Luxor Creek Outfitters - British Columbia Big Game Hunts & Guide Outfitting

An excerpt from "The Eastern Kootenay - A History of Exploration & Adventure," by Ken Tyson.

It is fitting that the location of the Burgess Shales, a veritable "crossroads" in the history of life itself, is in the vicinity of Field, British Columbia, which is another "crossroads" of sorts. Namely, Field is the site by which the Canadian Pacific Railway was able to breach the Canadian Rockies, connecting east with west, and where the CPR decided to build its first hotel; providing the central nerve center around which so much of the modern history and events in this region are bound. The history of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the National Parks, the logging and mining industries, tourism and hospitality, and guide outfitting are inextricably connected and all part of the same grand story of the taming of the Canadian West.

The idea of a transcontinental railway was proposed when Canada was only four years along into its history. The proposition was based upon politics as much as economic necessity in that independent British Columbia was being actively sought to join the expanding United States. The railway linking British

Columbia with the rest of Canada was promised as a means of luring it to join the Conservative Government of Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald. Fourteen years passed between the initial proposal of a transcontinental railway through the final completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

First begun by the Canadian government, the economic strain of the construction proved too much for the new government to bear, and it soon fell upon a syndicate of wealthy businessmen who financed the railway to its completion. The construction of the railway itself took almost five years, and required the efforts of around 22,000 laborers, mainly European immigrants referred to as "Navvies," and Chinese workers in British Columbia, who built over 600 bridges and trestles, and blasted twenty-seven tunnels through the mountainous terrain.

The preliminary survey to determine the feasibility of a transcontinental railway through the Rockies was the assignment of Thomas Blakiston while he was traveling with the Palliser Expedition in 1858. During the summer of 1871, the first survey crews, headed by Assistant Surveyor General of British Columbia, Walter Moberly, were sent into central and western Canada to locate a suitable cross-country line for the rails. Moberly had previously completed survey work of the area in 1865, when he discovered Eagle Pass through the


	Gold Range, and saw it as the most feasible pass for an Overland Railway. During the 1871 expedition, Moberly again surveyed the area around Eagle Pass, Revelstoke, and Golden, just to the north of Luxor Creek Outfitters. While planning the rouge of the line through the flats of central Canada was relatively easy, finding a workable		construction path through the formidable Canadian Rockies seemed an almost impossible task. The quest to find and map a suitable route through the Rockies fell upon an American railway engineer by the name of Major Albert Bowman Rogers, the chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railway's Mountain Division. "Hells Bells" Rogers, as he was commonly known, was one of the most colorful characters in the history of the Canadian Rockies. Rogers was a graduate from Yale University with a degree in engineering, and he served in the U.S. Cavalry during the extensive Indian Wars of the 1800s. With his outrageous moustache, liberal use of colorful metaphors, and questionable diet which consisted almost exclusively of raw beans and chewing tobacco, Rogers personified that rare breed with the "true grit" to not only survive, but to thrive in the wilderness and pull off the seemingly impossible. In a word, Rogers was tough and drove himself as mercilessly as he drove his men, earning their respect through fear. Before taking his expedition into the Canadian wilderness, Rogers first consulted the journals and survey


	reports of Walter Moberly, which resulted in a strong bitterness between the two in later years as Moberly was well aware that it was his exploration journals that led Rogers to what would become known as Rogers Pass. Upon discovery of the pass that would later be named Roger's Pass by a grateful Canadian Pacific Railway, Cornelius Van Horne, the President of the CPR, presented Rogers with a check in the amount of $5,000 as a bonus. Rogers chose to display the check in a frame rather than cash it, and it wasn't until Van Horne presented Rogers with an engraved gold watch that he finally		acquiesced and cashed the check. A few years after successfully finding a path through the Canadian Rockies, Rogers was again surveying for the Great Northern Railway near Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and died in 1889 from injuries he suffered when he fell off his horse in the wilderness; although others contend that he actually died of stomach cancer. Once a successful pathway was found, construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway began in earnest. Crossing the flatlands of Canada was relatively quick, with track being laid at the rate of around six miles per day. Once the workers reached the Canadian Rockies, and


	crossed the Continental Divide, progress slowed down considerably and became much more hazardous. Steep side-slopes, narrow canyons and gorges, rushing rivers, the constant threat of avalanche and the inherent dangers of working with dynamite claimed many lives. At times, progress of the railroad was so arduous that it claimed a life a day for an advance of only six feet. Finally, the railway punched through the Rockies to the site of Golden, British Columbia, in 1884, and construction continued to the coast. On November 7, 1885, the famous Last		Spike to complete the railroad was driven at Craigellachie, right in the vicinity of Walter Moberly's Eagle Pass. In July of 1886, the first through train on the newly completed Canadian Pacific Railway arrived in Vancouver after having departed from Montreal, and a new era began to unfold in the history of the Canadian Rockies. During construction, and after the railroad had begun operations, one of the biggest natural obstacles was on the legendary Big Hill in Kicking Horse Pass, to the north of Luxor Creek Outfitters. With no space in Kicking Horse Canyon or the Yoho Valley to provide a longer expanse of track,		the lack of alternatives resulted in the construction of a very steep line, straight down from the top of Kicking Horse Pass to Field with a grade of 4.5%, which was four times the recommended grade for railways of the time, and more than twice the recommended grade of modern railways. The CPR attempted to handle the problem by imposing a 10km per hour speed limit on the special locomotives that were


	brought in specifically to haul trains up and down the Hill, as well as the installation of safety switches at different points. However, even with these safety measures in place, several runaways and wrecks still occurred, as well as the mounting bottlenecks that resulted from the hindered traffic. Twenty-five years later, the CPR completed construction of the famous Spiral Tunnels, one of the great engineering feats of the time, which can still be seen in Yoho National Park. Designed by engineer John Edward Schwitzer, the tunnels "corkscrewed" into the two mountains to lengthen the track and reduce the gradient to an acceptable 2.2%.