The History of the Grizzly Northern Railway

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The following history of the Grizzly Northern Railway was published as part of the 1 July 1938 Dominion Day special issue of the “The Caribou News and Chronicle”. Maudie-Ann Currie, the Chronicle’s Editor and Publisher wrote the article.

The annual holiday on which Canada’s birth as a nation is celebrated was originally known as "Dominion Day". The Canadian Parliament changed it to “Canada Day” on October 27, 1982.

The Caribou News and Chronicle

Since 1909

Kamloops, British Columbia           1 July 1938           Dominion Day Special Issue

The Grizzly Northern Railway

Many readers of the Caribou News and Chronicle will be familiar with the sight of Grizzly Northern Railway trains, however they may not be aware of the story as to how the railway came into being. As part of our Dominion Day celebrations we’ve put together this brief history of the railway, which is based on interviews with railway old timers and the archives of the railway, which were kindly made available to me by Isambard Dunstan Neuville, the Grizzly Northern Railway’s President and General Manager.

Maudie-Ann Currie

The Grizzly Northern Railway runs from our bustling city of Kamloops, to Rocky Mountain House in Alberta, with a mainline length of 380 miles. Rocky Mountain House, known informally as “Rocky”, is a town of 1,000 people that lies on the North Saskatchewan River, at the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, 50 miles west of Red Deer, Alberta.

The major part of the Grizzly Northern, a distance of 250 miles, was constructed between 1906 and 1914 as the Groetli Northern Railway, running from Groetli, Alberta, a small coal mining settlement several miles west of Rocky, to Grizzly, British Columbia. The town of Grizzly, as most readers know, is 130 miles northeast of Kamloops, on the North Thompson River. The Canadian Pacific Railway acquired the assets of the Groetli Northern and completed the railway line between Grizzly and Kamloops in 1920, renaming it the Grizzly Northern Railway. 

The late 1890’s and early 1900’s were economic boom times on the Canadian prairies and the Pacific coast. Within a year of the discovery of large gold finds in the Klondike Valley in 1897, thousands of men with their pack animals poured into the interior of British Columbia, the Peace River country and the Yukon and Northwest Territories. Those who would supply the many needs of those who moiled for gold followed them. Some would stay only temporarily, until they rushed off to the scene of the next gold rush, others would stay to homestead in the west, establishing farms, businesses and industries.

Strongly encouraged by the federal, provincial and territorial governments and enthusiastically supported by ambitious railway builders, western populations increased rapidly through immigration from eastern Canada, the United States, Great Britain and Europe. Towns and cities appeared almost overnight. The products of western farms, forests, mines and fisheries were in much demand in the Americas, Great Britain, Europe and the Far East. With that demand and the need to also transport legions of passengers in both directions, railway companies sprang up, eager to meet those needs.

Into this scene stepped Horatio Heyerdahl Hardanger. Horatio Hardanger was a wealthy Norwegian businessman who had arrived in Canada in 1899 with the object of setting up a transatlantic steamship company headquartered in Montreal. Hardanger, later to become Sir Horatio H. Hardanger KCMG, was born in Hardangervidda, Norway in 1855. He was every bit the descendent of his father’s Viking ancestors, being six ft. six in. tall, weighing 250 lbs, with a fiery-red bushy beard and head of hair and piercing blue eyes.  His stentorian voice thundered at those standing in the way of progress of his project.  Hardanger had learned the railway trade and made his wealth as a brilliant young civil engineer and entrepreneur, building railways in the mountains of Norway, Switzerland and India. Hardanger’s father was Carl Gustav Vigeland, owner of the Bergen-Newcastle Steamship Line. His mother was Lady Lily Vanessa Trollope, a famous English writer from Newcastle upon Tyne, England. 

Hardanger upon re-assessing business opportunities in Canada concluded that the railway business offered a more promising prospect than a steamship line, and noted in particular that there was ample room for another railway in the Canadian west. He therefore set about founding a railway company that would link the central western prairies to the interior of British Columbia and the northwest Pacific coast; that would carry passengers, finished goods and equipment, agricultural, forestry, mining and fishing products.

Hardanger’s concept was a railway that would run from Groetli, then part of the North West Territories, to 100 Mile House in the British Columbia interior, that would turn northwards to Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory and then run down to Skagway on the Alaskan coast; from where ships could carry away Canadian products to the rest of the world. Groetli, founded largely by Scandinavian immigrants, was a bustling frontier town of 500 people in 1900, with a majority of the male population employed in coal mining. Others operated businesses as outfitters and suppliers to those still rushing to the Yukon to explore for gold, even though the Klondike Gold Rush was at its end.

In crossing the Rockies, Hardanger’s railway would run parallel to the Canadian Northern Railway and the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway to the north, both of these railways then being under construction in the Yellowhead Pass. To the south lay the Canadian Pacific Railway, with its established route through the Kicking Horse Pass. The duplication of routes through the Yellowhead Pass would be eliminated later when the Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk Pacific were merged into what is known today as the Canadian National Railway.

In early 1902 Hardanger commissioned a field party led by Angus Ranald Kirkcaldy to search for a suitable route across the mountains. Kirkcaldy, a wiry, cantankerous little Scottish railway surveyor, was the son of a crofter family born in Spean Bridge, Scotland. He had gained his experience while working on the location for the North Western Railway lines through the Bolan and Khyber Passes in India and Afghanistan. Kirkcaldy and his four man team, fuelled mainly by oatmeal, corned beef and Scotch whiskey, carried out their search over the spring to fall seasons of 1902 and 1903. Kirkcaldy concluded that the little known Running Bear Pass in the Columbia Icefields was the most direct way through the Rockies from Groetli, rather than the nearby Howse Pass and recommended this route to Hardanger, despite the steep grades and convoluted railway line that would be required. Given his experience and eternal optimism Hardanger was not fazed by the prospect of building a railway through the Running Bear Pass and the rugged mountain ranges to the west and northwest.

After sailing between Canada, Great Britain and Europe a number of times, Hardanger obtained British and European financing worth $10,000,000 by April 1904, following which the “Groetli Northern Railway” (the “GNR”) was formally incorporated in July 1904. Angus Kirkcaldy and his surveyors completed detailed route survey work in November 1905.

Hardanger hired Artemius Breukelyn VanDonkers, a hard-driving American railroader as the GNR’s Construction Manager. VanDonkers in contrast to Hardanger was a short stocky man, 5 ft. 4 in. tall, weighing 240 lbs, with a prodigious appetite for fine cigars, food, wine and glamorous women. VanDonkers was born in Stuyvesant, New York, the son of Cornelius VanDonkers, a wealthy steel magnate and Jessica Melba Jefferson, a prominent Philadelphia socialite. VanDonkers was noted for wearing the latest European fashions at all times, irrespective of the weather or the primitive conditions often prevailing when building new railways in undeveloped territories. He always wore an elegant silk hat and carried a gold tipped Malacca walking cane, usually causing amusement in those people meeting him in the rough conditions of the field for the first time. Despite his deceiving elegant appearance, like Hardanger, VanDonkers had a voice, manner and obvious competence that commanded attention and got results from his crews.

VanDonkers gathered together a 2,000-strong construction gang of experienced tracklayers, tunnel and bridge builders and other trades, many of whom had just finished working under VanDonkers in building a railroad in the northwestern United States. His Master Builder, responsible for the many tunnels, bridges and other structures, was Isambard Dunstan Neuville, originally a tin mine miner from Cornwall in England. VanDonkers’ construction crew started laying track at Groetli on the 31^st of March 1906, moving westward across the foothills and into the Rockies, following the North Saskatchewan River to its headwaters in the Columbia Icefields, near to what was to become the coal mining town of Clinemore, Alberta.

On the 22^nd of July 1909 the Groetli Northern railhead reached the Continental Divide at the eastern end of the Running Bear Pass, 58 miles west of today’s Clinemore and 125 miles west of Groetli, at an altitude above sea level of 5,010 ft. To commemorate the occasion an impressive stone cairn was erected at Nigel siding, one half mile east of the Continental Divide, near the headwaters of the Running Bear River. The cairn may be seen today from the train and also from the new Icefields Parkway now under construction.

The turbulent Running Bear River, generously fed by the Icefield glaciers, drops rapidly over the 46 miles from Nigel to its junction with the Columbia River at Flummery on Kinbasket Lake. Formidable steep-sided mountains confined the narrow pass, and limited the opportunities for relieving the effects of steep grades and tight curves. Hardanger. Kirkcaldy and VanDonkers decided that to avoid punishing 5% grades (264 ft. incline per mile), two spiral tunnels would be needed in the descent along the river, the first tunnel to be located three miles west of Nigel and the second tunnel two miles further on. In the summer of 1912 the two tunnels were completed, limiting grades to a maximum of 4% (211 ft. per mile) and average of 3% (158 ft. per mile) in the eleven-mile drop from Nigel to Geiranger, British Columbia. Geiranger sits on the Running Bear River flats where the pass briefly widens out and the Yee-haw River coming from the north joins the Running Bear.

Over the next two years track construction continued, from Geiranger running along the Running Bear River to its junction with the Columbia River at Flummery, then bypassing the Selkirk range via the northwards loop of the Columbia along Kinbasket Lake, before swinging southwards with the river along the east side of Lake Revelstoke for 25 miles; next crossing the lake and turning westwards to cross the largely unexplored Monashee mountains through a series of long tunnels, snow sheds and wooden trestles.

Numerous unplanned interruptions in the construction work occurred as unforeseen physical obstacles were encountered in the Monashees, and as money to cover escalating payroll and material costs was frequently exhausted.  Horatio Hardanger was forced to shuttle back and forth to Great Britain and the European continent several times to bolster investor confidence and raise new moneys, despite a slowing world economy and increasing political tensions between the Great Powers.

The Groetli Northern rail line reached the North Thompson River in mid-April 1914 at Grizzly, British Columbia, 130 miles northeast of Kamloops. Due to over-extended financial resources and the onset of the Great War in August of 1914, which resulted in many able bodied men leaving to join the Canadian Expeditionary Force, construction of the Groetli Northern beyond Grizzly was suspended on 28 October 1914 and bankruptcy was declared.

In June 1916 the Canadian Pacific Railway (the “CPR”) acquired the assets of the bankrupt Groetli Northern to avoid it being acquired by the Canadian Northern, the Grand Trunk Pacific, or James J. Hill’s St. Paul-based Great Northern Railway. The CPR elected to operate the newly acquired assets as a corporate subsidiary and incorporated these as the Grizzly Northern Railway (conveniently still the “GNR”).

The Grizzly Northern was extended in the summer of 1920 to meet the CPR’s mainline at Kamloops, running along the North Thompson on the opposite side to the Canadian Northern. On the east the Grizzly Northern was connected to the CPR’s branch line from Red Deer at Ullin Junction and Rocky Mountain House. In 1921 a 39-mile-long branch line was built running northwards from Geiranger along the Yee Haw River to service two new railway subsidiaries; a copper mine at Kingdom and a coal mine at Brunel. A second coal mine was opened at Brunel in 1929. Thanks to the profitability of the three mines and the dedication of its employees the Grizzly Northern has managed to survive the economic depression that we have been experiencing these last several years. Today the Grizzly Northern continues to operate as a CPR subsidiary, with headquarter offices in Kamloops, linking the people and economies of northern and central Alberta and central British Columbia. The railway currently employs some 500 people.

Following the bankruptcy of the Groetli Northern Railway, Horatio Hardanger, never one to be discouraged, waited out the Great War by exploring for gold in the Yukon, accompanied by Angus Kirkcaldy. Striking it rich in 1921 the two men moved on to South America to build several British-financed railways in the Bolivian and Chilean Andes and on the Patagonian plains, Hardanger finally retired to London, England and was knighted in recognition of his contributions to the British Empire. He died peacefully in 1935, age 80 and is buried in Hardangervidda, his birthplace.

Angus Kirkcaldy retired to Fort William in Scotland, where he established and operated the Glen Kilmallie single-malt whiskey distillery until his death at age 85 in 1937. Kirkcaldy is buried in the Kilmallie Cemetery under a monument topped with his surveyor’s transit. 

Artemius VanDonkers became President and General Manager of the Grizzly Northern under its CPR owner, a position he held until his retirement in 1929. VanDonkers died peacefully in Kamloops in April 1937, age 72. He is buried in Kamloops, in the Pleasant Street Cemetery. His grave is marked by large granite stone monument that bears a photograph on metal of VanDonkers taken one year prior to his death. The photograph shows him in his finest gear, wearing a top hat, a large Cuban cigar in his mouth, one arm raised in toast with a large balloon glass of wine in hand and his second arm firmly wrapped around the waist of a fashionably dressed and beautiful young lady. The inscription below the photograph reads, “A woman is only a woman but a good cigar is a Smoke”.

Isambard Dunstan Neuville was appointed President and General Manager of the Grizzly Northern on VanDonkers retirement, a position he holds today. When asked about his unique first name, Mr. Neuville advised that he was named after Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the famous 19^th century English engineer, as he had been born in Saltash, Cornwall in England, the location of Brunel’s famous design, the Royal Albert Bridge across the Tamar River.

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“KCMG” indicates that the holder of the title is a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, the second highest rank of the British order of knighthood, awarded for distinguished services to the British Empire.

Visitors to Kamloops with an interest in railways and the history of the west will want to spend an hour at the GNR museum, located in the GNR head offices at the corner of  Victoria Street West
and Seymour Street West, adjacent to Riverside Park. The museum is open during normal business hours.

A Happy Dominion Day to all from “The Caribou News and Chronicle”!

Copyright © R.T. Neuville, 2012