a pass, they had been unable to explore its eastern approach, a distance of from the junction of the Beaver and Columbia rivers. Returning in 1882 from the east, Rogers followed the Beaver River and Connaught Creek (formerly Bear Creek), and on July 24, 1882 he reached the same pass, confirming its existence and the feasibility of a railway route. Rogers refused to cash the $5,000 cheque, and instead framed it upon his wall until CP General Manager William Cornelius Van Horne offered him a gold watch as an incentive to cash it. Folklore has generated many later variations of this story. The discovery was due in part to the efforts of Moberly, his assistant Albert Perry and their First Nations guides, who had explored the Illecillewaet River on the west side of the pass fifteen year earlier. In later life Moberly stated that Perry reached the pass in 1866, but there is no contemporaneous evidence for this. Planning & construction Rogers blindly believed the pass presented no special engineering difficulties. By May 1883, the westward railhead had only reached Medicine Hat, still leaving time to find an alternative to the equally problematic Kicking Horse Pass. Moberly advocated Howse Pass. During the time it took to determine a practicable Kicking Horse/Selkirks route, the railhead had advanced up the Bow Valley making it too late to use Howse, which required an access from the North Saskatchewan River Valley. Since the immediate capital costs for the Selkirks and Big Bend options were similar, the additional operating costs expected from the increased mileage eliminated the latter. As a general rule, if the interest payable on a capital investment was less than the expected savings on operating costs, CP made the investment. Decisions were a trade-off between immediate costs and delayed costs. Later traffic revenue enabled upgrades. The acute capital shortage during 1885, meant months of unpaid payroll, and minor strikes. Captain Steele and his small North-West Mounted Police force protected construction manager Ross from confrontations with workers. When the Riel Rebellion drew Steele away, Ross formed his own 25-man armed police force. To survive the capital crisis, infrastructure costs were reduced to a bare minimum. Not only did untreated wooden trestles provide all bridging, but cuttings were of minimum width, track was not ballasted, and no snow sheds were built. Ballasting only occurred three years later. Although accurately predicting construction costs was difficult,