The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (8 page)

For the newcomer who planned to stay and grow with the community, the opportunities were almost unlimited. Of the first seven lawyers who arrived, four became ministers of the Crown, and one the Leader of the Opposition in the Manitoba legislature. The first organist in Thomas Lawson’s new frame church (the seats were two-by-ten planks without backs) became mayor of the city four times running. Douglas Cameron, from grading the bumps out of Sixth Street, rose to be lieutenant-governor of his province. And a jovial young Irish ploughboy from Kirkfield, Ontario, named Pat Burns, who broke sod on J. W. Sifton’s farm at six dollars an acre, went on to become the meat-packing king of the Canadian West. Sifton’s own sons, Arthur and Clifford, became, respectively, Premier of Alberta and Minister of the Interior in the federal government.

By the time the survey of Section 23 was completed in August, 1881, the town had acquired a dozen frame buildings including two hotels named, in the tradition of the age, the Royal and the Queen’s. By October 11, when the first official passenger train pulled into the new station, bearing Sir Charles Tupper, a boom of epic proportions was in full swing. The coming of the railway was already transforming the West and the changes were spectacular enough to set the continent buzzing.

In April, J. H. E. Secretan’s tent had been the only habitation on the site. The surveyor was loading horse-feed onto a wagon, preparing to head farther into the unknown, when he encountered a young Englishman who wanted to be a farmer. Three months later when Secretan returned he found a Brandon seething with activity – hundreds of tents, billowing in the prairie wind, lined geometrically along what would some day be streets and avenues, places of business rising “as if by magic,” sternwheel steamboats unloading passengers and merchandise, and storekeepers hawking their wares. He ran into his English acquaintance, who was bemoaning the fact that he had sold his homestead to a land shark for a piebald pony, a second-hand meerschaum pipe, a broken German silver watch, and $7.25 in cash.

Since no transfer papers had been executed, the surveyor was able to get the tenderfoot’s homestead back for him. He did not return to Brandon again until Christmas, by which time the rails had passed through “and a
real live town was in full swing.” Alas, the young homesteader had grown homesick and had again sold out, this time for three pairs of navy-blue socks, a second-hand concertina, six packages of cigarettes, eighteen dollars in cash, and steerage passage to Liverpool. Shortly afterwards, Secretan discovered, that little piece of land was purchased for eighty thousand dollars.

As for Grand Valley, which might have been the new metropolis, it lapsed into decay. The McVicar brothers, still trying to peddle lots, offered Robert Adamson, the Winnipeg banker, a half interest in the site if he could persuade the
CPR
to build a station on their property. That was September. Adamson was unsuccessful. In January, the McVicars and their neighbours tried again: they offered eight hundred acres of their land free to two lumber merchants if they could persuade the
CPR
to put in a station by May, 1882. But the trains went roaring through without stopping and the McVicars eventually sold out their townsite for fifteen hundred dollars. When Beecham Trotter passed through, early in 1882, “Grand Valley was a living corpse. The few buildings were forlorn. The business that was still being done … made a noise like a death rattle. The
C.P.R
. had refused to stop trains there.” Some years later, Charles Aeneas Shaw happened upon John McVicar ploughing in the vicinity with a team of mules. The farmer ran out onto the road. “Oh, Mr. Shaw, I was a damn fool. If I had only taken your advice, I would have been well off now!”

For future speculators in townsites, the fate of the little community on the Assiniboine was an object lesson in how not to deal with the great railway.

4
The “paid ink-slingers”

Sir Henry Whatley Tyler was the kind of man who, on his visits to the United States, enjoyed riding conspicuously on the cowcatchers of locomotives. He had been, variously, a captain in the Royal Engineers, a British railway inspector, and a Member of Parliament. Since 1876 he had been president of the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada, an enterprise that was directed from England. He might also have been president of the Canadian Pacific, but he could not stomach the idea of an all-Canadian route over the barren desert of the Canadian Shield. Like most Britons and many Canadians, including perhaps half of Sir John A. Macdonald’s cabinet and several directors of the
CPR
, he believed it an act of incredible folly to build seven hundred miles of line across country incapable of settlement. His own road ran south of the Great Lakes on its route from Sarnia to Chicago. That, clearly, was the sensible route to take. Macdonald was one of the few public figures who believed otherwise. Even George Stephen, in the early months, was unconvinced.

A handsome and debonair man with a military bearing, Tyler was noted for the brilliance of his conversation and his effectiveness at repartee. Shareholders’ meetings held no terrors for him; he apparently enjoyed being baited. His sense of humour was infectious and his wit often ironic. He could hold his own in any verbal battle. Behind the sophisticated façade there was a will of steel. With the help of his shrewd general manager Joseph Hickson, he had beaten the Vanderbilt interests and pushed his railway into Chicago, consolidated several lines in the New England states, and made the Grand Trunk one of the great railway systems of North America. But was it a Canadian system? Its ownership and its direction were largely British. Its main purpose seemed to be to link the American midwest with the U.S. Atlantic coast, using the St. Lawrence lowlands of Canada as a convenient route between Chicago and Portland. Its directors clearly did not grasp the significance of the Canadian North West.

Tyler had never thought of the
CPR
as a competitor. Indeed, until the contract was signed in 1880, he considered the entire transcontinental railway scheme an elaborate political pipe dream, designed to get votes. Even if it was built it would never threaten the Grand Trunk. It would start at Lake Nipissing in the wilds of Ontario and terminate at Port Moody in the wilds of British Columbia. It did not, apparently, occur to Sir Henry that a railway of that length, built at enormous cost, would have to continue on into the settled East. If the
CPR
had stopped at Callander it would, of course, have become a valuable feeder for the Grand Trunk. But it is clear from the
CPR
charter that the Syndicate intended from the very outset to establish a complete transcontinental system.

In the midsummer of 1881, Tyler woke up to the fact that the Canadian Pacific was to be a major competitor. The first
CPR
shareholders’ meeting, held in London on May 31, had approved the amalgamation of the new company with the government-subsidized Canada Central whose president, Duncan McIntyre, was also vice-president of the
CPR
. The Canada Central linked Lake Nipissing with Ottawa. On July 20, the
CPR
moved to extend its operations further into Grand Trunk territory. Stephen and McIntyre were elected directors of the Ontario and Quebec Railway, a company that held a charter to build from Montreal to Toronto. It shortly became apparent that the
CPR
intended to swallow this line. The
CPR
, through Stephen, also had an interest in the Credit Valley Railway, which connected Toronto with Georgian Bay. In addition it had announced a branch line to Sault Ste Marie to connect with another line on the United States side being taken over by Jim Hill. The new company was not yet six months old and already it was posing a serious threat to the older railway.

Thus was the scene set for a battle between the two roads – a battle that was to run unchecked for the whole of the construction period and for many years after. The Grand Trunk’s strategy was to discredit the
CPR
in public while crippling it financially behind the scenes in London and New York. In his campaign of attrition, Tyler had some powerful allies. Two great financial houses, Baring Brothers and Glyn, Mills, were on his side; they had originally financed the Grand Trunk. So were a large number of newspapers on both sides of the water, including most of the financial press, many of them enjoying the largesse of Grand Trunk advertising. Sir Alexander Galt, who had made a fortune out of Grand Trunk contracts, had been appointed Canada’s first high commissioner to London in 1880; he might not be an advocate of the railway, on whose board he had once sat, but he certainly would not be an enemy. Joseph Hickson, Tyler’s general manager in Canada, was on friendly terms with Sir John A. Macdonald – the two were pen pals; and the Grand Trunk could always be depended upon to deliver the vote of its employees to the Conservatives in federal elections. These links with the Canadian government were not decisive ones, but they might serve as a brake on the ambitious plans of George Stephen.

The Grand Trunk’s English shareholders had some cause for righteous discontent. The railway’s stock had not been the profitable investment they had hoped for. For the best part of thirty years, the company had teetered on the edge of financial disaster. Now, under sounder and bolder management, its prospects seemed much brighter. Suddenly the new railway came along to dampen that future. No wonder the overseas investing public looked with jaundice on the
CPR
: The Canadians, having asked the Englishmen to pump millions into one faltering railway, were now asking them to pour more millions into its chief competitor! The Grand Trunk propaganda to discredit the
CPR
in the British market found fertile ground.

All that summer and fall, the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Canadian North West were subjected to a torrent of abuse in the press of Canada, the United States, and Great Britain, some of it inspired by the Grand Trunk, some of it by the Liberal opposition, some of it by United States railway and immigration interests, and some of it by honest doubts
as to the practicality of a scheme as wild as this one seemed to be. After all, Canada was attempting a far more ambitious project than the United States had tried when the United States had almost ten times the population.

The American attitude was summed up in a brief interview in the New York
Herald
with the taciturn Jay Gould, the American railroad financier, shortly after the
CPR
was formed:

REPORTER
: There is a great project underway up in Canada?

GOULD
: The Canadian Pacific Railroad?

REPORTER
: Yes; what do you think of it?

GOULD
: Visionary.

REPORTER:
N
O
dividends?

GOULD
: Perhaps in one hundred years. It will be a good excursion line for English tourists and Canadian statesmen when Parliament adjourns.

REPORTER
: But they say there are great possibilities.

How about the great agricultural resources …?

GOULD
: One, the chief one, of the successful agricultural conditions is not there.

REPORTER
: Which is?

GOULD
: Population.

A large section of the British press, led by
The Times
of London, had convinced would-be immigrants that Australia was a far better prospect than the forbidding Canadian plains. The Governor General, Lord Lorne, the handsome and poetic son-in-law of the Queen, determined to remedy this impression by a personal tour of the railway’s route to the Rockies. He invited four British journalists, including a man from
The Times
, to accompany him at his personal expense. Single-handedly, the young marquis had decided to change the minds of his countrymen about the new Canada.

It was a colourful excursion, though the start could not have been prepossessing. The viceregal retinue set off from Port Arthur at the head of Lake Superior on the still-unfinished government line that led towards Winnipeg. The rails stopped at Lake Wabigoon where the passengers were forced to forsake the carpets and sofas of their specially accoutred caboose and, after a brief steamer trip, to endure the ordeal of a nine-mile portage. It was an exhausting tramp, rendered more uncomfortable by a forest fire which had destroyed the half-way house prepared for the party’s refreshment. The smoke-grimed travellers arrived, more than a little breathless, at the shanties and workshops of Eagle Lake to be greeted by the sound of bagpipes and the spectacle of a fleet of canoes, gaudily painted and decked
with flags for the occasion. Crews of voyageurs and Indians hustled them across the water to a vast barge groaning with iced wines and elaborate dishes served up on spotless linen.

The remainder of the journey was marked by similar contrasts – stretches of bleak rockland, awkward portages, handsome private coaches, interspersed with triumphal arches and uniformed guards of honour. On the outskirts of Winnipeg, Donald A. Smith, one of the largest shareholders of the
CPR
, entertained His Excellency at his home, Silver Heights, whose façade had been temporarily transformed into a replica of Inveraray Castle, the viceroy’s ancestral seat. At Rapid City, a town of real estate speculators struggling for recognition west of Winnipeg, a retired British colonel, flawlessly attired in formal afternoon dress, read an official welcome; the Governor General was more relaxed in flannel shirt and riding breeches. At the end of track, thirty-five miles beyond Portage la Prairie, the marquis laid a rail: “Considering the limited experience he has had in laying rails, it is said he accomplished the feat tolerably well,” the Manitoba
Free Press
reported guardedly.

From the end of steel, the party set off across the “limitless, marvellous green meadows” to the foothills of the Rockies in a horse-drawn cavalcade of barouches and Red River carts, accompanied by forty white-helmeted Mounted Policemen. It was an exciting and romantic journey. No British writer could resist the ceremony of a Blackfoot powwow, nor could he fail to be impressed by the unbroken ocean of grass or by Lorne’s own enthusiastic speeches along the way. (“You have a country whose value it would be insanity to question.… It must support a vast population,” he told the Manitoba Club.) The coverage was good, and
The Times
changed its editorial line and ceased to thunder against Canada.