Huff and Puff and Puff !

Some of my earlier blog postings discussed the various issues that the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) had to face as it was building the Transcontinental Railroad. The area near Field, British Columbia was particularly nasty! This post card helps to illustrate just how bad it was.

There are three steam engines pushing what looks like six passenger cars up the hill toward the summit of the Rocky Mountains just east of Field, British Columbia. If you look carefully, in the lower right hand corner of the picture is a short section of track that goes up a hill to nowhere in particular. CPR built several of these little spurs so that trains that lost control would have an emergency pull out to keep them from careening down the mountain side into the Kicking Horse River.


The picture on the front of this post card was taken by Richard H. Trueman.

He also printed the post card. Trueman first arrived in British Columbia in 1889. He had begun his career as a photographer in Brampton, Ontario, (where he was born in 1856) in the early 1880s at about the time replacement of the cumbersome wet-plate process by faster, commercially available dry-plates was revolutionizing photography, making outdoor photography an economic and practical reality. After working along the Canadian Pacific Railway main line for a year, Trueman and his partner, Norman Caple, set up headquarters in Vancouver. For the next four years the firm of Trueman & Caple worked between Winnipeg and the coast, specializing in mountain and railway views, ranch scenes and Indians.2 This specialty continued for Trueman even after the partnership dissolved and R. H. Trueman & Company of Vancouver was established in 1894. Although the company was primarily a portraiture business, the landscape and documentary sidelines remained Trueman's avocation. For the next sixteen years, until his death in 1911, he travelled the rails throughout the province, skilfully recording life and landscape.

This post card was mailed on August 24, 1909. It is over 100 years old.

NOT a Harmon.

As soon as I pick up these two post cards, I can tell that they were not published by Byron Harmon. The paper is thinner and the finish is glossy.

They are actually published by the Gowan Sutton Company out of Vancouver, British Columbia. Gowan and Sutton were both English by birth but came to Vancouver from two different ways. Gowan came through Manitoba (in 1913) and Sutton came via Ontario (in 1918); they were both photographers.

They formed the F. Gowan Co. on March 17, 1919 (Gowan had 4,000 shares to Sutton's 2,000 shares) and on March 17, 1920 they formed a partnership called the Gowan Sutton Co. Ltd. Frank Gowan sold his shares in the company in 1929 after his wife died. I cannot find if Sutton changed the name of the company after that. Frank Gowan developed a series of post cards for both the Canadian National and the Canadian Pacific Railways.

These two post cards are part of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

The first one tells us that it is on the Canadian Pacific Railway, in fact, it says that this is the "CPR TransCanada Limited near Field, BC." My research tells me that this one of Frank Gowan's photographs. The script is the same as the script on so many other of his photographs. The post card itself is a silver gelatin print.

The second post card is also a silver gelatin print, but this one has been colorized. A bit of green has been added to the picture to let us know that we are in a forest; and a bit of red has been added to the passenger cars, while some green found its way onto the observation car. The title has been put to the bottom of the post card and it is now in block letters. I wonder if this is the result of Mr. Sutton's work after he took full ownership of the company...

They both have a very similar rubber stamp on the back - like Byron Harmon's. It tells us the name of the publisher, that the address goes on the right and the correspondence goes on the left.

Introduction to Byron Harmon

This post card is a picture that was shot near the two spiral tunnels. It has a great shot of the Kicking Horse River in the background and the title written on the picture tells us that it is on Field Hill. This is still a steep section on the CPR main line. It is located near Field, B.C. a town that was built so that the Canadian Pacific Railway could add locomotives to trains to assist them over both Field Hill and the Big Hill (which I wrote about in the last posting).

The Railway built a roundhouse made of stone with a turntable so the engines could simply turn around go back to where they came. While Field Hill was not as steep as the Big Hill, it was steep enough to require assistance getting over even after the spiral tunnels were finished. Having said that, this is a picture of a train with only one engine on the head end. It must have been a very short train or there was one attached at the back.

This picture was taken by Byron Harmon as was the picture in the previous posting. I have about 30 of his train post card pictures. I will be sharing them with you over the next several blog postings. I will also be sharing some information about Mr. Harmon. I was impressed with the angles at which he was able to take some of these shots. I thought he must be very brave and adventurous to get to the places where he was to get these pictures. So, I investigated Byron Harmon. HE WAS BRAVE AND ADVENTUROUS!! You will find out more as we progress through the set of post cards I have in my collection.

The back of the post card can give us an idea of how old this particular card is.

In the top right, where the stamp goes, there is a rubber stamp marking. It says, “PLACE STAMP HERE” inside of a box that has AZO on all four sides and a square in each corner. The squares in the corners indicate that this post card was made sometime between 1926 and the 1940s. It is one of the younger cards with an AZO stamp on the back. They were started in 1907 with diamonds in the corners. On the left side of the card, Byron has stamped “ALONG LINE OF CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY” and included information that he was the photographer and he holds the copyright. It also tells us that he was headquartered in Banff, Alberta, Canada.

I have lived in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (about 400 kilometers or 250 miles from Banff) for 29 years. I have been to Banff and I have seen the building he built to house his business. I have talked to the person in the gallery and I have visited his granddaughter’s website.