The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (4 page)

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In the West
, some four hundred and fifty miles of heavy mountain construction.

In addition, the railway company was to be given, as a gift, some seven hundred miles of line built as a public work. There were three of these publicly built lines:

First, there was the sixty-five-mile branch line from Winnipeg to the Minnesota border known as the Pembina Branch, already completed. It connected with the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway owned by members of the
CPR
Syndicate. Thus the
CPR
enjoyed a freight monopoly on goods and grain leaving Winnipeg for the East.

Secondly, there was the line between Fort William and Selkirk, near Winnipeg-433 miles long-still under construction but slated for completion in the summer of 1882.

Thirdly, there was the 215-mile stretch that led from Savona’s Ferry on Kamloops Lake through the Fraser Canyon to Port Moody on Pacific tidewater. Construction had begun on this line under the contractor Andrew Onderdonk in the spring of 1880, but very little had yet been built.

Construction would proceed in four major stages:

First, the surveyors would locate the actual line, laying out the curves and gradients and driving stakes along the centre line as a guide to navvies who followed.

Next, the road would be graded, ready to lay steel. This was the most important operation of all. A swath sixty-six feet wide would be chopped out of bushland and forest. Tunnels would be drilled through mountain barriers and galleries notched into the sides of cliffs. Bridges of various designs would be flung across coulees and river valleys. Cuts would be blasted out of rock and the broken debris thus obtained would be “borrowed” to fill in the intervening gorges and declines so that the grade might be as level as possible. Swamps and lakes would be diked or drained. On the plains, huge blades drawn by horses would scrape the sod into a ditched embankment four feet high and nine hundred miles long so that the trains could ride high above the winter snowdrifts.

The third operation was to lay the steel. Ties or “sleepers” would be placed at right angles across the grade at exact distances. Parallel rails would be laid on top of them and spiked to the ties. Fishplates would connect one rail to the next.

Finally, the line would be “ballasted,” the space between the ties filled
with crushed gravel so that the line would not shift when the trains roared over it.

In addition, all the varied paraphernalia of an operating line – stations, sidings, water towers, turntables – would have to be installed before the railway could be said to be complete. Later on, branch lines to serve neighbouring communities would connect with the main trunk so that the railroad would resemble an intricate tree more than twenty-five hundred miles long, coiling through all of western Canada.

Almost twenty years before, the perceptive Sandford Fleming had reckoned that such a trunk-line would cost about one hundred million dollars to construct. That rough estimate was probably in the minds of the Syndicate that contracted to build the
CPR
. From the government the company received a cash subsidy of twenty-five million dollars, to be paid out in stages as the railway advanced, and twenty-five million acres of prairie land, between the Red River and the Rockies, also to be awarded in stages as construction was completed. The Syndicate hoped to turn the land into ready cash as quickly as it was earned by mortgaging it, at the rate of one dollar an acre, through the issuance of “land grant bonds.” It could also mortgage the main line at the rate of ten thousand dollars a mile, and issue capital stock up to twenty-five million dollars. Unlike other North American railway companies, the
CPR
shunned the idea of bonded indebtedness and heavy stock promotions. It expected-naively, as it developed – to build the railway with the subsidy, the proceeds of the land sales, the operating profits, and a minimum of borrowing. The first stock issue was fifty thousand shares at a par value of a hundred dollars a share; almost all of the five millions was subscribed on February 17, 1881, by the members of the original
CPR
Syndicate. By March 3, an additional $1,100,000 had been subscribed; that was the extent of the original stock sale.

The hustle in Winnipeg, that spring of 1881, was in sharp contrast to the vacillations of the previous year, when the railroad was being built as a public work. The government had originally planned the cheapest of colonization roads across the North West. It let the first hundred-mile contract in August, 1879, to John Ryan, who was unable to finish the job. The government took over his contract, and by the spring of 1880 the flimsy line had been completed for about seventy miles, as far as Portage la Prairie. A second hundred-mile section west of the Red River was let on May 3, 1880, to another contractor. An entire summer passed and nothing was done. That contract was also cancelled.

This section of the line, which the
CPR
, under the terms of the contract,
purchased from the government, was virtually useless; the company determined to rebuild it entirely to better specifications and relocate most of it. A different mood had settled upon railway construction in Canada. For the first time in the long, tangled history of the Canadian Pacific, the rails were being laid under the supervision of the same men who would eventually operate the road; it would not profit them to cut corners.

On May 2, 1881, the company was ready to begin. At the end of track, the little community of Portage la Prairie – Manitoba’s oldest town – clattered with activity. Strange men poured off the incoming coaches and elbowed each other in the mire of the streets, picking their way between the invading teams of snorting horses. Great heaps of construction materials transformed the railway yards into labyrinths. An army of ploughs and scrapers stood ready to rip into the unbroken prairie. Like soldiers poised on the start line, the navvies waited until the company’s chief engineer, General Thomas Lafayette Rosser, ceremonially turned the first sod. Then the horses, the men, and the machines moved forward and began to fashion the great brown serpent that would creep steadily west, day after day, towards its rendezvous with the mountains.

2
How John Macoun altered the map

Canada is deceptively vast. The map shows it as the second largest country in the world and probably the greatest in depth, extending through forty degrees of latitude from Ellesmere Island in the high Arctic to Pelee Island in Lake Erie, which is on the same parallel as Rome. It is almost twice as deep as the United States and considerably deeper than either China or the Soviet Union. If the tip of Canada were placed at Murmansk, the country would extend as far south as Cairo; if it were placed on the Manchurian border it would drop all the way down to Bangkok.

Yet all this is illusory. For practical purposes Canada is almost as slender as Chile. Traditionally half of its people have lived within a hundred miles of the United States border and ninety per cent within two hundred miles. It is a country shaped like a river – or a railway – and for the best of reasons: in the eastern half of the nation, the horizontal hiving of the population is due to the presence of the St. Lawrence, in the western half to that “sublime audacity,” the Canadian Pacific.

The
CPR
was the natural extension of the traditional route used by the
explorers and fur traders on their passage to the West. If that natural extension had been continued as was originally planned, Canada might today have a different dimension. But that was not to be. In the spring of 1881 a handful of men, gathered around a cluttered, circular table in an office in St. Paul, Minnesota, altered the shape and condition of the new country west of Winnipeg.

That decision affected the lives of tens of thousands of Canadians. It ensured the establishment of cities close to the border that otherwise might not have existed for another generation, if ever – Broadview, Regina, Moose Jaw, Swift Current, Medicine Hat, Banff, and Revelstoke. It doomed others – Carlton, Battleford, Eagle Hill, Bethlehem, Grenoble, Baldwin, Humboldt, Nazareth, Nut Hill, and Edmonton – to permanent or temporary eclipse. (Some, indeed, were never more than names on early railway maps.) It affected aspects of Canadian life as varied as the tourist trade and the wheat economy. In addition, it gave the railway company something very close to absolute control over the destinies of scores of embryo communities along the right of way.

This was not what the government had intended when the railway was conceived in 1871, or even in 1881, when the administration turned the task over to a private company. It had been conceded, since the days of the first explorers and surveyors, that any transcontinental line would have to cross the North West by way of the fertile, wooded valley of the North Saskatchewan, following more or less the route of the Carlton Trail, along whose rutted right of way the Red River carts had squeaked for the best part of a century. This route led north and west from Winnipeg, by way of Battleford, to Fort Edmonton and on to the Yellow Head Pass in the Rockies. From there the line was to continue in the fur traders’ footsteps down the valleys of the Thompson and the Fraser to Burrard Inlet on the Pacific. It had taken a decade of bitter argument, vicious recrimination, political manæuvre, back-breaking exploration, and meticulous foot-by-foot location survey to settle upon that route. It had also cost many millions of dollars, the reputations of several public figures, and the lives of forty surveyors. The powerful little group of men in St. Paul threw it all away after about an hour’s discussion.

There were three of them, all members of the four-man executive committee of the
CPR
– a remarkable trio: passionate, sometimes temperamental, strong-willed, and single-minded. Each had begun life in poverty with few prospects; each had known an astonishing personal success.

Of the three, George Stephen, the president of the new railway company, was the most sophisticated. The one-time draper’s assistant, now impeccably turned out by his personal valet, moved easily in the financial capitals of two continents. As president of the Bank of Montreal – a post he was about to resign – he had acquired a reputation as a financial wizard, respected for his integrity, admired for his audacity. Had he not transformed an expiring railroad, the St. Paul and Pacific, into the most profitable enterprise on the continent? He and his colleagues, Jim Hill and Donald Smith, had become multimillionaires as a result.

The second man, Richard Bladworth Angus, was Stephen’s protégé – another dark, cool-eyed Scot, heavily moustached and side-whiskered, and just two years Stephen’s junior. In an astonishing twelve-year period he had soared from an obscure post as a $600-a-year bank clerk to succeed E. H. King, “the Napoleon of Canadian Finance,” as general manager of the Bank of Montreal, the most powerful financial institution in Canada. Known for his tact, his foresight, his amiability, and his modesty (he would eventually refuse a knighthood), he was called in business circles the Man of Peace. Stephen in 1879, while still the bank’s president, had, in effect, stolen this shrewd, strict financier to manage the St. Paul railway. A year later, he seduced him into the great adventure of the Pacific road.

The third man was James Jerome Hill, a tougher and rougher specimen than his colleagues. With his single, burning eye, his short, lion’s beard and long mane, he looked like a bit of a pirate, which, in truth, he was. Five years before, Hill, the ex-Canadian, had talked Stephen into the financial gamble of the St. Paul railway. It was said that he could talk the hardest-headed man into practically anything. In an age when most capitalists were prudently close-mouthed he was unexpectedly garrulous, enveloping adversaries and colleagues alike in a smoke-screen of words. In his business dealings he was often devious, in his ambitions, Napoleonic. A dangerous man to have as an enemy, he had, in his forty-three years, made a good many enemies. All the traditional adjectives used to describe nineteenth-century entrepreneurs apply to Hill: ruthless, dynamic, unscrupulous, hard-driving, and, above all, decisive. It was he who made the ultimate decision that day in St. Paul.

The three men, together with the
CPR’S
new chief engineer, a one-time Confederate general named Thomas Lafayette Rosser, were seated around a table littered with maps of the Canadian North West and listening to an enthusiastic torrent of words from a Canadian naturalist and explorer, Professor John Macoun.

Macoun, a bright-eyed Irishman, almost entirely self-educated, had come to St. Paul at Hill’s behest because he was familiar with so much of the southern prairie between Winnipeg and the Rockies. A decade before, Macoun, on a sudden whim, had accepted Sandford Fleming’s invitation to cross half a continent with him from Lake Superior to the Pacific. As a
result he had become enamoured of the North West. In 1879 and again in 1880, the Canadian government sent him out to the prairies to explore as far as the Bow River valley in the foothills of the Rockies. These investigations confirmed in his mind a belief that had been taking form since 1872 and had by this time become a kind of religion with him. He was convinced that the southern plains were not the desert that almost everybody thought them to be.

In spreading this dogma, Macoun was flying in the face of previous scientific reports. Both Captain John Palliser from Great Britain and Henry Youle Hind from Toronto had advised their respective governments that the southern plains were a continuation of the Great American Desert, an “arid belt” unfit for cultivation or settlement. It was Hind’s enthusiastic espousal of the “fertile belt” along the North Saskatchewan that had influenced the original choice of a Pacific railway route.

Macoun resorted to the public platform as well as to the printed page to discredit both Palliser and Hind, and his infectious enthusiasm drew large crowds. He rarely gave the same speech twice. “I was so full of the question,” he recalled, “that I could talk for a week without stopping.” His estimates of arable prairie soil were far in excess of anyone else’s and helped confirm John A. Macdonald’s conviction that profits from the sale of prairie land could underwrite the cost of the railway subsidy. Since few Canadians wanted to pay higher taxes for the sake of a railway, this was a telling point with Parliament as well as public.

BOOK: The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885
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