Railway Wars in the Kootenays

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I was chatting with a friend who’s a bit of a railway-history buff, and we got to talking about the seriously intense rivalry between William C. Van Horne of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and James J. Hill of the Great Northern Railroad. Those two hated each other, and their companies feuded across the Canadian and American landscapes for decades.  But at one time, the two men had been close friends and colleagues. Hill had been greatly involved with the CPR in its early years, and even brought in his protégé Van Horne to head up the CPR.  So what, we wondered, had turned them into such bitter enemies?

Thanks to a few online biographies of the two, it was pretty easy to arrive at the answer.  First, James J. Hill’s first love and top priority was not the CPR, but rather the Minnesota, St. Paul and Manitoba Railway.  Hill got involved in the infant CPR only because it was pushing towards the west coast, and he needed a link to the Pacific for his Manitoba line. 

But Van Horne whole-heartedly embraced the Canadian government’s vision for a transcontinental line entirely within Canada, despite Hill’s arguments that the proposed line between Nipissing and Thunder Bay would be absurdly expensive to build and a money-loser to operate. He wanted the CPR to dip down into the US, and connect with the Manitoba line.  Nevertheless, the line took the northern route, and Hill’s Manitoba line was left without its link to the west.

Matters between the two men went from bad to worse when Van Horne decided to haul all the construction materials for the CPR over the Great Lakes, instead of giving this business to Hill and his  Manitoba line.  At this point, Hill vowed to get even with Van Horne, even if he had “to go to Hell for it and shovel coal.”  In 1883, Hill resigned from the CPR and sold all his stock in it.

Resignation, though, was not the kind of vengeance Hill wanted, and Van Horne was not content to simply let him go. Both railways expanded their operations on both sides of the international border, encroaching on each other’s territories and becoming each other’s greatest competitors. It led to some pretty interesting shenanigans in the Kootenays, as both companies raced to monopolise the mining traffic in the region.

In Grand Forks, for example, where the north-south Great Northern line crossed the east-west CPR line, the GNR built an illegal diamond crossing over the CPR tracks; the CPR retaliated by parking a locomotive on the crossing and tied up all railway traffic in all directions.  Whenever a CPR sternwheeler met a Great Northern one on Kootenay Lake, a race was sure to follow.  Things got really out of hand in Sandon, where the rivalry escalated into “The Great Station Battle of Sandon,” with tracks being torn up, stations torn down, bunk cars set rolling (with railway workers in them), and gangs of armed workers gathering in the local saloons to plot their revenge.

In the Creston Valley, the competition was tamer, but took an interesting turn.  The Great Northern, through one of its subsidiaries, actually arrived first, pre-empting a right-of-way and surveying a route through the valley before the CPR, building west from Lethbridge, had reached the area.  But the CPR was the first to begin construction – and so had first claim to the right-of-way. The Great Northern was faced with a difficult choice: build parallel tracks between Wynndel and Sirdar, or pay the CPR a rental fee for the use of its tracks.  The Great Northern chose the latter, but the rental fee of well over $300 per month would prove to be a considerable expense.

Construction of the Great Northern Railway through Creston, about 1899

Then, just after the turn of the century, the CPR got another chance to carry the war to its competitor.  As early as 1902, the CPR joined forces with Daniel Corbin, who had been heavily involved in early railway construction in the Kootenays, as well as mining and smelting activities.  Corbin had several reasons of his own for hating Hill and the Great Northern, and eagerly to partner with the CPR to build the Soo-Spokane line. This rail link connected with the American mid-west through St. Paul, Minnesota and Sault Sainte-Marie, came across Canada on the CPR mainline, then dropped back down to the US at Kingsgate to continue on to Spokane.  This line competed head-to-head with the Grant Northern, and was, in fact, the route that Hill himself had argued the CPR should take back in 1883. Hill did everything he could to block construction of this line, burying it in a mountain of lawsuits, but construction went ahead and the Soo-Spokane Line opened in 1906. To further rub salt into Hill’s wound, in 1908 the Soo-Spokane Line, being then the shortest route across the US, won the US Postal Service away from the Great Northern.

Hill retaliated by building a new, shorter rail line.  He got the mail contract back, but by then the end was inevitable.  Narrow gauge lines that connected to the GNR’s standard gauge main lines led to enormous and costly logistical problems; forest fires wiped out the Kaslo & Slocan line, which was one of the GNR’s most lucrative lines; GNR steamships ran aground or sank; the American Interstate Commerce Commission imposed increasing restrictions that hampered the GNR’s ability to set competitive rates.  In short, the GNR simply could not compete with the CPR.

By 1911, the Great Northern’s service between Porthill and Creston was down to a single mixed train two days a week, and the service was discontinued altogether on September 11, 1914.

CPR station in Creston, about 1905

Originally published October 2010