The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (20 page)

Haney had already tangled with Van Horne’s western superintendent, John Egan, and won. Egan, on an inspection tour, discovered what he considered to be a shortage of railroad ties; since Haney was in charge of the delivery of construction supplies, he sent him a memorandum telling him to ship every tie available and in the future to attend to his work more closely. The irate Haney went straight to Winnipeg, gathered up every unemployed man he could find around town, and shipped them out along the line on flat cars. At every point where spare ties were available, Haney and his crew loaded them onto the cars and moved forward. In two days, Haney had loaded one hundred and forty cars and blocked every siding between Rat Portage and the end of track. A heated wire arrived:
“What in hell are you doing?” Back came Haney’s laconic answer: “Filling orders, send more flat cars and will double quantity in 24 hours.” It was the last time the chastened Egan sent Haney any kind of a blanket instruction.

Haney was in the Winnipeg freight yard one day when his secretary came hustling down the track to warn him that Van Horne was on the warpath.

“He’s hot enough to melt the rails,” Haney was told. “If you’ve got any friends or relatives at home who are fond of you I’d advise you to hunt a cyclone cellar.”

As Haney recalled it, many years later, he was feeling pretty hot himself at the time. Everything seemed to have gone wrong that day. Jobs had been held up by a shortage of materials. He was, as he put it, in a humour to look for somebody with trouble. Instead of getting out of Van Horne’s way he stalked resolutely down the yards to meet him.

Van Horne began an exhaustive recitation of the system’s defects, punctuating his remarks with a colourful selection of profanity that turned the air blue. The pugnacious Haney waited until the general manager stopped for breath.

“Mr. Van Horne,” he said, finally, “everything you say is true and if you claimed it was twice as bad as you have, it would still be true. I’m ready to agree with you there but I’d like to say this: Of all the spavined, one-horse, rottenly equipped, bad managed, badly run, headless and heedless thing for people to call a railroad, this is the worst. You can’t get anyone who knows anything about anything. You can’t get materials and if you could it wouldn’t do you any good because you couldn’t get them where you wanted them.”

Haney followed up this outburst with a list of counter-complaints far more complete than Van Horne’s, since he was in closer touch with the work. His tirade made Van Horne’s explosion “sound like a drawing room conversation.” The general manager waited patiently as Haney unleashed his torrent of grievances; by the time Haney had finished he was grinning.

“That’s all right, Haney, I guess we understand one another,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”

3
End of Track

The contract to build the prairie section of the Canadian Pacific Railway was probably the largest of its kind ever undertaken. Tenders were called for in the third week of January, 1882, and the prize was awarded the following month to the partnership of General R. B. Langdon of Minneapolis, a one-time stonemason of Scottish heritage, and D. C. Shepard of St. Paul, a former engineer who had helped build the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad. The firm undertook to build six hundred and seventy-five miles of railroad across the plains from the end of track at Flat Creek to Fort Calgary on the Bow River. This was a formidable task – just fifteen miles short of the entire length of the Central Pacific. In spite of the
Globe’s
remarks about sour mashers, it is probable that no Canadian company existed that could tackle a job of such magnitude.

Shepard, an extremely shrewd contractor and an old friend of James J. Hill’s, was well aware of this. He did not believe that there was another firm on the continent that had the resources, the experience, or the personal following of subcontractors reliable enough to carry out the job with the speed the
CPR
required. Hill knew this just as well as Shepard, but he also felt that Shepard, operating from a position of strength, had set his bid unreasonably high.

Shepard had a habit of dropping in on his friend in St. Paul almost daily. A day or so after he and his partner had submitted their bid he called, according to habit, at Hill’s office. Lying face down on the desk, where he could not fail to notice it, was a telegraph form. Ostensibly it contained a lower bid from a large firm of contractors in the Middle West. Hill made an excuse to leave his office. When he returned a few minutes later, Shepard, apparently unconcerned, was seated in the same position. There was some small talk and then Shepard took his leave. But the next day he and Langdon submitted a revised bid which was somewhat lower than the one in the telegram – a telegram that Hill, of course, had invented. The new terms suited Hill, who accepted them on behalf of the
CPR
. In later years he used to joke about the incident with Shepard who never betrayed by so much as a lifted eyebrow that he knew what Hill was talking about.

On the day after the contract was signed, Langdon and Shepard advertised for three thousand men and four thousand horses. The job they faced was staggering: it would require no fewer than three hundred subcontractors. Between Flat Creek and Fort Calgary the partners would
have to move ten million cubic yards of earth. They would have to haul every stick of timber, every rail, fishplate, and spike, all the pilings used for bridge-work, and all the food and provisions for 7,600 men and 1,700 teams of horses across the naked prairie for hundreds of miles. To feed the horses alone it would be necessary to distribute four thousand bushels of oats every day along one hundred and fifty miles of track. It was no wonder that Van Horne’s boast about building five hundred miles in a single season was openly derided.

Winnipeg was transformed that spring of 1882 into a gigantic supply depot. Stone began to pour in from every available quarry, railroad ties from the Lake of the Woods country to the east, lumber from Minnesota, and rails from England and from the Krupp works in Germany. Since the St. Lawrence would still be frozen well into the construction season, Van Horne had the steel shipped to New York and New Orleans and dispatched to Manitoba by way of St. Paul. Whole trainloads of material destined for the Canadian North West were constantly passing through American cities where hundreds of checkers reported on them daily so that the exact moment of their arrival could be plotted. As fast as the supplies arrived they were hauled away to the end of track. Long trains loaded with rails, ties, fishplates, and provisions rattled westward to Flat Creek, dumped their loads, and returned empty. No newly completed line of steel had ever known such activity in the first year of its construction.

The floods of April put a halt to all this activity, causing a formidable log-jam of supplies in Winnipeg and another in St. Paul. The valley of the Red was inundated – as were the Portage plains. Beecham Trotter, travelling out towards Portage la Prairie in one of the last freight trains to get through, recalled that “it seemed as though we were traversing the ocean.” The Assiniboine near Brandon spilled over its banks and covered the entire valley. The
CPR
bridge would have been swept away had it not been held down by flat cars, loaded with steel rails. Settlers streaming west had to move on foot and swim their cattle and horses across the swollen rivers. Even oxen were mired. On the cart trail leading towards Qu’Appelle, a carpenter named William Oliver happened upon the strange spectacle of three wagons and six oxen all lying half buried in an ocean of gumbo, while their owners, six mud-caked Englishmen, sat helplessly by, making the best of things by downing a breakfast of bread and ale. Oliver, who later became mayor of Lethbridge, Alberta, hauled them out with the help of two hundred feet of rope.

The floods forced almost all work on the railway to come to a standstill. Trotter, who was employed west of Flat Creek digging five-foot
postholes for the telegraph line that followed directly behind the rails, wrote that “every thrust with the bar brought a splash of mud to the face.” Flat Creek itself, which seemed to be “the repository of more railway material than the whole world contained,” was a quagmire. Tents of every shape and size, some brand new, some filthy and tattered, stretched out in all directions on a gloomy expanse of swamp.

Save for the prostitutes, the population was almost entirely male – freighters, farm labourers, bull-whackers, railroad navvies, muleteers, railway officials, and, of course, whiskey peddlers. “Terribly hard and depraved faces could be seen on every side,” along with camp followers – “lewd women, the lowest of the low.” For any but the strongest, the community could be a death trap. There was no place to sleep and the food was of the very worst and sometimes non-existent. Men were “herded together like rats in a hole, [and] … given food which a well kept dog wouldn’t eat.” Perhaps fortunately, Flat Creek had a brief life. When the railroad blockade ended and the tracks began to creep west once more to the newer community of Broadview, the town virtually disappeared. Even the name was changed to the pleasanter one of Oak Lake.

By the time the floods ended, scores of would-be homesteaders were disheartened and ready to quit the North West. In Brandon, building was at a standstill because the
CPR
was rushing all available construction materials to the front; even before the floods began, hundreds of men were idle. The railway yards “looked like a great country fair.” Trunks were piled along the grade like cordwood, as high as men could throw them, but many of the owners were already trying to sell their outfits and leave.

In late May an unexpected blizzard struck, destroying scores of tents and causing great suffering. Fuel was at such a premium that men resorted to stealing lumber, stick by stick. Charles Alfred Peyton, who lived in a small tent on the river bank at Brandon, remembered crawling one night on his stomach towards a pile of dry poles his neighbour had collected. Just as he seized a stick a bullet whizzed through the wood, no more than a foot away. Such nightly fusillades, he recalled, were not uncommon. People began to tell each other that it would be better to leave the land to the Indians. “ ‘Why should we take such a country away from them?’ was heard on all sides.” The first passenger train to leave Brandon for Winnipeg after the flood pulled three coaches loaded to the doors with men and women quitting the North West, never to return.

At last, with the waters subsiding and blizzards ended, the sun came out and warmed the frigid plains. The prairie evenings grew mellower and soon the sweet incense of the wolfwillow drifted in from the ponds and
sloughs to mingle with the more familiar odours of salt pork, tamarack ties, wood smoke and human sweat. The early spring blossoms – wild pansies, strawberries, and purple pasqueflower – began to poke their tiny faces between the brittle grasses. Then, as a flush of new green spread over the land, the ox carts started west again until they were strung out by the hundreds ahead of the advancing line of steel.

As soon as the waters ebbed, a mountain of supplies descended upon Winnipeg. On a single day, May 15, eighteen thousand dollars worth of freight poured into the city, the largest amount since the Pembina Branch had been opened. The following day eighty freight cars arrived from St. Paul. The day after that fifty thousand bushels of oats and eleven carloads of mules were checked into the yards. With the freight came people. By June, three thousand immigrants were under canvas in Winnipeg, all buoyed up by the expectation of an entirely new life on the Canadian prairies: “Hope furnishes dessert for the frugal meal, expectation sweetens their daily life.”

Though few people believed it would be possible for the
CPR
to achieve its season’s goal or anything close to it after the delays, Van Horne was immovable. Langdon and Shepard had signed a contract promising to drive five hundred miles of steel that year; five hundred miles it would have to be. The general manager made it clear that he would cancel the contract if they did not live up to its obligations.

The prime contractors responded by increasing their army of men and horses, by adding an extra shift to the track-laying, and by lengthening the total work day from eleven hours to fifteen. “The iron now is going down just as fast as it can be pulled from the cars,” Shepard announced. “We shall show a record at track-laying which has never been surpassed on this continent.”

There followed a whirlwind of construction that was, in the words of the
Quarterly Review
, “absolutely without parallel in railway annals.” The grade, winding snakelike across the plains, moved so swiftly that Secretan and his surveyors were hard put to stay ahead. Sometimes, indeed, they were awakened at night by the rumble of giant scrapers being dragged past their tents. “We had never seen the like in Canada before,” Secretan wrote.

The prairie section of the
CPR
was built telescopically from a single base – a feat that a leading London journal, commenting on a projected British road in the Sudan, declared to be impossible. Winnipeg was the anchor point: from there the steel would stretch for a thousand miles into the mountains; there would be no supply line for the railway builders other than the rails themselves.

The previous year’s operations had seen small knots of men, working in twos and threes with loaded handcars, pushing the track forward at about three-quarters of a mile a day. Van Horne determined to move at five times that speed. This would necessitate the kind of timing that divisional commanders require of troops in the field when an assault is launched. Van Horne’s army worked that summer with a military precision that astonished all who witnessed it. “Clockwork” was the term used over and over again to describe the track-laying technique.

The pulse of the operation was at “End of Track,” that unique, mobile community that never stayed in one place for more than a few hours at a time. Turner Bone, who worked in the engineering office of Herbert Holt, one of the subcontractors, described End of Track as “a real live community, a hive of industry, in which teamsters, track layers, blacksmiths, carpenters, executive officers and other trades and professions all had a part.” At the end of each day’s work the town-on-wheels had moved three or four miles west of where it had been that morning.