The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (45 page)

These figures were largely the result of John Macoun’s enthusiastic, and sometimes overenthusiastic, reports of 1877. Macoun flatly contradicted the findings of Palliser and Hind, who had talked of an “arid belt” on the southern plains, which they believed to be an extension of the Great American Desert.

“I wrote as much truth about the country as I dared,” Macoun recalled in his autobiography, “for I saw that my best friends believed me rather wild on the ‘illimitable possibilities’ of the country. When summing up the various areas, I reached the enormous figure of 200 million acres and recoiled from making public this number on the ground that the very immensity would deny that amount of credence I desired, so, as a salve to my conscience, I kept the large number of 200 million but said there were 79,920,400 acres of arable land and 120,400,000 acres of pastures, swamps and lakes.… My statements appeared as those of a crack-brained enthusiast and little attention was paid to them.”

Tupper, however, had somewhat hesitantly decided to accept Macoun’s estimate for this and subsequent statements of public policy (“Macoun … for God’s sake, do not draw on your imagination”). In his 1879 resolution, which urged that the railway be built “with all practical speed,” he asked that one hundred million acres of land be chosen, appropriated and sold at two dollars an acre, the proceeds to be used to pay for the line.

He also announced several changes of route. In order to achieve speed, railway construction and colonization would have to proceed hand in hand and, therefore, the line must go through the prairie country that afforded the best attraction for newcomers; hence the route would be lengthened to pass south of Lake Manitoba. Moreover, Tupper continued, the selection of Burrard Inlet as the Pacific terminus was premature. The government wanted more time to make more surveys, including surveys of the Pine and Peace River passes and of Port Simpson on the coast. Marcus Smith’s furious efforts had obviously not been in vain.

On the other hand there were “the excited feelings of British Columbia in consequence of long delays.” Because of these, the government felt compelled to let contracts that year for 125 miles of railway. Tupper could not say where that railway might be built but, by coincidence, that was the distance between Yale, in the Fraser canyon, and Kamloops. This was a curious business: on the one hand the government was going to survey Port Simpson again and was talking of a possible choice between it and the Bute or the Burrard
termini; on the other it appeared to be preparing to build the most expensive portion of the Burrard route.

Mackenzie, in his reply to Tupper, declared that Macdonald had been elected in Victoria for the purpose of bringing the route through Bute Inlet to that city and this was probably the politics behind the paradox. Nevertheless, the surveys continued.

Characteristically, Tupper had decided to attack the most difficult section of the British Columbia line first. His reason was that “its early completion meant the breaking of the backbone of the undertaking.” The contracts were let in four sections. The successful tender for two of these sections, totalling almost five million dollars, was from a syndicate larded with the names of prominent Conservatives: A. P. MacDonald, ex-mayor of Toronto and ex-member for Middlesex; Duncan McDonald, sitting member for Victoria, Nova Scotia; and one of the Shanly family of Montreal, leading Tory politicians as well as railroad engineers.

One of the bidders on all four sections, though by no means the lowest, was a young American named Andrew Onderdonk, the courtly, sophisticated scion of a prominent Hudson River family of Dutch ancestry. Onderdonk arrived in Ottawa in November, 1879, at the time the tenders were opened, his pockets stuffed with letters of recommendation from Canadian bankers and United States railwaymen. His backing was impressive: he had almost unlimited means behind him. There was H. B. Laidlaw, a New York banker, L. P. Morton of the great New York banking firm of Morton, Bliss and Company, S. G. Reed, president of the Oregon Railway of Portland, and last, but certainly not least, the legendary San Francisco financier, Darius O. Mills, who was at that very moment constructing the world’s most palatial office building – nine stories high! – on New York’s Broad Street.

Onderdonk, who had just finished constructing a sea-wall at San Francisco, went straight to see Tupper and Tupper was impressed. In the muskeg country west of Lake Superior, Canadian contractors were running into difficulties. Joseph Whitehead was teetering on the edge of financial ruin. Some of the low bidders on the four British Columbia sections looked alarmingly shaky. One of them had already had an internal falling out and could not raise the required security. Obviously, a man of experience backed by solid capital could build all four sections more cheaply and efficiently than four under-financed contractors working independently. Onderdonk was
allowed to purchase all the contracts. He paid a total of $215,000 for the privilege, arrived at Yale on April 22, 1880, to a salute of thirteen guns, and by May was ready to begin construction. None of Macdonald’s followers appeared to grasp the irony of a Conservative government awarding an important section of the railway to a Yankee contractor.

Meanwhile, Marcus Smith, who had been pronounced dead by both Fleming and Mackenzie, refused to lie down on the subject of the Pine Pass-Bute Inlet route. Indeed, he seems to have gained a new lease on life with the advent of the new administration – an administration in which Fleming’s position was becoming increasingly insecure.

There is something madly magnificent about Smith’s furious windmill-tilting at this late date. He simply refused to give up, even when the odds were against him. On January 20, 1879, he sent Tupper a confidential memorandum detailing his differences with Fleming, whose reports he categorized as “an apology for a course predetermined by the Minister”; he also revealed that his map of the Peace River country had been “cunningly suppressed.” He followed this up with another long memo to Tupper. In it he charged that Mackenzie, who was writing articles for the
Globe
advocating the Burrard route, “was nervously anxious about it for he is well aware that it is not only a blunder but a
political fraud
connected with a land job before which that of the Kaministiquia [at Fort William] pales into insignificance.” Smith wanted Tupper to give him charge of a two-year survey of the Pine Pass section of the Bute Inlet route – scarcely a feasible suggestion in view of the clamour from British Columbia. In May he wrote to Macdonald asking him to intercede on his behalf to reinstate him as Engineer of the British Columbia division, the job he had held before becoming Fleming’s deputy. Fleming, he complained, was advising the Minister of Public Works, Langevin, to “suppress all information adverse to [Smith’s] views.” A week or so later he shot off a private letter to the editor of the Toronto
Mail
, all about the missing map.

In the meantime, Henry Cambie had taken a distinguished party of surveyors and scientists right across the uncivilized hinterland of northern British Columbia. They started at Port Simpson, “one of the finest harbours on the Pacific Coast,” worked their way up the Skeena, and then followed a succession of rivers, canyons and mountain trails on foot and packsaddle and by canoe, raft, and leaky
boat until they reached the Peace River country on the far side of the mountains. In all that journey they did not encounter a single human being. Cambie returned on his own with a pack train and reached the top of the Pine Pass in a raging blizzard. He made his way back to civilization down the fast-freezing Fraser, shooting the rapids of the canyon himself, without a pilot. “Sham surveys” Smith called them, in a letter to Brydges, when Cambie returned; but on the strength of his report the government, in October 1879, finally gave up on the Bute Inlet route and announced that Burrard Inlet would be the official terminus after all. The Yellow Head, apparently, would be the pass through the Rockies.

Still Marcus Smith would not admit defeat. He wrote immediately to Senator David Macpherson, attacking the whole decision, predicting that there would never be any through traffic on the route and urging that it be considered a local line only, to be built at one-third the estimated cost. Then he allied himself with General Butt Hewson,
^*
an American engineer resident in Canada, who was preparing a pamphlet advocating that the Fraser contracts be cancelled and that either Bute or Dean Inlet be named as the terminus and the Pine Pass substituted for the Yellow Head. Smith supplied Hewson with a good deal of material for his critical pamphlet but balked at a cash donation.

The Battle of the Routes continued all that winter, with Smith firing off letters to A. P. MacDonald, the Tory contractor, to Langevin, to Brydges and to Dr. Helmcken in Victoria, all peppered with the bitterest accusations against Macdonald, Tupper, Cambie, Trutch, Dewdney, Onderdonk, Fleming, all of the British Columbia mainland members and everyone else in the growing army of critics of the Bute Inlet route. As the months wore on the battle grew more confused with Smith still advocating Bute Inlet, General Hewson wavering between Bute and Dean inlets and Charles Horetzky entering the fray with a pamphlet melodramatically entitled
Startling Facts
, urging Kitimat Inlet as the railway terminus. These three strangely assorted propagandists had one thing in common: they all insisted that the Pine Pass was a better choice than the Yellow Head.

Horetzky’s pamphlet was by far the most intemperate published. In it, he too claimed that Fleming had suppressed one of his reports – that written in 1874 as a result of his exploration of Kitimat Inlet and the Kitlope River. Ironically, Fleming had edited the report on Marcus Smith’s advice. Smith had pointed out that Horetzky was not an engineer and that as long as he confined himself to descriptions of what he saw he was serviceable enough, but not when he gave engineering opinions, descriptions of grades, tunnels and curvatures: “You will have to explain this to Mr. Horetzky for he is such a crazy, conceited fellow, he will think (and publish) that his genius is being repressed, if he has not his say, although, I may inform you that, except for his photographs, his work is altogether worthless and can’t be laid down on a general map.”

Six years later Smith was proven right: Horetzky was having his say, laying about him with a verbal scythe, attacking George Grant, John Macoun, Henry Cambie and Fleming and charging that his findings had been mutilated for sinister reasons. “Nobody in his senses can believe any such nonsense as this,” wrote the
Canadian Illustrated News;
but a good deal of what Horetzky wrote was believed and used for political purposes.

All this pressure undoubtedly had some effect on public policy. On February 16, 1880, Tupper told the House that he still wanted more information on the Pine River-Peace River country before finally making up his mind about the choice of a pass through the Rockies. It was now the ninth year of the Canadian Pacific Survey in British Columbia and it seemed by this time that every notch in each of the mountain ranges and all the intervening trenches had been combed as carefully as a Japanese sand garden. Gillette and his party had toiled up the slopes of the Howse, Jarvis had almost starved at the Smoky, Cambie and Horetzky had struggled over the Pine and the Peace, Roderick McLennan had lost all his horses probing the Athabasca, Moberly had braved the avalanches in the Selkirks and scoured the Gold Range, while Fleming himself, not to mention a score of others, had come through the Yellow Head.

Every pass had been checked with transit, level and aneroid, again and again; every pass had been argued over, reported on, discarded or, sometimes, resurveyed — every pass, that is, except the Kicking Horse, which lay to the south, neglected and unsurveyed, waiting to be chosen.

2
“Get rid of Fleming”

Sandford Fleming’s days as Engineer-in-Chief were numbered. The dissensions within his own department, as symbolized by the intractable Marcus Smith, the total identification with Mackenzie’s sluggish and sometimes inept railway policies, the bills coming in from Lake Superior, far in excess of estimates, the expensive surveys in British Columbia – all these were laid at his door. In the spring of 1879 he had been given a hard time as a witness before the Commons Public Accounts Committee and it was clear that more investigations were to follow.

“I have the conviction that you will neither obtain speedy nor economical construction under Fleming’s management,” that old railway hand Alexander Galt wrote to Macdonald after his election victory. It was not an entirely disinterested comment; Galt wanted the job himself, or one like it, which he called “railway commissioner.” He urged Macdonald to “get rid of Fleming and all his copious paraphernalia” and in a later letter added that “Fleming seems incapable of grasping the idea of what the country wants and what its resources enable it to do and I must say with a frankness I trust you will pardon that his continuance on the direction of the Pacific Railway will defeat all our plans for the development of our country.”

Galt then suggested that the change might be effected through the appointment of a commission to report on the whole subject, with himself, Charles Brydges and Sir Casimir Gzowski – all experienced railway builders – as commissioners.

Macdonald had other plans for the ambitious Galt. He would shortly be appointed Canada’s first high commissioner to London. He did, however, intend to appoint a royal commission to look into the entire operation of the railway, though not with the personnel Galt suggested. He intended that Fleming should go, but not as a result of the commission’s findings. Senator Macpherson had also been urging the move upon him, perhaps partly as a result of Marcus Smith’s importuning; and there were other murmurings. Fleming had made substantial profits as a contractor on a section of the Intercolonial Railway and his opponents were insinuating that his friend Tupper had shared in these. (The
Globe
rarely mentioned Tupper without referring, somehow, to corruption.) This was never proved, though Fleming certainly contributed to Tupper’s campaign
funds, but somebody had to be sacrificed and it could not be Tupper. After nine years of service Fleming would go with as much honour as possible and with the government’s blessing; one never knew when he might be needed again.