The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (42 page)

By July, the organization had been perfected to the point where ninety-seven miles of track were laid instead of the monthly average of fifty-eight.
As Langdon and Shepard approached the end of their contract, the track-laying guides were seized by a kind of frenzy; on July 28, about two weeks out of Calgary, they set a record that has never been surpassed for manual labour on a railroad: 6.38 miles of finished railway – earthworks, grading, track-laying and ballasting – were completed in a single day.

It was, of course, a stunt, theatrically produced by an organization that had reason to feel cocky. Special men were brought in for the job: the tireless Ryan brothers, world champion spikers, who could drive a spike home with two blows, and Big Jack, a Herculean Swede who was said to be able to hoist a thirty-foot rail weighing 560 pounds and heave it onto a flat car without assistance.

The statistics of that day have been preserved. Sixteen thousand ties and more than two thousand rails (totalling 604 tons) were used. The ties were unloaded by a precision team of thirty-two men and hauled forward by thirty-three teams of horses. On the track a team of eight men unloaded and distributed the ties and a second team of four men spaced them out. Two men following behind spaced and distanced the joint ties while two more were detailed to arrange and adjust the misplaced ties in front of the leading spikers. Twelve men unloaded the rails, twelve more loaded them onto the four iron trolleys which hauled them to the front. Here a team of ten men, five on each side of the track, swung the rails onto the ties. Behind these came a platoon of bolters, fifteen in all, each putting in an average of 565 bolts, followed by thirty-two spikers, who drove a total of sixty-three thousand spikes handed to them by four peddlers. The lead and gauge spikers each drove 2,120 spikes, averaging four blows to a spike, which meant that in fourteen hours they each delivered an average of eighty-four hundred blows with a sledge hammer. The first two miles of material were hauled ten miles across the prairies and the remainder came up from a two-thousand-foot siding three miles away, which was itself installed that same day by the regular side-track gang. Such was the organization that the contractors had perfected in fewer than eighteen months.

The city of Calgary was not yet born but some of its future citizens were at work along the line of track, oblivious of the fact that they would help to build the foothills community. Turner Bone, the engineer, recalled in his memoirs how many men he bumped into who later became prominent Calgarians. When he arrived in Moose Jaw late one night, the
CPR’S
watchman guided him, with the aid of a sputtering lantern, to a large marquee, pretentiously named Royal Hotel. The man’s name was
Thomas Burns; he later became assessor and city treasurer of Calgary. In a Medicine Hat office there was a small messenger and chore boy, about twelve years old, who answered to the name of George. Years later in Calgary, Bone met him again, when George Webster was mayor. In the company boarding house, Bone encountered a former supply officer who had opened a law office in Medicine Hat but continued to eat with the engineers from force of habit. This was James Lougheed, soon to become the most noted lawyer in the West, Conservative leader in the Senate, cabinet minister in the Borden government, and a Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George.

As the railway towns began to prosper, the parochial jealousies that were a feature of Canadian life from Vancouver Island to the Maritimes blossomed out on the prairies. A bitter three-cornered battle, fought largely in the newspapers, took place all that year and the next between Winnipeg, Moose Jaw, and Regina. The argument, ostensibly, was over the choice of Regina as capital, but it was really over real estate. The Winnipeg
Times
charged that the new capital was nothing but a few tents and shacks, that the water was anything but pure and wholesome, and that the accommodations were terrible. The
Sun
said the capital should be moved – why, the
CPR
was so ashamed of it, the trains went through only in the dark of night! The Moose Jaw
News
declared that Regina was “dead beyond the hope of resurrection.”

Fortunately Regina had acquired a champion in the person of Nicholas Flood Davin, one of the most distinguished journalists in Canada. Davin had come to Regina the previous fall for a visit at the invitation of W. B. Scarth of the North-West Land Company, who had brought a private carload of prominent Canadians to look over the new city, no doubt in an attempt to nullify the bad press publicity. (Dr. John Rae, the famous Arctic explorer who had discovered the first clues to the fate of the lost Franklin expedition, was one of the guests.) In Regina, Davin met a delegation of leading citizens who pleaded with him to start a newspaper in their city. He told them that he could not afford to start “a paltry concern.” It might be a small paper, but it would have to contain the latest news “and would I hoped be something of a power.” To launch such a journal, Davin said, would certainly entail an initial loss of five thousand dollars.

“We’ll give you a bonus of $5,000,” somebody exclaimed.

Davin, looking about him at the huddle of tents and timber houses, only laughed. Nonetheless, he agreed to meet them that evening at a dinner in the Royal Hotel. There, to his astonishment, they voted him the
five thousand he asked for, subscribing $2,700 in cash on the spot and promising the remainder within a few days. Davin, cane in hand, took a long walk out onto the prairie to think about it. He was a creature of impulse, a romantic who lived for the day; his contempt for money – he spent it as swiftly as he made it and existed for most of his life on the cliff-edge of penury – was equalled by his love of good food, fine wine, comely women, and high adventure. He had been wounded at the siege of Montmorency while covering the Franco-Prussian war and injured so badly while riding to hounds in England that he had come to Canada in 1872 on sick leave, never to return home. His life appeared to be a series of accidental encounters. Here he was, a barrister, politician, and international journalist used to the sophistication of London and Paris, suddenly transported to the rawest of frontiers, trudging about on the open plains on a chill November night, pondering a journalistic future in a one-horse prairie town. He could not resist it; he succumbed. Regina had its champion.

A Limerick Irishman, Davin was a commanding presence, almost six feet tall with a massive head, entirely bald save for a sandy fringe about the ears. At forty, he was a bachelor with a long record of romances and flirtations. His dress, like his personal life, was unconventional, but his professional reputation in a variety of fields was enviable. As a journalist he had worked for the London
Standard
, the Irish
Times
, and the
Pall Mall Gazette
; he had been literary critic for the
Globe
of Toronto and editorial writer for the
Mail
. He had read law at the Middle Temple and had been called to the bar in both London and Ontario. His defence of the murderer of George Brown, the
Globe’s
publisher, had increased his reputation (“one of the most masterly appeals for human life that has ever been heard in a Toronto courtroom”), even though his client was later hanged. He was an author of note (
The Irishman in Canada)
, a poet of distinction, an unsuccessful candidate for office, a friend of Sir John A. Macdonald, a master of six languages, and one of the best impromptu orators in the country. Regina had got him cheap. So great was the enthusiasm over the catch that, as a sweetener, Scarth and some others threw in an additional five thousand dollars worth of choice lots.
^*
Several names were suggested for Davin’s newspaper – the
Shaganappi
, the
Blizzard
, the
Scalper
, the
Buffalo
. He chose to call it the
Leader
, for he intended to make it the leading publication in the North West and in
this ambition he was eminently successful. With his bonus money he set out to purchase the best possible equipment and was able to boast in the first issue that “in truth, so much money was never before sunk in a newspaper enterprise in a place the size of Regina. Nor ever before were such complete fonts of type and so able a staff combined to furnish a paper for a town six months old.”

Once established in the editor’s chair, Davin struck back at Regina’s critics. He charged the
CPR
with intentionally trying to boom Moose Jaw (“Loose Jaw,” he called it), and he engaged in a running statistical battle with that city’s press over their respective populations. “To give Moose Jaw a lift at the expense of Regina, has been the fondest hope of poor Godforsaken, bankrupt Winnipeg,” he wrote; and he put the blame where it properly belonged, on the shoulders of Arthur Wellington Ross, the real estate “shark” who had been behind the abortive sales of the Dewdney syndicate’s land. “The commercial interests of Winnipeg and this gentleman were in one tangle,” Davin wrote, “and Mr. Ross got left in his speculations regarding his surveyed sections near Regina. Nobody bought them. Ross was badly bitten and he howled. His howls found echo in the throats of his worthy ‘hangers-on.’ ”

When he ran out of prose, Davin turned to poetry to hit at Regina’s detractors. Then, in the fall of 1883, he invaded Winnipeg itself and sent back sarcastic reports of the post-boom atmosphere:

“Things are in such a condition here now that millionaires have had to leave their stately dwellings and go into lodgings … the owners of splendid mansions – the drivers of fast horses and swell rigs with footmen having rosettes in their hats … have shrunk to three rooms In the Cauchon Block.… What a revolution in one brief twelve months! Mr. A. W. Ross, M.P., has got into his house. But he is paying $60,000 interest. A few days ago one of the papers published a list of Winnipeg’s wealthy citizens. Many of those published there as worth a half a million could not get a $500 note discounted.… Could you know the anxiety, the calculations, the sleepless nights spent by some of Winnipeg’s reputed millionaires, you would bid your fellow-citizens of the Pile of Bones to congratulate themselves that Regina has not boomed, but is a subject of steady, quiet progress.”

Five thousand dollars was a handsome sum in the 1880’s; it was enough to keep a man and his family in luxury for four years. But, reading that sweet invective, the embattled Regina citizens who had subscribed to Davin’s bonus must have reckoned that they had already been given their money’s worth.

2
The displaced people

The whole country marvelled, that spring and summer of 1883, over the feat of building the railway across the prairies in just fifteen months – everybody, that is, except the people it was displacing. To the Indians, the railway symbolized the end of a golden age – an age in which the native peoples, liberated by the white man’s horses and the white man’s weapons, had galloped at will across their untrammelled domain, where the game seemed unlimited and the zest of the hunt gave life a tang and a purpose. This truly idyllic existence came to an end with the suddenness of a thunderclap just as the railway, like a glittering spear, was thrust through the ancient hunting grounds of the Blackfoot and the Cree. Within six years, the image of the Plains Indian underwent a total transformation. From a proud and fearless nomad, rich in culture and tradition, he became a pathetic, half starved creature, confined to the semi-prisons of the new reserves and totally dependent on government relief for his existence.

The buffalo, on which the entire Indian economy and culture depended, were actually gone before the coming of the railway; but the order of their passing is immaterial. They could not have existed in a land bisected by steel and criss-crossed by barbed wire. The passing of the great herds was disastrous, for without the buffalo, which had supplied them with food, shelter, clothing, tools, and ornaments, the Indians were helpless. By 1880, after the three most terrible years they had ever known, the emaciated natives were forced to eat their dogs and their horses, to scrabble for gophers and mice, and even to consume the carcasses of animals found rotting on the prairie.

On top of this the Indians were faced with the sudden onslaught of a totally foreign agrarian culture. Because of the railway, the impact was almost instantaneous. In eastern Canada, the influence of the white strangers had been felt gradually over a period of generations. In the North West it happened in the space of a few years. It did not matter that the various treaties guaranteed that the old, free life would continue and that the natives would not be forced to adopt white ways. With the buffalo gone and the grasslands tilled and fenced, such promises were hollow.

The government’s policy, born of expediency, was a two-stage one. The starving Indians would be fed at public expense for a period which, it was hoped, would be temporary. Over a longer period, the Indian Department would attempt to bring about a sociological change that normally occupied
centuries. It would try to turn a race of hunters into a community of peasants. It would settle the Indians on reserves, provide them with tools and seed, and attempt to persuade them to give up the old life and become self-sufficient as farmers and husbandmen. The reserves would be situated on land considered best suited for agriculture, all of it north of the line of the railway, far from the hunting grounds. Thus the
CPR
became the visible symbol of the Indians’ tragedy.

It was a tall order. Only the terrible privations of the late seventies and early eighties could have caused thousands of once-independent people to abandon so meekly an entire way of life. The famine of 1879–80 forced thousands of reluctant Indians onto the new reserves. Others, led by such free spirits as Big Bear and Piapot (both Cree chieftains), continued to defy the authorities and follow the will-o’-the-wisp of the buffalo through the Cypress Hills and into the United States. It was not the buffalo they were chasing but the shadows of the past; the great herds were always over the next hill. By the winter of 1882–83, five thousand disillusioned Indians were starving in the neighbourhood of Fort Walsh. In the end, all the tribes moved north to the reserves. To the south lay the line of the railway: a steel fence barring them from their past.