The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (74 page)

Van Horne was quite blunt about his intentions in a letter to Major Rogers: “Our object should be of course to give the greatest possible value to our lands and therefore the least to any other.” He warned Rogers to keep the company’s plans for the Vancouver townsite secret from everybody including the engineers under him. “There are more speculators about New Westminster and Victoria than there were in Winnipeg during the boom and they are a much sharper lot. Nearly every person is more or less interested and you will have to be on your guard against all of them.”

To get what he wanted, Van Horne resorted to tough measures. He told Henry Beatty to intimate to private speculators east of Granville that if they did not deal liberally with the company, the
CPR
shops and all terminal works of any consequence would be moved away from their property to the area of English Bay. In the end the landholders had to yield a third of the lots in each block they held. The railway, in short, would dominate the new city. No street could be continued to tidewater without its permission.

The private speculators included David Oppenheimer, late of Kamloops, who was to become Vancouver’s second mayor, John Robson, editor of the New Westminster
Columbian
, Marcus Smith, the government surveyor, and Arthur Wellington Ross, who had come to Port
Moody in 1884, hoping to recoup the fortune lost when the Winnipeg boom collapsed. Ross moved on almost immediately to the livelier-looking end of Burrard Inlet and proceeded to purchase all the land he could afford. Since Ross was employed by the railway as a real estate agent and adviser, he might be said, once again, to have been in on the ground floor.

The Fraser Valley and New Westminster real estate interests saw what, in hindsight, seems obvious; but in Victoria, the land speculators continued to believe that Port Moody would be the terminus. Indeed, the
Colonist
stationed a reporter there to interview newcomers and convince them that there was no spot on the inlet known as Vancouver, a statement that was technically correct until 1886. Late in 1885, the Port Moody
Gazette
was still solemnly assuring its dwindling band of readers that the Coal Harbour “scheme” was nothing more than “a speculation dependent upon suckers.”

By then, the Vancouver townsite was well on the way to being surveyed. One autumn day Lauchlan Hamilton, the
CPR
engineer who had laid out Regina, Moose Jaw, Swift Current, and Calgary, set off from the Sunnyside Hotel, which overlooked the beach at what became the corner of Water Street and Carrall. He made his way through the swamp and blackberry bramble on the later site of Woodward’s department store. Behind him, in single file on the narrow trail, were eight assistants, including young Jack Stewart, the future general and construction tycoon. At a point on the forest’s edge, which would one day be the site of Victory Square, Hamilton drove in a wooden stake with a nail on top. From this point he ran a line, east and west, from which to start a system of streets; it became Hastings Street. A future alderman, later to be known as “the godfather of Vancouver” (he is credited with the idea for Stanley Park), Hamilton named several of the major streets – Beatty, Abbott, Cambie, and, of course, Hamilton – for faithful
CPR
hands. The forest was so dense that one man, John Leask (he would be the city’s first auditor), got lost and the survey party spent an entire afternoon finding him. It took three days to cut a peep-hole through the mass of Douglas firs that rose from the water’s edge to the ridge on the far side of False Creek. Only then could Hamilton and his men see where to put the mile-long street that ran south from Hastings. Hamilton named it Granville, after the hard-drinking, hard-living, poker-playing community through which the railway passed to its official terminus at English Bay. “Keep your eyes open,” Van Horne is said to have told Hamilton after an all-night poker session in which he himself had been badly taken. “These damned Vancouver fellows will steal the pants off you.”

But Van Horne was engaged in a larger game for higher stakes. He had all the unalienated lots in Granville township, the right of way from New Westminster to Kitsilano on English Bay, including much of the north bank of False Creek, the vast grant from Hastings Mill and, far back in the forest, a valuable tract of residential property, which he named Shaughnessy Heights. He also had the entire foreshore of the future city, which he had insisted upon because, he said, the depth of the water made piers impossible; the railway would need all that land for dock facilities. Future events were to prove that this was not necessary, and, as later generations slowly realized, the railway would have had to come to the mouth of the inlet anyway, whether or not it was given as much as an acre of free real estate. Van Horne may have been skinned at poker in the last of the frontier railway towns, but he was the real winner in a much more important game of skill and bluff.

6
Craigellachie

Edward Mallandaine wanted to fight the Indians. When the news of the rebellion reached Victoria, where he lived and went to school, there was no holding him; and his father, a pioneer architect and engineer, did not try to hold him. He booked passage to New Westminster, got aboard the new
CPR
line out of Port Moody, and took it as far as Eagle Pass Landing. He was just seventeen years old, small for his age, with a thin, alert face, half-hidden by a black cap. He trudged over the line of the partly finished road until he reached Golden, at the foot of the Kicking Horse, and there he learned, to his intense disappointment, that the rebellion was over and that the troops from eastern Canada, which had had all the adventure and all the glory, were already on their way home.

He was disappointed and disgusted. He headed west again, through the Rogers Pass and into Farwell, with its single street lined with log and frame shacks. There was a feeling of excitement in Farwell that summer of 1885. The town was the half-way point between the two Ends of Track: freight outfits bustled in from the Rogers and the Eagle Passes; boats puffed into the new docks from the mines at the Big Bend of the Columbia; a new post office was opening. Young Mallandaine decided to stay for a while in Farwell and go into business for himself. He opened a freighting service between the town and Eagle Pass Landing, taking a pony through the Gold Range twice each week along the tote road carved out by
the railway contractors and soliciting orders for newspapers and supplies from the navvies along the way. It was hard going but it made a profit.

For a teenage boy it was an exciting time in which to live and an exciting place in which to be. Mallandaine was bright enough to realize that history was being made all around him and he noted it all in his mind for later reference: the spectacle of fifty men hanging over the face of the cliffs at Summit Lake, drilling holes in the rock; the sound of thunder in the pass as hundreds of tons of rock hurtled through the air; the sight of a hundred-foot Howe truss put together in a single day; the long, low huts where the navvies, mostly Swedes and Italians, slept “huddled in like bees in a hive with little light and ventilation”; the accidents, brawls, drinking, and gambling in the camps, “with men of all nationalities throwing away their hard-earned pay at faro, stud poker and other games of chance”; a gun battle with two men shot in a gambling den not far from the Farwell post office; and, towards the end of the season, the rough pageantry of the Governor General, Lord Lansdowne himself, riding on horseback through the gap between the two lines of steel on his way to the coast.

Each time Mallandaine made his way through Eagle Pass, that gap was shorter. He noted “day by day the thousands of feet of earth removed and … the swarms of men slaving away like ants for the good of the gigantic enterprise.” By October it became clear that the road would be finished by first snow. The mushroom towns began to lose their inhabitants and a general exodus took place as the contractors discharged more and more men. Now, as the boy moved through the mountains, he noticed the wayside houses shut up and deserted, contractors’ equipment being shifted and carted away, and hundreds of men travelling on foot with all their belongings to the east or to the west. Some of the rougher characters, who had operated saloons and gambling dens, became road agents, “and many a poor man who had been toiling all summer, was obliged to deliver up his earnings.”

All the activity that had excited Edward Mallandaine on his arrival began to die away, and an oppressive silence settled on the pass – a silence broken only by the hideous shrieking of the construction locomotives echoing through the hills, as they rattled by with flat cars loaded with steel rails. Mallandaine felt a kind of chill creeping into his bones – not just the chill of the late October winds, sweeping down through the empty bunk-houses, but the chill of loneliness that comes to a man walking through a graveyard in the gloom.

“It seemed as though some scourge had swept this mountain pass. How ghostly the deserted camps would look at night! How quiet it all seemed!” The pass became so lonely that Mallandaine almost began to dread the ride between Farwell and the Landing. There was something eerie about the sight of boarded-up buildings, dump cars left by the wayside, and portions of contractors’ outfits cast aside along the line of the tote road. And the silence! Not since the days of the survey parties had the mountains seemed so still. Mallandaine decided to pack it in; there was no business left to speak of anyway. He made plans to return to his parents’ home in Victoria. There was, however, one final piece of business, which he did not want to miss. He was determined to be on hand when the last spike on the Canadian Pacific Railway was driven.

On the afternoon of November 6, the last construction train to load rails – an engine, a tender, and three flat cars – left Farwell for Eagle Pass. Mallandaine was one of several who climbed aboard and endured the “cold, cheerless, rough ride” that followed. A few miles out of Farwell, it began to snow. The rails became so slippery that when one gumbo grade was reached the locomotive could not creep over it and, after three attempts in which the train slid backwards down the incline, one car had to be abandoned.

Far into the darkness of the night the little train puffed, its passengers shivering with cold. Mallandaine, lying directly upon the piled-up rails and unable to sleep, was almost shaken to pieces as the train rattled over the unballasted roadbed. Finally it came to a stop. The youth tumbled off the flat car in the pitch dark, found an abandoned box car, and managed a short sleep. At six that morning the track crews were on the job. By the time Mallandaine awoke, the rails had almost come together.

At nine o’clock, the last two rails were brought forward and measured for cutting, with wagers being laid on the exact length that would be needed: it came to twenty-five feet, five inches. A peppery little man with long white whiskers, wearing a vest with a heavy watch-chain, cut the final rail with a series of hard blows. This was the legendary Major Rogers. One of the short rails was then laid in place and spiked; the second was left loose for the ceremony. The crowd, which included Al Rogers, Tom Wilson, Sam Steele, and Henry Cambie, waited for the official party to appear.

It is perhaps natural that the tale of the driving of the last spike on the
CPR
should have become a legend in which fancy often outweighs fact; it was, after all, the great symbolic act of Canada’s first century, a moment of solemn ritual enacted in a fairyland setting at the end of a harrowing year. Two days before the spike was driven, George Stephen had cabled in cipher from England: “Railway now out of danger.” The bonds had
risen to 99, the stock to
52½
. Nine days after the spike was driven, Louis Riel kept his rendezvous with the hangman at Regina. In more ways than one the completion of the railway signalled the end of the small, confined, comfortable nation that had been pieced together in 1867.

It is not surprising, then, that some who were present that day in the mountains – a construction boss named George Munro was one – should have recalled half a century later that the spike was made of gold. Munro claimed that it was pulled out and taken east. The Perthshire
Advertiser
of Scotland, in a special issue honouring Alexander Mackenzie, “a Perthshire lad who rose to eminence,” stated that the former prime minister’s widow drove the spike, which was “of 18 carat gold with the word Craigellachie in diamonds. It was replaced almost immediately with a serviceable one of steel and the first presented to Mrs. Mackenzie who afterward wore it as a brooch.” But Mrs. Mackenzie was not a widow in 1885 and there was no golden spike. The Governor General had had a silver spike prepared for the occasion; it was not used, and His Excellency, who had expected to be present, had been forced to return to Ottawa from British Columbia when weather conditions caused a delay in the completion of the line.

“The last spike,” said Van Horne, in his blunt way, “will be just as good an iron one as there is between Montreal and Vancouver, and anyone who wants to see it driven will have to pay full fare.” He had toyed with the idea of an elaborate celebration and excursion but found it impossible to fix limits on the necessary invitations. It would have resulted “in a vast deal of disappointment and ill feeling” – not to mention expense.

The truth was that the
CPR
could not afford a fancy ceremony. It had cost the Northern Pacific somewhere between $175,000 and $250,000 to drive its golden spike. The
CPR
might be out of danger, but it had enormous expenditures facing it. Stephen proposed paying off the five-million-dollar temporary loan almost immediately. Van Horne’s whole purpose was to get a through line operating to the Pacific so that he could tap the Asian trade. There would be time for ceremonies later on.

The very simplicity and near spontaneity of the scene at Eagle Pass – the lack of pomp, the absence of oratory, the plainness of the crowd, the presence of the workmen in the foreground of the picture – made the spectacle an oddly memorable one. Van Horne and a distinguished party had come out from Ottawa, Montreal, and Winnipeg for the occasion. The big names, lounging at their ease in the two parlour cars “Saskatchewan” and “Matapedia,” included Donald A. Smith, Sandford Fleming, John Egan, John McTavish, the land commissioner, and George Harris, a Boston financier who was a company director. Because of the incessant rains the party was held up for several days at Farwell until the work was completed.