The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (29 page)

To reach the Rockies, the party had to struggle over hills choked with loose boulders and through mudholes so deep the horses were mired to the girth. Over and over again Rylatt had to go through the laborious business of unloading each animal, hauling him out of the mud and reloading him again. Some had to be left to their fate:

“How worried would be any member of the Humane society, could he see the treatment animals in a Pack Train receive, where the animals themselves are only a secondary consideration, the open sores on their backs, from hard and incessant packing, angry and running with humour, over which the Packer, too often, if not closely watched, without washing throws the heavy
apparajos
or Pack saddle, and as
the sinch
[sic]
is tightened … the poor beast groans, rears and plunges and not unfrequently sinks down under the pain, only to be whipped again into position.”

Ahead of the horses moved the axemen, hacking their way through the massive network of prostrate cedars, cutting tunnels in a green tangle as thick as any Borneo jungle and laying down patches of corduroy for the animals to cross.

The party pushed straight across the Selkirk Mountains into the Kootenay country and did not reach the upper Columbia until late in September. They started down it on rafts and in small canoes, watching with growing alarm as it swelled in size with every mile. On the third day, the raft on which Rylatt was travelling hit a submerged log in the rapids and was sucked under. The five men on the raft leaped for the shore; one, James Malloy, fell short. The current pulled him under with the raft and he was never seen again.

At the mouth of the Blaeberry River, which flows down from the summit of the Howse Pass to join the Columbia, the axemen were faced with a Herculean task. They must cut a pathway to the top through forests untrodden since Palliser’s associate, Hector, had passed that way a dozen years before. The fall winds had already reduced the country to a mire so thick that one mule could not be pulled from the gumbo; Rylatt was forced to shoot him in his swampy prison.

Yet there were moments of great beauty and mystery here among the silent peaks and Rylatt, who was a sensitive man, was not unmoved. On his first Sunday in the mountains he found himself alone – the others were working five miles farther up the pass. It was his first such experience in the wilderness and he made the most of it. He watched the sun dropping down behind the glaciers on the mountain tops, tipping the snows with a gold that turned to red while, in the shadowed gorges, the ice could be seen in long streaks of transparent blue. He watched the glow leave the peaks and the gloom fill up the valleys. He watched velvet night follow ghostly twilight and saw the pale rays of the aurora compete with the stars to cast “softening hallows
[sic]
of light around these everlasting snows.” Suddenly, he began to shiver and a sense of irreconcilable loneliness overcame him. It was the silence – the uncanny and overpowering silence of the Canadian wilderness: “Not a leaf stirred; not the hum of an insect; not even the noise of the water in
the creek – this being too distant.… I listened for a sound but did not hear even the rustle of a falling leaf.…”

He made a fire, as much to hear the crackling of the wood as for the warmth. It came to him that no one who had not experienced what he was going through could ever really understand what it was like to be truly alone:

“Your sense of being alone in the heart of a city, or even in a village, or within easy distance of fellow beings … gives you no claim to use the term ‘alone.’ You may have the feeling peculiar to being alone – that is all. Listen sometime when you think you are alone.… Can you hear a footfall; a door slam in the distance; a carriage go by? Or the rumble of one …? Can you hear a dog bark? Have you a cricket on the hearth or even the ticking of a clock …?”

Rylatt realized that the tiniest of sounds can give a feeling of relief – “the sense of knowing your species are at no great distance” – but here, in the solitude of the Rockies, there was only silence.

The sense of isolation was increased by the onset of winter and the absence of mail. Goaded by Walter Moberly, who had rejoined the party, Gillette and his men began chopping their pathway to the summit of the pass. By the time the trail was opened, on October 26, the snow was already falling. The following day, with eight inches blanketing the mountainside, the surveyors gathered at the summit, ready at last to start work, but the instruments were so full of water they were useless and the slopes so slippery with wet snow that no man could maintain a footing. The following day another foot of snow fell, the engineers realized that nothing could be done, and the party settled down for the long winter. It would be May before the mountain trails would be passable again and for those sections that ran through the canyons it would be considerably later. It was not really safe to travel with loaded pack horses before June; even then the mountain torrents could be crossed only with difficulty, being swollen with melting snow from above. The twenty-nine members of the party, including two ex-convicts, were faced with each other’s company for six or seven months.

At the very outset the party was beset by worries over mail and pay. It was months before they saw a pay-cheque. A government official in Victoria – another political appointee – had withheld the money, banked it and appropriated the interest to himself. Nor was the mail forwarded. It lay for months in various post offices because
no arrangements had been made to handle it. One of the packers set off in late November for Wild Horse Creek, a five-hundred-mile journey on snowshoes, and returned with a few letters, but nothing for Rylatt, who was beside himself with anxiety over his wife’s condition.

“Poor wife, are you dead or alive?” he confided to his diary. “Have the two deposits of money I sent reached her? It may easily be understood in my case how hard it is to receive no word, no sign, and altogether I am very miserable.”

On December 4, Walter Moberly, accompanied by his Indian guides, left the camp on his long trek across the Selkirks. He took with him one of the party, a Frenchman named Verdier who had just learned that his wife had eloped leaving their five children alone. “He was like a crazy man,” Rylatt observed; he sent a note with some money to his own wife with Verdier, knowing there would be no further communication with the world until the following May or June.

A few days later he cut his thumb and opened a small roll of bandage material his wife had stowed in his kit. “When I saw scraps of oiled silk, fingers of old gloves, and the softest of lint, how tenderly I felt towards her, but when a slip of paper came to light, on which were the words ‘God bless you, Bob,’ it made me feel wretched.…”

On Christmas Day, the thermometer dropped to 34 below zero and the following day the mercury in it froze solid. Though Christmas dinner was served piping hot, the food was frozen to the plates before the men could consume it.

By New Year’s Eve, 1871, Rylatt felt he had reached the bottom. He and four others sat in their cabin, seeing the old year out and trying to keep warm. Though a rousing fire had been lit it was necessary for each man to change position constantly as the side of the body away from the heat became numbed with cold.

“We talked of our wives, adventures, etc.; but there was no mirth; and when the New Year was announced by the watch, we crept into our blankets. I was quite a time before I slept, my brain being busy with past remembrances. This was the first time the anniversary of the New Year had not been kept in the company of my wife.”

Ahead of the party stretched four more months of this prison-like existence. The tensions, which had been simmering beneath the surface, began to burst out more frequently. Already Rylatt and the
chief surveyor, Gillette, were speaking to each other only when necessary. Earlier in the season they had had an altercation in which Gillette had thrown a grouse bone in Rylatt’s face. Rylatt had responded with a cup of hot coffee and Gillette had threatened to shoot him. By February Rylatt had conceived a deadly hatred for the surveyor, who he was convinced was going crazy. This raging antipathy was returned in kind. “That man, Gillette, is not only a fool but an unmanly cur, deserving the sympathy of none, and the power that pitchforked such a being into even our rough society, and placed him pro tern at the head of it, ought to be blackballed,” Rylatt wrote in his diary. Gillette, on his part, promised Rylatt he would drill a hole in him before they parted.

“The men are growing rusty for want of activity and biliousness has soured their tempers,” Rylatt recorded on February 25. Two weeks later he noted in his diary that “the roughs of the party are in open mutiny. Growling at their food, cursing me for being out of sugar; all this I care little for … but my pent up feelings have found vent today, and the leader of the roughs will carry my mark to his grave. I have passed through a somewhat exciting scene and don’t care to have it repeated.”

Seven of the most mutinous of the party had gathered at the cookhouse door, intent on rushing it and seizing the food including the non-existent sugar, which they believed Rylatt was secretly hiding. In the altercation that followed, Rylatt was threatened by Roberts, the ringleader, an Australian ex-convict. Rylatt snatched up a hatchet and when Roberts made a move, chopped off three of his fingers. This drove off the mob but they returned again in an hour, armed with axes. Rylatt held them off with his Henry rifle and stayed on guard until the threat diminished and the camp returned to a state of sullen tension.

As the sun grew warmer in April and the river ice showed signs of breaking up, much of the ill-humour disappeared. Some mail arrived in May, but still Rylatt had no word of his wife; the white man who had undertaken to carry letters from Wild Horse Creek to Hope on the Fraser the previous fall had perished in the snows, his body discovered in the spring with the mailbag beside it. “I cannot understand why no line has reached me from my wife,” Rylatt wrote. “Is she dead? … this suspense is terrible … surely some one of our many acquaintances would have let me know.… Generally people are ready to signal bad news. My chum Jack had some bad news;
his house being burned down. His wife it would appear was enjoying herself at a Ball.… He lost everything.…”

May 6:
“I have somehow got it into my head my wife is not dead, but out of her mind – this thought haunts me.”

On May 15, Walter Moberly arrived with the news that the Howse Pass route had been abandoned and that the party must quit its quarters on the Columbia and move north. In his pocket he carried a letter from Rylatt’s wife. It had been on his person so long that the cover had been worn away. It was dated October 9, 1871.

Moberly dealt swiftly with the mutineers and with Gillette, who had surreptitiously countenanced the attack on Rylatt: “If Gillette has sown the seed of this discontent, damn him, he shall reap the harvest.” Four of the malcontents were dismissed; Gillette was suspended and his assistant, Ashdowne Green, put in charge of the party.

“I cannot forget the look of hatred on Roberts’ face as, upon my leaving in the boat, he held up to my sight his mutilated hand and exclaimed: ‘You see this; it will help me to remember you!’ ”

Gillette tried to carry out his threat to shoot Rylatt but as his hand reached for the Smith and Wesson on his belt, Rylatt staggered him with a heavy blow and another member of the party pinioned his arms.

Guided by Kinbasket, the Chief of the Kootenays, a “daring little shrivelled up old fellow,” the party started on the long journey northward, breaking trail for the pack horses as they moved through dense clouds of mosquitoes. “I have smothered my face with mosquito muslin, smeared my hands with bacon grease, but bah! nothing keeps them off, and the heat only melts the grease and sends it beneath my clothing,” Rylatt wrote in disgust.

In mid-August Chief Kinbasket came to grief when a grizzly bear attacked him. “The old chief had barely time to raise the axe and aim a blow … ’ere the weapon was dashed aside like a flash and he was in the embrace of the monster; the huge forepaws around him, the immense claws dug into his back, the bear held him up. Then fastening the poor chief’s shoulders in his iron jaws, he raised one of his hind feet, and tore a fearful gash, commencing at the abdomen, and cutting through to the bowels, he fairly stripped the flesh and muscles from one of his thighs, a bloody, hanging mass of rent flesh and clothing.” Kinbasket was not found until the following morning. Miraculously, he was still alive; more miraculously, he survived; but the party had lost its trailblazer.

In late September, the party reached the Boat Encampment at the Big Bend of the Columbia River. The route now took a right angle towards the Rockies and the foot of the Athabasca Pass. It seemed impossible to reach the Yellow Head before winter set in. The party hesitated. And here, in the shadow of the glowering peaks, with the brooding forest hanging over them and the moon glistening on the great, rustling river they indulged in a weird charade. On September 28, they held a Grand Ball.

“Think of it,” Rylatt wrote in his diary, “a dance – and an enjoyable dance at that.”

The “orchestra” consisted of the best whistler in the party, a man who knew all the latest dance tunes (“Little Brown Jug,” “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” and “Shoo, Fly, Don’t Bother Me” were all popular during the early years of the decade). “He puckered his mouth, beat loud time on an empty soap box with a stick, and the graceful forms began to whirl.”

The dancers were deadly serious. Some were assigned the role of lady partner-and later allowed to change about. Rylatt described his assistant, the bespectacled Dick White, dancing with one such “lady” – a great six-footer, hairy-faced and with a fist like a sledge, pants tucked carelessly into boots still covered with river mud, “while Dick, with eyeglasses adjusted, held the huge hand gingerly, and by the tips of his fingers, then circling the waist of this delicate creature with the gentleness due to modesty and the fair sex, his lovely partner occasionally letting out a yell of hilarity, would roll the quid of tobacco to the other cheek of the sweet face, discharging the juice beneath the feet of the dancers.”