The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (10 page)

Stephen, who had once thought the idea of building the line north of Lake Superior “great folly,” was becoming an enthusiastic champion of an all-Canadian route. When the contract was signed in 1880, he and, indeed, all the
CPR
directors had been cool to Macdonald’s plan to build it across the Shield. But in late August, 1881, Stephen confessed to the Prime Minister that “all misgivings I had last year … have disappeared with a better knowledge of the position of the whole country. I am now satisfied that the
C.P.R
. without the control of a line to the
Atlantic
seaboard would be a
mistake
. If for instance, it terminated like the Northern Pacific, at Lake Superior it never could become the property it is certain to be having its own rails running from sea to sea. I am sure you will be glad to hear this from me because I do not think but for your
own
tenacity on that point, would the line North of the Lake
ever
have been built, events have shown you were right and all the rest wrong.”

Some of this was flattery and some of it was close to being blackmail. Stephen had been aware, from the outset, of Macdonald’s obsession with an all-Canadian railway. He used his knowledge to good advantage – to bargain toughly for the insertion of the Monopoly Clause in the contract. The Prime Minister was made to understand that he could not have one thing without the other. If the
CPR
was to pay through the nose for an unprofitable line through an uninhabitable wilderness, it must receive compensation. Stephen might argue that this was merely an extension of the Conservative Party’s National Policy of protection, but that protection was paying big dividends for the proprietors of the
CPR
and of the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway whose directorates interlocked. The contract gave them a monopoly of all traffic out of Winnipeg into the United States and they made the most of it.

At the time he wrote that letter, Stephen had an additional reason for his enthusiasm. He had just returned from Winnipeg, where he discovered that the white elephant might not be as unprofitable as he and his colleagues had believed. Lumber from Ottawa could be laid down in the Manitoba capital at ten dollars a thousand less than the city was paying elsewhere. He confided to the Governor General that the company would not give up the controversial portion of the line “even if the Government wished us.”

The safety of the railway and of the country – the two were often identical in Stephen’s mind – could, he now felt, be guaranteed only by keeping the traffic of the North West on the Canadian side of Lake
Superior. (He did not, apparently, count the branch out of Sault Ste Marie, which circumvented the lake by connecting with Jim Hill’s road.) For that reason, the line from Lake Nipissing west must be “in all respects a first class road, capable of easy operation at high speed.” Stephen was eager to complete it in the shortest possible time: indeed, he was talking about driving steel from Portage la Prairie all the way to the foot of the Rockies by the late fall of 1882 – a forthright policy that would bring additional financial pressures to bear on the new company. Stephen was aware of the danger, but determined to press ahead: “This new and urgent necessity … is going to tax us to the full extent of our capacity, but I mean we shall do it.…”

Again, as in the case of the prairie and mountain sections, Stephen and his colleagues had rejected Sandford Fleming’s surveys. The Fleming line took the easiest route, well to the north of Lake Nipigon, but Stephen wanted to adopt a new location that would hug the granite-ribbed shores of Superior. “The line north of Nipigon would be easy of construction and operation too, but it
never
can support settlers, there is absolutely no
land
, nothing but bare rocks and pools of water.” Moreover, by building close to the lake the contractors could be supplied by water transport. Stephen argued that because of this, construction time would be cut, perhaps in half. “Do not forget,” he told Macdonald, “that its adoption means the completion of the road in 5 years.” The Prime Minister, by mid-November, 1881, had become a convert.

Though he thought the new route along the lake ought to be most acceptable to Ontario, Stephen had no illusions about the attitude of the
Globe
, which he believed was “conspiring with the Northern Pacific to strangle Canada’s national road.” The
Globe
could be depended upon to blackball the idea and “perhaps declare that we do not mean to build the Lake Superior section at all.”

It was “simply disgusting” to have to swallow the “lying charges” of such newspapers. The best answer was “to take care to avoid anything that even looks like a breach, or even an evasion, of the terms of the contract. It will be the duty as well as the interest of the Company to ask nothing of the Government savoring of a favoritism not provided for in the contract, and you may be sure, that so far as I know, I will be guided by this principle. Acting in this way and pushing our work with the utmost energy and especially that part of the contract which the
Globe still insists we mean to shirk”

Few railroad executives in North America had ever talked this way before, but then Stephen was not cast in the traditional mould of the rail
way entrepreneur. Among his own colleagues he was unique. Certainly Jim Hill had no intention of blasting a railroad out of the black scarps that frowned down on the slate waters of the great lake. Hill pinned his hopes on the branch line that Stephen had announced would be built to Sault Ste Marie to link up with Hill’s road from St. Paul. Like Villard of the Northern Pacific, Hill saw Canadian freight being diverted south of the lake and up through the underbelly of Manitoba. One of his chief reasons for joining the
CPR
Syndicate was that his St. Paul road would get all the construction traffic for the line being built west of Winnipeg. The line across the Shield, he was convinced, “would be of no use to anybody and would be the source of heavy loss to whoever operated it.”

In the fall of 1881, Hill picked the best railwayman he could find to look over the Precambrian country to the north and west of Lake Superior. According to William Pearce of the Dominion land department – a man privy to a good deal of
CPR
gossip – Hill’s plan was to have the visitor damn the all-Canadian route as impractical. He chose for this task the dynamic young general manager of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad; though no one yet realized it, his influence on the future of the young nation was to be enormous. His name was William Cornelius Van Horne.

5
Enter Van Horne

The new man was being considered for something more permanent than a mere report on the Lake Superior route. The
CPR
badly needed a new general manager. Stickney had managed to build only one hundred and thirty miles of railway that season; moreover, he was under a cloud because of his land speculations. At the end of August, the
Globe
, always ready to report dissension in the ranks of the company, published a rumour of “serious trouble between the Syndicate and Superintendent Stickney on account of the latter having obtained the title to lands including the town plot of Brandon, ostensibly for the Syndicate but really on his private account.” The
Globe
added: “It is said the Syndicate make the condition that the lands and proceeds of sales be given up to them or Mr. Stickney is to quit their service.… There are also reports that General Rosser has largely improved the chances, which the early knowledge of the location of the line gave him, in speculation.” The friendlier Manitoba
Free Press
denied the story flatly, but it was about this time that the company began looking for a general manager.

As usual George Stephen turned to Hill, who had done the major share of the hiring for the top echelons of the company that year and whose preference for American railroad men and engineers (they were, after all, the only ones he knew from experience) had already caused rumblings in the Canadian press. Hill recommended Van Horne. Of all the men he knew, Van Horne was the best equipped mentally for the job, and in every other way as well. A pioneer was needed, Hill told Stephen, “and the more of a pioneer, the better.”

“You need a man of great mental and physical power to carry this line through,” Hill said. “Van Horne can do it.” He added a word of caution: “But he will take all the authority he gets and more, so define how much you want him to have.”

Stephen undoubtedly recognized the type; he had seen it once before in his career when he, Donald Smith, and Jim Hill were fighting to turn a bankrupt, half-finished railway into a profitable business. Hill in those days had been the pioneer – a man of seemingly inexhaustible mental and physical power – cozening politicians, figuring out balance sheets far into the night, and even taking a hand with a snow shovel to raise the morale of a track gang. Now Stephen was being offered a second Jim Hill. It was small wonder that he was prepared to pay Van Horne the largest salary ever dangled before a railroad man in the West – a princely fifteen thousand dollars a year.

In the two-volume authorized biography of James Jerome Hill there is not, in all of 957 pages, a single reference to his remarkable protégé. Physically and temperamentally, Hill and Van Horne were very much alike; that similarity may help to explain the unyielding antagonism that developed between them over the rival interests of the Great Northern and the Canadian Pacific – two parallel transcontinental lines that fought for business. They were both powerful men with big chests and huge heads sunk on massive shoulders. Their strong faces were half hidden by short beards, which tended to mask the expression of their mouths. The eyes differed: Hill’s single eye was like a smouldering coal; Van Horne’s, impassive and ice-blue, were the product of his Dutch-German ancestry. If you removed Van Horne’s beard, cropped his hair, and gave him a Bismarck moustache he could have been mistaken for a Junker general. Indeed, it was often remarked that the
CPR’S
gain was the military’s loss. After all, like Hill, he was used to controlling armies of men – “the ablest
railroad general in the world, all that Grant was to the
U.S.A.,”
in the admiring phrase of a fellow railroader, Jason C. Easton, president of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul.

Van Horne’s speech was military in its decisiveness – blunt, direct, and simple. So was Hill’s; the ex-Canadian hated adjectives, preferred short, pungent words, and often spoke of
Pilgrim’s Progress
as a model of style. Both men had the ruthlessness of great generals and great statesmen. Both were single-minded to the point of obsession in any cause they served. Both knew how to seize and hold power. Hill, the Canadian-turned-American, and Van Horne, the American-turned-Canadian, would both push their railroads through to the Pacific. It was inevitable that when their interests clashed they would find themselves locked in battle. It was also understandable that, given their temperaments, they would be hard to reconcile. The sophisticated Stephen remained Hill’s mentor for all of his life and was called on more than once to act as arbiter between the two strong men who were both his closest friends and business associates.

On October 7, Hill brought Van Horne into Winnipeg to look over the
CPR’S
prairie construction and also the government line still being built between the Red River and Fort William. The town was then locked in the throes of a great real estate boom, which had been touched off by the railway and which was to astonish the nation and cause a ferment in the North West for more than a year. Winnipeg was a city of contrasts – buildings springing up everywhere; “the streets full of garbage, egg shells, rinds of lemons and other forms of refuse cast out in broad daylight”; stray horses prowling around the suburbs where they “mangle shade trees, stamp around at nights and make a nuisance of themselves generally”; tents blossoming so thickly in St. Boniface along the Assiniboine that the police tried to burn them out; workmen and settlers jamming the broad, muddy avenues. Arthur Rowe Miller, a young music student from England on his way to join a survey party, noted in his diary that the town was “just old enough to be dirty, and smells dreadfully.”

Nonetheless it was beginning to acquire a patina of culture. The Nathal Opera Troupe performed at the city hall on the very day Hill and Van Horne arrived. “Miss Louise Lester … was particularly effective, her performance in the wine drinking scene being most artistic in every respect.” The wine drinking was not confined to the stage: “This city,” the
Free Press
had complained the previous month, “is suffering from drunken Indians. They are to be met on almost every street at almost every hour. They seem to have no difficulty in procuring whiskey.”

The white population was as addicted to drink as the Indians. The
opening that August of Winnipeg’s pride, the Louisa Railway Bridge, had been accompanied by an “incarnai orgy … a great, hilarious, illimitable guzzle,” in which small boys quaffed glass after glass of free champagne and beer, provided by the city, “with the easy nonchalance of veterans,” and the crowd, on learning that the liquor was cut off, “acted generally more like wild beasts than rational creatures,” tearing down the ceremonial tent, appropriating the forbidden stock of spirits, and indulging in a “debauch … the largest and most varied the city has seen for many a day.”

There were other problems, all reflected in the letters column of the local newspapers. One man wrote of “Winnipeg’s brazen shame”: prostitutes who promenaded the streets by the dozen every afternoon. Another deplored “the disgraceful state of that leading thoroughfare, Portage Avenue.…”

Hill, Van Horne, and Hill’s two sons, who had come along for the excursion, stayed overnight in Winnipeg and then went west – through Portage la Prairie (“for its size … perhaps one of the hardest for drink in the Dominion”), through the booming community of Brandon, and on to the end of track. The trip impressed Van Horne: the quality of the grain in the fields was good, the vegetables unusually large, the crops abundant. Van Horne, who knew a great deal about soils, gardens, and crops, took it all in. The following day, the party headed east along the line to Thunder Bay, which the government had begun in 1875 and was still in the process of completing before turning it over to the
CPR
.