Michael James Heney (1864 – 1910)
Michael Heney was born in the Ottawa Valley near present-day Stonecliffe, Ontario to Irish immigrants Thomas and Mary Ann McCourt Heney. He ran away from home when he was fourteen and worked in construction on the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). An elder brother brought him back to the family farm and he remained there until he was seventeen, when he went west to the CPR end of steel at Elkhorn, Manitoba. He worked as a muleskinner and then laid rail until 1883 when he joined the survey crew. He worked in the mountains through 1884 and 1885 and learned all phases of railway construction. He was twenty-one when the last spike was driven. Heney returned east to earn an engineering degree before returning to British Columbia where he was awarded contracts by the CPR.1)
Heney moved to Seattle in 1887 and built the Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad in two years. In 1896, he constructed a mine hydraulic at Anchor Point, Alaska. During the Klondike gold rush he surveyed a route for a railway into the Yukon interior. Heney was hired by Close Brothers of London, the owners of the White Pass & Yukon Route railway, as the labour foreman and, completing the last two-thirds of the line as the contractor, earned an international reputation. He and other contractors drove the last spike at Carcross in July 1900.2)
In 1901, J.P. Morgan and the Guggenhems’ Copper River Railway companies had interests in Alaskan copper claims. Heney founded the Copper River Railway Company and had a route surveyed through the Copper River Valley to copper and coal deposits in the area. He began construction of the rail line in 1906 with the support of the Close Brothers and engineer Erastus Corning Hawkins. The American companies started their own railway and then had to pay Heney $250,000 for his survey and gave him the contract to complete the Copper River and Northwestern Railroad. Heney had finished the most difficult sections by July 1909 and then left for Seattle. On his return trip a month later, the steamer Ohio struck a rock and sank in Milbanke Sound. Heney developed pulmonary tuberculosis and died a year later. A range of mountains, a mountain peak, and a glacier were named in his honour.3)