The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (39 page)

A retired British army officer, bent on settling his sons in the North
West, arrived at St. Vincent, the border point, with twenty pieces of luggage, several of which contained china and other fragile articles. He made bold to ask the station manager to treat his possessions as gently as possible. “His reply … to which was ordering me, in tones of Imperial importance, to ‘stand back’ and hurling the luggage with all his force from one end of the car to the other.”

The subsequent journey was “a miserable apology for railway travelling” but the travellers did not complain too much. They counted themselves lucky that the train did not run off the track, “a misadventure that at this period was happening almost daily.”

In Winnipeg, the citizenry could only wait and hold their breath and listen to the faint sounds of activity in the East where, piece by piece, the railway was being built on Canadian soil from the head of Lake Superior.

2
Adam Oliver’s favourite game

On the afternoon of June 1, 1875, a spirited little ceremony took place on the left bank of the Kaministiquia River, about four miles from its mouth on Thunder Bay, Lake Superior, in the sprawling township of Shumiah. Here was turned the first sod of the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The affair was sponsored by the firm of Sifton and Ward, which had secured the contract to grade the first thirty-two miles of roadbed for a line that the government intended to build in sections between Fort William and Selkirk.

Like so many contractors in those days, John Wright Sifton and his brother Henry were up to their sideburns in politics. It was more than merely useful to have a friend in high places; for a contractor it was virtually mandatory. The Siftons came from Petrolia, near Sarnia, in Alexander Mackenzie’s federal riding of Lambton. J. W. Sifton had served as reeve of the municipality and as a member of the Lambton County council. His other partner, Frank Ward, was an American, but he and his brother were, as Josiah Burr Plumb took care to point out in the House of Commons, “ardent supporters and close friends of the hon. gentleman in his constituency of Lambton.” J. W. Sifton’s decision to seek contracts along the route of the
CPR
(he and his brother were awarded several) not only changed his personal life pattern but also had a considerable effect on the political future of
the country. He himself went on to become Speaker of the Manitoba legislature but it was his sons, both of whom were in their teens at the time of the sod-turning, who would make history. The elder, Arthur, would rise to become Premier of Alberta and later a federal cabinet minister. The younger, Clifford, would become Minister of the Interior in the Laurier cabinet, and would also found the best-known and most powerful newspaper dynasty in Canada. Such were the ever-widening ripples set in motion by the brief June ceremony of 1875.

By two that afternoon, two steamers, “loaded with the beauty and fashion of the neighbourhood,” had arrived from Prince Arthur’s Landing, a few miles away. With a crowd of five hundred in attendance, Judge Delevan Van Norman gained the platform.

“We have met today,” he said, “for no other purpose than to inaugurate the beginning of the actual construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway.”

The Judge confessed his utter inability to do even a measure of justice to the occasion, but he tried manfully nonetheless, pointing out that an immigrant with his family “seeking a new home in this new world, but still under the old flag, may with celerity, safety and certainty examine the country from Cape Breton in Nova Scotia to Vancouver’s Island in British Columbia, in the meantime passing over a space as vast as the great ocean that divides and separates the old world from the new.”

Then Judge Van Norman told his listeners what they really wanted to hear: Buffalo had once been no larger than Prince Arthur’s Landing, Chicago no bigger than Fort William!

“I verily believe,” the Judge said, “that history is about to repeat itself.”

Adam Oliver rose as the applause died. He was a bulky man with shrewd, narrow eyes and a small billy goat’s beard, who hailed from Oxford County in southwestern Ontario, which he represented in the local legislature. He was known as an impassioned player of euchre, then the most popular family game on the continent. Euchre has several variations including “Railroad Euchre” and “Cutthroat Euchre”; Oliver, as events were to prove, certainly knew something about the cutthroat aspects of the railroad game. He and his partners owned forty thousand acres of good timber in the Fort William area together with considerable property and a lumber mill. They
already had one government contract, to build the telegraph line accompanying the railroad to the Red River, and were about to sign another for the construction of an engine house. Oliver, too, was a prominent Liberal.

Amid loud cheers, Oliver pointed to a pile of five hundred wheelbarrows and a thousand shovels lying ready for use.

“Looking farther still up the line you can see hundreds of men clearing the way,” he cried, “while the magnificent wharf along the side of the river is rapidly approaching completion. The place on which you are now standing is destined in no distant day to form one of the most important cities in your great Dominion.”

In the crowd applauding those remarks were: Peter Johnson Brown, one of Oliver’s partners and a former reeve of Shumiah Township, which harboured both communities; Thomas Marks, the pioneer merchant at the Landing and the incumbent reeve; and Peter McKellar, an old Fort William settler and council member. Working together, these men, with Oliver’s political help, had succeeded in wrestling the official lake terminus from the rival port of Nepigon, farther to the east. Now they were united in a moment of common triumph. It was the last that they would share together.

Originally the controversy had been between Thunder Bay and Nepigon. Nepigon won the railhead by default after a fire in the engineering department, early in 1874, destroyed all the evidence in favour of Thunder Bay. When the Thunder Bay merchants learned of this from Adam Oliver they mustered a delegation from the twin communities to reassemble the original arguments and lay the evidence before Sandford Fleming. An aggressive paper battle was mounted as well. The Thunder Bay delegation made sure that every Member of Parliament received a pamphlet trumpeting the advantages of the westerly terminus and hinting at dark and sinister plotting on the part of the Nepigon boosters who, it charged, were land speculators.

Nepigon fought back with a pamphlet of its own, pointing out that the land around the harbour had always been the property of the Crown. Each pamphlet indulged in an orgy of statistics designed to prove that the rival harbour was choked with ice at a time when the other was open. The Thunder Bay pamphlet, for instance, contained an affidavit from one James McKay, a Hudson’s Bay Company trader at Nepigon, who swore that the harbour was never open before June 1. To which the author of the Nepigon pamphlet,
another
Hudson’s
Bay trader at Nepigon, replied: “Poor McKay! Into what designing hands hast thou fallen? Poor fellow! I fear the best excuse for you would be that you were drunk when you swore to such a tissue of lies.”

Nevertheless, the government changed its mind and awarded the terminus to Thunder Bay. This prompted a third pamphlet from James Beaty, editor of the Toronto
Leader
, entitled
The History of the Lake Superior Ring
. The pamphlet promised more than it delivered since it carried on its cover the jaw-breaking subtitle: “An account of the rise and progress of the
YANKEE COMBINATION
, headed by
HON. ALEXANDER MACKENZIE
, premier of Canada and
THE BROWNS
for the purpose of selling their interest and political power to enrich Jay Cooke & Co. and other
AMERICAN SPECULATORS
, changing the route of the Canada Pacific Railway, with a view to breaking up our great Dominion, and severing our connection with the British Empire,
THOROUGH EXPOSé
of Mackenzie’s and Brown’s
TREACHERY TO THEIR COUNTRY.”

There was only one piece of hard evidence in Beaty’s shrill tract. He was able to show that, late in 1873, when Mackenzie was contemplating the change of route to bring the railway close to Lake Superior, two mining companies had been incorporated to buy and develop lands in the same general area. Four of the six principals were Mackenzie, George Brown of the
Globe
, his brother Gordon, and the American consul in Toronto, Col. Albert D. Shaw.

The impropriety of the Prime Minister of Canada speculating in real estate along the line of a proposed government railway scarcely fazed the voters of that day who were inured to far more blatant instances of political jobbery. It was an era in which plots and counterplots, sinister “rings” and cabals, intrigues and conspiracies of all kinds, fancied or real, were part of the standard political and economic weaponry. People of standing were conditioned to believe – sometimes with good reason – that secret forces were working just beneath the surface. Almost forty years later, Peter McKellar of Fort William, who had helped compose the pamphlet attacking the wicked Nepigon “interests,” recalled that he had believed the affair was “a culpably deep laid scheme.” In his old age he confessed, “I have changed my mind.”

Early in 1874 Fleming settled on a point two miles from the old Hudson’s Bay post of Fort William, on the Kaministiquia River, as the terminus for the Fort Garry-Thunder Bay line. After the first flush of victory, the people at Prince Arthur’s Landing, which was
seven miles away, began to experience a sense of discrimination. The rivalry between the two communities had actually begun the winter before with the appearance of two opposing newspapers, both produced on foolscap and hand written in ink. Peter McKellar was the mainstay of the Fort William
Perambulator
, George T. Marks (Thomas Marks’s nephew) of the Landing’s
Thunderbolt
. Each condemned the other in the most violent and abusive language on the only subject that counted: the exact location of the terminus. In describing the future of their respective villages, each paper always portrayed the rival community as being wiped out of existence.

The two newspapers vanished with the ice on the lake, but early in the fall the Landing got a journalistic champion in the person of an itinerant and volatile Irishman named Michael Hagan. With the backing of the Marks family, Hagan founded the Thunder Bay
Sentinel
and immediately began to reflect the popular opinion that the choice of Fort William as the terminus was part of a scheming conspiracy. In one of its earliest issues, the newspaper hit out at the Toronto
Mail
, which was supporting Fort William and attacking the Landing. What was this “tirade of abuse,” Hagan asked. Then he began to fuel the fires of suspicion:

“Some would have it that a certain excursion to Silver Lake with persons well known hereabouts, together with Fort William Hudson Bay rum, cooked the job. Others would have it that [it was a] certain unpleasantness at the Queen’s Hotel, where a little amusement was had at the expense of a would-be ‘expert’ from Toronto; and another class think there is a lady in the case, and jilting don’t go down with high blood.”

By October, the bitterness between the communities was so great that Fort William, led by Oliver and his two business partners, Joseph Davidson and Peter Johnson Brown-started a movement to separate from Prince Arthur’s Landing. The
Sentinel
rushed into print on November 4 with the inside story of why the “Fort William clique” or “this little band of schemers,” as it called them, was trying to engineer the schism. The Landing interests wanted to finance, with municipal help, a railway to hook up with the
CPR
terminus. Fort William wanted no part of this. In order to save paying taxes to build the line and also to protect their own real-estate holdings at the town plot of Fort William, the Oliver interests were trying to opt out of the township of Shumiah.

The two communities were quite different in character and in history. Fort William was by far the older of the two; it had been a fur-trading post for almost two centuries and the venerable Hudson’s Bay fort guarded by twin cannon was its oldest building. The new town was to be built on a plot of land surveyed some two miles distant, not far from Adam Oliver’s sawmill – “the nucleus of a second Chicago,” as one visitor wrote of it.

The Landing had been the taking-off point for the Gladman-Hind-Dawson expedition of 1858, for Wolseley’s military trek across the Shield and for the ill-fated Dawson road. It was now the end of steam transportation from Ontario. Silver discoveries had caused it to boom in the sixties and by the time of the sod-turning ceremony it was by far the larger of the twin settlements, a prosperous mining town and lake port of more than one thousand souls, with several churches, hotels and lodges and four lines of steamboats, both side-wheelers and screw-driven, making use of its dock facilities. It had the characteristics of a silver town: a love of easy money, a propensity for speculation, a get-rich-quick philosophy and a cynical attitude regarding human nature.

“The very streets show veins of silver, prospecting being the prevalent topic,” James Trow wrote of it in 1874. “Speculation often runs wild. Mineral locations are sold for fabulous sums and resold repeatedly. One victim wants to victimize another.”

Now the entire community thought itself victimized. “There is no disguising the fact,” wrote one journalist, “that the recent location of the terminus of the railroad seven miles distant has cast a cloud over this place.” The leading citizens of the town formed a company to build the railroad to hook up with the main line and managed to get municipal backing-but not before a bitter struggle, since Fort William interests were also involved.

There were public meetings in which charges and countercharges flew between the two groups like poisoned arrows. Oliver, Davidson and Brown, the three partners who stood to make the most money out of the Fort William terminus, attacked the whole idea of a connecting railroad to the Landing. Simon J. Dawson, now a member of the provincial legislature for the district, retorted that all three were absentee landowners, who wanted to get rich at the expense of the community. Brown replied by charging that the Landing had twenty-two liquor outlets and all the members of its council were selling liquor in direct contravention of the law. The Fort William group
were attacked as “vile slanderers.” At last the by-law was passed and the little railway was built but the Mackenzie government refused to link it with the
CPR
. The citizens of the Landing responded in another pamphlet, in which they charged that the refusal had been brought about “at the instigation of parties interested in crushing their settlement and building up a town on the Kaministiquia” and that “through the sinister influence of these parties, they have been subjected to the most cruel persecution.”