set vertically between the ties to hold the track to a piece of 4.8 percent grade.   This may well have been done later by the CPR when the line was standard gauged.

At the corner of St Paul street and Le Roi Avenue, a station site was located on a lot donated by the Rossland Townsite Company.   From this point the line had to be blasted through granite bluffs as it climbed into the upper part of town, crossing the Golden Dawn, Paris Belle and Golden Chariot claims amid the squatters of Sourdough Alley.     Gutelius’ grade stakes were now marching into Dan Corbin’s land grant, though it is not clear whether Superintendent Gutelius knew this or not. Most likely, he set his stakes and left it to Fritz Heinze to settle with Corbin.   Gutelius’ stakes outlined a wye to turn his trains on the small flat on Monte Cristo Street between Second and Third Avenues.   From this flat, the stakes made a wide, climbing loop to the east, and then turned west on present Mc Lead Avenue, passing above the Great Western Mine. Continuing west, spurs were staked to the Enterprise, Virginia and Idaho mines.   The stakes then turned up Centre Star (Acme) Gulch and indicated a high, curving trestle across it to the lower slopes of Red Mountain and the Centre Star mine at mile 13.   The Le Roi and the War Eagle were higher up on Red Mountain, so to reach their ore bunkers, a high line branch was staked out, beginning back at mile 12.7 and climbing into the same Centre Star Gulch on a higher alignment.   The gulch was crossed with a second trestle, this time on a 25 degree curve.   Parallel to the lower line, but 200 feet higher, the high line reached the War Eagle at mile 13.2 and the Le Roi at mile 13.3, and the end of the grade survey.

The Trail Creek Tramway was engineered to climb 2400 feet in 13 miles with long stretches of 4 percent grade, several climbs of 4.6 percent, and two short pieces of 4.8 pecent.   Nelson Bennett’s crews would lay out four switchbacks, Gutelius’ carpenters would have to build eleven timber trestles, and on those sharp 25 degree curves, ties would have to be cut to length and tamped in place to brace the curved rails against the mountain wall.   It was a pioneering railroad, steep and crooked, with the prudent consideration that all mines have a limited life and that the railroad might only be needed for five or six years.

Down at the Columbia River, another barge from Revelstoke brought in Locomotive No. 1, an Identical Hinkley 2 -6 -0, from the Alberta Railway and Coal Company, and more cars.   With Nelson Bennett’s men well up the gulch, digging and blasting grade, and Gutelius’ home-made track layer following with rails and ties, the little railroad was underway.   In Trail, track was laid down the center of Bay Avenue to the south end of town where a sawmill which was cutting ties and timbers for the line.  From the south end of Bay Avenue, a track angled down the riverbank with a switchback to keep runaway cars from plunging into the Columbia, and reversed down to the extreme low water level.   Here the transfer for passengers and freight from steamers and barges was made.   The original scratch line at the mouth of Trail Creek was taken up, since the spring floods would wash it away in any case, and its sole purpose had been to secure Larsen’s rails on the beach at that point.

Fritz Heinze had renamed his Trail Creek Tramway the Columbia and Western Railway to attract support for a rail outlet to the coast which would make his Trail smelter independent of both Corbin and Van Horne’s lines.   He had his engineers survey a line running from the Le Roi mine west, contouring around the slopes of Red Mountain and into the head waters of Little Sheep Creek, maintaining its elevation along Mt. Roberts, OK Mountain, and crossing the Rossland Range through the pass between Mt. Sophie and Record Ridge. From there it was to hold its elevation as it contoured to the head of Big Sheep Creek and then back south to cross the 5000 foot Santa Rosa summit, and down to Christina Lake on the Kettle River.   The line would have been 55 miles long, most of it snaking around the ridges and canyons of Big Sheep Creek, a fearfully cut up country where railroad construction would be extremely costly.   Once in the Kettle River Valley, his line was to use Dan Corbin’s route to Midway, Rock Creek and over the Rock Creek range to Penticton.

The Trail Creek Tramway had been built under Peter Larsen’s Trail Creek and Columbia River charter without land grants or subsidies.   But now Fritz Heinze intended a major railroad, and needed a more liberal Provincial charter which would grant him public lands along the right of way to sell or mortgage to provide the funds to build the line.   His methods demonstrate his mastery of public relations.

The charter he wanted was nearly the same as that which had been refused Dan Corbin a few years before.   Fritz Heinze, however, young, handsome and personable, seemed able to charm the very men that cold, grim, Dan Corbin had offended. Heinze’s campaign opened with an announcement that he would build a line from Rossland to the newly discovered copper-gold deposits above Greenwood, the claims that the young Jay Graves was being invited to invest in.   A smelter had been built in Vancouver in 1889, but was languishing for lack of ores.   Heinze led the owners to believe, that with his railway, they could bid for those ores.   His line would carry them to Penticton where they could be put on the CPR steamers to the Shuswap and Okanagan Railway at Okanagan Landing, and from there they would move to the CPR main line at Sicamous.

The Vancouver press was intrigued but suspicious.   Heinze’s proposal sounded to them like Captain Ainsworth’s scheme warmed over.   Or Dan Corbin’s proposal under another name.   But Heinze’s line did have one thing that the Canadians could approve: it did not have a Spokane connection.   Heinze said he would connect his line at Penticton end to end with that “Coast to Kootenay” line if it were built.   This would tie the Kootenays to Vancouver, not Spokane. At this enthusiasm built.   When public sentiment had swung his way, Heinze flashily presented himself at the Legislature, young, handsome, confident, impeccably tailored, and radiating charm.

In Victoria, Heinze was persuasive.   He merely wanted a charter, he told the members, not public money.   He invited the members and their wives to a great dinner at the Driard Hotel.   There was food and wine and oratory.   Fritz Heinze presented himself as a champion against the CPR’s greedy scheme to capture the Kootenay traffic for the hated East .   Why, he said, if he got the charter, he would build a copper refinery in Vancouver, and ship his copper matte there for finishing, and not to Montana as he was presently doing.

The combination of provincial patriotism and profit was as persuasive for Fritz Heinze as it had been for Captain Ainsworth.   He got his charter, where Dan Corbin had not.   Confident they were doing the right thing, the Legislature gave him a land grant as well.   Even further, as a sort of trophy, he got Lieutenant Governor Dewdney, the man who had contracted the trail, on his board of directors.

Yet, when the effects of fine wine and patriotic oratory had worn off, the legislators found themselves somewhat embarrassed by the immense tracts of land they were handing to this dandified American. As an afterthought, they required Heinze to post a bond of $50,000 that he would actually complete his railway to Penticton by 1900.   Cannily, Heinze gave them a $50,000 mortgage on his uncompleted tramway, now grandly called the Columbia and Western.   Much later, Heinze candidly admitted, “I went down there prepared to spend $50,000 among them, and all it cost me to get my bill through was $240 for a good dinner at the Driard.”[x]

Some British Columbians refused to be charmed.   They began asking how their legislators had managed to give away such valuable blocks of land for a promise and a mortgage on an uncompleted railway.   All admitted that there was a desperate need for a railway across the southern part of the Province, one that would funnel its trade to Vancouver.   But once again, their legislature had handed the project to an American.   Captain Ainsworth had tried to capture the Kootenays for Portland.   Dan Corbin was trying to grab its trade for Spokane.   The Canadian Pacific appeared ready to snatch it for Winnipeg and Toronto.[xi]   Now here was this glib fellow, Heinze, who said he wanted only a charter, but is already back in town asking for a cash subsidy.

The coast cities of B.C. were outraged by the Federal Government’s Crowsnest Pass agreement with the CPR, which promised a subsidy of $11,000 per mile for the Kootenay line if the CPR would reduce freight rates in Western Canada.   This was seen in Vancouver and Victoria as an outrageous reduction in rates to the East, which it was, while rates to Vancouver and Victoria remained unchanged.   Obviously, the CPR, in building just half way across southern B.C. to the mines would replace Spokane’s control with Winnipeg control.   Vancouver and Victoria would have no share in the bonanzas.   In angry response, Mayor Templeton of Vancouver, Dr. Milne of Victoria, and the Mc Lean Brothers, contractors, chartered the Vancouver, Victoria and Eastern Railway and Navigation Company in 1897 to build a line from Victoria to Sydney, on Vancouver Island, to operate a ferry service to Vancouver, and then lay rails on the Dewdney Trail route to the Kootenays.   These were evidently men who had never seen the notorious Dewdney Trail, or they would not have seriously suggested putting a railroad on it.

The railroad alliance between Vancouver and Victoria would not last.   The railroad was known in Vancouver as the “Vancouver, Victoria and Eastern,” while in Victoria, it was the “Victoria, Vancouver, and Eastern.”   In the rest of the Province, it was the “VV&E.”   Still, it was a B.C. attempt to challenge both the CPR and Dan Corbin with a locally owned railroad, serving local interests.   Heinze quickly responded. He would join his Columbia and Western rails to the VV&E at Penticton if they would build east to meet him.

To continue building his Kootenay Empire, Heinze now wanted access to the silver-lead ores of the Slocan and of Kootenay Lake for his smelter.   He intended to install lead furnaces and capture those ores which were going to Jim Hill via his Kaslo and Slocan narrow gauge railway, and then by water to his main line at Bonner’s Ferry.   But access to the Slocan Mines was by the CPR’s Columbia and Kootenay Railway from Robson to Nelson, and the CPR was implacably hostile to him.   So, in an effort to persuade the CPR to allow Slocan ores to be shipped to him via the Columbia and Kootenay line, he invented a fictitious railroad, the “Columbia River and Kootenay River RR.”   He had the cars being shipped to him from the Alberta Railway and Coal Company lettered, “CR&KRRR,” knowing the word would quickly reach Van Horne.   Of course, the CR&KRRR never existed. It was a pure bluff.   But Fritz Heinze was a Brooklyn boy with a wild sense of humor and a pugnacious self confidence.   He awaited Van Horne’s reaction to this supposed railroad, by its title pretending to parallel the Columbia and Kootenay line.   The Pilot Bay smelter on Kootenay Lake had failed.   The Hall Brothers were smelting their Silver King copper -silver ore at Nelson.   The CPR wanted the coal and coke haul from Vancouver Island, and the smelter matte haul out via the Columbia and Kootenay line to Robson, by steamer to Revelstoke, CPR rail to Montreal, and via ship to Swansea, Wales where it would be refined.[xii]     By threatening a rival railroad to bid for the Silver King ores, which being copper with silver, he could smelt in Trail, Heinze seems to have been bargaining for a favorable rate on Slocan ores moving west on the Columbia and Kootenay to the steamer connection to Trail.   Van Horne, however, was not a man to be bluffed.[xiii]   He instituted a wholly exorbitant rate on Slocan ores moving to Trail to make sure no mine owner could make a profit contracting his ores to Heinze.   Then he secured the ore haulage contract to the Hall Brothers’ smelter from the Slocan district for the CPR’s Columbia and Kootenay Railway which now had a branch to Slocan Lake and the mines.

On March 12, 1896, Heinze’s hastily built Trail smelter was blown in with Le Roi ore, wagon-hauled down the mountain.   On April 2, as the first rails were being laid on the Trail Creek Tramway, the first shipment of 20 tons of copper matte from the smelter was trundled aboard the steamer, Lytton, for Northport where Dan Corbin’s line would start it on its way to Heinze’s copper refinery at Butte.[xiv]   The Trail smelter was a crude operation, fed with cordwood rafted down the Columbia, and then hauled up the steep, high back to the smelter from the river. There were no electric motors.   A main steam engine, its boiler wood fired, supplied all the power for the furnaces, mill, sampling works and crushers with a 2 inch rope drive.   Power transmission technology, before electricity became available, depended on endless rope drives from the power house, running overhead to the various buildings where the moving ropes dived through the roofs to the grooved sheaves inside that turned the machinery. A rope splicer was present at all times to mend breaks in the rope which were frequent.[xv]     The water jacketed blast furnace was fired with coke which Heinze had to bring in from the coke ovens on Vancouver Island via rail to tidewater, ship to Vancouver, and CPR rail to Revelstoke.   From there it came down the Columbia through the lakes on barges to be transferred to the narrow gauge cars at Trail.   In winter, when the Columbia froze, coke was obtained from Roslyn in Washington via Dan Corbin’s line, put on sleighs at Sayward and hauled up the ice road to East Trail where it was ferried across the river.[xvi]

Once Heinze’s smelter and the Hall Brothers’ smelter in Nelson, began producing copper matte on a continuous basis, the competition for Kootenay traffic became intense, with announcements of great projects being made monthly in the newspapers.   An American company was proposing to build a smelter at Robson or at Blueberry Creek on the CPR’s proposed Robson – Rossland line, the Rossland Miner reported.[xvii]   Another was rumored to be built at Northport.   But Heinze was still in the lead.   His Columbia and Western charter had been issued that May, and he announced that the Directors of the Railroad would be himself, of New York and Butte, Frederick Ward, of Rossland, Chester Glass, a Spokane lawyer, and the ornamental Lieutenant Governor Dewdney.

Sometime that spring, Heinze’s engineers convinced him that it would be impractical to build west out of Rossland over Sophia Mountain and in and out of Big Sheep Creek to reach the Kettle River Valley. They suggested a route from Trail up the west bank of the Columbia to a point across the River from Robson and then west, climbing the bluffs along the south shore of Lower Arrow Lake to Dog Creek which could be followed to Mc Rae Pass, a lower crossing than Santa Rosa Pass. From there the line could descend down Mc Rae Creek to Christina Lake.   The line would be longer than the Santa Rosa line, but would have easier grades and but one summit.   Heinze was more concerned with blocking the CPR than with grades and passes.   He accepted the engineers’ proposal chiefly because it preempted the CPR’s Robson -Rossland line; if the Canadian Pacific wanted to reach Rossland it would have to do so over his rails.

The CPR, after the disastrous floods of 1894, had been obliged to rebuild much of its main line and replace weakened bridges in B.C.   Desperately short of funds, announced that it would not build its Robson-Rossland line that year, as it had promised.   Instead, the public was told, it would build to Trail instead, and three rail Heinze’s Tramway to Rossland to have its standard gauge cars pulled up the hill by Heinze’s narrow gauge locomotives.   This seemed to be a feeler put out by Van Horne to learn whether Heinze would consider an alliance with the CPR against Dan Corbin whose men were steadily grading up Little Sheep Creek, closer and closer to Red Mountain.

In Rossland, the Miner reported on April 25, that the blasts of Corbin’s graders could be heard daily from the west, while from the east, the whistle of Hinkley No. 2 could now be distinctly heard as it bustled up and down the track in the canyon below, forwarding timbers, ties and rails to the track gang.

As the graders neared the Rossland townsite, the principals in the Rossland Townsite Company broke a promise, and demanded that Heinze pay for the land his rails were to cross.   This infuriated Fritz Heinze, who had obtained a verbal agreement with the Townsite Company the year before when they were encouraging him by any means they could, to build his tramway. Now, with the tracks actually marching up the gulch toward their town, greed took over; they demanded $5,000.   Heinze swore and blustered.   He threatened to route his line east and north, circling outside the townsite, and put his Rossland station up on the Enterprise Claim, far above the business district.     The Townsite Company countered with an offer for a station lot at the corner of Victoria Avenue and Spokane Street, which was far below the business district.   A compromise put the station half way between the two extremes, at Le Roi Avenue between St Paul Street and Monte Cristo Street.   This was on the original survey and the grading could proceed as planned.[xviii]

But further trouble manifested itself.   As his graders entered the townsite, Dan Corbin, whose own graders were considerably behind Heinze’s, obtained an injunction from the court to prevent Heinze’s men from trespassing on his grant lands (everything north of First Avenue) with their grade.   Heinze had brashly ignored Dan Corbin’s ownership of these lands when he had Fred Gutelius make the original survey, counting on his own negotiating skills to somehow wrest a permission from Corbin. Now, in a race to Rossland, Corbin was his adversary, and would use any method to delay the Trail Creek Tramway from completing its line.   Fritz Heinze had to approach Corbin once again with an offer on that Sayward to Trail line to try to get him to lift his injunction.   Heinze promised to build a three rail line from Trail to Sayward, and guarantee Corbin a share in the Trail traffic if only his graders were allowed to proceed.   Corbin, not knowing Heinze that well, agreed.   Heinze could build his track, he promised, and then, with his habitual thin smile, he exploded a bomb under the young man.   It would not matter, he told Heinze, he was planning to build his own smelter at Northport; the Le Roi Company had already promised him their ores.[xix]

At this news it became more than ever essential for Heinze to build his C&W connection to the Coast.[xx]   With the Hall Mines smelter in Nelson in operation, and with a greater capacity than his own, and now with a third smelter planned for Northport, it was going to be extremely difficult to dominate the Kootenay mining industry unless he could connect himself to Vancouver.

With Corbin’s injunction lifted, Charles King’s graders moved onto the heights above Rossland and finished their work.   The track gangs, working behind them, laid the last rails the first week of June, 1896 at the Le Roi Mine and a “Last Spike” celebration was held.   Townspeople came up on foot and in buggies, and every small boy in Rossland was there with his dog.   Colonel Topping was present on his white horse, and his partner, Frank Hanna, in a new suit.   Fritz Heinze, looking like a college freshman, was in charge. The gentlemen of importance removed their coats and hung them on convenient posts.   In their shirtsleeves, they drove the final spikes, the sounds of their hammer blows echoing above the growing town, already spreading beyond its platted townsite.   From over to the southwest, the rumble of a blast was heard.   E. J. Roberts’ men were down in Little Sheep Canyon, chewing at the stubborn granite, ten feet at a blast.   The Canadians, a minority in the crowd, grinned; it would be months before the American railway arrived.   Heinze had won the race.

On June 6, 1896, the inaugural run was made.   Locomotive No. 1, another Hinkley 2-6-0, was coupled to three boxcars which had windows cut in their sides.   Inside, the cars each had a double bench down their centers, the passengers sitting back to back, facing outward, feet braced against the sides of the cars for what was expected to be a rough ride.   It was a crisp morning and stoves were lit in the makeshift coaches to keep everyone warm for the trip up to chilly Rossland, 2300 feet above. Every seat was taken when No. 1 whistled off and moved down the center of Bay Avenue where crowds were gathered on the wooden sidewalks and people waved from upstairs windows.   At Farwell street the 3.5 percent grade began and the train began its ascent of Trail Creek Gulch.   At Dublin Gulch, the switch was thrown and the Hinkley backed its train up the switchback to the smelter where blue sulfur flames flickered on the piles of roasting ore, and thick, yellow fumes swirled around the train. The train reversed and climbed into Trail Creek Gulch again.   Alongside, on the wagon road, teamsters scowled and cursed.   They were hauling their last loads of ore from the Le Roi.   In the following days they would move down to Bossburg or Marcus, Washington where work was to be had hauling mining machinery and supplies to Jay Graves’ new camp in the Monashees to the west.

Up at Rossland, on the granite bluffs east of town, men were watching with spyglasses, following the progress of the tiny train below and checking their watches.   At moments the cars were visible through the trees, but for the most part, a moving column of blue wood smoke sifting through the firs was the only indication of the event.

Up on the Lake Mountain switchbacks, the passengers crowded the right hand windows for a look down on the roofs of their houses, a thousand feet below.   On the crinkled surface of the Columbia, the Lytton, backing out into the stream, looked like a skittering water bug.   As they backed into the tail track of the Tiger switchback, the crew of the Tiger mine, high above them, let off a celebratory blast of black powder to mark the occasion, and cheered the tiny Hinkley.

The sidewalks and wooden steps above Le Roi Avenue were crowded with onlookers when the train entered the Rossland townsite, crossing Earl, Spokane, Washington and Queen Streets, and coming to a halt at the new St Paul Street Station.  The whistle blew, fireworks were let off, salutes were fired from every sort of firearm, and all made their way up the steep Rossland streets to a monster celebration at the Allen Hotel, complete with whiskey-garbled speeches and a barrel of phlegm-loosening punch, American Style.   For, small as it was, this was an American railroad, American owned, American built, and operated by American railroaders.   The Canadians, on the fringes of the crowd, let the Americans have their calithumpian celebration.   Now, they believed, Canadian Pacific would have to come to Rossland as well.   And it would bring Canadian capitalists from Montreal and Toronto to buy back their mines, it was hoped, from the Yankees.

The ore trains began service on the 16th.   The little Hinkleys could handle no more than eight cars each.   On the loaded trips down the mountain, with only hand brakes, the brakemen stood between the cars, with a foot on each, where they could apply brakes on two cars at once by using the leverage of a pick handle to twist the brake wheels.   Three ore trains ran each day, plus three passenger trains. [xxi] The Hinkleys were pressed to the limit, and in December, Heinze sent Master Mechanic Garlock to Utah, where the Utah and Northern had been standard gauged and the UP, its owner, now had yards full of narrow gauge equipment for sale.   Most western narrow gauge lines were reequipping themselves from the U&N; some of the older locomotives were going for as little as $250.   Garlock needed a powerful locomotive; he picked out another 2-6-0 which suited him.   It was a Brooks locomotive of 1881, originally Kansas Central, No. 8. There has been some confusion about this engine among rail historians.   Some have thought it to have been Utah and Western No. 2, another, smaller and earlier Brooks Mogul.   Utah and Western No. 2 was Brooks construction number 227, of April, 1875, with 36” drivers.   Trail Creek Tramway (Columbia & Western) No.3 was Brooks construction number 578, of 1881, with 14 x 18 cylinders and 42” drivers.   The narrow gauge Kansas Central, which had bought this engine new, had been acquired by the Union Pacific, and in 1890 it was standard gauged.   No 8 and the other narrow gauge equipment were transferred to other UP narrow gauge lines.   No 8 does not show up on the Colorado and Southern or the Denver, South Park and Pacific, nor on any of the UP controlled Utah narrow gauge lines.   It seems certain, then, that it went to the UP owned Utah and Northern. This would have been after the U&N roster of 1885 was published, so it would not show up there.     The U&N was standard gauged in 1887, and its three foot equipment put up for sale.   The author’s conclusion is that C&W No. 3 was found among those locomotives stored for sale at Pocotello, Idaho, or Salt Lake City.[xxii]

In addition to No.3, Garlock bought 11 flat cars, 6 boxcars, a first class class coach and a private car.   This last was the Brigham Young family’s car, dating back to the days when the Mormon Church owned the Utah and Northern and a number of other narrow gauge lines in Utah.   The car was reportedly decorated inside with paintings of angels, cherubs and seraphim.   In Trail it was rebuilt to suit President Heinze’s much more worldly tastes, with “one half fitted up as a drawing room with lounges.”[xxiii]   One may suppose that a “drawing room” for Fritz Heinze would have included a poker table, chip racks and a bar, appurtenances that the Trail Creek News chose not to specify.   Eyewitnesses testify, however, that the angels and seraphim were retained to look down on the antics below and to gratify Fritz Heinze’s irreverent sense of humor.   In December, the private car made its first run with the contractors from Butte who were bidding on the C&W extension to Robson West.

Once the Trail Creek Tramway was in operation, Heinze ordered a second furnace for his smelter to increase its capacity.   He went to the Spokane Colonels to negotiate a long term contract for Le Roi ore before Dan Corbin could complete his line. The Colonels refused.   They believed he was overcharging them for smelting their ores.   Dan Corbin had just made them an attractive proposal: one third of the Northport townsite if they would build a smelter there.   Henceforth, the Colonels told Heinze, they would mine and smelt their own ores.   The CPR, building slowly up the east side of Crowsnest Pass, and not likely to arrive in Nelson for another two years, tried to stay in the game by announcing a smelter to be built at Blueberry Creek, half way between Trail and Robson.[xxiv]

Heinze, with his revised plans for the C&W, went back to the B.C. Legislature for a cash subsidy for his line which his engineers had told him was going to be fearfully expensive to build.   His charter gave him a grant of 10,400 acres of public land per mile of narrow gauge railway built, or 20,000 acres if standard gauge.   The land grants would be handed over as the track was completed, and then could be mortgaged to pay the contractors.   Now he got an additional grant of $4,000 cash per mile.   This would still not be enough.   In the summer of 1896, taking the ornamental Governor Dewdney along, he sailed for England to try to raise money to build the C & W.   In England, he showed his prospectus claiming his tramway was grossing $25,000 per month and his smelter, $100,000.[xxv]   Governor Dewdney was displayed as the obligatory “Guinea Pig,” the sort of titled nonentity which gave Britishers confidence that their investments would be well looked after.[xxvi]    However, even Governor Dewdney’s assurances could not convince British investors that a railroad from Trail to Penticton — “from nowhere to nowhere” as it was said, was anything but a backwoods pipe dream.   Heinze and Dewdney returned empty handed, and Fritz Heinze mortgaged some of his Montana holdings for the funds with which to begin the first section of his Columbia and Western Railway, the line from Trail to Robson West, a steamer landing across the river from the Columbia and Kootenay terminal at Robson.

It was not until December, 1896, that Dan Corbin’s Red Mountain Railway was completed to Rossland.   Heinze had a six months start on him and seemed in no hurry to fulfill his promise to build that three rail line to Sayward.   He never did build it. No one did.   Today it is still an absurd gap in the ore haul from tidewater, which is filled with a truck haul from the BN transfer at Sayward to the Cominco smelter.