Canadian Transport Sourcebook

Chapter V

Bute Inlet

My next appointment was as first officer under a gentleman named Gamsby who came from Perth, Ontario. Our destination was Waddington harbour, at the head of Bute Inlet, and our orders were to run a line up the Homathko River which breaks through the Cascade Range of Mountains and empties itself into the sea at the head of Bute Inlet. This was no child's pastime, I can assure you, but a real man's job. The summit of the Cascade Ridge is in many places within thirty or forty miles from the sea and therefore the descent is naturally very abrupt and the waters a roaring torrent, rushing madly through many a dangerous canyon.

The history of the first explorer of this picturesque region, Alfred Waddington, a surveyor, has long since been forgotten, but we found traces of his work. It seems he was engaged in the construction of a waggon road and did actually blast out some of the rock and built some crib work round the bluffs, etc. We found evidences of this, also the tracks of his mules down on the flats.

The story told in those days (1875) related how Waddington's men very unwisely fraternized with the Indians and their wives rather too familiarly, the result being that thirteen of them were massacred in one night. The work then seems to have been abandoned. Waddington came to Ottawa and died of the smallpox. A strong posse of British Columbia Police went after the murderers and about a dozen of them were strung up at Kamloops after trial. Thus the legend goes. We actually had one of the murderers with us. He rejoiced in the name of "Cultus Jim", which in Chinook means absolutely useless, good-for-nothing. Managing to prove an alibi, this gentleman was fortunate enough to escape the general hanging, and was quite proud of it, and often related to us the bloodthirsty doings of the others and how near he came to "Klatawa Kopa Sagaalie Illahie," which is Chinook for going up to Heaven—in English, for being hanged. He was a picturesque scoundrel, but an excellent pack animal.

These Homathco Canyons were very difficult to negotiate and many a time I was slung up with a line under my armpits laboriously trying to find room for the tripod of a transit on a narrow ledge of projecting rock often many hundred feet above the foaming whirling white waters of the stream below. I spent two years on this route, and the last season we actually located the line, carefully running in all the curves, sometimes a very hazardous occupation, accomplishing only about forty miles of line.