The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (19 page)

Van Horne called Burdick into his office and tore into him: “Are you the God-forsaken idiot who buys the provisions? If so, I’ll just give you till six o’clock to-night to ship a car-load of the very best stuff you can find up to Secretan, the engineer at the front; and see here, you can come back at six o’clock and tell me you have shipped it, you understand, but if you have not, you need not come back at all, but just go back to wherever you came from.”

All that summer small luxuries continued to arrive at Secretan’s camp. The climax came when Burdick himself turned up personally with the latest English illustrated papers, two boxes of the best cigars, and a bottle of Hudson’s Bay mm. He told the surveyor that Van Horne had given him “the gol darndest settin’ out I ever had in my life.”

In Winnipeg, Van Horne faced greater problems than the matter of his commissariat. One was the general chilliness of his staff, and, indeed, of Winnipeg itself, a city preoccupied with making a fast dollar. Another was the spring floods that threatened to disrupt the goal he had so recklessly and publicly set for himself.

His reputation as a Yankee go-getter had a reverse side to it. It was generally held, and not without considerable evidence, that he was favouring Americans over Canadians when new employees were hired for the railway. This was especially true in the key jobs. The
Globe
, which led the newspaper pack in listing every American appointment, commented as early as January 25 that “a notice, ‘No Canadians need apply,’ should be posted at all
CPR
offices, and appended to all their advertisements.…
Thus the managers of the Company would be saved from the trouble of refusing Canadian applications.” The paper pointed out that the general manager, chief engineer, and superintendent were all Americans and “so are a host of well-paid minor employees.”

The situation grew more acute as Canadians were fired and replaced by Americans or “sour mash,” as they were called. In April, the
Sun
revealed that five Canadian conductors had been fired and two more suspended, while of eleven new conductors, six were Americans. The paper listed eight other minor Canadian executives – yard masters, dispatchers, a construction superintendent – who had been replaced by Americans. The list was widely reprinted and the subject raised in the House of Commons by George Ross, the Liberal member for Middlesex, who quoted a Winnipeg correspondent who charged that “other Canadians, who, cannot be got rid of for just reasons, are having their berths made so warm for them that they will have to leave if they want to live in peace.”

The
Sun
, which was generally friendly to the railway, felt it necessary to admit editorially that a feeling prevailed among Canadians in the company’s employ that their jobs were not secure and that there was a determination to weed them out on any pretext. These remarks had little effect upon Van Horne. On June 10, the
Globe’s
correspondent reported that “there are very few Canadians left. The new appointments, so far as I can discover, are every one of them ‘sour mash.’ Not a single Canadian has been made a conductor, though 57 Minnesota men have been put in charge of trains.… Quite a number of new drivers have been appointed but every one of them is an American, and the Govt. drivers who were promised engines are still waiting for orders.”

It was not in Van Horne’s nature to take notice of such criticism. He was, in fact, doing his best to lure another American into the fold, a Milwaukee Irishman named Thomas Shaughnessy, who had once been on his staff in the United States. Van Horne needed Shaughnessy to act as quartermaster-general for the vast army he intended to throw into the West once the floods subsided that spring. Shaughnessy required some persuading and did not arrive until late in the year, “a fashionably-dressed, alert young man, sporting a cane and giving general evidence of being what we call a live wire,” in the words of Van Horne’s private telegrapher, E. A. James.

It is an irony that from the very beginning the
CPR
– that most nationalistic of all Canadian enterprises – was to a very large extent managed and built by Americans. The government section in British Columbia, from Kamloops Lake to Port Moody, was contracted to an American engineer,
Andrew Onderdonk, backed by a syndicate of American financiers. On the prairies another American company, Langdon and Shepard, held the prime contract. The remainder of the railway, involving the most difficult work of all – the mountain section and the section north of Lake Superior – was given to a third American concern, the North American Railway Contracting Company of New Jersey. This firm was to be paid partly in cash and partly in
CPR
stock; in November, 1883, after the shares tumbled on the New York exchange, the company backed out and the
CPR
took over construction in the mountains and across the Shield. On both these sections most of the subcontractors were Canadians, several of whom went on to become internationally famous entrepreneurs.

But in the eighties, most of the experienced railway talent was American. No major trunk-line had been built in Canada since the Grand Trunk, almost thirty years before. It was natural that Van Horne, like Jim Hill before him, should employ men he knew something about and felt he could depend upon. Many of these came from the Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad – executives like his old colleague John Egan, who became general superintendent of the
CPR’S
western division, or his hometown in-law from Joliet, S. B. Reed. Neither was popular with Canadians. By July, 1884, the Prime Minister himself was complaining to George Stephen about Egan’s reputation for dismissing Canadians and hiring Americans. A friend, “on whose calmness of judgment I can rely,” had called the western superintendent “a low down blasphemous Yankee Fenian.” Macdonald reported to the president that Egan’s policies in Winnipeg had, rightly or wrongly, “made the
CPR SO
unpopular that the feeling amounts to hatred.” Egan also fought with John Ross, the Canadian who was in charge of
CPR
construction on the western section of the Lake Superior line, but Van Horne stuck by his friend.

The presence of so many Americans at every level in the
CPR’S
hierarchy was the subject of bitter complaint for all of the construction period; but there was another side to the coin. The brain-drain to the United States, about which Canadians had complained for more than a decade, was being partially reversed by the great project of the railroad. Many of the “sour mash” became dedicated Canadians; as someone remarked, the building of the
CPR
would make a Canadian out of the German Kaiser. It certainly made Canadians out of Van Horne, Shaughnessy, and Isaac Gouverneur Ogden, the company’s western auditor, who, after he became vice-president, was known as the Finance King of the
CPR
. (Secretan called him “an ambidextrous marvel [who] could write with both hands at the same time, I believe, and could also add up a couple of
columns of figures simultaneously.”) These men, and many lesser executives, turned their backs on their native land forever when they joined the railway. Business dictated that they must, since their chief rivals were the transcontinental Yankee lines. Shaughnessy, the policeman’s son who became a baron, was an Imperialist’s Imperialist, a staunch supporter of Monarch, Empire, and Nation – so British in outlook that he was offered a cabinet post (which he declined) in the Asquith government. As for Van Horne, he was more Canadian than any Canadian. “I am a Chinesewall protectionist,” he told Augustus Bridle before his death. “I don’t mean merely in trade. I mean – everything. I’d keep the American idea out of this country.”

But in the late spring of 1882, Van Horne was more concerned over floods than he was with “sour mash.” The high water had already thrown his careful schedule off balance by postponing construction for nearly a month. The
Globe
, which seized every opportunity to knock the Syndicate in general and Van Horne in particular, ignored the unseasonable weather and laid the blame at the feet of the general manager. On June 23, it reported that “Van Horne’s men have not laid one solitary rail upon the grading done under his regime.” The paper dug up “a well known tracklayer who has been in the business out west for 20 years” who was quoted as saying that “the idea of Van Horne talking about laying 500 miles of track this year, after the way time has been frittered away, is preposterous.”

“Never mind who is doing the work, sir,” the anonymous tracklayer told the
Globe’s
reporter; “figures will tell you who the men are that know their business. Give Van Horne a trial, but you’ll find, as we all know, that there is more construction in Stickney’s little finger than in Van Horne’s body. He’s alright in his place, and that’s in his office, scheming to cut down wages on an old road.”

Nonetheless, the general manager was making his presence felt. He was positively indefatigable, an iron man who never knew a moment’s sickness and did not seem to require any sleep. Years later, when asked to reveal the secret of his stamina, he summed it all up with characteristic candour: “Oh,” said he, “I eat all I can; I drink all I can; I smoke all I can and I don’t give a damn for anything.”

“Why do you want to go to bed?” he once asked Secretan. “It’s a waste of time; besides, you don’t know what’s going on.” He could sit up all night in a poker game and then, when seven o’clock came, rub his eyes, head for the office, and do a full day’s work. He loved poker and he played it expertly. It was not a game, he would say, but an education. He
enjoyed all card games and he was good at them all. James Mavor, the Toronto professor who knew him well in later years, thought this was his secret – his ability to “turn rapidly from one form of activity to another and to avoid over-anxiety about any one of his enterprises.”

Many colleagues were to remark upon this characteristic in Van Horne. When he had done his work he was free to play games, to eat a good supper, to smoke one of his gigantic cigars, to pore over his collection of Japanese porcelains, to work with his rock specimens, or to best a colleague at billiards or chess. Chess intrigued him; he kept a set of chessmen in his private car and would challenge anyone – private secretary or merchant prince – to a game.

He loved to play and he loved to win. He was reluctant to leave any poker table when he was losing. He liked to dare his associates to duplicate the feats of memory with which he astonished acquaintances and utter strangers. His memory for obscure detail was quite remarkable and he revelled in it. Armstrong, the engineer, had one experience of it that remained with him all his life. Early in 1882 Van Horne told him to substitute nine-inch discharge pipes for the seven-inch on a water tank in order to save six minutes’ time. Armstrong did not receive any nine-inch pipe before he and his fellow workers were dismissed. Two years later, when he was once again working for the
CPR
, he received a note from Van Horne, naming the date on which the order had gone out. “I told you to have those goosenecks made 9 inches,” Van Horne wrote. “Why wasn’t it done?”

By June, Van Horne had become the terror of the railway, a kind of superman who had an uncanny habit of always turning up just when things went wrong. The
Surf’
s uninhibited columnist, R. K. Kernighan, who signed himself “The Dervish Khan, the Screamer of Qu’Appelle,” had been dispatched to Flat Creek – or Flat Krick, as he invariably called it – the transitory community at the end of the track. There he watched, with a mixture of awe and amusement, the descent of Van Horne upon the unsuspecting settlement.

“The trains run in a kind of go-as-you please style that is anything but refreshing to the general manager. But when Manager Van Horne strikes the town there is a shaking up of old bones. He cometh in like a blizzard and he goeth out like a lantern. He is the terror of Flat Krick. He shakes them up like an earthquake, and they are as frightened of him as if he were the old Nick himself. Yet Van Horne is calm and harmless looking. So is a she mule, and so is a buzz saw. You don’t know their true inwardness till you go up and feel of them. To see Van Horne get out of the car and go
softly up the platform, you would think he was an evangelist on his way west to preach temperance to the Mounted Police. But you are soon undeceived. If you are within hearing distance you will have more fun than you ever had in your life before. He cuffs the first official he comes to just to get his hand in and leads the next one out by the ear, and pointing eastward informs him the walking is good as far as St. Paul. To see the rest hunt their holes and commence scribbling for dear life is a terror. Van Horne wants to know. He is that kind of a man. He wants to know why this was not done and why this was done. If the answers are not satisfactory there is a dark and bloody tragedy enacted right there. During each act all the characters are killed off and in the last scene the heavy villain is filled with dynamite, struck with a hammer, and by the time he has knocked a hole plumb through the sky, and the smoke has cleared away, Van Horne has discharged all the officials and hired them over again at lower figures.”

As Van Horne’s admirer, the Wisconsin banker and railway president Jason Easton, remarked, “Van Horne was one of the most considerate and even-tempered of men, but when an explosion came it was magnificent.” Yet he rather enjoyed it when somebody stood up to him. In June he finally managed to secure the services of the flamboyant Irish construction boss, Michael J. Haney, as superintendent of both the Pembina Branch and the Rat Portage divisions, both of them originally built under government contract. Haney, one of the most resourceful railway men in the country, had managed to pull Section Fifteen of the government line into shape after the original contractor, Joseph Whitehead, had been forced to abandon it for lack of funds. A hard-muscled Galwayman with a flowing moustache, he was as lucky as he was tough; he had survived a whole series of accidents any of which ought to have put him in his grave. He was also impetuous and derisive of red tape. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, he and Van Horne would clash.