Scanning our History
Revelstoke Museum and Archives has just completed a project through the Documentary Heritage Communities Program funded by Library and Archives Canada. Harumi Sakiyama was hired to digitize a selection of our Canadian Pacific Railway accident reports. The reports date from 1909 to 1935 and include documentation on accidents which occurred in the Revelstoke Division, including derailments, collisions, avalanches, fires, and other events. Part of the job involved looking through each file to determine which files were significant. In the end, more than 12,000 pages were digitized, with reports, correspondence, telegrams, and related documentation from 179 different incidents.
One of the biggest incidents in terms of loss of life was the March 4, 1910 Rogers Pass avalanche, which took the lives of 58 men. Through this project, we now have digitized copies of all of the original records related to this event, including telegrams, letters from family members who lost their loved ones, and correspondence with the contractors responsible for the 32 Japanese men who died in the slide.
A rockslide came down onto the track on August 17, 1915, just east of Golden, hitting a train and killing William McLennan, fireman. The slide was 100 feet long and 10 feet deep, and threw the engine onto its side. McLennan, age 36, left a wife and four sons, with the oldest age 6, and the youngest just a few weeks old. The files on this accident included memos indicating that the CPR would pay for a neighbour to accompany Mrs. McLennan to go back east with her family, considering that she had an infant to care for, as well as her three other young children. This was one of the very few reports to include photographs of the accident.
Rockslide east of Golden, August 1915. William McLennan died in this accident.
On January 27, 1929, a head-on collision between two freight trains happened at Lauretta, 17 miles east of Revelstoke. The two headend brakemen, Orville Thompson, age 23, and Alfred Abrahamson, age 24 both died in the collision. One day later, January 28, 1929, Jeffrey Griffith, age 20 and Bert Woodland, age 45, died when the bridge over Surprise Creek, east of Rogers Pass, collapsed and their engine plunged into the ravine. Both incidents had large files created, and these are now all scanned and available for anyone wanting access to them.
These are just a few of the many incidents that are represented by the reports. Behind the official records are stories of the people who worked on the railway, and the hazards that they faced in their everyday lives. We can read between the lines of the impersonal report forms and telegrams and discover stories of people’s real lives impacted by tragedies on the rail line. We can see how next-of-kin were treated – not always fairly, and how others involved in the events were treated, sometimes losing their jobs. Each one of the 179 files has a story to tell.
Over the course of the project, Harumi scanned all the documents and entered the information on them in our collections database. This will allow researchers to find information based on the names of individuals involved, or on specific events. Revelstoke Museum and Archives greatly appreciates the funding from the Documentary Heritage Communities Program of Library and Archives Canada that allowed us to complete this important project. The files can be accessed by contacting Revelstoke Museum and Archives.