agement a contract was made in 1882, with Langdon
and Shepard of St Paul, to complete the line to Calgary. Later in the
year a construction company was organized, the North American Railway
Contracting Company, to build all the uncompleted sections of the main
line for $32,000,000 cash and $45,000,000 common stock. This was
really a financing rather than a construction expedient, and was
abandoned within a year.

In this section the engineering difficulties were not serious, but the
pace of construction which was demanded, and the fact that every stick
of timber and every pound of food, as well as every rail and spike, had
to be brought a great distance, required remarkable organization.
Three hundred sub-contractors were employed on the portion of the line
crossing the plains. Bridge-gangs and track-layers {162} followed
close on the graders' heels. In 1882 over two and a half miles of
track a day were laid. In the following year, for weeks in succession,
the average ran three and a half miles a day, and in one
record-smashing three days twenty miles were covered. By the end of
this year the track was within four miles of the summit of the Rockies.

The change of route across the plains had made it essential to pierce
the Rockies by a more southerly pass than the Yellowhead. The Kicking
Horse or Hector Pass, short but steep, was finally chosen, but here, as
at the Yellowhead, to cross the first range did not mean victory. The
towering Selkirk range faced the pass, as the Cariboo Mountains flanked
the Rockies farther north. Until the rails reached the hills the
engineers had found no way through them, and had contemplated a long
detour to the north, following the winding Columbia. Then Major
Rogers, the engineer whom James J. Hill had suggested to take charge of
the location of the mountain section, following up a hint of Moberly,
an earlier explorer, found a route, steep but practicable, across the
Selkirks, following the Beaver river valley and Bear Creek, and then
through Rogers Pass into the valley of the Illecillewaet, {163} and so
through Eagle Pass to the settled location at Kamloops. Both in the
Kicking Horse and in the Rogers Pass gradients of 116 feet to the mile
were found necessary, but these difficult stretches were concentrated
within one operating section of a hundred and twenty miles, and could
easily be overcome by the use of additional engines. Unique provision
was made against the mountai