The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (35 page)

At night there were social functions without let up; whist with the gigantic chief justice, Matthew Baillie Begbie, serenades by choruses of young girls, a “drawing-room” at the Legislative Buildings, garden parties, dinners, concerts, theatre, canoe races. By the end of the week, the Governor General was beside himself. He had not even had time to attend to his personal dispatches. His private secretary, the Hon. E. G. D. Littledon, handled them for him. “Lord Dufferin,” he wrote, in a postscript to a letter to Mackenzie, “bids me add that he finds great difficulty in keeping his temper with these foolish people.” It was understandable. At that point, the Governor General had spent seven days, ten full hours a day, “listening to the same old story, abuse of Mackenzie, of Canada, of Sir John Macdonald and the absolute necessity of bringing the Pacific Railway via Bute Inlet to Esquimalt.”

But then, Victoria was literally fighting for its life. The depression had dealt the community a blow more staggering than that which the rest of the country had suffered. The economy, which had been based largely on the wild spending of the Cariboo gold miners, was grinding slowly to a halt, yet the cost of living remained astronomical since all the provender from Europe and eastern America had to be shipped around the Horn and up the long western coastline of two continents.

Now this isolated English village with a total population of 5,000 – and only 950 voters – saw its chance, and its only remaining
chance, to rival San Francisco as the great port of the Pacific. The superb naval harbour, the mooted drydock at Esquimalt, the rich Nanaimo coal-fields, the shorter distance to the Orient – all these could be bound together into one enormous asset if only the railway could be made to span the channels of the strait. But without the terminus Victoria could never become the major metropolis of British Columbia.

“In Victoria,” Lord Dufferin reported to Lord Carnarvon, “the one idea of every human being is to get the railway to Esquimalt. It is upon this chance that the little town must depend for its future … most of its inhabitants have wildly speculated in town lots.… You can therefore imagine the phrensied
[sic]
eagerness with which Victoria grasps at every chance of making itself the terminus of the great transcontinental railway.”

When he reached the mainland, it was the same story. “The location of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and its terminus along such a line, and on such a spot as may enhance the value of his own individual town lot, or in some other way may put money into his pocket, by passing as near as possible to where he lives, is the common preoccupation of every Columbian citizen.”

Again in New Westminster it was arches all the way; the messages pushed for the Fraser Valley route. “Speed the Railway,” one arch read, and above, a little model train tooted back and forth. At Yale, Dufferin’s gaze rested on a horse whose blanket bore the inscription: “Good But Not Iron.”

“Here also,” he wrote, “the same intense longing to become the terminus of the railway possesses the people.” The entire population along the Fraser and North and South Thompson rivers shared the same desire; only the Cariboo miners remained indifferent. But the merchants who lived among them, ex-Victorians all, were entirely partisan. Though the large majority of the mainland population was anti-Victorian, the Nanaimo-Victoria-Cariboo alliance gave the Victoria interests a parliamentary majority of something like fifteen to ten.

Dufferin was given the grand tour of British Columbia: the fantastic corduroy road to the Cariboo, perched on the rim of the Fraser canyon; the Indians scooping salmon out of the frothing gorge from rickety platforms; the old diggings at Boston Bar; the curious native houses; the great trees, twelve feet thick, severed by axemen; the goggle-eyed totem poles at Alert Bay-he and his countess were
introduced to all these wonders. The Governor General took the trouble to visit Bute Inlet about which he had heard so much. He was dismayed by the precipices which rose from the ocean and by the bad anchorage at Waddington Harbour. He did not respond with any greater enthusiasm to two other fiords, farther to the north, also being considered as possible termini: Dean Inlet and the Gardner Channel. The mouths of both, he learned, would probably be stuffed with ice all winter.

He had found much less bitterness on the mainland: very little abuse of the government, though some denunciation of the island railway. When he returned to Victoria he was privately convinced that the Fraser Valley route offered many advantages over the island’s choice – an opinion he was to push at Ottawa. Actually, he could see no reason for anything more than a cheap local line for years to come, on a route which would make use of water as well as rail transportation. But he did not say that in his farewell speech on the island. In a highly successful address that occupied two and a quarter hours, interrupted by much applause, he soothed the Victorians as best he could, pointing out that the passes in the Rockies were not yet fully surveyed, that the railway could not be started until the engineers had done their work, and that construction would soon commence. He even spoke favourably of the Bute Inlet route. Then, with the cheers of his audience still ringing in his ears, His Excellency took his leave.

In spite of the constant pressure upon him, he returned to Ottawa with considerable sympathy for the British Columbians. He had the feeling – he expressed it before his departure – that Mackenzie, pushed by Blake and Cartwright, was trying to wriggle out of his commitments. On his return that feeling was reinforced. There is a revealing tale about his arrival in the capital: at the Ottawa railway station he was presented with an address of welcome by the Mayor and Council and here, in the presence of some of his ministers (it was said), he went so far as to make a speech which some thought reflected on Government policy. Within a few hours the word that the Cabinet had been repudiated by the Governor General was all over Ottawa. There was only one verbatim report of His Excellency’s remarks – so the story has it – and George Holland, an able reporter, was rapidly transcribing it in the office of the Ottawa
Citizen
. In the midst of his labour, Holland received a message: the Governor General would be interested in having a copy of his speech. Holland
cheerfully obliged. At Government House, an affable Dufferin asked casually what system of shorthand Holland used; he explained that he himself read shorthand fairly well. Flattered, the reporter produced his notes. Dufferin looked them over carefully, made a pretty compliment about the clarity of their style and then pocketed both the original notes and the transcribed speech. The matter, said Dufferin gravely, was too important to be settled hastily; would the journalist join him for lunch the following day? Between the two of them they could put the speech into shape for publication. Holland agreed, but asked for his notebook back. Ah, said His Excellency, that would be impossible; he was not accustomed to exerting himself so soon after a long journey. The journalist left empty handed. The next day, the Governor General, still in possession of the notes, persuaded him to publish an innocuous report without reference to his objectionable remarks. Thus was a political crisis nipped in the bud.

There was another crisis to come. In November, the “horrid B.C. business,” as Lord Dufferin was to call it, touched off an extraordinary scene at Rideau Hall. Here, for the first and only time in Canadian history, a governor general and his two chief advisers came perilously close to fisticuffs.

Dufferin had returned from the West convinced that Lord Carnarvon should re-enter the picture. Why not have a representative of each government meet in London under the Colonial Secretary’s auspices and make a decision about the island railway, which Victoria continued to claim was part of the main line of the
CPR
and which Mackenzie insisted was a local project divorced from the transcontinental route? Later, Dufferin suggested raising the $750,000 offered in lieu of the line to an even million: “I don’t think it would be ill-spent in getting this troublesome matter out of the way.” Any reasonable sacrifice was worth while, if Confederation was at stake.

On Saturday, November 18, Dufferin met with Blake and Mackenzie at Rideau Hall. Both men were obdurate. Mackenzie obviously regretted that he had ever consented to the British colonial office’s interference in Canada’s domestic affairs. Blake was immovable. Carnarvon, he said, had written a dispatch approving $750,000 as a fair and legitimate offer; the payment was to be made on the understanding that British Columbia accepted the qualification about no tax increases. This was not strictly true and now Dufferin completely lost his temper “and told them both in very harsh language
what I thought of their principle of interpreting public documents.” The interview, he reported to Carnarvon, was stormy and disagreeable. They “nearly came to blows … Mackenzie’s aspect was simply pitiable and Blake was on the point of crying as he very readily does when he is excited.”

The day after this extraordinary encounter, everybody cooled off. Dufferin agreed not to send the 180-page dispatch he had so laboriously composed for Lord Carnarvon though he could not quite bring himself to consign it to the fire. There were expressions of regret and mutual respect all round and a kind of face-saving formula was evolved in which the matter was hoisted for eighteen months until the surveys could be completed and a route fixed; failing that, Mackenzie cautiously agreed to some sort of London meeting under Carnarvon’s auspices.

With that, the importunate Dufferin had to be content. He had pushed his ministers as hard as any governor general could or ever would; he undoubtedly felt he had been successful; but the hard fact was that he had battered his noble head against an unyielding wall of granite.

3
The Battle of the Routes

By 1877, the Battle of the Routes had reached the stage of a pamphlet war – that tried and true propaganda technique of the Victorian Age. Print and paper were cheap and pamphlets could be issued as swiftly as a newspaper. Advocates of burning causes duelled with tracts as they had, in earlier times, duelled with swords. In the Battle of the Routes, the adversaries attacked each other with blizzards of paper.

One of the pamphleteers was the federal member for Yale, British Columbia, Edgar Dewdney, a massive surveyor with flaring side whiskers who liked to appear in public in fringed buckskin. Dewdney was perhaps the most powerful advocate of the Fraser River-Burrard Inlet route. It was he who at a public meeting charged that the Burrard route had been abandoned because Marcus Smith was caught in a blizzard in the Fraser canyon in 1874 and had to trudge forty miles through the snow on foot. In a letter to Mackenzie, read at the meeting, Dewdney urged the Prime Minister “not to be guided by a single circumstance of this kind.”

Early in 1877, a New Westminster writer signing himself “Old Settler” wrote to
The Times
of London attacking the “bitterness and selfishness of Victorians” for trying to appropriate the terminus “so that their lands and town lots and speculative purchases may be made to return $20. for $1.00.” This produced an immediate answer in the form of a pamphlet titled
A British North American Reply to a Letter of “Old Settler.”
Then Fraser Tolmie, a member of the provincial legislature for Victoria, wrote an interminable series of letters to the
Colonist
dealing with harbours and anchorages. All of these were subsequently churned out on the paper’s steam presses in pamphlet form. The pamphlet, which one suspects was preaching to the converted, attacked both Dewdney and Old Settler and advocated the Bute Inlet route for scientific reasons. Even the British Columbia government joined the pamphlet war with a publication of all the correspondence relating to the controversy.

And still Fleming had not settled on a final choice for a pass through the Rockies or a terminus along the coastline or a route in between. Some of this apparent dallying had to do with the nature of the country itself, but much of it was clearly political procrastination. In the late fall of 1875, Richard Cartwright, the Minister of Finance, had written Mackenzie a pointed letter regarding the restive Carnarvon’s doubts about the Government’s flexible interpretation of his arbitration award. “But,” said Cartwright, “he is willing to hold his peace until he is driven into a corner and we had better leave the matter so for the present especially as the contingency is not likely to arise unless your surveys were
very promptly
closed indeed.” The italics are Cartwright’s and the inference is clear: it was in the Government’s interest to keep the surveys going.

Sandford Fleming’s own opinions in his massive report of 1877 are clouded in ambiguity. By 1875 there was a general understanding that Bute Inlet would probably be the terminus rather than Burrard. Engineering interest in the latter harbour cooled. Then, in November of 1876, it occurred to Fleming, rather tardily, that the Admiralty might be asked its opinion of the various harbours along the coast. Fleming sent along twenty-eight questions about eight different harbours on the mainland. The answers varied somewhat but the overwhelming opinion of the seamen was in favour of Burrard Inlet. Admiral de Horsey, the naval commandant at Esquimalt, who favoured Bute Inlet was, Lord Dufferin suspected, “very much under the influence of Mr. Marcus Smith.”

Fleming still could not make up his mind. A discussion of the
anchorage at Bute Inlet was, he said, irrelevant since the real terminus would be on the island. On the other hand, the cost of bridging the channel was “unprecedented in magnitude.” On the
other
hand, Fleming rationalized, British Columbia would some day be a rich province. “The exigencies of the future may render a continuous line of railway to the outer shore of Vancouver [Island] indispensable at any cost.”

Fleming was treading on eggshells. His appreciation of Burrard Inlet as a terminus was equally vacillating. On the one hand, it was more expensive to build than the Bute Inlet route. On the other hand, it was “the route of the greatest advantage to the population.” On the
other
hand, on a cost-of-transportation basis, it stood fifth on the list of projected lines.