“One’s experience is varied from camping out in tents at fifty degrees below zero, to spending a large amount of time in the wilderness, when provisions are very short and one has to depend upon fish for food.”

This was the description of the task of discovering a path for the iron road through a new country, as related to me by the late John E. Schwitzer, one of the most brilliant railway engineers that Canada has produced, and one who had climbed the ladder of success from the humble capacity of rodman at a few shillings per week, to the position of chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railway, within the short space of twenty-two years. From his unique experience he was fitted to speak with authority, and his statement sums up the life of a surveyor in a nutshell.

So far as the loneliness and the need to fish for food are concerned I can speak from experience. This article of diet is plentiful, but its monotony palls very quickly, while at times one longs for the excitement of the city. But once this feeling has been lived down one would not exchange the virgin country, with its invigorating air and life of exciting adventure, for a smoke-begrimed stifling centre of activity for any consideration.

In Great Britain, owing to its completely settled condition, the difficulties incidental to this class of work do not exist. The wrestles with heat, sun-baked desert, ice-bound forest and extreme cold have never been experienced in connection with the driving forward of the ribbon of steel in these islands. There is an utter lack of that thrilling romantic interest and adventure associated with similar work in an unknown country, where the surveyor is not merely a surveyor, but an explorer as well. In any of the four continents beyond Europe he fulfils an important mission. He is the advance-guard of civilisation. He spies out the country for the greatest settling force that has yet been devised, and although the work more often than not is extremely perilous, he revels in the dangers. One must be prepared to face any emergency: be ready to fulfil any duty. One may be buried for months amidst the strongholds of ice-capped mountains, isolated upon the sweltering desolate expanses of broiling deserts, imprisoned in the hearts of yawning ravines, or immersed amid reeking dismal swamps, cut off by hundreds of miles from the nearest town or settlement. Then Nature is the surveyor’s sole companion, and in her silent company herculean and heroic tasks often have to be fulfilled, of which the world at large never gleans an inkling.

The surveyor is the personification of happy-go-luckiness. He pursues his path doggedly, laughs at obstacles, no matter how forbidding they may be, and accomplishes glorious deeds unsung. Often his sudden death through accident, disease or misadventure goes unmourned beyond the limits of his own camp. Yet an everlasting and omnipotent monument to his memory is raised—the thin thread of steel which annihilates time and space.

These men show a devotion to their calling which it is impossible to fathom. They brave perils beyond conception and face death in a hundred different forms. It may be a slip on a treacherous foothold at the brink of a yawning gulch, the upset of a frail bark in a swiftly rushing rapid, a land- or rock-slide, an avalanche, or a tree snapping under the fury of the storm which hurries them to their doom. In silence they suffer the torments of thirst, the pangs of hunger, physical exhaustion, frostbite, snow-blindness, disease, the hostility of mankind and a thousand other dangers. When they have emerged from the ordeal they laugh at their experiences, and consider them no more fearsome than those confronting the ordinary city dweller as he walks along a crowded thoroughfare.

As one travels over the railway through Mexico, interest is aroused by four primitive little wooden crosses beside the track. It is a small God’s acre in an undulating expanse. The probability is that it would miss the eye unless one were bent on its discovery. Yet those four monuments tell a silent story of grim adventure. The Mexican Central was being driven through a hostile country, and the Indians were being forced back relentlessly by its influence. They were sullen but not subdued.

A little squad of four surveyors were busily engaged in pegging out the path for the line. They were deep in the intricacies of their task. Suddenly there was a savage blood-curdling whoop. A horde of Indians, in the full panoply of war-paint and feathers, were bearing down upon them on mischief bent. The engineers discarded their instruments hurriedly and grabbed their rifles. They were outnumbered hopelessly, but undaunted, they kept blazing away, picking off their foes with that stubbornness born of despair. There were no thoughts of surrender to the implacable enemy. Nor could they hope for aid; they were too far distant from their base. One by one they fell, and when at last their comrades came up, their mutilated corpses were the sole evidences of that forlorn struggle. To-day those four wooden crosses serve to recall that grim episode. Such dramatic incidents unfortunately were only too frequent in the early days of railway building upon the American continent, though they were far from being peculiar to the New World. They have been, and still are, repeated occasionally in connection with such enterprises in other parts of the globe.

It was only a year or two ago that one of the most ferocious acts of savage barbarity, such as is difficult to parallel in the annals of railway engineering, was perpetrated in South America. Only the fringe of that vast territory has been opened up by the iron horse. The greater part is more unknown to-day than the land around the North Pole.

A small party of engineers set off up country to map out a projected extension. They plunged boldly into the depths of the primeval forest. But they never returned. What happened when they disappeared within the tangled labyrinth of trees no one knows. The time slipped by, and their comrades outside, fretting at their prolonged absence, grew so alarmed that a relief party was organised. The worst was dreaded, for the hostility of the natives to the locomotive was known only too well. The relief party advanced warily, weapons in hand, ready for the slightest sign of fight. However, they were safe from molestation, but had not ventured far into the tangled jungle before they solved the mystery, and were able to reconstruct a tragic adventure only too realistically.

The steps of the surveying engineers had been dogged silently and relentlessly by the remorseless savages. When the former had gained a point sufficiently remote from the belt of civilisation, they were laid low by poisoned arrows. The relief-party accounted for every engineer, but one and all were beyond human succour. They were found in a gruesome row, poised upside down, with stakes driven lengthwise through their bodies and heads into the ground. They had been pinned down with no more compunction than the school-boy secures his etymological prize to a piece of cardboard.

A few years ago British North Borneo was the scene of a similar disaster. It had been decided to drive a railway from coast to coast, and a party set out on the reconnaissance, as the first step in a new railway undertaking is called. The path lay through the dense forest which had never been penetrated by the white man, and where the dreaded Head Hunters held undisputed sway. The prospect was forbidding in the extreme, but it did not dismay the engineers who plunged fearlessly into the bush. As the crow flies their journey was only one of some 150 miles, but the thick vegetation concealed difficulties innumerable.

That survey was doomed to failure. The party was overwhelmed by the Dyaks and massacred, with the exception of three native porters who succeeded in making good their escape. After experiencing terrible privations, this trio regained civilisation and communicated the sad tidings of the calamity. For years that stretch of forest defied conquest. Finally another attempt was made to traverse the jungle, and on this occasion no interference to progress was offered. The surveyors gained the opposite coast in about six months, being called upon to fight only one enemy—disease. It was a desperate plunge, for the party had to hack and hew its way foot by foot through the matted scrub and trees.

These afford instances of the hostility of mankind which fortunately to-day are encountered but seldom. It is the hostility of Nature which is feared more greatly now. Yet the work possesses a fascinating glamour. The existence of difficulty only spurs the determined to further effort.

Railway surveying in the effort to roll back the map in a new country offers the young man all the adventure in life that can be desired. As one surveyor who had spent more years than he could remember in the wilds between China and Peru remarked to me, “If it is not the natural difficulties or the hostility of the natives which lend variety to the work, the chances are a hundred to one that a revolution will fill the gap, especially in China or the South Americas.”

At times the work is exasperating. Perhaps the surveyor who has been imprisoned for months on end in an inhospitable country has been driven to his wits’ end to find a practicable location which is immune from the many disturbances of Nature. By dint of supreme effort finally he discovers a route which he congratulates himself to be absolutely safe, only to receive a rude awakening. In the survey of a new line through the Rockies, the mountains barring the engineer’s path had achieved an unenviable reputation, owing to the frequency and severity of the avalanches that tore down their steep slopes every spring. The surveyor reconnoitred that mountain chain from end to end, observed every path that the slides had been known to take, searched local records and questioned aged inhabitants to make himself acquainted thoroughly with the conditions.

At last he concluded that he had elaborated a path for the railway which was beyond the destructive efforts of the periodical visitations and work was commenced. Yet in the first spring, while the construction train was crawling along with a load of excavated spoil from the mountain-side, the slipping snow departed from its accustomed path, and in its descent caught the unlucky train, threw it into the gulch some distance below, ripped up the metals, buried the grade beneath thousands of tons of debris, and obliterated every vestige of the work.

The surveyor must be a man not to be daunted very easily in his enterprise, not to be cast down by heart-breaking failures, and who has the capacity to gather tangible assistance from apparently insignificant trifles. The search for a rift through a frowning mountain wall often is galling in its hopelessness. When the first Canadian trans-continental line was being forced towards the Pacific coast, the crossing of the Rocky, Selkirk and Gold ranges puzzled the surveyors acutely. Walter Moberly, a surveyor to the manner born, was deputed to complete the conquest of the Gold or Columbia Range. The obvious path to follow was along the bank of the mighty Columbia River, and this was taken by Moberly. Yet the Gold Range had to be threaded somewhere and somehow, though it appeared to defy penetration. He spent months wandering up and down the river, enduring hardships indescribable, seeking for the slightest breach through that terrible wall, wide enough to carry a pair of metals, but no gateway could he find.

Weary and sick at heart at the fruitlessness of his endeavours, he was one day returning despondently to camp. He was compelled well-nigh to admit failure. Suddenly he espied an eagle wheeling over his head. He followed its movements somewhat nonchalantly, until he saw it make directly for the Columbia mountains. Then his heart gave a thump! Would the bird rise and clear their lofty summits or would it sweep through a rift? Following its flight through the air, he saw the bird give a majestic dip downwards towards the chain. He turned the head of his jaded horse, and digging his spurs into its flanks, sped in the wake of the bird. Onward it flew as straight as an arrow towards a projecting crest, where it made a sharp turn and was lost to sight.

Moberly galloped madly forward with his eyes glued to that crag. He never turned his head, fearing his sight might play him false, and was oblivious to stumbles and lurches as his steed fell over logs and slipped among boulders in its mad career. He swung round the crest, and there before his eyes the peaks were rolled back on either side, leaving a broad canyon, and of such a character that Nature appeared to have fashioned it expressly for the advance of the steel highway. The Columbia range was conquered. It was by pure accident that it had been found, but it was an accident which culminated a prolonged industrious quest. Indebted to his success to the monarch of the air Moberly christened the break in the rocky wall “Eagle Pass,” and it is through that gulch to-day that the Canadian Pacific makes its way to the western sea. As one sweeps between the massive ice-crowned teeth of the mountains one may see the site of the oldest cabin in the mountains, where the indefatigable Moberly passed the winter of 1871–2 completing the preliminary surveys for the line among the fastnesses of the Columbia Mountains.

The task of planning the location through such broken country is attended with the gravest dangers, relieved with exciting adventures. At places among the peaks a foothold on terra firma for the manipulation of the survey instruments is impossible. Then massive tree-logs are lowered into the gulch a few feet above the raging foam of a wicked mountain torrent, and along this slender staging the surveyor has to crawl to carry out his task.

Life often hangs upon the veritable thread. It may be that logs cannot be thrown over the cliff face. Then the surveyor has to don a leathern waist-belt fitted with a heavy swivel to which a rope is attached. In this way he is swung over the edge of a cliff to operate his level and transit along the face of a precipice where no foothold exists. Sometimes it becomes imperative to have recourse to dynamite to blast out a ledge along which to advance. Many a promising young engineer has gone to his last account in work of such a desperate character. In the survey of what is now the Denver and Rio Grande through one of Colorado’s yawning canyons, a young assistant had to be lowered in this manner. Half-a-dozen labourers grasped the end of the rope and steadied the surveyor in his descent over the perilous edge. From the brink to the bottom of the canyon was a matter of 200 feet or so straight down. In a few seconds the young fellow was dangling betwixt earth and sky, steadying his descent as best he could down the face of the cliff.

Suddenly there was a cry of alarm! The rope-man nearest the cliff edge noticed that the rope was bearing upon a piece of rock the edge of which was as keen as that of a razor. The rope had been sawn almost in two. Lowering stopped. The two men rushed forward to grasp the rope below the point of pending rupture to ease the strain. But they were too late. There was a slight tremor, the last strand snapped, and before the rope-men realised the situation as the end hung limply in their hands, the cry of the lost engineer as he tumbled through the air was echoed from the depths of the canyon.

Life in the field is indisputably hard and exacting, and the task is often aggravated by the scarcity, or monotony, of the food. This condition of affairs, however, is incomparably better to-day than it was thirty years ago. The surveyors are tended more thoughtfully than they were then, and the perfection of food-preserving science has enabled a camp now to be provisioned with tasty comestibles which formerly were unknown. Pork, beans and bannock—a substitute for bread made from flour and bacon fat with a little baking-powder—constituted the staple articles of diet, varied with fish from the streams, game from the forests and wild fruits. The bread was often musty, for immersion time after time in a torrent and storage upon damp ground did not improve the flavour of the flour by any means. The pork or bacon often was rancid, while the cook was invariably an execrable exponent of the culinary art, and his bannock played sad havoc with the digestive organs of the human body. Little wonder that the men, under such conditions, sought to secure additions to the menu from the rivers by methods decidedly unsportsmanlike, but the “end justified the means”; or delighted in bear steaks and venison.

Extreme altitudes such as have to be attained in order to cross the Andes undermine the strongest constitutions and render the surveyor’s work increasingly difficult. Struggling, crawling and slipping among crags and loose rocks inflicting cuts and bruises is arduous work indeed, but when the human frame is racked by the tortures of sorochté, or mountain sickness, the surveyor’s plight is to be pitied in very truth. In such climes the cold and winds are pitiless, the movements of the thermometer between midnight and noon are enormous, the fluctuation in some cases being as much as a hundred degrees in the course of twelve hours. In the middle of the day the heat is well-nigh unbearable, and the surveyor gladly discards his outer clothing. At night he finds it no simple matter to keep warm, for the mercury descends to a very low level and frost prevails. The winds too are so cutting and penetrating that it requires elaborate and special clothing after dark to keep warm.

Now and again a situation develops which relieves the monotony of the daily round of struggle against the forces of Nature. South America is pre-eminently the home of these humorous incidents. The concession for the construction of a railway through one of the tropical republics had been granted, and no time was lost in pushing forward with the preliminary surveys. But when the men with the transit and level reached a certain city they were surprised to meet with unveiled opposition. The municipal authorities point-blankly refused to permit the surveyors to carry out their work in the precincts of the city. Seeing that the latter was to benefit mostly from the steel link, the attitude was somewhat inexplicable at first sight. A little reflection, however, upon the South American methods of transacting business convinced the surveyor that bribery was the root of the trouble. He reported the interruption to his superiors, whose representatives hurried to the city to fathom the reason for the unexpected opposition. It was as the surveyor had surmised. The civic authorities would permit the iron horse to enter the city if the concessionaries would make a handsome contribution to the municipal improvement fund—explained the mayor. “Well, how much do you want?” remarked the concessionaries, who inwardly had not overlooked this contingency. The mayor could not say off-hand, and accordingly several delays occurred until this vital consideration was arranged. As a result of the prolonged parleys the concessionaries undertook to deliver a certain sum of money to the city.

The bullion was dispatched forthwith and reached the city the night before payment was due, so as to prevent the authorities to withdraw from the bargain on the plea that the concessionaries were dilatory. But law and order were not enforced very strongly, and the surveyor, with his companions, entertained certain qualms. Accordingly they decided to mount guard over the building in which they were passing the night in case of eventualities, at the same time securing a goodly supply of arms and ammunition.

As the first streaks of dawn lighted the scene the guard thought he descried the forms of men creeping along the ground in the gloom. Silently he roused his companions, and with firearms cocked they waited developments. Not a sign of movement was displayed among the inmates, and the robbers silently forced an entrance through the windows and door. Once inside the building they were greeted with a warm fusillade of lead, and in accordance with the characteristics of their ilk, they did not stop to reply, but beat as hurried retreat as they could under the assistance of bullets, leaving some of their number hors de combat. When day broke the besieged party examined the fruits of their marksmanship, and to their intense surprise discovered that the dead included the mayor of the city, and one or two of his companions who had carried out the negotiations for the contribution to the improvement fund, and who had been so remarkably solicitous concerning the city’s welfare!

It will be realised that the surveyor who undertakes the plotting of the line through a new country must be a man of illimitable resource and capacity, and at the same time ready to meet any development. It must be confessed, however, that the work, from its adventurous aspect, appeals strongly to the young engineer anxious to get away from monotonous routine.