THE PROGRESS of construction, particularly when the line traverses dif-
ficult territory, has long occupied a prominent place in many accounts of
railway development. Triumph over natural barriers provided a graphic
setting for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century celebrations of the
indomitable power of railways and their captains. ¹ The most influential
view of the construction of the GTP in British Columbia remains the
tendentious contemporary accounts of British journalist Frederick
Talbot, who travelled over the uncompleted line from Edmonton to
Prince Rupert in 1910. In two books and a stream of articles, this unoffi-
cial company publicist justified the slow progress of the Mountain
Section to British investors by presenting a 'first-hand, face-to-face
impression of the obstacles that reared up at every foot advance which
had to be broken down by sheer physical effort or ingenuity.' ² Because
Talbot evidently perused selected GTP documents and recorded frag-
ments of conversations with some of the company's officers, later histori-
ans have borrowed data from his works almost without question. They
have, for the most part, also accepted his unreflective Whiggism, and offer
little beyond what an American scholar has described as 'anecdotal history,
with the emphasis on personalities, colourful and melodramatic events,
and the triumphant completion.' ³ These laudatory accounts elicited an
opposing view of construction from those who regarded the owners and
managers of the project as robber barons. But though the muckrakers
and their more restrained academic successors have suggested other
motives for building the railway, they have not substantially revised our
understanding of the nature and problems of construction of the GTP. ⁴

From works in both these traditions, one can construct a simple nar-
rative of the construction of the GTP in British Columbia. Crews began

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