The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (26 page)

From McMullen’s one-time partner, Sir Hugh Allan, there was only silence in the years that followed the scandal. Taciturn and uncommunicative after his one terrible lapse, he left no memoir of his role in the affair, expressed no regret, delineated no hint of his emotions at the time. The closest he ever came to it was one night in his cavernous castle in Montreal when he was entertaining William Smith, a Deputy Minister of Marine and Fisheries. Warmed by Allan’s hospitality and emboldened by Allan’s brandy, Smith made bold to try to break through the crust of Allan’s reticence.

“Sir Hugh,” he ventured, “between ourselves, don’t you think you made rather a mistake in mixing yourself up with John A. in that Pacific Scandal business?”

The shaggy knight of Ravenscrag stared into the fire. It was some time before he delivered himself of a definitive response. Finally …

“Mebbe,” he replied.

Chapter Four

1
“Hurra! The jolly C.P.S.!”

2
The bitter tea of Walter Moberly

3
Ordeal in the mountains

4
“That old devil” Marcus Smith

1
“Hurra! The jolly
C.P.S!”

All the time the political hurricane was gathering force in the settled East, hundreds of men were freezing, starving, sickening and sometimes dying in the unexplored crannies of the new Canada, as they tried to chart a route for the railway. On July 5, as Macdonald arrived in Toronto to launch the election campaign of 1872, a young man named George Hargreaves, deep in the rain forests of the Homathco, wrote in his diary that “there was more bad news from A Camp”; two more men had been drowned, making a total of five that summer. On August 7, the day on which Allan wrote his compromising letter to General Cass, seven men perished in a forest fire in the Nepigon country north of Lake Superior. On December 27, when George McMullen was dining in the Russell House with his fellow conspirator, Senator Asa B. Foster, another survey party found itself marooned in 50 below zero weather on Superior’s frozen shores. On April 15 the following spring, when John Hillyard Cameron was preparing the Oaths Bill for the House, Robert Rylatt, in the Athabasca country, was scribbling in his diary that “the quantity of blood discharged somewhat alarms me”; he was suffering from acute scurvy.

No life was harsher than that suffered by members of the Canadian Pacific Survey crews. None was less rewarding. Underpaid, overworked, exiled from their families, deprived of their mail, sleeping in slime and snowdrifts, suffering from sunstroke, frostbite, scurvy, fatigue and the tensions that always rise to the surface when weary and dispirited men are thrown together for long periods of isolation, the surveyors kept on, year after year. They explored great sections of Canada. The first engineers scaled mountains that had never before been climbed, crossed lakes that had never known a white man’s paddle and forded rivers that were not on any map. They walked with a uniform stride developed through years of habit, measuring the distances as they went, checking altitudes with an aneroid barometer slung around the neck and examining the land with a practised gaze, always seeing in the mind’s eye the finished line of steel – curves, grades, valley crossings, bridges and trestles, tunnels, cuts and fills. In the first six years of the Canadian Pacific Survey, forty-six thousand miles of Canada were reconnoitred and blazed in this manner.

Twelve thousand of these miles were then laboriously charted, foot by foot, by scores of survey parties. Axemen, following the pathfinders’ blazes, hacked the lines clear of brush. The chainmen
who followed meticulously divided the distances into hundred-foot sections, each marked by a stake. Behind the chainmen came the transit men, calculating the angle of each bend and estimating, by triangulation, those distances which could not be measured by a chain. Behind the transits, the rodmen and levellers worked, reckoning the altitudes and inscribing them on bench marks at half-mile intervals. By 1877 there were twenty-five thousand of these bench marks and more than six hundred thousand chainmen’s stakes scattered across Canada from the Shield to the Pacific. At this point the surveys had cost three and one half million dollars and the lives of thirty-eight men by drowning, forest fire, exposure, illness and shipwreck.

Sandford Fleming, who took charge as Engineer-in-Chief in April, 1871, had by midsummer dispatched twenty-one survey parties, totalling eight hundred men, across the country. His task was not easy. A special kind of man was needed and, as Fleming reported after the first season, it was impossible to find enough of them: “Many of those we were obliged to take, subsequent events proved, were unequal to the very arduous labour they had to undergo, causing a very considerable delay and difficulty in pushing the work.”

“The leveller in party S is physically unequal to the hard work that I shall unquestionably require from all my staff,” Walter Moberly, the pioneer surveyor of British Columbia, scribbled in his journal when he reached the Athabasca country in November, 1872. “He is a capital man, nevertheless I
must
have strong men for my work.”

But even if enough good men could have been found, it is doubtful if Fleming would have been able to employ them. Political considerations entered into the question: various sections of the country had to be considered, different nationalities and creeds had to be consulted. Then there was the problem of patronage; there was constant pressure on Fleming to appoint the friends or protégés of Members of Parliament or of Senators. As late as 1879, Charles Shaw, an experienced transit man, discovered he could not get a job on the prairie survey with his old chief because a son-in-law of Senator John Sutherland, a powerful Manitoba Conservative, had been given the post. Major C. F. Hanington, a civil engineer with considerable experience in British Columbia, found himself, after the election of 1874, working in the area of Rat Portage under a man named Lucas “who says he is the friend of the wife of the new Prime Minister, Mr. Mackenzie.” A good many Conservative surveyors, indeed, lost their jobs after the new regime came to power.

Often appointments were made over Fleming’s head at Cabinet
level. The chief engineer found he had people of whom he had never heard working for him; such appointees could not easily be fired for inefficiency. Fleming did not bother to protest. As he put it, “I knew that patronage had to be respected.” Sometimes work had to be invented just to keep the political appointees busy, a phenomenon that a royal commission subsequently felt might help explain the incredible amount of unnecessary surveying that took place in British Columbia in those years. Fleming testified before it that the public interest had suffered because of patronage in the hands of the party in power.

One man Fleming was apparently forced to put up with for political reasons was the surly photographer-explorer Charles Horetzky, who was given his job as a result of the intervention of Sir Charles Tupper. Horetzky, after parting from Macoun at Fort St. James, had pushed on westward towards Port Simpson, “an irksome and hazardous journey.” When he returned to Ottawa a fanatical advocate of the Pine Pass-Port Simpson route, which he had explored, Fleming dismissed him. Horetzky always insisted that Fleming acted out of pure jealousy: “I should have made no allusion to the Pine River route and should have known that opposition to the Chief Engineer’s pet theory … was a signal for my dismissal.” Fleming’s version differed. “It was sometimes necessary to employ persons who were not adapted to the work or qualified to be chief engineers.” Whatever the reasons, Horetzky ingratiated himself with the new administration and was soon back on the job again, exploring his favourite country along the northern British Columbia coast. There was nothing, apparently, that Fleming could do. In the summer of 1875, Marcus Smith, in charge of surveys in British Columbia and as irascible an engineer as ever existed, had a raging row with Horetzky at Waddington Depot near the head of Bute Inlet. Smith arrived to find that Horetzky had been there for ten days, contrary to instructions. When Smith inquired about this, “he flew at me like an enraged tiger, defied me in my instructions and said he was going home to Ottawa.” Smith had several witnesses to the scene, but Horetzky kept his job until the administration changed in 1878.

After the first year of surveys, Fleming reported that it was impossible to obtain “the class of men required.” That year two crews, working through the unexplored and impenetrable country between Ottawa and Fort Garry, simply gave up the ghost. One party had had enough by late summer; the second, on learning that they would be
required to stay out all winter, “suffered a few days of cold and snow and then promptly trooped in to Fort Garry.” There was a seller’s market in survey labour and, like it or not, Fleming and his staff had to retain incompetents.

“I wish you would find out what Walter Dewdney is doing,” Marcus Smith wrote to a subordinate, Joseph Hunter, in May of 1875. “I heard last week that [he] was seen on the wagon road blind drunk and making an ass of himself. I had told him his duty was to look after the transport but as he is evidently unfit for this duty he had better … go with the trains that are to follow Jarvis to Tête Jaune Cache.” Since Dewdney’s brother Edgar was Member for Yale and a strong political power in the province, the erring Walter could scarcely be dismissed.

The same year, Smith again wrote to Hunter, this time about the head of Party “N,” H. P. Bell. “I find Bell utterly incompetent to manage the working of a party beyond the surveying position. He cannot calculate more than a child how much he can do in a fortnight or how much stuff he could take out of the country in a given time but acts entirely by impulse – and if left to himself would be certain to be snowed in. I have therefore told him that you will take full charge of the party when you arrive and he must work under you. This will be a disagreeable task for you – but it is necessary in order to close the surveys and save the packtrain. I think you had better let Bell attend entirely to the surveys and not interfere much about the line unless he does something very absurd which he is likely to do-for he is evidently more than half-crazy.” Three days later, Smith decided that Bell could not even handle the survey party: “I find he is as incompetent as an engineer as in general management.” And again: “I am almost afraid to trust him out of your sight as he is almost certain to do something desperate – some wild fancy.”

The wonder was that anyone worked on the surveys at all. In spite of the difficulty of getting men each season, there was little long-term job security, even for experienced engineers. Crews were discharged at the end of the summer, left without winter work and re-engaged the following spring. When the work began to diminish towards the end of the decade, there was real hardship. “There is much distress among the engineers, etc., of the staff who were dismissed last spring,” Marcus Smith, then Fleming’s deputy, wrote in February 1878 to his chief, who was on leave in England. The men had been dismissed on a month’s notice “and have not a shilling to maintain their families.
If all the surveying staff is now dismissed there will be wholesale distress.”

It was a lonely, remote existence the surveyors led in the field, cut off from news of family, friends or the world at large, in a land where the native rites and customs were as foreign as those of an Oriental satrapy. In the spring of 1875, Henry Cambie, exploring the east branch of the Homathco, came upon Indians so removed from civilization that many of the women had never seen a beard “and would not believe that mine really grew on my chin.” Jason Allard, one of Walter Moberly’s men, unwittingly accepted an invitation to visit an Indian lodge on the Fiddle River and made the mistake of sitting on a bear rug next to a strapping maiden. Too late he realized that this was tantamount to an offer of marriage. In desperation he traded her back to her father for a handsome finger ring.

Yet out they went, year after year, men who were for the most part tough, intelligent and uncomplaining. They drank anything they could get: “Be it known and I say it without shame at all, all engineers in those days were accustomed to take what they felt like,” one of them, Harry Armstrong recalled. When they drank, they sang their theme song to the tune of
“Les Deux Gendarmes” –
sang it from the ravelled coastline of British Columbia to the gloomy granites of northern Ontario – the song of the Canadian Pacific Survey:

Far away from those we love dearest,
  Who long and wish for home,
The thought of whom each lone heart cheereth,
  As ’mid these North-west wilds we roam,
Yet still each one performs his duty
  
And gaily sings:
Tra, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la,
  Hurra! The jolly C.P.S.!
They’re at home upon Superior’s shore,
  Hurra! we’ll drink to them success,
And a safe return once more
.

In 1872, it was a nightmare just to reach that “home upon Superior’s shore.” Charles Aeneas Shaw, who was with the Canadian Pacific Survey from the beginning until the last stake was driven, graphically recalled his initiation in November of that year. Shaw, a wiry eighteen-year-old at the time, “keen to learn and a hog for work,” was hired as a packer under William Murdoch, seeking to locate a
line west from Prince Arthur’s Landing. The trick was to try to reach the Landing before winter sealed off the lake. The group attempted it first in a cockleshell of a steamer, the
Mary Ward
. It foundered on a reef in a howling blizzard, drowning three of the party. The survivors returned to Toronto, picked up new kits and set off again. Murdoch made his way overland to Duluth, where he offered to pay as much as twenty-five hundred dollars for a tugboat to take his men up the lake. Conditions were so desperate that no seasoned skipper would attempt the crossing. Notwithstanding, the party bought a small fishing boat and started off in mid-December, rowing and sailing to their destination. The temperature sank to 52 below zero – so cold that each crewman had to chip from the blades of his oars a ball of ice the size of a man’s head. They crept along the shoreline, sleeping in the snow at night, existing on frozen pork and hardtack and even surviving a full-force gale. When the lake froze on New Year’s Day, they finally abandoned the boat, built toboggans out of strips handsawn from frozen birch logs and hiked with their supplies the last fifty miles to Prince Arthur’s Landing.