The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (76 page)

Arthur Wellington Ross
lived in Vancouver for six years following its establishment as the Canadian Pacific’s terminus – a decision in which he had had a considerable say – and is credited with obtaining the military reserve for the city as Stanley Park. He later became, for a brief period, a mining broker in Ontario. He continued to represent the Manitoba constituency of Lisgar as a Conservative in the House of Commons until his retirement in 1896. He died in Toronto in 1901.

Nicholas Flood Davin
edited the Regina
Leader
until his death. In 1887 he entered politics as Conservative Member for West Assiniboia and sat in the House of Commons until 1900. Another of his books,
Eos, an Epic of the Dawn
, was published in 1889. In 1895, at the age of fifty-six, the perennial bachelor and flirt took a wife. On October 18, 1901, he shot himself in the Clarendon Hotel in Winnipeg. He had exactly $6.40 in his pocket.

Samuel Benfìeld Steele
continued to preside at the most colourful incidents in the history of the Canadian North West. He was sent to the Kootenays in 1887 to settle the Indian troubles. In 1897 he manned the passes on the international boundary between Alaska and the Yukon during the stampede to the Klondike. He ran the stampede like a military manæuvre, saving untold lives and keeping the city of Dawson, in the boom year of 1898, under tight control. (This aspect of his career is chronicled in detail in the author’s
Klondike.)
During the Boer War he commanded Lord Strathcona’s Horse and remained in the Transvaal as head of the South African Constabulary there. On returning to Canada in 1906 he commanded the Calgary and later the Winnipeg military districts. When war broke out he was promoted major-general, raising and training the Second Canadian Division, which he took to England in 1915. He retired and was knighted in 1918. He died at Putney, England, the following year.

John Macoun
travelled about Canada and continued collecting botanical specimens for most of his life. In 1887 he became assistant director and naturalist of the Geological Survey. In 1912 he retired and moved to British Columbia. After his death, at Sidney, in 1920, his autobiography was published posthumously by the Ottawa Field Naturalists’ Club. There are forty-eight species of flora and fauna named after Macoun as well as a mountain in the Selkirks.

Sandford Fleming
remained as a director of the
CPR
and chancellor of Queen’s University until his death. His most notable achievement after the
CPR
construction period was the part he played in planning the Pacific Cable, which was completed in 1902. He represented Canada at colonial conferences in London in 1888 and Ottawa in 1894 and at the Imperial Cable Conference in 1896. Knighted in 1897, he died in Halifax in 1915 at the age of eighty-eight.

George Monro Grant
carried on as principal of Queen’s until his death. His reputation in both political and education circles was outstanding. He was elected moderator of the Presbyterian Church in 1882 and president of the Royal Society of Canada in 1901. He died in 1902.

Louis Riel
was hanged on Nov. 16, 1885. He remains the most controversial figure in Canadian history, the subject of dozens of books, novels, histories, at least one play, and one opera. His adjutant,
Gabriel Dumont
, escaped to the United States, became a leading performer in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (where he re-enacted the stirring days of 1885), returned to Canada under a general amnesty, and died in Batoche at the age of sixty-eight.
Big Bear
and
Poundmaker
, the rebel Cree chiefs, were given prison sentences for felony but were released in 1887. Neither survived his freedom by more than a few months.

Crowfoot
lived on his reserve until his death in 1890. Although he was thought of as an ancient chieftain, he was only fifty-six years old. His great friend,
Father Lacombe
, lived to be eighty-nine. After the coming of the railway, Lacombe’s career was anticlimactic. He became a settled parish priest, first at Fort Macleod and later at St. Joachim, near Edmonton. He retired in 1897 to a hermitage at Pincher Creek, emerged in 1899 to help negotiate Treaty No. 8 with the northern Indians, travelled to Europe and the Holy Land, and, in 1909, founded the Lacombe Home at Midnapore, Alberta, for the derelicts of all races who had never been able to make an adjustment to the new North West. When he died in 1916, the eulogy he read over Crowfoot’s grave a quarter of a century before might have been his own: “Men, women and children, mourn over your great parent; you will no more hear his voice and its eloquent harangues. In your distress and misery you will no more rush to his tent for comfort and charities. He is gone. There is no one like him to fill his place.”

The “last spike”
was removed, after the dignitaries departed, by road-master Frank Brothers (who is to be seen in the immediate left foreground of the famous photograph, facing the camera). Brothers was afraid that souvenir hunters would tear up his track to secure the prize. (As it was, chunks of the tie were chopped away and the remaining piece of the sawn rail was split up by memorabilia seekers.) Brothers later presented the spike to Edward Beatty, but it was stolen from Beatty’s desk. What happened to the spike cannot be ascertained with any accuracy, but it may be the one in the hands of Mrs. W. H. Remnant of Yellowknife. According to Mrs. Remnant, Henry Cambie came into possession of the spike and gave it to W. J. Lynch, chief of the patent office in Ottawa, to keep for his son Arthur, who was serving with the British Army Medical Corps. When Arthur returned home, his father presented him with the spike which by this time had been worked into the shape of a carving knife with the handle silvered. His daughter Mamie, now Mrs. Remnant, inherited it. The other spike, which Donald Smith bent and discarded and which he appropriated as a souvenir, was cut into thin strips which were mounted With diamonds and presented to the wives of some of the members of the party. Several ladies who did not receive the souvenirs were so put out that the diplomatic Smith had a second, larger spike cut up into similar souvenirs. These, however, were made larger so that the recipients of the original gifts would be able to tell the difference. Lord Lansdowne’s original unused silver spike was presented to Van Horne and, as far as is known, is still in the Van Horne family.

The CPR
was immortalized by Hollywood in 1949 when Twentieth Century-Fox made
Canadian Pacific
, a film purportedly about the building of the railway. The star was Randolph Scott, who played the role of Tom Andrews, a surveyor who, unassisted, discovers a pass in the Rockies, thus allowing railway construction – held up in the prairies – to proceed once more. There are only two historical figures in the film: Van Horne, depicted as a weedy construction boss with his headquarters in Calgary, and Père Lacombe, shown as a stout and rather comical Irish priest. The conflict revolves around the attempt by the Métis (pronounced “Mettisse” in the film) living around Lake Louise (!) to prevent the railway from coming through the mountains. Dirk Rourke, the Métis leader (played by Victor Jory), rouses the saloonkeepers along the line of the road to cause a strike, which Scott breaks up single-handedly by the use of his six-shooters. Then Rourke persuades the Indians to attack the railroad as if it were a wagon train; they appear in full feathered headdress, waving tomahawks and shooting flaming arrows from their primitive bows. Scott rallies the railroad navvies and, in a pitched battle, they destroy or disperse the redskins. Love interest is supplied by a woman doctor, whom Scott eventually rejects because she believes in non-violent methods, and a pretty Métis girl who saves the day by disclosing her people’s plans and thereby winning Scott’s affections. This is perhaps the only Hollywood film ever made about the Canadian West in which the North West Mounted Police are conspicuously absent. That may explain why almost every railroader in the picture carries two six-shooters on his hip. The film lists a Canadian technical adviser in the person of John Rhodes Sturdy, at one time a public relations officer for the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Chronology