In the meantime the people of the United States had been vigorously carrying on surveys, and preparing to build railroads across her vast domains, where lofty mountain passes and barren wastes of desert land intervened between her rich and populous East and the thriving and energetic West, but in Canada no line as yet connected the provinces of the central plains with her eastern possessions, while British Columbia occupied a position of isolation beyond the great barriers of the Rocky Mountains.
On the 20th of July, 1871, British Columbia entered the Dominion of Canada, and on the same day the survey parties for a transcontinental railroad started their work. One of the conditions on which British Columbia entered the Dominion was, that a railroad to connect her with the east should be constructed within ten years.
More than three and one half millions of dollars were expended in these preliminary surveys, and eleven different lines were surveyed across the mountains before the one finally used was selected. Nor was this vast amount of work accomplished without toil and danger. Many lives were lost in the course of these surveys, by forest fires, drowning, and the various accidents in connection with their hazardous work. Ofttimes in the gloomy gorges and canyons, especially in the Coast Range, where the rivers flow in deep channels hemmed in and imprisoned by precipitous walls of rock, the surveyors were compelled to cross awful chasms by means of fallen trees, or, by drilling holes and inserting bolts in the cliffs, to cling to the rocks far above boiling cauldrons and seething rapids, where a fall meant certain death. The ceaseless exertion and frequent exposure on the part of the surveyors were often unrewarded by the discovery of favorable routes, or passes through the mountains. The Selkirk Range proved especially formidable, and only after two years of privation and suffering did the engineer Rogers discover, in 1883, the deep and narrow pass which now bears his name, and by which the railway seeks a route across the crest of this range, at the bottom of a valley more than a mile in depth.
The romance of an eagle leading to the discovery of a pass is connected with a much earlier date. Mr. Moberly was in search of a pass through the Gold Range west of the Selkirks, and one day he observed an eagle flying up a narrow valley into the heart of these unknown mountains. He followed the direction of the eagle, and, as though led on by some divine omen, he discovered the only route through this range, and, in perpetuation of this incident, the name Eagle Pass has been retained ever since.