Christopher Columbus died ignominiously in 1506, feeling discredited and disheartened, having once been dragged back to Spain in irons. The conqueror of Mexico, Hernán Cortéz, died of dysentery, a bitter and chronic complainant, long suspected of murdering his first wife. So when Walter Moberly died penniless and friendless in 1915, one of the 'forgotten heroes' of B.C. was in good company. In 1914 he had tried to immortalize his reputation with Blazing the Trail Through the Rockies: The Story of Walter Moberly and his Share in the Making of Vancouver in which he emphasized his many achievements since Governor James Douglas had encouraged his engineering bravado in 1858. Self-proclaimed as the founder of New Westminster (back when it was still named Queensborough), Moberly also claimed to be the original pre-emptor of land in the West End. But his great achievements were non-urban, in eastern B.C. and the Interior. He had built part of the Cariboo Highway between Lytton and Cache Creek and he had created the Dewdney Trail with Edgar Dewdney. More important, Moberly discovered Eagle Pass, the gateway through the Selkirk Mountains.

It was always Moberly's ambition to find a Northwest Passage-by land, not by sea-to allow for an all-Canadian route, by rail, across the continent. As a government surveyor, he had realized his dreams by trudging Cortéz-like through the snow-covered mountain ranges of the province. Eagle Pass allowed the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway to reach the West Coast via Revelstoke, thereby linking B.C. with the rest of the nation. "Walter Moberly...must occupy a place in our picturesque history second only to that of [George]Vancouver himself,"; the Vancouver Province once wrote. The Toronto Mail described him as 'the pioneer of pioneers,' a man on par with Alexander Mackenzie, Simon Fraser and Edgar Dewdney. But posterity has been far from generous to Walter Moberly. There's a Moberly school in Vancouver, a Moberly Road near False Creek, a Moberly Pub north of Golden, a Moberly Peak, a Moberly Theatre at Three-Valley Gap and a Moberly Park in south Vancouver, but precious few people know his first name.

A serious biography was always been lacking. In her even-tempered appraisal of her subject, Walter Moberly and the Northwest Passage by Rail (Hancock $14.95), former Maple Ridge museum curator Daphne Sleigh concludes the engineer's personality limited his fame, even during his lifetime. "Touchy, opinionated, careless with money and prone to self-importance,"; she writes, "he antagonized many people in spite of his sociable and generous nature... Yes, Walter Moberly was a flawed hero, but which of our heroes is not?";

Moberly 0-88839-510-8

[BCBW 2003]