Bridges of the Pend d’Oreille

The portion of the Pend d’Oreille River that flows through Canada is only 24 kilometers long, but four bridges have crossed it, two of which still stand.

One is semi-famous because it’s the oldest bridge in BC in situ and was converted from a railway crossing into a highway bridge. Two others were privately owned and are now gone. While the four bridges never stood simultaneously, there were two periods where three of them existed at once.

Two or three other Pend d’Oreille bridges were proposed but not built, along with another planned to cross the Columbia at its confluence with the Pend d’Oreille. Quite a bit of preliminary work was done on the one of these, but the rest were merely theoretical.

For good measure, I’ve included on this list a series of bridges that crossed the Salmo River near its confluence with the Pend d’Oreille, one of which has some unusual attributes.

Five of the bridges are labelled on the Google map below.

BRIDGES THAT ARE

Waneta highway bridge

I wrote an extensive history of my beloved Waneta bridge in 2011 for the Trail Journal of Local History but here is the short version: It was built in 1893 as part of the Nelson and Fort Sheppard Railway that connected Northport and Nelson, and nicknamed Cooper’s Grasshopper after its designer, Hugh Lincoln Cooper, who went on to become the 20th century’s most noted hydroelectric engineer.  

The 500-foot steel cantilever structure was built by the San Francisco Bridge Co., who undercut other bidders by figuring out a way to ship materials to the site without having to pay duty. Once completed, provincial inspector George Keefer declared the bridge “a piece of excellent work” and its piers and abutments “good for all time to come.”

By 1945, the Great Northern Railway, which had long since acquired the Nelson and Fort Sheppard, was running trains with heavier loads than the Waneta bridge was designed to handle and decided to build a replacement, immediately adjacent. (Which had the unfortunate effect of obscuring the old bridge’s lines.)

Washington state legislator Patrick H. Graham (pictured), who was from Boundary, just south of Waneta, championed the idea of turning the old bridge into a highway crossing, as had been done with the old Northport railway bridge in 1923. The Great Northern sold the bridge to the BC government for $1. It was planked and opened to single-lane traffic in late 1947 or early 1948.

In recent years, some interpretive signage has been installed close to what is now the oldest surviving bridge in BC, at 131 and counting. (The only other bridges that might give it a run for its money are along the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway on Vancouver Island.)

Although local politicians seem hellbent on replacing it with something utilitarian to facilitate truck traffic, the Ministry of Transportation has not shown any interest in doing so. I’m optimistic the bridge will outlast us all. Historical photos of the bridge (and Waneta in general) can be found here.

BC’s oldest bridge on July 23, 2020 and in May 2001.

Waneta train bridge

As alluded to above, the current steel train bridge was built in 1947, adjacent to the old train bridge that was afterward converted for highway traffic. However, I can find very little about the new bridge’s construction, which is odd considering it was no small feat. The Hamilton Bridge Co. received the contract, but I don’t know what the price was.

One intriguing thing online suggests the spans were actually recycled from the Great Northern bridge at Marcus, Wash., which was inundated following the completion of the Grand Coulee dam. Its sections were then salvaged for other projects.

While the present Waneta train bridge does resemble the spans of the old Marcus bridge, I nevertheless find it doubtful that it could have come from there, because the latter was disassembled in 1942. If a portion ultimately went to Waneta, where was it stored for five years? In any case, Dan Bolyard’s slideshow about the Marcus bridge is fascinating and worth a look. He created it a few years ago for the Great Northern Railway Historical Society’s annual convention in Nelson.

Waneta train bridge in August 2007, July 23, 2020 and Oct. 7, 2021.

BRIDGES THAT WERE

Red bridge

This 350-foot wooden suspension bridge was built in 1921-22 at a cost of about $25,000 by the Waneta Power Co., who tried unsuccessfully to build a hydroelectric plant near the confluence of the Salmo and Pend d’Oreille rivers.

The latter spot was also where a company principal, Jack Falls, had a townsite surveyed called Falls City that amounted to nothing. The bridge, however, was about a mile to the west. It was intended to access a sawmill the company built on the south side of the river to replace one that burned a year prior, although the mill was reportedly never completed.

The captions on these photo read: “Bridge near Waneta built during the construction of a sawmill by James Seeley from Washington” and is part of a series of photos Seeley took in 1921. (Trail Historical Society No. 12924 and 12913)

The bridge still came in handy, though, because the Red Bird Mining Co. paid $100 per year to use it to access their claims. The bridge was wide enough and sturdy enough to take mining equipment across. It was padlocked, but Red Bird was given a key.

The arrangement soured in 1926 when Jack Falls alleged breach of contract by Red Bird and changed the locks. It’s not clear what his beef was, but the Nelson Board of Trade went to bat for the mining company. However, according to the Nelson Daily News, “Lengthy efforts to secure a reversal of this attitude, and to secure the intervention of the government, have met with complete failure.” As a result, the mine closed.

By 1939, the structure was known as the red bridge, because it was painted red and perhaps also because of the Red Bird mine. By that time, people were living where the sawmill site had once been. I’m not sure if they were leasing the land from Jack Falls or squatting, but one of the buildings they used was probably a log cabin built at the time of the sawmill’s construction.

As Art Buckley explained in the book Beaver Valley and the Pend d’Oreille:

Families came in from Alberta and Ontario and they did placer mining … Some could come as families, some would just be bachelors. Across the river there in the Hungry ‘30s there must have been eight or nine families, beside a bunch of bachelors and all they did was to placer mine — or pan for — gold in the river. They’d shoot deer for meat and they had good gardens; in fact one of the pipelines that Jack Falls put in, when he was going to put that sawmill in, they used for water for their gardens.

Buckley said most people left during the Second World War, leaving just Ted Jablonski, who continued to prospect until his death. (I can’t find an obituary or death registration for him, although others named Jablonsky were in the area.) Jablonski apparently had a placer mining partner named Pello at one time.

By one account, the settlement was known as Placerville, but you won’t find it on any map or in any civic directory. Ed Brown, quoted in the same book mentioned above, also recalled this place: “The last time I was in there, there was about eight small houses. It was all going to ruin.” He didn’t say when that was, but he was interviewed in the 1970s.

Denis Rorick, who has lived in the Pend d’Oreille most of his life, told me he hasn’t been to the spot in a long time, but when last he visited, a couple of buildings were still standing. The final people to live there were Art and Betty Thomas, whose cabin is now on Denis’ property.

Spokane Spokesman-Review, Oct. 29, 1922

What happened to the bridge? It was still standing as of 1951. We only know this because of a geological report from that year discussing the Red Bird mine: “The property was formerly reached by two miles of trail from the suspension bridge which crossed the Pend Oreille River about a mile below the junction with the Salmo River. This bridge is no longer safe and access now is devious and long … The suspension bridge could be repaired for foot travel but the cost would be considerable.”

It does not appear the bridge was ever repaired. Rorick remembers walking across it, but “the decking was so bad that you couldn’t drive a vehicle across … The Thomases brought their vehicle across it, but they put two planks down and drove to the end of the planks, then put another [set of planks] down.”

Rorick says the bridge was blown up by the provincial government because it was unsafe. Did Jack Falls still own it at the time? I don’t know. He died in Trail in 1952. Perhaps his death hastened its destruction.

Remac bridge

In September 1969, the Reeves MacDonald Mines Ltd. prepared to open a new lead-zinc-silver mine known as the Annex, across the Pend d’Oreille from its primary mine at Remac. To access it, they planned a bridge more than 400 feet long.

Nelson’s Ray Johnson (pictured) was a surveyor/engineer on the bridge project and knew more about it than anyone. He died this year, but I am very lucky to have interviewed him about it in 2013, long before I became deeply interested in the subject.

He explained the company needed the bridge completed by the end of the year to take advantage of a tax write-off, giving them only three months. But that wasn’t enough time to bring in steel for a conventional beam bridge, so they had to go with two Bailey spans, connected to a small island in the middle of the river.

“They had the bridge man and knew they had to put in a Bailey bridge but didn’t know exactly where and didn't have exact measurements,” Johnson told me. “They had a rough idea, but I had to measure it and damn near got drowned several times out in the boat.”

Johnson worked for A.B. Sanderson and Co. and reported to Ramsay Murray, previously a government bridge engineer. Their immediate problem was finding a dozen carpenters. Johnson first asked Nelson contractor (and longtime mayor) Louis Maglio, who was building Johnson’s house in Rosemont. However, Maglio turned him down, as he didn’t think he could get enough workers and wasn’t prepared to take on such a large project.

Next Johnson approached a contractor from Castlegar (whose name he couldn’t remember) who had just built a school in Fernie. “I explained the job. Just grab 20 guys or so, go to work and get paid the going rate, lots of overtime, and you can stay right in the mining camp there. The best of food and accommodation, separate rooms for every guy. Go to it. It worked like a damn.”

Starting to build the bridge across the Pend d’Oreille River to the Annex mine across from Remac. (Pend Oreille County Library District/Washington Rural Heritage)

The project involved considerable concrete work, doweling, and reinforcement of piers. But perhaps the biggest challenge was placating the very annoyed operators of the Waneta dam. As Johnson explained:

I had the river shut down for three weeks. It was costing West Kootenay Power conservatively $8,000 a day — but I think it may have been $8,000 an hour. I went to the US Corps of Engineers just by phone. I said “I’ve got to put some piers out in the Pend d’Oreille River on some benches that we can see down there in the swirling water. I’ve got to get two piers out there for this bridge. I’ve got to get the water level lowered.” “Oh, you’d like the river shut down a little bit?” I said “Yeah, could you knock it down to half flow?” They said “Sure, whatever you want!”

Good thing West Kootenay Power wasn’t there. Did they ever start screaming! “What the hell are you doing?” It was reasonable for a few days, but when it went to three weeks, they were up every day. We had all the [Remac] mine crew, 20 guys or so, out there drilling the dowels into the bedrock and piers because they were sitting on a couple of ledges. We didn’t know whether they would fall into the river. We had to dowel down more than 20 feet to reinforce them and make sure they were stable.

The bridge was completed in 60 days — so fast that the Nelson Daily News suggested “some kind of record must have been established.”

It cost about $200,000 (though I’m not sure if that’s in American or Canadian currency), which, according to Johnson, was under budget: “The mine superintendent was so pleased he said it’s gotta be written up in the mining magazine what you guys got done here.”

Some things about the Annex mine development did appear in Engineering and Mining magazine, but I haven’t been able to locate the relevant issues, so I don’t know if the bridge was mentioned. The bridge did, however, appear in at least a couple of newspaper photos.

Spokane Daily Chronicle, Feb. 12, 1970

Nelson Daily News, May 22, 1970

The caption above has a couple of odd statements. First: “The bridge gives the company quick access to its annex on the United States side of the river.” The phrasing seems to have fueled the myth that the Annex mine was actually in Washington state. It was not; there just hadn’t been any road access to it, from Canada or the US. Second: “The temporary crossing has since been replaced with a permanent bridge.” Johnson didn’t say anything about the Bailey bridge being replaced.

While I don’t know if the bridge was gated, you needed permission to cross it, since it was privately owned. Denis Rorick told me he walked across because he had a placer lease on the other side.

Aerial shots of the bridge appeared in a circa 1973 BC Hydro film called Project at Seven Mile, which they kindly allowed me to include here.  

To my surprise, the footage reveals another crossing! Was this the temporary bridge referred to in the Nelson Daily News? Or a utility bridge to deal with sewage? Johnson said his company designed and built a sewage disposal system for 20 homes at Remac. However, a survey plan he created at the end of 1969 suggests the mystery crossing was actually a power line. Yet it looks more substantial — we wouldn’t be able to see it as well if it was only lines suspended in the air.

The Annex mine began production in April 1970 and slightly extended Remac’s life. The old ore bodies on the east side of the Pend d’Oreille were depleted by mid-1971 but the Annex kept going, with its ore milled at Remac. However, a gloomy report from the company in 1972 suggests they knew the end was near. Mining operations stopped in October 1973 and development and exploration ceased by April 1975. On Sept. 8, 1977 all the mining equipment and buildings at Remac were auctioned off.

Calgary Albertan, Aug. 13, 1977

(There was no mention in the ad of the company homes that once stood there. I don’t know if they had already been removed.)

As for the Remac bridge? When BC Hydro proposed the Seven Mile Dam, a public hearing in 1974 was told the bridge might have to be raised or replaced: “BC Hydro has held discussions with the company and will be working to satisfactorily conclude the problems created by raising the river level.”

I don’t know if a deal was reached before the mine stopped operating, but an Alberta rancher ultimately bought the mining properties, including the bridge. Ray Johnson said prior to Seven Mile’s construction, water never lapped at the bridge deck, although it came close. With the raising of the reservoir, the bridge was at risk of flooding or being knocked out by log jams, creating a potential liability for BC Hydro.

So they went to the guy and said how much do you want to take the bridge out? I got involved a little bit with what is it worth to pull it out? He was just going to get paid some money and he had to look after taking the bridge out. There was a guy from up Winlaw way that took the contract. I went down and looked at it when he was taking it out. Had a hell of a time. It wasn’t that hard putting the bridge in, but he had a hell of a time pulling it out. It should have been easier to pull out than put in in the first place.

I neglected to ask Johnson what made removal so much more difficult than construction. 

I assumed, however, that this all took place prior to Seven Mile’s completion in late 1979. So I was very surprised to learn that BC Hydro’s records show they didn’t pay the landowner (a mining company) to remove the bridge until 1987!

The agreement also included a clause that allowed for the bridge to be rebuilt if the piers were raised another 1.37 meters. In 2008, a geologist noted this possibility in a report for ReMac Zinc Development Corp., although nothing has come of it or is likely to.

The massive concrete pylons are still there, though, easily seen on Google Earth and from shore, which must puzzle the heck out of most people who encounter them, since they seem like remnants of a bridge to nowhere.

The remains of the Remac bridge on July 7, 2024.

As seen on Google Earth.

BRIDGES THAT WEREN’T

Highway bridge

In 1911, a wooden highway bridge was proposed across the Pend d’Oreille, although work didn’t start until five years later. Plans called for a 160-foot Howe truss, crossing half a mile upstream of the Waneta railway bridge. The project was considered equally important to BC and Washington state, and in 1916, Rossland-Trail MLA James Schofield met with legislators at Olympia, including Boundary resident Patrick H. Graham, to finalize the details. The southern approach was completed and rock excavation for the piers was nearly finished when the provincial government pulled the plug in 1917, pleading poverty because of wartime. The Trail board of trade resurrected the idea in 1933 but faced pushback from Rossland city council, which called it an “unjustified expenditure.” It went no further.

Seven Mile Dam bridges

When BC Hydro proposed the Seven Mile Dam, three routes were considered for getting materials and workers to the site, one of which involved one or two new bridges across the Pend d’Oreille to access the project from the south. From 1974 public hearing transcripts, I glean that one bridge had an estimated cost of $750,000 and was said to be comparable to a bridge built across the Kootenay River during the Kootenay Canal project. However, it doesn’t sound like too much energy was invested in this option and ultimately a different route was chosen that didn’t require new bridges.

It was also suggested that either or both of the existing highway and railway bridges at Waneta might be used to connect with a new road to be pushed through on the south side of the Pend d’Oreille, but the Department of Highways concluded they couldn’t handle the loads.

Columbia River railway bridge

While it would not have crossed the Pend d’Oreille, I’ll mention another bridge that failed to materialize. In 1913, the CPR proposed a couple of new branch lines to connect Metaline Falls with Trail and Salmo. One would have followed the Pend d’Oreille to Waneta and then crossed the Columbia and followed its west side north to Trail. The required bridge would have been 700 to 800 feet long. While the rail lines were surveyed, neither was built.

SALMO RIVER BRIDGES

A series of bridges existed at the confluence of the Salmo and Pend d’Oreille Rivers. While we know little about the first two, photos do exist of them. The Trail Historical Society has two pictures of a CPR survey crew crossing one of them, dated 1912. The crew may have been surveying one of the phantom rail lines mentioned above.

(Trail Historical Society Nos. 0562 and 0569)

The BC Archives has an undated photo of the second bridge, showing a pack train crossing a wooden truss bridge.

(Image D-07684 courtesy Royal BC Museum and Archives)

The third bridge was a 105-foot wooden Howe truss built in 1951, which was briefly seen in the circa 1973 BC Hydro film Project at Seven Mile, which appears below with their permission.

The fourth bridge, built in 1979, is known as the Blue bridge (because it’s blue) and is still in use. Initially all I could find on its construction was this note in the Ministry of Transportation’s 1979-80 report: “This crossing was spanned by a Japanese type ‘Bailey Bridge’ new to Canada and attracted much interest.”

What is a Japanese-type Bailey bridge and why was it so interesting? Google had no answer, so I asked the Ministry of Transportation. They provided a bit of info but told me I would have to file a freedom of information request to get more.

It took several months, but it was worth the wait, for the material I received revealed all sorts of things about the bridge’s construction as well as the surprising fate of the bridge it replaced. I have appended the entire file below (and at this link if it doesn’t automatically load in your browser).

Here is the summary: the old bridge might have lasted a while longer but for the Seven Mile Dam, whose completion on Nov. 3, 1979 was expected to raise reservoir levels and flood the bridge. It’s not clear from the file exactly how much notice the Ministry of Transportation had of this problem, but it’s apparent they had to work fast.

In the summer of 1979, the ministry picked a site for a new Bailey bridge at a higher elevation. The initial proposal called for a 160-foot Acrow bridge with 15-foot approach spans at each end. But the ministry also sought a quote from West Bridge Corp. of Kamloops on what was known as a KD (Krupp Design) truss using components designed in West Germany and pre-fabricated in Japan by Hirose Steel Industrial Co.  

(While Krupp existed until merging with another company in 1999, the KD truss design didn’t catch on. A Google search turns up no other examples or even mentions of that bridge type.)

The quote came back at $187,869 for materials plus $20,000 for installation. The government decided to push ahead. West Bridge would place the bridge on a substructure constructed by a ministry bridge crew. The time frame was exceedingly tight: the truss was to be delivered by Sept. 30 and the bridge had to be finished by Oct. 31. If completed on schedule, this bridge would be assembled even faster than the Remac bridge, although it was not nearly as long.

However, after the order for the truss was placed, a geotechnical engineer raised an alarm about the instability of the rock slope on the crossing’s east bank. Four options were considered: lengthening the bridge by ordering more components at an estimated cost of $60,000; bolting the east canyon wall; moving the bridge to the east; and re-aligning the highway. It was decided that realignment was the most practical solution. This resulted in a more direct crossing of the canyon at a spot where the rock appeared more solid and also eliminated the need for the approach span on the east side.

Construction photos from the Ministry of Transportation file

Details of the substructure construction and truss assembly may be of interest to engineers, but I won’t get into them except to say the truss was put together with a crew of 10, including two representatives from the Japanese fabricator. They ran into a few issues but resolved them.

I learned something new: when a crane swings a prefabricated bridge onto its substructure, it’s called “launching the truss.” This is what attracted the interest of out-of-town ministry personnel, who wanted to witness the launch of the first KD truss in Canada.

The delicate procedure was originally scheduled for Oct. 26, but didn’t occur until three days later, by which time most of the visitors had been forced to depart. Alas. The project was declared completed one day before its deadline and the new bridge opened on Nov. 10, 1979.

The Salmo River bridge (aka Blue bridge) on July 7, 2024.

Three postscripts on this one:

• Because the two Bailey towers on the west end of the bridge spend part of the year underwater, the ministry contemplated encasing them in concrete, but it never happened.

• Before receiving the project file, I’d heard that due to an error, the truss was too short, necessitating the approach span on the west side to fill the gap. The file suggests this was not the case, although I’m still a bit hazy on the matter. It appears the span was either the result of the last-minute realignment to address geotechnical concerns, or was always part of the plan but the realignment made a matching approach on the east side unnecessary. Either way, the bridge is asymmetrical.

• The fate of the 1951 Howe truss bridge is unusual and interesting.

The bridge was needed right up until the new one was completed, so it wasn’t possible to remove it before the river level came up. Instead the truss was cut off at both ends and allowed to float, with the top of the deck just above the water. The truss was tied with wire rope to trees on shore.

A letter from regional highway engineer W.M. Sproul indicated that as of Dec. 3, 1979, the truss remained “anchored to the shore in a semi-floating position.” He felt that “while some timber could be salvaged, the cost of doing so makes it hardly worthwhile.”

So he recommended it be advertised for sale as is, where is, on the condition the buyer remove it entirely and clean the site up. “We have had a number of inquiries concerning the proposed disposal of the bridge so should have no difficulty in disposing of it,” he said. “Even if it sold for only a nominal amount, it would be to our advantage.”

Nine days later, Sproul was given the go-ahead to sell the bridge. But it was already too late: some time between Dec. 3 and 10, the reservoir was drawn down and the entire truss collapsed. I don’t know if any attempt was made to salvage the pieces.

— With thanks to Mary Anne Coules, Katie Harris, Ray Johnson, Denis Rorick, and Nathan Wilkinson