The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (37 page)
Read The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 Online
Authors: Pierre Berton
A few days after this confrontation, Mackenzie asked Cambie to give his written opinion of the several lines surveyed in British Columbia. Smith reported to Fleming that Cambie was in “great tribulation.” All the Minister was entitled to, he told Cambie, was a brief report of the previous season’s work – with
no
opinions. Smith would supply the opinions.
“I have made up my mind to take the bull by the horns and am prepared to resign my post rather than truckle to the whims or political necessities of the Government against my better judgement,” Smith declared.
Cambie complied with Smith’s instructions and ventured no opinion on the relative merits of the various routes proposed through British Columbia. Smith sent the report along to Mackenzie with a laconic note stating that it was “about as full and accurate as it could be in the present unfinished state of the plans.” He added that he was in no position yet to make a comparative judgement on the various routes. But Mackenzie had other sources. Smith complained to Fleming that he “continues to get information secretly from private interested and irresponsible persons while he refuses to receive or suppresses all information laboriously and disinterestedly obtained by myself.”
Quite clearly, the Prime Minister had settled on the Burrard route. In the
Globe
, his old mentor George Brown faithfully reflected these views. There were many reasons for Mackenzie’s decision: the Admiralty report (De Horsey’s demurral notwithstanding); the skilful advocacy of the mainland Members of Parliament led by Edgar Dewdney and Lieutenant-Governor Richards, which was far more temperate than the shrill carping of the islanders; Lord Dufferin’s own opinion; the new surveys by Cambie; and, finally, Smith’s bull-headed intransigence. The acting chief engineer had got his minister’s back up. By March, 1878, Mackenzie had ceased to consult him or even speak to him.
On March 29, Smith sent in his own official report, as acting chief, on the progress of the surveys of the previous year. Predictably, he
advocated the Pine Pass-Bute Inlet route, but suggested another year’s delay to settle the final location of the line.
“It has apparently fallen like a thunderbolt,” Smith wrote gleefully to Helmcken a month later. “It has been repeatedly asked for both in the House and Senate but kept on one excuse or another.”
Smith’s report presented Mackenzie with a new dilemma. He could scarcely settle on Burrard Inlet in the face of the direct and public opposition of his acting chief engineer. The islanders would pounce on that and cry foul. There was only one thing to do: without telling Marcus Smith, he sent for Fleming who, for the second time, found his sick leave in England interrupted.
Fleming returned to find his department in an uproar. Rowan complained of Smith’s language and treatment of him. There were also reports, that Smith had stated in public that some of the department engineers were working in collusion with railway contractors – a charge designed to infuriate the members of that proud service. Rowan reported that in Winnipeg, Smith had spent more time collecting data to be used against Fleming and Mackenzie than he had on the knotty problems connected with his own department. Smith was totally unabashed by these charges.
“He spoke to me in a way in which I had never been spoken to before by a gentleman, on several occasions,” Fleming later told the public accounts committee of the House. Mackenzie determined that Smith must go. He told Fleming that he no longer had confidence in him and that he, Fleming, must no longer consider Smith an officer of the department. This resulted in a curious situation: there was the peppery Smith, still fuming away in his office, still, apparently, on the staff, but stripped of his powers.
“He did not receive his dismissal but he was as good as dismissed,” Fleming later recounted, “and I was not at liberty to consult him any longer, inasmuch as he was no longer a public officer.” No doubt Fleming expected Smith to resign, as he had once expected Moberly to resign, but Smith hung on stubbornly, as he had once hung on to the slippery crags of the Homathco canyon. He was more than a little paranoid by this time. He explored, in a letter to Helmcken, the possibility that Lord Dufferin had an interest in Fraser Valley land – hence his motives in “moving Heaven and Earth” in favour of the Burrard route. Smith added that Dufferin wanted another term of office as Governor General and thus would do “any dirty work for the Canadian Government if they will use their influence to get it for him.”
While Smith busied himself with his correspondence – he had nothing else to do – Fleming set about writing his own report. In this he was finally forced to a conclusion: if engineering decisions alone were to govern the selection of a route, and if that selection could not be postponed further, then the Bute Inlet route should be rejected and the Burrard Inlet route selected. He left the question of a pass open. He thought there should be more extensive surveys in the region of the Peace River Pass in case it proved to be less expensive than the Yellow Head.
Fleming included Smith’s report as an appendix to his own. He did not, however, reproduce Smith’s map, which purported to show the comparative richness of the country surrounding the Peace. This was to become a minor
cause célèbre
and political football. “The map which formed the most valuable part of my report was cunningly suppressed so that the report was not intelligible to any but those who had some knowledge of the country,” Smith later charged. To this Fleming replied that Smith was neither a botanist nor an agronomist but a surveyor; the map, showing soils and fertility, was the work of a layman and not a professional and hence had no place in the report.
On July 12, 1878, the government settled officially on the Fraser River-Burrard Inlet route and prepared to call for tenders for the construction of the railway through the dismal canyon of the Fraser. That seemed to be the end of the horrid B.C. business. It was not. Party lines had already been drawn around the opposing routes. The Pine Pass-Bute Inlet route, thanks in part to Marcus Smith’s importuning, had become something of a Tory route. The Burrard route had become a Grit route. As for Smith, he was still around. Two years later, in a new job and under a new administration, he would still be, in his own eyes at least, “the
Bête Noir
of the Govt.”
*
Though the British Columbians blamed Blake for this smear, it was actually the
British Colonist
that first spoke of the route through which the railway would run as “a sea of mountains.”
Chapter Six
1
The first locomotive
On the morning of October 9, 1877, the citizens of Winnipeg were awakened by an unaccustomed fanfare – the shriek of a locomotive whistle. For the generation to follow, this would become the authentic sound of the prairie, more familiar, more haunting, more nostalgic than the laugh of the loon or the whine of the wind in the wolf willow. But on this crisp October day, with the sere leaves of birch and aspen yellowing the ground, it was something totally new. There were many there that day who had never heard a train whistle in their lives and for some of these, the Indians and Métis, it was as symbolic in its sadness as it was for the white community in its promise.
George Ham, the western editor and raconteur who was there that day, recalled the scene:
“A lone, blanketed Indian standing on the upper bank of the river looked down rather disdainfully upon the strange iron thing and the interested crowd of spectators who hailed its coming. He evinced no enthusiasm but stoically gazed at the novel scene. What did it portend? To him it might be the dread thought of the passing of the old life of his race, the alienation of the stamping grounds of his forefathers, the early extinction of their God given provider, the buffalo, which for generations past had furnished the red man with all the necessities of life … whatever he may have thought, this iron horse actually meant that the wild, free, unrestrained life of the Indian was nearing its end.”
She was a Baldwin engine, built especially for the job, and she bore a noble name,
The Countess of Dufferin
. She came complete with six flat cars and a van; but she could not arrive under her own steam. She had to be floated down the river on a flag-decked barge, pushed by the stern-wheeler
Selkirk
, because the railway to the boundary, which Mackenzie had been promising since 1873, was not finished. Even if it had been, there was nothing yet on the other side of the American border with which it could connect.
But a locomotive, even without a railway, was still a marvel and the entire town was streaming to the dock with whistles, bells, banners and bunting to inspect it. They gave three cheers for the massive contractor, Joseph Whitehead, who was in charge; as a boy, he had worked on railways in the old country when they were drawn
by horses. Then, as the barge touched the bank, they crowded aboard and began to crawl over the little black engine with the huge smokestack. Two hours later, the
Selkirk
steamed to a location below Douglas Point where a piece of track had been laid to the water’s edge and here the crowds watched in awe as the little train puffed its way off the barge and ran under full steam up the bank and into St. Boniface. Whitehead, who was laying track on the line between St. Boniface and Selkirk, had imported her as a work engine. For the white community, at least, she was a promise of things to come, an end to the maddening isolation of half a century and a tangible response to the pleas for a railway, which had been issuing from the Red River since the beginning of the decade.
This isolation was real and terrible and could be translated into concrete terms. At the beginning of the decade a keg of nails, if nails were available at all, cost at least ten times as much at Red River as in Ontario – a fact of life which helps explain why Red River carts were held together with shaganappi. And it cost six shillings — more than a farmhand earned in a day – to send a letter to the old country.
The steamboats, which began to arrive on the river in the late sixties, did not appreciably lower prices save during those brief, adventurous periods when rival lines fought for control. The Hudson’s Bay Company held a monopoly of the Red River traffic with its rickety
International
until one spring day in 1871 when a strange vessel loaded with 125 passengers and 115 tons of freight steamed into Fort Garry. This was the
Selkirk
, operated by James Jerome Hill, a one-eyed ex-Canadian with a razor-sharp mind now operating out of St. Paul. Hill, an omniverous reader, had discovered an old United States law which held that all goods crossing the international border from American territories into Canadian ports must be bonded. He quietly built the
Selkirk
, had her bonded and persuaded the customs officials at Pembina on the border to hold up all unbonded vessels plying the river. The
International
, in short, was legally beached and Hill had a transportation monopoly of the Red River Valley. It was said that he paid off the entire cost of constructing his new steamboat with the profits of that first voyage.
Jim Hill had had the audacity to challenge the monopoly rule of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which for two centuries had enjoyed the mastery of the North West. Donald A. Smith, the chief commissioner of the company, lost no time in fighting back. He had the
International
bonded by assigning the steamer to Norman Kittson, the respected Minnesota fur trader who was the Hudson’s Bay agent in St. Paul. Then he leaped into battle with Hill.
They were evenly matched adversaries and, in many respects, remarkably alike – short, fierce-eyed, muscled men, all bone and gristle, with backgrounds crammed with adventure and romance. They knew and respected one another, having met quite by accident in exacting circumstances on the bald, snowswept prairie in February of 1870.
This scene, which took place near the Elm River, north of the United States border, was a memorable one for it marked the beginning of an association which would eventually launch the Canadian Pacific Railway company. Hill, en route to Fort Garry to investigate at first hand the Red River troubles, had made a truly terrible journey from St. Paul. First, the stage out of Breckenridge, on which he was travelling, had fought its way through gigantic drifts, the passengers shovelling out the route themselves and sleeping in the snow. Hill left the stage, hired a dog team and pushed north through the blizzard. When his Métis guide became surly, Hill drove him away at revolver point and plunged on alone. The situation grew more serious: he was sleeping out by night, running behind the dogs by day, existing on a pocketful of pemmican and tea made from melted snow. He travelled this way for eighty miles until he reached Pembina. Here he hired another guide and pressed on towards Fort Garry. On his way across the white wastes of the southern Manitoba prairie he suddenly beheld, emerging from the curtain of swirling snow, the vague outline of another dog team coming south. Its passenger was Donald A. Smith, en route to eastern Canada by way of St. Paul, to report to Ottawa on his successful mediation in the Red River Rebellion; he had, among other things, bribed Louis Riel into exile with three thousand dollars of his own money and one thousand of the government’s.
The scene deserves to be preserved on a broad canvas or re-enacted on a wide screen: the two diminutive figures, muffled in furs, blurred by the drifting snow and dwarfed by that chill desert which stretched off for one hundred and forty miles, unmarked by a single human habitation. There they stopped and shared a frozen meal together – Hill, the young dreamer, his lively mind already crammed with visions of a transportation empire of steel, and Smith, the old Labrador hand, who had clawed his way up the slippery ladder of the fur trade. Hill was thirty-two, Smith, fifty; within a decade both of
them would be multimillionaires as the result of a mutual association. A quarter of a century later, Smith would recall that bleak scene and say: “I liked him then and I have never had reason to change my opinion.”