The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (3 page)

George Stephen ought to be driving the final spike, but George Stephen is not even in the photograph. The
CPR
president is eight thousand miles away, in London, resting briefly after his four-year battle to keep the struggling railway solvent
.

But Van Horne is there. The general manager stands directly behind Donald Smith, hands thrust deep in side pockets. John A. Macdonald once called him a sharp Yankee, but he has become more Canadian than any native. With his Homburg-style hat, his spade beard, and his heavy-lidded Germanic eyes, he looks remarkably like Bertie, the Prince of Wales, for whom he is occasionally mistaken. His poker face, so valuable in those legendary all-night card games, betrays no expression of triumph, jubilation, or sense of drama – only a slight impatience. “Get on with it,” Van Horne seems to be saying. After all, the first transcontinental train in Canadian history is waiting to take him on to the Pacific
.

Sandford Fleming stands to Van Horne’s left. With his stovepipe hat and his vast beard, he almost dominates the photograph and perhaps that is as it should be; after all, it was he who made the first practical suggestion for a Pacific railroad nearly a quarter of a century before. Because of Fleming, the railroad engineer, the country runs on railroad time, so that now when it is noon in Toronto it is not 12.25 in Montreal
.

Andrew Onderdonk is not in the picture. The man who brought the Chinese coolies to British Columbia to help build the railroad through the canyon of the Fraser is as elusive as ever. He has sent, in his place, his reckless Irish superintendent, Michael Haney, who can be seen craning his neck over Van Horne’s great bulk, his handlebar moustache giving him the look of a Tammany politician. Not far away is another of Onderdonk’s men, Henry Cambie, the engineer who hung by ropes to plot the railway’s location along the walls of that same black canyon. He is standing a row or two behind the small boy, his long beard already whitening, a bowler tilted forward over his eyes. On his left, also bearded and bowler ed, is one of the men chiefly responsible for the crazy-quilt pattern of Regina, John McTavish, the
CPR’S
land commissioner; on McTavish’s left, wearing a floppy hat, is the railway’s western superintendent, John Egan, perhaps the only man ever to see Van Horne shed a tear
.

Directly across from Donald Smith, hands plunged into the pockets of his short coat, eyes twinkling, is the stocky, black-bearded figure of James Ross, the man in charge of the
CPR
’
s mountain construction. He looks no different from the other roughly dressed labourers around him, but he will shortly become one of the richest and most powerful capitalists in Canada – a coal and steel baron, a utilities magnate, a financial wizard
.

There are others present, though not all can be seen. Sam Steele of the Mounted Police, fresh from his pursuit of Big Bear, the rebellious Cree chieftain, is present but not in the picture. Young Tom Wilson, the packer who discovered Lake Louise, is just identifiable at the very rear in his broad-brimmed cowboy hat. And that most unconventional of all surveyors, the peripatetic Major Rogers, holds the tie bar as Smith strikes the spike. In a less familiar photograph, taken a moment before, the Major can be seen quite clearly, white mutton chops, black string tie, gold watch-chain and all; but in most school books only his boot is showing. He does not need the immortality of this picture; his name is already enshrined on the long-sought pass in the Selkirks
.

Do they realize, as the shutter closes, that this is destined to be the most famous photograph ever taken in Canada? Perhaps they do, for Canada, with their help, has just accomplished the impossible. In 1875, Alexander
Mackenzie, then Prime Minister, declared that such a task could not be completed in ten years “with all the power of men and all the money in the empire.” Now it is 1885 and the job has been done with precious little help from the empire at all through a remarkable blend of financial acumen, stubborn perseverance, political lobbying, brilliant organization, reckless gambling, plain good fortune, and the hard toil of a legion of ordinary workmen
.

It is these nameless navvies who really dominate the Great Canadian Photograph. Few of them have ever been identified and perhaps that is fitting. They have become symbolic figures, these unknown soldiers in Van Horne’s army, standing as representatives for the thirty thousand sweating labourers – French and English, Scots and Irish, Italians and Slavs, Swedes and Yankees, Canadians and Chinese – who, in just four years and six months, managed to complete the great railway and join the nation from sea to sea
.

Chapter One

1
The end and the beginning

2
How John Macoun altered the map

3
The first of the CPR towns

4
The “paid ink-slingers”

5
Enter Van Horne

1
The end and the beginning

The bitterest and longest parliamentary wrangle in the history of the young Canadian nation ended on February 15, 1881, when the contract to build the Canadian Pacific Railway finally received royal assent. The debate had occupied almost two months, consumed its major participants, and left the capital dazed and exhausted. It must have seemed to those who emerged bone weary but victorious, after those midnight sessions on the Hill, that the ten-year dream of a national highway tying the new Canada to the old had finally come true – that the in-fighting was at an end, along with the despairs, the heartaches, the scandals, and the rancours that had marked that first decade. Now it was simply a matter of driving the steel west to the Pacific; men of stature, means, and experience – most of them, thankfully, Canadians – had been found to do the job.

The ink was scarcely dry on the historic document when those same men met on February 17 in Montreal. The country knew them as “the Syndicate,” a phrase that did not have the universally sinister connotations of a later century. Certainly to one segment of the nation (Liberal) they were seen as profiteers and exploiters; but to another (Conservative) they were financial geniuses and high-minded men of principle. Even their political opponents had a grudging admiration for them: they had all made a great deal of money in a very short time out of a bankrupt Minnesota railway. It was assumed they would bring the same acumen and drive to the Canadian venture.

If the members of the Syndicate could have foreseen the trials of the next four years, their understandable elation would certainly have been tempered with restraint, for the great debate in Parliament was not an end, as so many believed, but a beginning. The Canadian Pacific Railway Company was officially launched on that February afternoon; for the next generation and longer it would be the dominant force west of Ottawa. The initials –
CPR
– had already entered the national lexicon; soon they would be as familiar to most Canadians as their own. In the decades to follow they would come to symbolize many things to many people – repression, monopoly, daring, exploitation, imagination, government subsidy, high finance, patriotism, paternalism, and even life itself. There were few Canadians who were not in some manner affected by the presence of the
CPR;
no other private company, with the single exception of the Hudson’s Bay, has had such an influence on the destinies of the nation. Nor has any other come so close to ruin and survived.

When the debate over the contract came to an end, Ottawa settled into a kind of doldrums. After two months of verbal pyrotechnics in the House
everything else seemed to be anticlimactic. The glittering social season burned itself out, the session limped to its close, and the capital reverted to the status of a backwoods lumber village. When the Governor General arrived to prorogue Parliament on March 21, there was hardly anybody left in the House.

The rigours of the debate had wrecked the health of John A. Macdonald, Charles Tupper, and John Henry Pope, the three Conservative leaders most responsible for the railway contract. They had set off for England the previous summer to find the men and the money to build the railway. They had returned in triumph with the contract in their pockets to silence the shrill cries of “Failure!” in the Opposition press. They had steered the entire document through the House and preserved it
in toto
in the face of a cataract of oratory, a blizzard of pamphlets, a hastily conceived rival syndicate, and twenty-three hard-fought amendments. Now it seemed that their efforts had done them all in.

Macdonald, who had almost collapsed during his great speech in the Commons in January, seemed to be desperately – perhaps fatally-ill. The post-midnight sessions on which he himself had insisted (there were thirty of them) had sapped his strength so sorely that he could not be present when the Governor General finally approved the bill for which he had worked so hard. A few days before the session ended, he broke down completely: his pulse dropped to forty-nine and he was in an agony from bowel cramps. His physician was alarmed at his haggard appearance and his friends were aghast. With his fast-greying hair and his drawn features, he looked old before his time. He was dispatched to England in May with the unspoken fear that he was suffering from terminal cancer. It was expected that he would shortly resign. As for Tupper’s condition, it was described by the press in February as “critical,” while John Henry Pope, in Tupper’s words, was “in a sad condition which promises little for the future.”

Remarkably, all three of them recovered. Tupper’s doctor told him that he had been “strained but not sprung.” His condition was diagnosed in August as “catarrh of the liver” and Macdonald’s not as cancer but as “catarrh of the stomach,” phrases that doctors used when they could not explain an illness. “Sir John still suffers from languor and a sense of prostration,” the Ottawa
Free Press
reported from London that summer. Obviously, the problem was exhaustion from overwork.

In contrast to the lassitude of the capital, Winnipeg, a thousand miles to the northwest, was all bustle and turmoil. The eyes of the country were focused on the new Canada beyond the Precambrian wilderness of the Shield. Tupper was preparing for an autumn visit to the country through
which the railroad would run. So was the Governor General, Lord Lorne, with a covey of foreign newspapermen. The great North West boom was about to begin.

Within a fortnight of its formation, the
CPR
company was established in Winnipeg in temporary headquarters pending the completion of the new Bank of Montreal building. A freight shed was under construction and fourteen new locomotives were on their way – all samples from various makers in the United States, sent up on trial for the company’s inspection. “One of these machines is a regular giant, with driving wheels six feet in diameter and capable of making tremendous speeds,” the Manitoba
Free Press
reported on March 10. Contracts had already been let for half a million railroad ties, six thousand telegraph poles, and fifty thousand feet of pilings. Mountains of timber were heaped in the yards waiting to be moved to the end of track. The great triple-decker construction cars were rolling westward. Workmen were pouring into town: three hundred from Montreal, another three hundred from Minneapolis. Five hundred teams of horses had been hired to move construction supplies. New settlers were beginning to trickle in, and Charles Drinkwater, who had once been John A. Macdonald’s secretary and was now secretary to the
CPR
board, publicly predicted that the influx of immigrants that summer would be enormous.

There were other signs of the swiftly changing character of the old North West. The Ogilvie Milling Company had abandoned millstones and introduced steel rollers to cope with the hard northern wheat. The Manitoba Electric and Gas Light Company was planning to light the entire city by gas. (“It is now inevitable that gas is to be the light of the future – at least for some time to come.”) There was talk of a street railway to run the whole length of Main. The Red River cart, held together by buffalo thongs, was all but obsolete; ingenious Winnipeg wheelwrights were working on new wagons with iron axles and iron tires to compete with the railway. And the herds of murmuring buffalo which, just ten years before, had blackened the plains, were no more. They seemed to have vanished the previous winter as suddenly as if the earth had opened and swallowed them – a phenomenon the Indians believed had actually occurred.

The railway builders estimated that they had close to two thousand miles of trunk-line to construct.
^*
It could be divided into three sections:

In the East
, some six hundred and fifty miles, between Callander on Lake Nipissing and Fort William at the head of Lake Superior, all heavy construction across the ridges of the Precambrian Shield.

On the prairies
, some nine hundred miles from Winnipeg across the rolling grasslands to the Rocky Mountains.