E.O. Wheeler, Mountaineer

By Wade Davis

E.O. Wheeler was the son of famed surveyor A.O. Wheeler, the man who first mapped the Rogers Pass. Edward Oliver Wheeler was awarded the Military Cross and membership in the French Legion of Honour, and after the war joined George Mallory’s expeditions to Mount Everest. Wheeler is the subject of a new book being written by BC’s Wade Davis, who told us more about what he considers a great, unsung Canadian hero.

Mallory for some reason had a great dislike of Canadians, but Oliver Wheeler, who was held in some disdain in 1921, was in fact an extraordinary man, and in the end Mallory came around to him. Wheeler’s father, Arthur, founded the Alpine Club of Canada. At a time when George Mallory was doing gymnastics at Winchester College, Oliver Wheeler was climbing first ascents in the Canadian Rockies—mountains that now bear his name.

Wheeler then went off to RMC, the highest-rated candidate for our military college. He graduated having won every single major award. He then went off to train as a Royal Engineer, and he was with the 7th Meerut Division at the outbreak of hostilities and immediately was dispatched to France. By the time the Indian contingent reached the battlefield, the topography of Armageddon had come into place and the trenches reached from the Swiss border to the English Channel. Now curiously I found Oliver Wheeler—who went on to become Surveyor General of India, knighted in World War II for his contribution in the creation of eighty million maps that more than anything kept the Japanese out of India—also found the route to the mountain, the route up the East Rongbuk Glacier to the North Col, the route climbers follow to this day from the Tibetan side. That’s often credited by the British in particular to George Mallory, but it was Oliver Wheeler.

Wheeler had been seconded to the expedition in 1921 with a mission of mapping the inner massif of the mountain with a new photo-topographical survey technique his father had invented in the Canadian Rockies. And so it was Oliver Wheeler who spent more time alone on the mountain exposed to the wrath of the mountain than anyone else in 1921. Ironically when it came time to assault the North Col in 1921, the reconnaissance mission, who does Mallory turn to? To accompany him to the highest point that human beings had ever reached? None other than Oliver Wheeler. They crested that North Col and they were met with a wind so ferocious that Oliver Wheeler said he thought he was going to suffocate and die. He survived it by remembering how he had survived artillery fire at the front by breathing between the blasts of the shellfire. And that night as they retreated from the North Col, having established a world height record at that time, George Mallory in this wonderful moment stayed up all night saving Wheeler’s life by rubbing his legs with whale oil.

The fascinating thing about Oliver Wheeler is that British historians say there was only one diary, one journal kept in 1921 as these Brits walked across Everest, four hundred miles into the unknown to come to close quarters with the mountain that no human being—no European that is—had ever embraced directly.

Now I found Oliver Wheeler’s son, a wonderful man, John Wheeler living not four blocks from the house I was born in in Vancouver. When I went to see Mr. Wheeler, over the course of a lovely afternoon he suddenly pulled two treasures off his book shelf, two fat journals that his father had kept as he marched across Tibet with Mallory in 1921. These were treasures not only for their content but for what you can read between the lines. On the day that Arthur Kellis dies and is buried, the entire journal entry from Oliver Wheeler reads, “Well, they buried the old boy in the morning, thought it’d be the afternoon, terribly sorry to have missed it, but I do hate funerals.”

How on earth do you miss the interment of one of the climbers you’re walking across Tibet with? I knew the answer had to lie in the Western Front. When Wheeler reached the front in the fall of 1914, the entire British Expeditionary Force had been wiped out, so the entire British sector of the line was held by the Canadians in the north and the Indian army in the south. By that time both sides had begun to sap each other, building perpendicular trenches from the main trench lines to get close, or raid, or toss bombs.

It came to the attention of Wheeler’s command on November 4, 1914, that the Germans had put two saps within thirty feet of their front line. As a Royal Engineer he was given the order to go over the top and bury that sap and to do so in a way that would dissuade the Germans from ever trying that tactic again. He goes over the top, all hell breaks loose, he’s got 125 men with him—machine-gun fire, artillery. To their horror they discover the saps are full of Germans about to attack them. The result is a melee of hand-to-hand combat of the worst sort. Eventually the Indians push the Germans back, but not before the entire trench is filled three bodies deep, chest-to-chest of dying boys of both sides flailing about as Wheeler would write, “Like trout in my creel.”

He tried to get his wounded out, but he did have to bury men alive, and he never knew how many he actually buried alive. So when he says on Everest, “I do hate funerals,” you begin to see the impact of that war on the lives of these men.

On the day he died in Vernon on April 16, 1962, there’s one single word in his journal, a journal he has kept since he was a boy in 1903. That word indisputably written in his own hand is a single word that says, “Died.” Imagine the discipline to be able to bring yourself to that point in a long series of journals and still be able to sign off in that way.

[To Top]

[Back to Chapter 15]