Discovery
During the 1870s when the Canadian Pacific Railway was being planned, the preferred route through the Rocky Mountains was the northerly Yellowhead Pass. When the railway construction project was turned over to a private company in 1881, the route was changed to the Kicking Horse Pass. While the railway was being built across the prairies, the railway company had to find a pass over the unexplored Selkirk Mountains, or else it would have to detour around them via the Big Bend.
Major A. B. Rogers was hired in April 1881 by the railway company to find the pass with the promise of having the pass named after him and a $5000 bonus. Walter Moberly had discovered Eagle Pass just to the west, and based on suggestions in Moberly's reports, Rogers started out from what is now Revelstoke, up the Illecillewaet River. Running out of food, Rogers and his party almost reached the summit but turned back feeling reasonably confident that a pass existed. Rogers returned the following year, 1882, from the east and reached a point where he could see where he had stopped the previous season, confirming that the pass existed and was good enough for the railway rapidly approaching across the prairies. Rogers was reluctant to cash the $5000 cheque, and instead framed it for his wall until CPR General Manager William Cornelius Van Horne offered him a gold watch as an incentive to cash it.
Read more about this topic: Rogers Pass (British Columbia)
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universal ... that error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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—George Berkeley (1685–1753)
“He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)