Monkman Pass, in the Canadian Rockies, is southwest of Tumbler Ridge and northeast of Hansard. Found in the Hart Ranges, some consider this mountain pass as the southern limit of the informal grouping known as the Northern Rockies, although those are occasionally reckoned as extending farther southeast to Mount Ovington or even to Mount Robson.
The pass is at the head of the Murray River and south of the height of land at the head of the Parsnip River.
Monkman Pass forms part of Monkman Provincial Park. Like the park, Monkman Lake, Monkman Creek and Monkman Falls, it was named after Alexander Monkman.
History
Discovery
By the 1920s, Monkman Pass had been a First Nations travel route for some 300 years.
Alex Monkman was a pioneer trader and trapper in the Peace Country. According to his account, while on a westward trapping and hunting trip in the 1921/22 winter, he realized he had crossed the continental divide through a lower pass, either on locating a spike from the 1904 Grand Trunk survey, or on meeting trappers who had canoed from the Fraser River.
St. Pierre Gauthier (c.1850–c.1930), is also claimed as the discoverer. With a skilled eye for topography, he was reputed to be an expert trail locator. Of French-Cree ancestry, he spoke some English but was otherwise illiterate. Supposedly, after leading Monkman to the pass, the latter, being literate and well known, assumed the credit.
Hank Munro, a leading trapper in the area, was acknowledged by George Woosley as the true discoverer. Allegedly, Munro informed Monkman of its existence when railway fever was gripping the region.
Railway proposal
During the early 1900s, grain and cattle from the Peace Country in Alberta and B.C. were primarily exported to the west coast by way of Edmonton—a circuitous by rail to Vancouver, which by a direct route would be only . By 1920, grain prices were low and freight rates high, and many settlers, who had been attracted by repeated government assurances that a line would be built imminently, were forced to abandon their holdings.
Monkman reported his findings to the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and the Canadian National Railway (CNR), and guided reconnaissance engineer E. Murray Hill through the pass in 1923. When CNR president, Sir Henry Thornton, visited the Peace Country in 1924, he promised to build a railroad westward when the region produced tonnage equal to of wheat. That volume surpassed within two years, no railway materialized.
The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway (GTP) surveys during 1904–06 examined a Wapiti Pass line southwestward to Hansard, as did the 1920s surveys through Monkman Pass, with the latter offering a superior grade west of the Canadian Rockies. Via the CNR at Hansard would be shorter than either the Pine or Peace passes for shipping Peace wheat, and would require less than of new track to connect with the CPR controlled Edmonton, Dunvegan and British Columbia Railway. However, a branch line northwest from Brule, Alberta was the CNR preference.
The CNR, reliant upon an unenthusiastic parliament for funding, and satisfied with their Yellowhead crossing, and the CPR leaning toward the Pine or Peace, Monkman Pass presented a compromise proposal that connected CNR tracks to the west with CPR tracks to the east. If a further line through the mountains were economically viable, railway survey engineers favoured the Monkman route, because of lighter snowfall and no chance of slides in a wide pass at its narrowest.
Bypassing their farms, this option drew protest from the northern Peace. Residents unfairly compared this choice to the then Pacific Great Eastern Railway (PGE), which "started nowhere, ended nowhere, and served no settlers". For nearly of the Monkman route, there were neither mines, good agricultural land nor timber belts. The Brule branch, or a modified alternative through Obed, Alberta, equally lacked appeal.
The respective cost estimates were: Obed $13,336,000; Monkman Pass $16,092,000; and Pine Pass $21,472,000. In terms of cost benefit, the federal government favoured Monkman, but the CNR and CPR chose Obed. For all participants, delay, not construction, was their prime objective. The exercise created some uncertainty as to whether the PGE would build through the Monkman Pass or follow its earlier surveys north toward the Pine or Peace passes. In 1928, the PGE conducted a joint survey with the CNR and CPR of these three possible routes. Meanwhile, British capitalists were considering building a Monkman line independent of the CNR or CPR.