“That was the hardest Sunday’s work I’ve ever done, and [I] hope it will be the last to [do] of that kind.”—Irwin.
Of British Columbia’s many outstanding missionaries, surely Father Pat Irwin was among the most extraordinary.
Although his Christian name was Henry and he was an Anglican rather than a Catholic, the miners christened him Father Pat because he was Irish. He, in turn, treated one and all equally, regardless of religious belief. Should, as occasion demanded, a skeptic choose to argue his case with his fists, Father Pat was ready, willing and able to oblige.
Born in August 1859, the son of a vicar, Irwin was educated in Dublin to be a missionary, during which time he excelled in sports. This background was to prove invaluable when, years later and a world away, he carried the word of God to the wild and woolly camps of B.C.
His career began in 1885 after his service as curate at Rugby when he was assigned to serve as an assistant to the bishop at New Westminster. Once there, he was forwarded to Kamloops to embark upon what would a lifelong crusade of administering to the spiritual and ofttimes material needs of the miners, railway workers and settlers.
It was in the bustling Canadian Pacific Railway construction camp of Donald that Irwin built his church. And it was there that he recorded details of what he termed the strangest procession ever.
“I must write you a line to tell you of one of the most weird things you ever heard of and what I have just gone through today,” he wrote to a friend. “A few days ago up here in the Selkirks an avalanche came thundering down Mount Carroll…smashed into two [locomotives] and the snow plough [sic], burying them completely, and 16 men with them. Nothing was to be seen of them but the end of the plow and the smokestack of one engine, which was buried up altogether.
“When the few men who were around saw this, they set in digging and got out 10, but six of the poor fellows were killed. The men dared not to go on digging for long, as avalanches were coming down all around them, and they were in peril of their lives. It was a strange scene, and a heartrending one, too. They have got all the bodies out. One of them was the husband of a poor woman in Donald whom I knew. I had to break the news to her and as there was no one to hurry up things, I started for Donald yesterday, and after a ride of 12 miles on an engine, I got to Bear Creek last evening late.”
Early in the morning he and his companions pushed on to the camp where the bodies of the avalanche victims were being kept. With 10 men to pack the coffin containing the remains of his friend’s husband, he began the return trip to town.
‘…I think of all queer frisks,” he marvelled, “this day’s was the greatest I ever had.”
Encumbered by heavy clothing, snowshoes and the weighty coffin, the burial party was forced to run from one snow shelter to another while keeping close watch on the mountainside so as to time their sprints between avalanches whose thunder resembled an artillery barrage.
The slides, he wrote, were preceded by a roaring and flurry of snow which “always told us when they came…exactly like artillery booming away [with] the smoke curling from the guns and, true to the simile, the great snow or ice balls came thundering down with all the rightful force of cannon balls.”
They had to “climb over slides between the snow slides, and that by a bad trail, over perhaps 30 feet of snow and trees, and you fancy that these 200 or 300 yards did not take us long to make. The scene of the accident was too awful and too weird to describe, all snow around, piled up 100 feet, and there down in the hole, the engines, and the graves of the poor six, one of whom we had to put in a coffin, and start back along that fearful hillside, and run all the risk again.”
He termed it “the strangest funeral procession that ever passed on earth. Fancy avalanches rumbling and thundering around, and 12 men trailing across the hills with a coffin swinging on a pole, every man listening for the avalanches above him and going as fast as he could across the 200 yards between the sheds. I can tell you, it made one think of the 600 ride into the valley of death. [He’s alluding to the immortal Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War.]
“However, thank God, we got through all safe [and] we don’t have to do it again. I am going to Donald tomorrow with the coffin.”
In a second letter Irwin again impressed upon his friend the horrors of that funeral procession across the snow, “the weirdest funeral that ever the wildest imagination could paint”. Even when safe in Donald, he continued to relive every terrifying moment of that mad race down the mountain slopes, between snow sheds and snow slides.
“You can only think of great gigantic heights up to 4,000 feet above you, and some 20 feet off snow on the hillsides, then to hear the rumbling like a roll of thunder, you see the smoke rolling from guns and the slide rushes into the gulch below you at 100 miles a minute. No place can give you a better idea of the power of nature and the powerlessness of man. There is no railroad to be seen; the only things to mark the line [are] the tops of telegraph poles on the butt ends here and there where they have been turned end-wise.”
On Sunday morning Irwin decided it was safe to begin the 24-mile trek along the railway line to Donald. Dividing his volunteers into three six-man teams, he stationed them at various locations along the route, each taking turns to pull the toboggan with its coffin to the next relay point as Father Pat took his turn on the towline or broke trail through three feet of packed snow.
They struggled on at the rate of two miles per hour until, late in the afternoon, they were able to hitch a ride to a way station where Irwin wired to Donald for another train. They finally returned to town about midnight.
Sighed Irwin: “That was the hardest Sunday’s work I’ve ever done, and [I] hope it will be the last to [do] of that kind. Of course, I should not have done it unless the poor wife was here fretting her heart away that her husband’s body was lying miles away in the snow.”
