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Background

Lowering skies and a tense atmosphere hung over the neighbourhood of Yale, British Columbia, at 11:00 on 14 May 1880. The blast that was to herald the beginning of the British Columbia section of the Canadian Pacific Railway was ready to be exploded. When the official speeches had been made, Andrew Onderdonk, the contractor, signaled his foreman to detonate the charge. Captain John Irving added the shrill tones of the whistle of his sternwheeler. Work had begun! Stephen Tingley waited impatiently for the road to be cleared of debris so that his six-horse stage for the Cariboo might go through. For one of the terms of the contract was that, in spite of the nearness of construction to the highway, the road to the Cariboo mines must be kept open.

Then followed a downpour of rain, attributed by the local press to the blasting. But more than rain making and road clearing faced young Andrew Onderdonk, as he well knew. He had inspected the route of construction on horseback before he agreed to undertake the work.

Although his was not the lowest tender of the seventeen companies competing for the work, it was the lowest considered feasible. It has been said that their common Dutch ancestry may have influenced Van Horne in his decision to award Onderdonk the contract for the most difficult section of the coast-to-coast railway, from Savona to Emory's Bar (Emory's Bar is 3 miles railway west of Yale). But it is more likely that he recognized in the young engineer the same driving force that inspired himself.

Who was this daring young man who had undertaken this Herculean task for so exacting a taskmaster? Andrew Onderdonk was tall and handsome, with dark blue eyes and brown hair, and at times he wore a full beard in the Victorian style. He was beloved by his workmen, who saw no shame in love of the "grand manner".

Onderdonk was a direct descendant of Adrian van der Donk, a Dutch settler who came to America in 1672. His mother was Sarah Trask, of English ancestry, from Boston. Andrew, tutored by his mother, was educated at Troy Institute of Technology (New York), where he excelled in mathematics and engineering. His first position after graduation was with the New Jersey Central Railway, after that he made a survey for roads and townsites in New York for Darius Ogden Mills, the multimillionaire. Then he spent three years building ferry slips and sea walls in San Francisco. It is to be noted that, in spite of the activities of the California labour agitator Dennis Carney, Onderdonk completed his contracts. While he was still in San Francisco, he heard of the proposed Canadian Pacific Railway, and he submitted a bid for the Savona-Emory section.

Launched on his new contract, Onderdonk cut and blasted his way along the Fraser River for three years. He had ample backing for the project, being supported by a syndicate consisting of Darius Ogden Mills and associated promoters of New York, California, and London. Canadian engineers who supervised construction included Marcus Smith, in charge of the work from Port Moody to Emory's Bar, and Henry J. Cambie, supervising that part of the work along the Fraser Canyon from Emory's Bar to Boston Bar.

Every available man in the country was engaged to work on the construction project. There were many well-educated men among the workmen, there were also miners who had failed to find gold and remittance men who needed a grubstake. Wages were $2.00 a day and up. Onderdonk provided excellent camps with fine sleeping quarters, and the food was good. Indeed, many surveyors and travellers were glad to drop in for a meal at his camps. But, hire as many men as he could find, he still did not have enough workmen to complete his contract within the specified time, so he then decided to bring in Chinese labourers from San Francisco.

When the first 2,000 Chinese arrived, the people of British Columbia rose up in alarm. While the building of the railway had been made the price of joining Confederation, they were determined to keep out Chinese workmen. A resolution to the government anticipating such a move had read that "no man wearing his hair more than five and a half inches in length be deemed eligible for employment upon said work, or any contract of the Canadian Pacific Railway." At the time Chinese men were still wearing queues. It was vain to argue that these prospective workers came from Hong Kong, and since they were British subjects, Canada should not legislate against them. But Andrew Onderdonk had an answer ready, "You must have labour or you cannot have the railway."

Finally, when Victoria moved to ban Orientals, Onderdonk procured labourers direct from China, bringing them in by the ship load. Onderdonk's crew, known sarcastically as "Onderdonk's Lambs", totaled 9,000 in all, of whom 6,500 were Chinese. Many of them were employed between Yale and the Suspension Bridge. Pay night at Yale has been described as "bizarre, risque, and grotesque".

By the end of November, 1880, the first two tunnels beyond Yale had been completed. In October of that year there was a disastrous landslide on the Thompson River about 20 miles above Spence's Bridge. The solid dam of the slide, half a mile long and 150 feet wide, blocked the river, flooding several farms in the region and leaving the fish stranded (these were salvaged with glee by the Chinese). Gradually the water rose until it overflowed the old banks and wore a new channel, this giving relief to the flooded areas.

Emory, the point at which the British Columbia section of the railway began, prove an ephemeral city. The riffle known as Emory's Bar, always a difficult spot, became an obstruction to navigation. At first, Emory was a lively town. The storehouses of supplies for the road eastward were there, and at the height of its glory three sawmills operated by the construction company sawed bridge and construction timbers.

It was not long, however, before Yale became the center of activity, and it assumed even greater importance than it had had in the mining rush of 1858, or when it served as a distributing point for the Cariboo in 1862-1864. The general offices of the contractors were located at Yale. Powder and acid works, engine works, repair shops of various kinds were established there. For safety the powder works, manufacturing 2,000 pounds of high explosives per day, was built between Emory and Yale. In July, 1880, when Yale had only 1,500 people and only wooden buildings, one-third of the town was destroyed by fire. The following August a second fire wiped out nearly half the town.

Nothing seemed to deter "A.O." (as his workmen called him) from the project. He solved tremendous rock and earth problems daily. The steep banks of the Fraser, which in Simon Fraser's time the Indian packers had scaled with vine ladders, Onderdonk's workmen conquered by hanging suspended from the canyon wall by ropes to locate the blasting points for the new right-of-way.

With such large crews working in such dangerous terrain, accidents were numerous, necessitating a hospital at Yale, where the injured were taken. Mrs. Onderdonk, A.O.'s capable but unassuming wife, supervised the hospital. The former Sarah Delia Hilman of Plainfield, New Jersey, Mrs. Onderdonk, a beautiful blonde, was the toast of visiting celebrities. The Onderdonk residence at Yale, the scene of many gay times, later was used as an Anglican church school for girls and was named All Hallows.

The first locomotive for the new railway, the Yale, arrived in New Westminster on 3 May 1881, and was shipped to Emory, where track laying had already commenced. That Fourth of July the first railway excursion train was run over the four miles of track that had been completed between Emory and Yale. This was the first piece of the Canadian Pacific Railway, or of any railroad laid on steel rails in British Columbia, and it was immediately put to use to transport material from Emory to Yale, the construction center.

In spite of his organizing ability, and his fixed determination to complete his colossal undertaking in time, all did not go smoothly for Andrew Onderdonk. Complaints were voiced in the local press. In 1882 an open letter to the Inland Sentinel stated that in an "evil hour the railway contract passed into the hands of Onderdonk... Boss Onderdonk does just as he pleases knowing that he has the ball at his own foot to kick as he pleases."

At first, supplies had to be taken in from Yale by wagon road, but this was both expensive and slow. It cost $10 per ton to move freight over the Yale-Cariboo road, plus other costs such as tolls. Onderdonk decided to build a steamer that could run the canyon of the Fraser and do freighting above Yale. And so the sternwheeler Skuzzy, 126 by 24 1/2 feet, drew 18 inches of water, and was about 150 tons, with twenty bulkhead compartments. The boat was christened by Mrs. Onderdonk and launched on 4 May 1882.

The major problem was to get the boat through the canyon. The first experienced pilot met with no success. Then Onderdonk engaged Captain S.R. Smith, who had years of experience navigating the Fraser. His engineer and pilot were also experienced in the varying moods of the mighty Fraser. At the time the river was 40 feet above ordinary high water. With her own engines, the help of a powerful steam winch, and 125 Chinese workmen on the towline, the Skuzzy brought her freight safely through the fierce current. But it was sixteen days before she was moored at Boston Bar. and all this at a cost of $2,250. The Skuzzy made several trips up and down between Boston Bar and Lytton. She was later tied up at Keefers, where she remained until 1884 when her engines were removed, taken to Savona, and placed in Skuzzy No. 2.

Until this time probably only Peru and Switzerland had offered such challenges to engineers as those provided by the terrain between Emory and Boston Bar. The average cost per mile of the railway at this point was $80,000, though some miles cost three times as much. Thirteen tunnels, one of them 1,600 feet long, were bored along 19 miles of road, whence millions of tons of earth and rock went into the Fraser. Onderdonk's original contract allowed well over $9 million to extend the line a distance of 128 miles from Emory's Bar to Savona.
 

As construction of the line progressed, freight was carried on it, and in time Andrew Onderdonk found himself in the passenger business. Although the service was offered only as a convenience, the patrons nevertheless found fault. Charges were made that the line was not safe for passengers and that Onderdonk was trying to kill the river trade. Finally, the Dominion government was accused of having engaged a contractor "who when he has exacted the last possible penny out of the people of this province will carry off the booty to a foreign country." Complaints were also made that the road north was not repaired according to contract. At Spuzzam Hill it had to be rerouted, and a poor job was made of it, or so it seemed to the settlers.

I rediscovered some material about the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CP) through the Shuswap in my history file cabinet. These papers were obtained during a visit to the CP archives in Montreal back in 1988, when my focus was on local history. The information was significant enough to warrant including some excerpts.

The building of the CP was key to British Columbia joining Confederation and it was an essential part of nation building for Canada. It was a monumental task to construct the railway through the mountains and over the many canyons and waterways, and much of it was accomplished with hand labour. William Cornelius Van Horne, who later became CP president, was in charge of the project. There were two major contractors in B.C., Andrew Onderdonk in the west, and James Ross in the east.

It was not until the summer of 1884 that work began on the section between Savona and Chase Creek under the supervision of Henry Cambie and to the east, under Major A.B. Rogers. In early September, Van Horne wrote a letter to the CP directors outlining the status and estimated cost of the project:

"The section to Griffin Lake, at the summit of Eagle Pass (113 miles) is estimated to cost not more than an average of $16,000 per mile, making the average cost per mile from the west end of Kamloops Lake to Griffin Lake, a distance of 128 miles, $21,565 dollars per mile."

A 1 Nov 1884 handwritten letter from Andrew Onderdonk, an American construction contractor for the railway, to W.C. Van Horne provided even more description:

"At Salmon River, I found seven gangs of Chinamen working on the fill, which will be finished in about 2 weeks. The work was well advanced. The bank is quite heavy, about 1 1/2 miles long and in some cases 16 feet high. When this is done some of these Chinamen will work at a heavy earth cut all winter 8 miles west of Salmon River, and the balance be sent to the rock work west of the Summit. Sinclair was building winter quarters for five gangs of white men to work on this rock and by this time I think the men have gone up, being about through on the Kamloops Lake. I found the two tunnels, 3 and 8 miles west of Chicamose (Sicamous) well stocked with flint, powder, and provisions sufficient to complete the tunnels with their approaches. Bray has three gangs of white men, all first class. I think his tunnels are sure to be finished in April."

The book "Van Horne's Road" by Omer Lavallee describes how there was a warehouse and store for the Chinese at the west end of Shuswap Lake, and a smaller store for the whites in Blind Bay. Once the excavation work was done, and the bridges and trestles were completed, the actual laying of the track progressed quickly at the rate of one mile per day.

This book also provides some other interesting details:

"The hot and dry midsummer of 1885, which had so much trouble with forest fires in the Selkirks, produced the same effect in the Shuswap region. A stockpile of ties, estimated to number between 12,000 and 15,000, was completely consumed as the railway was being built eastward from Kamloops in July. As a result, when the railway was advancing over Notch Hill, and even though new ties were being delivered to replace those lost, the supply was far behind the demand. Major Rogers noted with dismay that only half the required number of ties were being placed in the track, in order not to impede tracklaying. Ties were thus laid on a 42 inch spacing, rather than the specified 21 inch spacing. The delays in construction in the Selkirks in the summer of 1885 put Ross far behind schedule, and Onderdonk completed his section first. On 28 Sep 1885, Onderdonk ran out of rails two miles west of the north fork of the Eagle River, on the west slope of Eagle pass. Ross' forces were still 43 miles to the east, about five miles west of Albert Canyon."

Onderdonk dismissed his employees on 26 Sep 1885 (the poster states "discharged on the evening of September Thirtieth"), while Ross continued work until the last spike was driven on 7 Nov 1885 at Craigellachie - Jim Cooperman - Salmon Arm Observer - 3 Mar 2016.

Onderdonk completed his contract two months before the expiry date and went on to finish the section between Savona and Eagle Pass. By fall of 1885 the east and west ends of the Canadian Pacific Railway tracks were approaching each other. The ceremony of closing the gap took place on the morning of 7 Nov 1885. Donald M. Smith, the vice-president, drove the Last Spike. It had been suggested that a golden spike be used, but W.C. Van Horne, the general manager, had long before announced that "The last spike will be just as good an iron spike as any in the road, and those who want to see it driven will have to pay full fare." The first spike bent, and another was substituted. About 18 inches had to be cut from the last rail to make it fit. From this piece a number of souvenirs were made. For the ladies, there were brooches, for the men, tie pins and rings. The first brooch, made by Dan McDougall the blacksmith, was given to Mrs. Onderdonk. It was a tiny replica of a steel rail, complete even to the holes for bolts. It is now deposited in the Vancouver Archives.
 

Archived in a collection at the Museum of Vancouver is a brooch reportedly made from a piece of the last rail to be laid at Craigellachie on 7 Nov 1885.

Andrew Onderdonk's next destination was South America, where he built the Entre Rios Canal in the country north of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Back in the United States, he completed nine miles of the tunnel for the Chicago drainage canal and the Northwestern Elevated Railway there. He is said to have assisted in the building of the Ferris Wheel for the World's Fair. G.W.G. Ferris, the inventor, was for a time a partner of Andrew Onderdonk.

In 1895 Onderdonk returned to Canada, where he bored the double-track tunnel at Hamilton, Ontario. Parts of the Trent and Soulanges canals were also his work, Part owner of the Union Bridge Company, he had several bridge contracts, including one for part of Montreal's Victoria Bridge. In New York he dredged the new Ambrose Channel in the lower bay and built part of Jerome Park Reservoir. His last contract was for the building of the first of the tunnels under New York's East River at South Ferry.

Andrew Onderdonk died at his home at Oscawana-on-the-Hudson on 21 Jun 1905. He was buried in Sunset Cemetery of the Episcopal Church of the Divine Love at Montrose, New York. The simple headstone bears the words, "Andrew Onderdonk, August 30, 1848 - June 21, 1905. His work is done/His crown is won." So departed this versatile engineer, who without the aid of modern machinery successfully completed some of the world's outstanding engineering projects.

Ann Hanley - I have used contemporary newspapers for information on Onderdonk and the Canadian Pacific Railway. British Columbian 18 Mar, 22 Apr, 10 May, 14 Jun, 4 Oct 1882. Dominion Pacific Herald 20 Oct 1880, 19 Mar, 20-24 Aug 1881. Inland Sentinel 10 Jan 1991, 11-18 May, 5 Oct 1882, 10 Jan, 18 Sep 1884. Victoria Colonist Jul 1882. I have also consulted the Quarterly Review for Jan 1887 and the special edition of 1905 of the Inland Sentinel. I found useful information in Lewis and Dryden's Marine History of the Pacific Northwest (Portland 1895). F.W. Howay, British Columbia from Earliest Times (Vancouver, B.C. 1914) and John Murray Gibbon, Steel of Empire (Indianapolis and New York 1935). Mrs. Bradford G. Weeks, nee Gladys Onderdonk, was of considerable assistance. W. Kaye Lamb of the Public Archives of Canada, and Willard Ireland of the British Columbia Archives were also very helpful. The Pacific Northwest Quarterly Vol. 49, No. 4 (Oct. 1958), pages 146-149, University of Washington, Washington, USA.

Several years ago a website named "Onderdonk's Way" appeared online containing a tremendous amount of history, Onderdonk's contract data, maps, and photographs of the equipment and work in constructing his portion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in British Columbia. Although this website is long-gone another website known as the "Internet Archive Way Back Machine" has saved a copy of the original website. Here is the link to "Onderdonk's Way" on the Way Back Machine.

A Canadian Pacific Railway 100 foot span timber trestle 6 miles east of North Bend - 1885 Photographer? - Vancouver City Archives AM54-S4-: Can N100.