The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (31 page)
Read The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 Online
Authors: Pierre Berton
He was a Northumberland man who had been a land surveyor all his life, first in England and Wales, then in South Africa and, since 1850, in Canada. He had worked for Fleming on the Intercolonial, as had so many of the men on the
C.P.S
.; and like so many of the others – men accustomed to fend for themselves in wild and inhospitable climes – he was totally self-confident and more than a little proud. “I have no claim for genius,” he wrote at the close of his career (he lived to be 89), “but a strong love of my profession, an aptitude and energy for carrying out great works, and a determination for honesty and accuracy which I have so far carried out, that in a long practice there has never been a dollar lost to any of my employers from any blunder of mine.”
He was a hard drinker. On the prairie surveys, where prohibition reigned, his keg of “lime juice” contained straight whiskey. On the Homathco, he and his subordinate, W. O. Tiedeman, broke open a case of brandy and fought and drank an afternoon away. “They would keep having a drink and a row, turn and turn about,” one of
the party noted. He was not an easy man to work under for he did not suffer incompetence, fatigue or any kind of human frailty. Young Edgar Fawcett, the rodman on the Bute-Homathco survey, was toiling up a steep, rock-strewn hill in June, 1872, when an enormous boulder, bouncing down the slope, struck him a blow that knocked him insensible. Smith took personal affront at the mishap. He could not have children working for him, he said. “That boy who could not keep out of the way of stones would have to be sent home.”
Anything that interfered with the progress of the survey distressed him and this impatience seems to have rubbed off on his subordinates. Tiedeman, who was in charge of the Bute Inlet survey under Smith’s over-all supervision, insisted on moving camp at the end of October even though it meant leaving one lost man to die in the wilderness. Anyone who got lost, Tiedeman said, in his thick German accent, deserved to die. Some other members of the party remonstrated with him and he finally consented to send out search parties. Eventually, the missing man was found: he had been wandering around in circles for two days and nights without sleep or food and was so far gone he did not recognize the comrade who eventually located him. Tiedeman’s reaction was an echo of Smith’s: “You shall have four more days’ work for losing those two days.”
“Sunday morning and no one sorry for it except perhaps Old Smith who I think would like to keep everyone at work night and day and then growl and snap at anyone he came near or happened to speak to him,” George Hargreaves, the leveller on the party, confided to his diary that June.
Three days later he wrote that “Old Smith came to camp about 7.30 and boiled over, accusing us of putting obstacles in his way and saying he would carry through with the survey if he had to send 5,000 miles for men.”
Six days later: “Had a row with Old Smith for not bringing the levels through before stopping work.… Says he, ‘what did you mean by saying you was through, you must be an idiot.’ ”
Two days later: “It appears Smith had a big row with two or three of the men and also with Bristow, the Transit. Called him a Gd. dmd. fool and Idiot, who said he would not have such language used to him that he would go home to Canada if he continued to use it, and also told Smith he was stopping the work by carrying on so. Smith told him to go back to his instrument or he would give him the Gd. damdist darning ever he had dam’d.…”
“It was most awful the way that old devil swore and went on generally,” young Fawcett wrote of Smith in his own diary a week after the incident with the boulder. “He swore at me for the most ordinary things and kept us from dinner till half-past two.”
Yet, Fawcett admitted, he was treated no worse than the others, for Smith made no distinctions. He barked at Tiedeman, the head of the party, and barked at transit men, levellers, axemen and Indian packers with a fine democracy. The Indians, who could afford the luxury of independence, calmly unloaded their canoes and prepared to head off into the wilderness. Smith called in Hargreaves and asked him who had authorized the Indians to leave. Hargreaves replied that Indians didn’t require any authorization to do anything, a remark that seemed to astonish Smith. “He said we must talk about that, only while he was talking about it, they were going, which put him in a flutter rather.” Smith asked what the Indians wanted. The Indians replied they didn’t want to work for Smith. Hargreaves prevented a wholesale desertion by apologizing for Smith and agreeing to pay the Indians in cash at the time of every trip.
But if Smith was hard on others, he was equally hard on himself. When he was sixty years of age, he travelled for one thousand miles through the Lake Superior country by canoe, all in a single summer, making two hundred portages that varied from a few yards to four miles.
He must have seemed a superman albeit a satanic one, to the young chainmen and rodmen who, at the end of each day, found themselves so exhausted they were ready to throw in the sponge. Some of their diary excerpts from the Bute Inlet survey of 1872, when Smith was driving them without mercy, tell the story:
“So tired I could hardly drag myself along. After one of the hardest, hottest and longest days I had ever experienced in my life, we arrived at ‘W’ camp. I was so far done in I could not get up and sat down to rest.”
“Yesterday I really thought I should have to give in I felt so the loss of having eaten nothing all day but a bit of bread and fat pork in 12 hours. If this is surveying, I have had my bellyfull of it.”
“I am heartily sick of the whole business and feel like turning tail.”
“… legs and feet all benumbed and aching fearfully. I felt like giving up and leaving it many times but knowing it had to be done
sometime, and if we left it today would have to go again tomorrow, managed to get through.…”
Yet here was the demonic Smith, a man twice their age, driving hard late into the evening, scaling the rocks and forging through the glacial waters with enough breath left in his barrel chest to shower curses and imprecations upon the stragglers.
The truth was that he was as exhausted as any. “Felt terribly used up,” he wrote in his journal on July 9, 1872 – it is a phrase that keeps recurring on those cramped pages. But he would not give up that night until he had worked out the calculations of his travels across the mountains. Four days later, when he boarded the boat to Victoria (to the immense relief of his men), he was near collapse. “Fatigue set in after a month of excessive labour and anxiety and I lay and dozed the hours away, totally unfit for anything.”
Sick or not, Smith was back in the upper Homathco country a month later. He was tortured by pains and cramps in his hip and left leg and by August 11 was so ill he could not rise until noon. But rise he did, saddled a horse and headed off across a swamp. The swamp was so bad that Smith had to leave it and make his way up the side of a hill, still on horseback. After this detour, Smith plunged into a second swamp. The horse became mired. Smith tried to spur it on. The saddle slipped off and Smith tumbled into the morass. He was too weak to re-saddle the horse but he managed to crawl all the way to the head of a lake where he found two Indians who cared for him.
He was still at it, in the same country, in the summer of 1875. He was then in his sixtieth year and he confided to Joseph Hunter, one of his surveyors, that he had “less heart for this journey than any I have undertaken. I am far from well and very weak and the mountain torrents are very high.”
When he wrote that letter, Smith was planning to force his way from the Chilcoten plains through the Cascade Mountains by way of the Homathco Pass and move down to Bute Inlet. Tiedeman and Horetzky had started at the inlet and were on their way to meet him, opening up a trail and bridging the streams as they went.
Smith set off on foot with five Lillooet Indians and a Chilcoten guide, struggling for two and a half days along the dripping, perpendicular cliffs of the canyons. Sometimes it took several hours to move a few yards since they had to climb as high as fifteen hundred feet and descend again to circumnavigate the spurs of rock that jutted
from the canyon face. At one point, unable to bridge a torrent (six of the largest trees, thrown across the chasm, had been swept away like chips), they were forced to detour by way of a glacier, fifteen miles long, whose sharp ridges they crossed on their hands and knees.
It was not the kind of summer excursion a doctor would prescribe for an ailing man in his sixtieth year. En route to the coast Smith discovered that Tiedeman’s bridges had been swept away by the mountain torrents. It took him and his men seven hours to construct an Indian fly bridge over the Grand Canyon of the Homathco. It “looked like a fishing rod and line hanging over the torrent, the butt end resting on the ground and loaded with boulders.” Smith crept gingerly over this precarious filament, dropped heavily to the rocks below and then spent six hours scrambling over tangled creepers, huge deadfalls and masses of detached rocks before reaching the camp of division “X.”
Smith’s love-hate relationship with this strangely compelling land of grim canyons and smiling meadows had, to borrow his own phrase, used him up. Would all this travail be in vain? Survey parties were crawling over the rumpled face of British Columbia and probing the ragged fiords of the coastline, seeking a feasible method of reaching the Pacific. Sandford Fleming was contemplating no less than eleven different routes leading down from the mountain spine to salt water. Only two led through Smith’s country. What if another route should be chosen? What if all those ghastly days in the numbing bogs and among the brooding crags should end in defeat? Marcus Smith was not a man to contemplate defeat; and he had not yet begun to fight.
Chapter Five
1
Lord Carnarvon intervenes
“I will leave the Pacific Railway as a heritage to my adopted country,” Alexander Mackenzie is said to have declared in his dry, Gaelic accent, when Donald A. Smith, the Member for Selkirk, tried to argue the merits of using a private company to build the line. Smith, nonetheless, remained in Mackenzie’s camp. “He is a noble man,” Smith said of him and the voters, who returned him with a landslide early in 1874, seemed to agree.
They wanted a noble man and they got one: a high-principled Scot with honest eyes of piercing blue, clear as ice, which seemed to bore right through an adversary. Though he was in no sense immune to the pressures of nepotism and patronage, he appeared to be a man of probity. The public had reduced Macdonald’s following in the House to a corporal’s guard, as he ruefully remarked, and placed his antithesis on the pedestal. With his graven features, his metallic voice, his rigid attitudes, his Baptist teetotalism and his blunt manner, Mackenzie was in every possible sense, except for his Scottish heritage, the exact opposite of the rounded, soft-spoken, tolerant and indulgent politician whom he replaced.
As Prime Minister he lacked Macdonald’s conciliatory gifts and in debate he tended to continue as if he were in opposition, striking down his opponents with the blunt bullets of his words. He “shot to kill,” George W. Ross said of him, “and he rarely failed.” Sometimes, it seemed, he tried too hard. He took, said Ross, “a strange delight in making his opponents feel he was their master.” Mackenzie could never quite let well enough alone and his tendency to want to rub his adversaries’ noses in their mistakes, or imagined mistakes, was to affect his railway policy.
He was a bear for work and never allowed an early adjournment of the Commons if there was business to fill up the time; but he sometimes worked unnecessarily hard, for he found it difficult to separate small details from over-all plans – a stonemason’s trait, perhaps. He had the body of a man who has worked hard with his hands all his life – lithe and well-proportioned without a spare ounce of flesh and not a fold of surplus tissue on his drawn face. As a stonemason he had created fortifications, canals and court houses. When the Martello towers were built at Fort Henry, in Kingston, he was the foreman on the job. He built well: the towers were a major
tourist attraction a century later. One day when he was at work on the bomb-proof arch at the fort, a huge piece of cut stone weighing more than a ton fell upon the lower part of his foot. He allowed no cry of agony to escape from his thin lips. For all of his political career he masked his inner tortures. He was not one to cry out in public; but then he was not one to chuckle, either.
Goldwin Smith remarked, wickedly, that while his strong point as a political leader consisted in his having been a stonemason, his weak point consisted in his being one still. This was not quite fair. The Governor General, who still yearned secretly for Macdonald, came to revise his opinion of Mackenzie. “By no means a man of genius,” he wrote, “but he is industrious, conscientious and exact.” Dufferin had once thought of him as terribly narrow but he was not so narrow in his interests. In his early days in Kingston he had owned a telescope with which he used to gaze at the night sky from his log shanty. He was a lover of poetry and English literature; his speeches were seasoned with quotations from the classics. He had not had much formal schooling – and he was sensitive about that – but he had managed to read everything to which his better-educated peers had been exposed and seemed to remember far more of it. Though he had, in his younger days, been an incorrigible practical joker, his public image was one of uncompromising sobriety. Strong drink had never passed his lips and it is difficult to imagine anything but the bleakest of smiles illuminating those chiselled features. The church, to Mackenzie, was the rock on which civilization rested; scarcely a day went by on which he did not read his Bible and fall on his knees to ask his God for forgiveness and guidance.
Though the new Prime Minister had no natural gaiety, his speeches and his private conversation could be marked by a dry and often cutting wit. There was the story of his remark to William Paterson of Brantford, a fierce-faced man with a bull’s voice, which was seldom restrained. Paterson, after his maiden speech, was desperate for his leader’s approval. “Do you think they heard me?” he asked Mackenzie. “Aye,” was the Prime Minister’s only comment, “they heard you at the Russell Hoose.”