The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (21 page)

The nerve centre of End of Track was the line of boarding cars – eight or nine of them each three storeys high – that housed the track-laying crews. The ground floors of these cars served as offices, dining rooms, kitchens, and berths for the contractors and company officials; the two storeys above were dormitories. Sometimes there were even tents pitched on the roofs. These huge cars formed part of a long train which contained smaller office cars for executives, a cooking car, freight cars loaded with track materials, shops on wheels and, on occasion, the private car of the general manager himself. Van Horne was continually to be found at End of Track, spinning yarns with the workmen, sketching buffalo skulls, organizing foot races and target-shooting at night, and bumping over the prairie in a buckboard inspecting the grade. Every day some sixty-five carloads of railroad supplies, each carload weighing eighteen tons, were dumped at End of Track. Most of these supplies had been carried an average of a thousand miles before reaching their destination.

To a casual visitor the scene, at first glance, was chaotic: cars constantly being coupled and uncoupled, locomotives shunting back and forth pushing and pulling loads of various lengths, little handcars rattling up and down the half-completed track at the front, teams of horses and mules dragging loaded wagons forward on each side of the main line -and tents constantly rising like puffballs and vanishing again as the whole unwieldy apparatus rolled steadily towards the Rockies.

The apparent anarchy was illusory for the organization was meticulous, down to the last railway spike. Each morning two construction trains set out from the supply yards, far in the rear, for End of Track. Each was
loaded with the exact number of rails, ties, spikes, fishplates, and telegraph poles required for half a mile of railway. One train was held in reserve on a siding about six miles to the rear; the other moved directly to the front where the track-laying gang of three hundred men and seventy horses was waiting for it.

The tracklayers worked like a drill team. “It was beautiful to watch them gradually coming near,” one observer wrote, “…  each man in his place knowing exactly his work and doing it at the right time and in the right way. Onward they come, pass on, and leave the wondering spectator slowly behind whilst he is still engrossed with the wonderful sight.”

The ties were unloaded first, on either side of the track, to be picked up by the waiting wagons and mule teams – thirty ties to a wagon – hauled forward and dropped all the way along the graded embankment for exactly half a mile. Two men with marked rods were standing by, and as the ties were thrown out they laid them across the grade, exactly two feet apart from centre to centre. Right behind the teams came a handtruck hauled by two horses, one on each side of the grade, and loaded with rails, fishplates, and spikes. Six men marched on each side of the truck, and when they reached the far end of the last pair of newly laid rails, each crew seized a rail among them and threw it into exact position. Two more men gauged these two rails to make sure they were correctly aligned. Four men followed with spikes, placing one in each of the four ends of the rails. Four others screwed in the fishplates and another four followed with crowbars to raise the ties while the spikes were being hammered in. All worked in a kind of rhythm, each man directly opposite his partner on each separate rail. More men followed with hammers and spikes to make the rails secure, but by this time the hand-truck had already moved forward, passing over the newly laid rails before the job was complete. W. Henry Barneby, an Englishman who watched this operation when it had reached a peak of sophistication, noted that “all the men must keep in their places and move on ahead, otherwise they will be caught up by those behind them.”

As each construction train dumped its half-mile of supplies at End of Track, it moved back to the nearest siding to be replaced by the reserve train. There was no time lost. As the track unfolded the boarding cars were nudged ahead constantly by the construction train locomotive so that no energy would be wasted by the navvies in reaching their moving mess halls and dormitories.

The operation was strung out for hundreds of miles across the open prairie. Up ahead were the survey camps, followed by the grading gangs and the bridge-makers. Far to the rear were other thousands – saddlers and carpenters, cooks and tailors, shoemakers, blacksmiths, doctors, and provisioners. Vast material yards were established at hundred-mile intervals between Winnipeg and End of Track. The supply trains moved west on schedule, unloading thousands of tons of goods at the yards; here the material was sorted daily into train lots and dispatched – as many as eight trains a day – to the front.

The organization left nothing to chance. In case track-laying should proceed faster than expected, reserves of supplies were held on the sidings and in the yards themselves. There were always rails available for three hundred miles and fastenings for five hundred, all within one hundred miles of End of Track. When the steel moved past the hundred-mile point the yards moved, too. An entire community of office workers, sorters, dispatchers, trainmen, labourers, and often their families as well, could be transported a hundred miles in a single night without the loss of an hour’s work, because the houses were all portable and could be fitted easily on flat cars. “Flat Creek has folded its tents and gone
en masse
to Broadview,” is the way the
Sun
laconically reported the first of such moves on July 28.

Right behind the track-laying gang came the telegraph teams. The telegraphers camped in tents and moved their gear forward every afternoon on handcars. The construction trains that brought half a mile of track supplies also brought half a mile of poles, wires, and insulators to the front. One hour after the day’s track was laid, End of Track was in telegraphic communication with the outside world.

Far out on the barren plains, miles to the west of End of Track, were the bridging teams, grading units, and surveyors, all driven forward by the knowledge that the tracklayers were pressing hard behind them. Although the work was broken down into subcontracts, the organization was so arranged that no weak link could hold up construction. The head contractor had a flying wing of his own men standing by, prepared to complete immediately any work that seemed unlikely to be ready in time for the “ironing” of the track. This work was, of course, charged against the subcontractors; it served to force the pace. When the flying wing was not needed for this purpose, it was employed in completing the ballasting of the line, which was laid so swiftly that it was necessary to go over it again with great care. In addition, the flying wing built the sidings which were required at six-mile intervals across the prairies.

The grading was accomplished by immense scrapers pulled by teams
of horses. Their task was to build an embankment for the railway four feet above the prairie and to ditch it for twenty yards on either side. This was more than the original contract had called for; but Van Horne, who always looked ahead, knew that in the long run a solidly built line – the standards here exceeded those of the Union Pacific – would pay off. At that height the rails would be protected from the blizzards of winter and costly delays from snow blockage would be avoided.

The bridgers worked in two gangs, one by day and one by night. Every sliver of bridging had to be brought from Rat Portage, one hundred and forty miles east of Winnipeg, or from Minnesota; for this reason the bridge-builders were seldom more than ten miles ahead of the advancing steel. The timbers were unloaded as close to End of Track as possible and generally at night so as not to interfere with other work. “Sometimes,” one eyewitness reported, “not a stick of timber nor any preparation for work could be seen one day, the next would show two or three spans of a nicely finished bridge. Twenty-four hours afterwards the rails would be laid, and trains working.…”

“The history of the world offers no such evidence of push as the work of this year has done,” R. B. Conkey, Langdon and Shepard’s general manager declared at Winnipeg in August. “Sherman’s march to the sea was nothing to it. When the road is completed there will be nothing in history to compare with it.”

The nation was electrified by the speed with which the railroad was being forced across the plains. One man on the scene noted that it seemed to move as fast as the ox carts of the settlers who were following along beside the tracks. Alex Stavely Hill, the British Member of Parliament, going in for lunch on one of the boarding cars around eleven one morning, noted, on emerging at two that afternoon, that a wagon that had been parked beside the car was already two miles to the rear. William White, homesteading near Pile o’ Bones Creek, left his camp one morning to bring in wood from a copse six miles away. When he left there was no sign of construction for two miles to the east. When he returned, he and his companions had to cross a newly completed track.

The North West of Canada, once so haunting and so mysterious, was being transformed by the onslaught of the rails. A single incident illuminates that change: a young homesteader and his sweetheart eloped successfully in the face of parental obduracy by commandeering a handcar and speeding towards Winnipeg along the line of steel, thus throwing off their pursuers.

One railway employee, A. C. Forster Boulton, who came from a not
able Toronto family, wrote that the progress of construction was so swift that antelope and other game migrating north were cut off on their return that fall by the lines of rails and telegraph posts, “and terrified by the sight … gathered in hundreds on the north side, afraid to cross it.” It was probably the last summer in which herds of buffalo and antelope freely roamed the prairie.

Father Albert Lacombe, the voyageur priest who had served his time as chaplain to the railroad navvies of Rat Portage and was now back among his beloved Blackfoot nation, watched the approach of the rails with both sadness and resignation:

“I would look in silence at that road coming on – like a band of wild geese in the sky-cutting its way through the prairies; opening up the great country we thought would be ours for years. Like a vision I could see it driving my poor Indians before it, and spreading out behind it the farms, the towns and cities.… No one who has not lived in the west since the Old-Times can realize what is due to that road – that
C.P.R
. It was Magic – like the mirage on the prairies, changing the face of the whole country.”

The Indians watched in silence as the steel cut through their hunting-grounds. They would arrive suddenly, as if from nowhere, squat on their haunches in double rows, and take in the scene with only the occasional surprised grunt. To them the engines were “fire wagons.” They were a little puzzled by the lack of white squaws and papooses. Why would men want to work in a wilderness without women and children? But if they realized that their wild, free existence was at an end they gave no sign.

Onward the track moved, cutting the plains in two. It moved through a land of geese, snipe, and wild ducks, whose eggs were prized by those navvies who took the trouble to search them out. It moved through a land fragrant in the soft evenings with the scent of willow and balsam. It cut across acres of yellow daisies, tiger lilies, purple sage, and briar rose. It bisected pastures of waist-high buffalo grass and skirted green hay meadows which, in the spring, were shallow ponds. As it travelled westward it pushed through a country of memories and old bones – furrowed trails fashioned decades before by thousands of bison moving in single file towards the water, vast fields of grey and withered herbage, dead lakes rimmed with tell-tale crusts of alkali. Day by day it crept towards the horizon where, against the gold of the sunset, flocks of fluttering wildfowl, disturbed by the clamour of the invaders, could be seen in silhouette; or where, sometimes, a single Indian, galloping at full speed in the distance, became no more than a speck crawling along the rim of the
prairie. This had been the Great Lone Land, unfenced and unbridged, which explorers like Palliser, Butler, and Grant had discovered and described as if it were on the dark side of the moon. The line of steel made Butler’s phrase obsolete, for the land would never again be lonely. All that summer it reverberated with the clang of sledge and anvil, the snorting of horses and mules, the hoarse puffing of great engines, the bellowing of section bosses, the curses of thousands of sweating men, and the universal song of the railroad navvies: “Drill, ye tarriers, drill.”

History was being made, but few had time to note that fact. Trotter was to write, a little sheepishly, that “few, if any of us were historically minded enough to think of the interest that might attach to a running diary of what was seen, and said, and done, from day to day. We talked a good deal about what would follow in our wake – the towns that would appear, and the sort of population that would spread over the illimitable plain … [but] we enjoyed the life, as you would expect men busy in physical labour to enjoy the wonderful atmosphere; the open space; the zest with which the whole scheme of advance was prosecuted; the barbarian who came to behold us putting the enemy of uncommercial distance under our feet.” Nor did William Oliver in his ox cart heading west, almost always in sight of the railway grade, watching idly the straining mules and men, consider the significance of what he saw: “It never came to my mind in watching the building of the railway … that in the next fifty years it would play so important a part in the commerce of the country and in fact of the world.… We were more interested in our own affairs and the prospects of a future home.…”

At the same time the spectacle of the steel-laying gangs remained in Oliver’s memory all his life. They were “a sight never to be forgotten.… Ties to the Irish and Swede giants were like toothpicks, steel rails like crowbars. They were soon gone and out of sight.”

They were a mixed lot, these railroad navvies. Charles Alfred Peyton, walking down the track and looking for work, came upon a gang of Italians who “looked like guys who would cut your throat for a dime.” A few miles farther on, however, he joined a team of young Englishmen, “a very nice bunch of lads,” and went to work for $1.25 a day. Stavely Hill, who was a barrister, encountered a man ploughing, “throwing almost as much strength from himself into his work as he was getting out of his horses.” It developed that he was a former doctor. That night, the man who cooked his dinner in the boarding car turned out to be the same solicitor’s clerk who had once visited his London chambers with briefs.