Born May 28, 1829 at Orleans, Massachusetts, Albert Bowman apprenticed as a ship’s carpenter but went to sea but one time. Entering the engineering faculty of Brown University in 1851, he transferred to Yale, earning a bachelor's degree in 1853. He worked as an engineer on the Erie Canal, later moving to Iowa and then Minnesota. While an engineer for the Chicago, Milwaukee and St Paul Railroad he gained the name of the “The Railway Pathfinder”. While there he caught the eye of James Jerome Hill of the Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR), who hired him to find routes through the Rockies and the Selkirks, the next range west of the Rockies.
While he sent out a party of surveyors to locate the pass through the Rockies, he tackled the Selkirks personally and, after three tries, located what came to be Rogers Pass.
Rogers was determined to find the pass, which Hill had promised to name after him. “His driving ambition was to have his name handed down in history,” his friend, the packer Thomas Edmond Wilson, said of him. “For that he faced unknown dangers and suffered privations.” “To have the key-pass in the Selkirks bear his name was the ambition he fought to realize.”
The date was July 24, 1882 and the Canadian Pacific Railroad was completed in 1885 with the driving of the last spike at Craigellachie at 9:22 am on November 7, 1885, an event which Rogers attended. With the completion of the CPR Hill hired Rogers as engineer for his own railroad, the Great Northern. In 1887 Rogers was badly injured in a fall from his horse, ending his career. He died two years later of stomach cancer at the home of his brother in Waterville, Minnesota.
This bust of Rogers is mounted in the museum of the Rogers Pass Discovery Centre at the summit of the pass which bears his name, Rogers Pass. It is the pass used not only by the Canadian Pacific Railroad, but the Trans Canada Highway, as well. The elevation at the summit is 1,330 metres, or 4,360 feet. This is not a particularly high summit but, due to is location and the surrounding geography it receives a tremendous amount of snow each winter, as much as 45.5 feet on nearby Mount Fidelity. As a result avalanches are an ever present and dangerous threat. The most deadly occurred on March 4, 1910, when sixty-two railway workers died when an avalanche buried a crew trying to free a train caught in a previous avalanche. Snowsheds have been built to protect both highway and railway in the most avalanche prone spots. To reduce the grade and to minimize avalanche danger, the railroad has since been rerouted through two tunnels, the Connaught Tunnel, begun on April 2, 1914 and the Mount Macdonald Tunnel, inaugurated on May 4, 1989.
The quote above is from Biographi Canada
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