Meanwhile, right on through the rebellion, the work was being pushed ahead in the mountains, although it was not generally known then that the Company at first had boldly thrust its spear-head against the embattled hills without very definite knowledge of how it was to get through beyond the Rockies. The Kicking-Horse Pass showed the way, along its flashing, frothing river, through the Rockies, but for some time there was doubt about how the Selkirk Range was to be pierced. So anxious was the Company about this problem that Mr. Sandford Fleming, the famous engineer, was summoned by cable from the Old Country to look into the situation. He journeyed by train to Calgary and went by trail through the Kicking Horse, but just then Major Rogers, a hard-bitten, adventurous man, acting on some information given by Walter Moberly years before, discovered the famous pass called Rogers’ Pass to this day. Rogers was an American engineer who, with his son Albert (after whom Albert Canyon was called by Principal Grant of Queen’s University, Secretary to Sandford Fleming on his journeys), had explored amid much hardships to find a pass through the Selkirks. When he did find it, the Company was so pleased that a bonus cheque for $5,000 was sent to Rogers. A few months afterwards Van Horne met Rogers and reminded him that he had never cashed the cheque. Rogers, who was well educated, but rough at times in temper and language, evidently had abundant sentiment withal. For he replied, “Do you think I would cash that cheque? I was not out there for money, but to have a hand in a big project. No, sir, I have that cheque framed in my brother’s house in Waterville, Minnesota, where my nephews and nieces can see it as a token of some work their old uncle did in his time.” Contractors who became famous later on in various ways were at work on the mountain section. The work on the prairies had been child’s play compared to it. A good old Scotch elder who came in to see me at the Coast twenty years ago was amazed at the enormous task that had been accomplished. In political life in Manitoba he had attacked what people called “the ruinous expenditure” on the road. But he said to me then, in 1903, in Vancouver: “Now that I have seen it I wonder that men ever undertook the work at any price, and so far as I am concerned I am through with criticism of the expenditure on construction.” And then the good man added, “The fact is that if the good Lord had not bored through the mountains with rivers, there is not enough money in the Empire to build to the Coast.” There was much in what this honest man said that day.