Friday, December 11, 2009

This Day in Western History (Discovery of Marias Pass Opens Door to Great Northern Railway)


December 11, 1889—One year before the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the American frontier was closed, a lone explorer-engineer, working for iron-willed business magnate James J. Hill, discovered the mountain pass that furthered construction of the Great Northern Railway.

I wish I could be more positive about John Frank Stevens’ achievement. Unfortunately, some baleful consequences followed in the wake of the successful construction of the railway.
The 36-year-old New Englander (in the image accompanying this post), leaving a mule team and understandably reluctant Flathead Indian behind, had tramped alone, through 40-degree-below-zero temperatures and heavy snowdrifts, to confirm Hill’s hunch about a pass west of Havre, Montana. (He had to keep walking that bitter night, to avoid freezing.)

Lewis and Clark had come across the pass in 1805, and Hill had heard reports circulating about it. But no white man had glimpsed it since.

The endurance and indomitable spirit that Stevens displayed in re-discovering Marias Pass, on the southern edge of Glacier National Park, would have surprised someone who knew him from his prior work on the Canadian Pacific Railway. Major A.B. Rogers christened him “an effeminate gourmet” when Stevens protested the low-quality, unvarying food (bacon and beans, three times a day) that laborers consumed.
Stevens, though, turned out to be nothing like what Rogers thought. By the time he came to Marias Pass, he had become an experienced hand at both surveying and constructing railroads. Now, in making a reconnaissance of the pass, he was fulfilling Hill’s requirement: finding a route that would feature short mileage, low grades, and other favorable logistics that would allow “the Empire Builder” to create his master project cheaply.

Nobody, but nobody, interfered with Hill when he had the bit between his teeth. The Northern Pacific learned this the hard way when it tried to keep him from offering a shorter, cheaper alternative to their railway. Other railroad executives and observers learned this when they scoffed at the notion that he could find any other crossing through the Rockies other than what the Northern and Central Pacific lines had already found.

The men who earned their bread from Hill also learned this, to their regret. When an architect disregarded Hill’s instructions on materials for his St. Paul, Minn., mansion, the miscreant found himself looking for another client. Similarly, assistant engineers on the Montana Central (the precursor to the Great Northern) did not feel the love from Hill, to the point where they resigned rather than deal with his steep demands.

All the more remarkable, then, that, after Stevens pinpointed Marias Pass and a later crossing—now called Stevens Pass—in Washington’s Cascade Mountains, Hill acceded to Stevens’ demand for a raise from $200 to $300 a month.

Maybe the great builder figured that Stevens was worth every penny by finding routes that would allow the railway to expand through the Rockies to the Western Coast—thus becoming a true transcontinental railroad—without requiring a tunnel. Or maybe Hill saw a little bit of his intelligent, brusque manner in Stevens, who had little tolerance of small talk and was so accustomed to smoking (and chewing) cigars that he earned the nickname “Big Smoke.”

Stevens would go on to a brilliant career, including an unheralded two-year stint as chief engineer of the troubled Panama Canal project, when he turned around its fortunes and left his successor, George Goethals, an organization so smoothly functioning, Goethals wrote his son, that “that there is nothing left for us to do but just have the organization continue in the good work it was done and is doing.”

Today, a statue of Stevens in rugged winter wear marks the spot near where he is believed to have made his great re-discovery. His hardiness, intelligence and vision are indeed all worth celebrating.

Nevertheless, his achievement—and Hill’s—in getting the Great Northern was not without doleful consequences. So many workers and settlers rushed into the Pacific Northwest and the upper mountain states that the overwhelmed Native-Americans soon had no chance but to cede the lands that had sustained them to the United States.

No comments: