The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (56 page)

One of the influences working upon Van Horne in the selection of a terminus was that of the bristly engineer, Marcus Smith, who was the government’s watchdog on the Port Moody-Emory’s Bar section of the Onderdonk contract. At the end of April, 1884, Smith urged the general manager to select English Bay as the terminus rather than Port Moody and suggested that the company purchase land for a station and siding as soon as possible before prices became inflated through speculation. What Van Horne did not know and what Smith was at pains to keep
secret was that Smith himself had owned property along the future right of way since the previous July. He had purchased it in the name of a New Westminster merchant, C. G. Major, who was holding it in trust for Smith’s children. Smith made it clear to his banker that he did not want his name to appear in the transaction and that he particularly did not want the
CPR
to know he owned the land. Smith, in addition, was for a time a silent partner in a syndicate that was offering the railway a bonus of land if it would extend the line to Coal Harbour or English Bay.

The spectacle of Marcus Smith secretly dabbling in real estate and repeatedly urging Van Horne to place the terminus where it was best designed to enrich him is an intriguing one. For Smith was a man who proclaimed his own honesty repeatedly and loudly in the face of what he believed to be almost universal corruption. Some years before he had actually accused the Governor General (then Lord Dufferin) of speculating in land along the projected line of the railway. He believed most politicians to be corrupt, especially those who had favoured the Fraser River-Burrard Inlet route, which he had vigorously but vainly opposed for so many years. If a man was not corrupt, Smith generally thought him to be crassly motivated or incompetent. Sandford Fleming he put in the former bracket, Henry Cambie in the latter. His own surreptitious dalliance in railway land speculation did not weaken the venom of his personal suspicions. He told his banker that sale of the land would give him a chance “of making a few thousand dollars which will be very acceptable as the Govt. service is becoming very irksome through corruption connected with the Onderdonk contracts so that I fear I cannot stand it much longer.” Smith was forever predicting his imminent resignation or dismissal; in point of fact, he survived in the government service longer than most of his colleagues.

Marcus Smith clearly believed that corners were being cut on the Onderdonk section of the line and that many of his colleagues and superiors were purposely ignoring inferior work in accepting without question or further investigation the estimates of the contractor’s men. In his diary, he wrote of sitting in Michael Haney’s room with Joseph Trutch, one of the government’s supervising engineers (and a former lieutenant-governor of British Columbia), and Collingwood Schreiber, the engineer-in-chief: “Then began an extraordinary comedy – Mr. Schreiber setting aside a contract and the scientific calculations of quantities executed and to be executed by engineers and adopting those guessed at by the company’s men in riding over the line – occasionally appealing to Trutch who sat behind looking wise and blinking like a Centennary owl – confirming by a nod everything that Schreiber did. This was the end of the first act of the drama of corruption openly played.”

Although Marcus Smith’s witness cannot be taken as gospel – he was far too suspicious of too many people to be considered a fair or unbiased observer – it is quite clear that, for one reason or another, the government engineers did not hold Andrew Onderdonk to the letter or even the spirit of his contract and that they allowed a good deal of shoddy work to go unremarked. (It is possible that Onderdonk’s vigorous lobbying in Ottawa persuaded the government to wink at some of the shortcuts he subsequently took.)

Van Horne, when he travelled the line in August, made no public remark other than that he was “agreeably surprised to find the character of the country so favorable generally for railway construction, and is satisfied that the line will be completed inside of 16 months.” In fact, as his later comments indicated, he was appalled at what he saw. The timber trusses were “the worst I ever saw in a railway. In the attempt to strengthen them they have been patched and spliced in a most wonderful manner – boulders and debris are continually coming down on the track.”

The situation led to a series of disagreeable battles between Van Horne and John Henry Pope, who was Charles Tupper’s successor as Minister of Railways. Pope was in a difficult position. He felt duty bound to stand behind his own people, who had told him that the work was properly done. “It seems to be a very sore question with him,” Van Horne told Stephen, “and he usually gets into a rage within ten minutes after we touch upon it.” When the Onderdonk contracts were finished, Pope refused Van Horne’s suggestion of a board of arbitration to examine the contentious points and swore “he would find some way to compel the Company to take over the road in its present condition.” The dispute led to an open breach between Pope, who had been the railway’s greatest friend and supporter within the Cabinet, and Van Horne. Their feud was so bitter that they did not speak for many years and shook hands only on Pope’s deathbed.

Pope, of course, had inherited the Onderdonk problem from Tupper. To admit that the line was substandard would be to admit that his predecessor’s policy was wrong. In 1882 Tupper had actually boasted in the House that he expected to save almost three million dollars of public money on four of the Onderdonk contracts by such cost-cutting devices as reducing the radius of the curves. On the fifth contract – the one on which Marcus Smith was employed as supervising engineer – there was less chance of effecting savings because it had been let as a lump sum and not broken down into component parts. There, if corners were cut, the contractor would profit.

Marcus Smith was scathing in his comments about this section – between
Port Moody and Emory. He told a friend that when the time came for the road to be inspected, Michael Haney would manage to get the trains running at thirty miles an hour, hiding the sore spots, but that the Syndicate would discover to their cost the following winter that many of the cuttings would turn into canals and the steep clay slopes and boulders would roll down over the track because of imperfect workmanship.

Smith made such a fuss that he was transferred to the section east of Kamloops (which Onderdonk had contracted to build not for the government but for the
CPR
). At least that was Smith’s suspicion. He had, in October, 1884, refused to put his signature on documents approving the work along the Port Moody-Emory line; his transfer followed shortly after this impasse. Certainly he was impolitic in his official correspondence in charging Onderdonk, and by inference Collingwood Schreiber himself, with corruption. “It is … generally believed,” he wrote, “that Onderdonk by corrupt means had the power to get any engineer removed from his contract and that I was removed at his instance. Be that as it may I cannot allow my reputation to suffer by the contractor’s incompetence or neglect and if the work is not finished fairly in accordance with the specifications I will testify against it in any commission or committee that may be appointed.…” Smith warned that if a public scandal arose he would “if driven to extremity” make public everything he knew, “even if I have to leave the Government service.” But in the complicated dispute that followed over the Onderdonk contracts he was not called. Nor did he speak up or leave the service.

There is no doubt that along the Fraser Canyon, the government shaved costs to the bone to the detriment of the line, as Henry Cambie’s diaries make clear. The curves were not to exceed four degrees and the grades were not to exceed one per cent, but Cambie had scarcely located two miles when he received a telegram from Ottawa to “locate the cheapest possible line with workable curves and grades.” Cambie and his assistant, T. H. White, stopped the survey and began adopting eight-degree curves, thereby avoiding tunnels and expensive cuts. According to White, when the curves reached ten degrees, Andrew Onderdonk, “throwing up his arms to high heaven declared that he refused to accept the order to run construction trains on so impossible a curvature.” A short time later, the government went so far as to permit reverse double curves, the bane of railroad engineers and operating crews. A reverse double curve occurs when one curve follows another in a figure S without any intervening straightaway. The resultant unequal wear and tear on both tracks and wheels is considerable. Between Kamloops and Lytton there were 430
curves and virtually no straight track. Not only would the maintenance be costly on such a section but the operating speed would also be slower.

In another attempt to reduce expensive excavation, the line was built along the face of sheer bluffs by means of grasshopper trestles. Sometimes inferior timber was used. Cambie admitted in his diary that it was impossible to get proper timber for a truss across Yale Creek and that second-grade material had to be employed. Yet a great deal of such inadequate work was passed by the government’s inspecting engineers in the interests of saving money – and, perhaps, of aiding the hard-pressed Andrew Onderdonk. The
Inland Sentinel
was critical of these inspections. Michael Hagan charged in September, 1883, that Collingwood Schreiber was going over the line too rapidly and in many cases did not bother to look at all of it: “His recent ‘inspection’ was recently described as like a flock of pigeons going over a town.” The paper reported that Sandford Fleming was dissatisfied with what he saw en route to Port Moody after he and Grant emerged from the mountains. Originally Fleming had tried to prevent Tupper’s cheese-paring and had gone along with it only on pain of dismissal.

The result of all this parsimony was a long and acrimonious debate between the
CPR
and the government which finally resulted, in 1888, in a board of arbitration. The company claimed twelve million dollars from the government; the final settlement, in 1891, was $579,255. The dispute embittered Stephen, who felt that he had been betrayed by Pope and Tupper, both of whom swore before the arbitrators that the line was built as intended, yet admitted under cross-examination that if the company had taken the full ten years to complete the transcontinental the government would have been forced to rebuild the Onderdonk section. As a reward for building the line swiftly, Stephen felt he was “forced and cheated into accepting a temporary road, utterly unfit to be operated as a through trunk line.…” This was certainly one of the reasons why Stephen, in the end, left Canada and returned to his native Scotland, disgusted with politics and with politicians and estranged even from Macdonald. “I am thoroughly sick and tired of these wretched squabbles with the late Government,” he wrote to the Prime Minister in 1889, “…  and shall not be happy until I get away from them all.”

As for Van Horne, he told a United States Senate inquiry in 1889 that if the
CPR
had had control of the British Columbia section, “we would not have built it where it is.…” He would have found a way to circumvent the Fraser Canyon which he described, not inaccurately, as “one of the worst places in the world.”

6
Nota dollar to spare

The general manager had his first view of the Fraser Canyon on August 9 after a record run from Port Moody in which the train travelled at speeds approaching sixty miles an hour. He was accompanied by Collingwood Schreiber, Joseph W. Trutch, Major A. B. Rogers, Marcus Smith, Henry Cambie, Michael Haney, and S. B. Reed – as quarrelsome, temperamental, and jealous a company of engineers as it was possible to assemble. Smith, who had always been opposed to any route through the Fraser Canyon, thought that Schreiber was “mean and inferior,” Rogers “a thorough fraud,” Cambie “a toady of Fleming’s,” and Trutch a total incompetent. These feelings were generally reciprocated. Smith had quarreled with Rogers, bullied Cambie, and questioned Schreiber’s integrity. The Canadians were all jealous of Rogers, whose crusty personality did not endear him to either casual acquaintances or colleagues. Haney and Smith had fought eyeball to eyeball on several occasions. Reed was known as the man who did the hatchet job on the Winnipeg engineering office in the spring of 1882. In addition, several of the company had apparently been engaged to spy on one another. When the
CPR
decided to give Onderdonk the subcontract to build east from Savona’s Ferry towards the Eagle Pass, it sent Rogers out as supervising engineer. Van Horne, in April, decided to send Cambie out to check up on Rogers. Later he sent Reed to check on Cambie and then, to cap it all, dispatched Marcus Smith to look over Reed’s work. Obviously, the general manager was taking no chances, and when the unhappy Rogers, feeling the breath of several rivals on his neck, wrote several letters of complaint, Van Horne soothed him by explaining that a great deal of money was involved and “I have thought it to the interest of the Company to get opinions from as many engineers as possible, before expenditure … should actually commence.… This was not intended to indicate any want of confidence in you.” Nonetheless, it could not have been a very happy relationship; Marcus Smith’s description of Rogers as “a man one cannot discuss work with …” gives a clue to the kind of atmosphere that was engendered among the engineers in British Columbia.

In spite of all this it was a reasonably harmonious group that arrived in Kamloops on August 10, having inspected the steel cantilever bridge across the Fraser near Lytton, “one of the great wonders of the c.p. railway,” as the
Sentinel
rightly described it. Designed by C. C. Schneider of New York, it was the first bridge of its kind in North America; the second (which was actually installed first) crossed the Niagara Gorge
just below the famous falls. Until the bridge was finished a cable was stretched across the boiling Fraser, and freight and passengers were carried over in a basket suspended from pulleys. The basket ran for six hundred feet from the high bank to the lower opposite bank under the force of gravity, was stopped by a bale of hay at the far end, where it discharged its cargo, and was then hauled back by a horse. Cambie actually made the crossing before the basket was used, sitting in the body of a wheelbarrow slung by ropes from its four corners. As he came hurtling down the cable Cambie to his dismay saw a man roll two bales of hay into his path and, fighting back the inclination to scream, threw his legs into the air to prevent them from being snapped off. The barrow struck one bale and sent it flying; the second brought it to a stop.