Searching for a Seaport

introduction (continued)

The BC coast in the 1870s from the 49th parallel to the Yukon border and for 200 miles inland was a no-man's land, virtually unexplored and unmapped. In the eight years between 1871 and 1879 into this wilderness the Federal Government unleashed a small army of Canadian Pacific Railway surveyor explorers. Their combined task was to find alternative routes across BC's interior plateau that in turn would breach the Coastal Mountains and descend to tidewater. Their intent was to have a choice of locations for a western seaport somewhere between Port Simpson in the north and Burrard Inlet in the south.

Sandford Fleming, Engineer-in-Chief of all coast to coast CPR preliminary railway surveys, appointed Marcus Smith as his deputy in charge of exploration surveys in BC. He served in that position from 1872 until 1878. The coastal areas chosen by Smith for potential route exploration activities were Bute Inlet and the Homathco River, Dean Channel and the Dean and Kimsquit Rivers, Gardner Canal and the Kitlope, Kemano and Kitimat Rivers and lastly, the Skeena River area.

Location requirements for the future transcontinental terminus called for some special considerations. For example, easy access from the sea, a good anchorage, a safe harbour for ocean going ships, and desirable surrounding land to enable both population and infrastructure growth. We shall see that these prime requirements were not given the full consideration they deserved at the outset and had not received such attention until after several years of exploration and route selection activity had transpired.

With sailing ships in mind and considering the necessary harbour parameters the best locations in the 1870s that had the easiest access from the sea, were thought to be Burrard Inlet and Esquimalt; however, rail access to these and all other potential BC coast seaport options came with horrendous construction costs. For Burrard Inlet it was the difficult Fraser Canyon. For Esquimalt it was the tumultuous and steep-walled Homathco River Canyon to Bute Inlet, not to mention the intervening 20 miles of Georgia Strait to Vancouver Island; for the six other up-coast options under consideration, it was the soaring continuous vertical face of the Coast Range.

The British Columbia coast, at times, can be a foggy, cold, wet and miserable place. When going out into the bush in the 1870s just about everything that one is familiar with today, beginning with modern transportation methods, (by air) communication devices (radios), chain saws, modern foods, high tech shelters and clothing, did not exist. What the surveyors did have were sailboats, canoes, axes, hand saws, leather boots, wool blankets, leaky cotton tents, bacon and beans, determination and guts.

Of the hundreds of men who spent these years (1871-1879) searching for possible CPR routes across BC, only a small number bore the extreme brunt of forcing their surveys from tidewater up and through slots in the Coastal Range to the interior plateau.

The ubiquitous and dense undergrowth of the fertile coast, together with a lack of trails, prohibited the use of pack animals. Packing away from salt water, and into the coastal range in the 1870s, was done on men's backs. On the other hand, in the open country of the interior, trails were not only established by Indians, but were more easily made allowing the use of pack animals for transporting over many miles.

As a group of professionals, land surveyors are not inclined to seek notoriety for the work they have done. My hope is that this book reveals the efforts of some of them whose names have been basically lost in the larger context of British Columbia history. Many began their explorations at tidewater with everything they would need carried on their shoulders. If one creek, river or valley turned out to be unsatisfactory for railway grades, it was back to saltwater and on to the next channel and another river valley.

James Sirois Books: Grizzly Chronicles, Afloat in Time, Searching for a Seaport, Once was not Enough, Kimsquit Chronicles