Tragedies of the Crowsnest Pass

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

Those farmers who felt that the federal government’s recent decision to abandon the Crowsnest Pass freight rates was a disaster they could ill afford might be consoled by knowing that the area has seen far worse in its history, since over 600 people have died from deadly shoot-outs, plane crashes, fires, explosions, floods, avalanches, and other calamities.

After a short and enticing Introduction, the first chapter of the book, written by Frank Anderson, tells what happened in April 1903, when a gigantic wedge of limestone (2,100 feet high, 3,000 feet wide, and 500 feet thick) crashed down from Turtle Mountain obliterating an entire mine and railway and part of the Town of Frank, taking 70 lives — all in approximately 100 seconds. In a second chapter, Mr. Anderson recounts how a terrifying explosion claimed 189 lives in the nearby Hillcrest coal mine eleven years later, in June 1914. Charles Elick, one of the miners who survived the Frank slide, was not so fortunate second time around. In the third chapter, Elsie G. Turnbull recounts the series of fires, floods, and mine explosions that seemed to plague the town of Fernie, on the B.C. side of the pass, for many years of its history.

This reviewer has only one important caveat about this collection. Anderson, in his journalistic attempt to create a “you were there” effect, insists on telling what virtually everyone in town was doing before each tragedy. He succeeds, but probably not in the way he intended — since one feels suffocated by all those names. That caveat aside, his Frank story, like his Hillcrest story, is still a good read, in part because it comes complete with well-drawn maps and well-chosen pictures. For this reviewer’s money, though, Turnbull’s Fernie stories make up the best chapter in the book — perhaps because they are less intense and better documented.

The recent debate over freight rates aside, the Crowsnest Pass seems to have triumphed over its past, according to the final chapter of this book. Reading more like a tourist brochure than a conclusion, the anonymous author implies that the worst disaster that befalls anyone these days takes place on the numerous golf courses that dot the area.