The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (46 page)

Clearly, Fleming was not the man to prosecute Macdonald’s aggressive railway policy. He could be maddening in his caution yet wild in his extravagances. He had, for instance, insisted on a great many instrumental surveys in British Columbia when simple exploratory surveys would have done, for the routes were later abandoned as too expensive, too difficult or too unwieldy. An exploratory survey involves one or two men; an instrumental survey involves a painstaking, foot-by-foot measurement by a large, heavily supplied party. Even Fleming was to admit that the expense in British Columbia “was simply enormous.” In British Columbia, between 1874 and 1876, there were twenty-nine instrumental surveys and only eight exploratory surveys. The former cost an average of thirty thousand dollars apiece, the latter less than nine.

Even when the explorations revealed little chance of a practical route – as they did in the case of Gardner Channel – the overcautious Fleming ordered an instrumental survey anyway. It is true that such a criticism, which was levelled at the time, was made from hindsight as Fleming himself was quick to point out – after all, the map of northern British Columbia was absolutely blank for more than two hundred miles. But it was also true that Fleming had settled on the Yellow Head Pass and rejected Moberly’s choice of the Howse on the basis of simple surveys.

Everybody acknowledged Fleming’s genius; yet at times he could be singularly blind. Why, for instance, did he wait five years before consulting the Admiralty about the usefulness of the various harbours at the head of the inlets his men were examining? A great deal of money could have been saved if these reports had been in his hands at the outset, for they made it clear that Burrard Inlet was the only really satisfactory terminus on the mainland.

Fleming, of course, had to take the blame for all the manifold political sins of the day. The surveys had to be kept going while the Government tried to arbitrate between warring factions. Untrained and incompetent employees were forced upon him. Sometimes he had to invent work where no work existed. Often he was late getting his men into the field in the spring because he was forced to wait for the estimates to come down in Parliament before he could know how
much money he had to spend. He was also unlucky: a disastrous fire in the engineering offices on January 26, 1874, destroyed most of the work of the previous two years which meant that all the hardships suffered by the men on the unfriendly shores of Lake Superior, in the canyons of the Homathco and Fraser and in the passes of the Rockies had been in vain; it had to be repeated. But Fleming also tried to do too much. When he was on the job he could give only half of his working day, admittedly a long one, to the Pacific railway; and, after 1876, when the Intercolonial was completed, he spent a great deal of time away from the job on doctor’s orders, working on his concept of standard time, visiting Thomas Carlyle, hob-nobbing with the Prince of Wales in Paris. Even in Ottawa a great deal of his time was taken up with preparing for and testifying before parliamentary committees of inquiry.

Overly scrupulous in the Far West, he appeared to have been unduly hasty in his eastern surveys. Here there were terrible delays and extraordinary added charges because the engineers on the job had made only cursory examinations of the ground. In every case between 1875 and 1878, the contractors arrived on the job before their work was fully laid out. In one instance, J. W. Sifton turned up with sixty teams of horses and twelve hundred men all of whom had to be kept idle because the surveyors had not yet adopted a final location. Contracts were let on the basis of profile plans only, so that the estimates of the quantities of rock and earth to be removed or filled were nothing more than guesses and expensive adjustments had to be made after the fact. The disputes between the government and the contractors, as a result, seemed endless and many of them went to court. On four contracts tendered at a total cost of $3,587,096 the government paid extras amounting to $1,804,830. The surveyors apparently had no idea of the kind of ground the railway builders would be working. They did not know, for instance, how deep the marshes and muskegs would go; and, because they had not studied the nature of muskeg, huge prices were paid for fill materials. Muskeg is so spongy that when it is taken from an embankment and dried out it loses about half its size. Yet the removal of muskeg, and its employment as fill, was charged for as if it were ordinary earth. On one contract, the loss from this oversight amounted to $350,000.

Often enough, Fleming, the thrifty Scot, was penny wise and pound foolish. The cost of running the railway through the gorges of the Thompson and the Fraser to Burrard Inlet seemed so high that
he continued to search, diligently but vainly, for a cheaper route. Eventually even the Pine Pass was abandoned and, in 1880, Fleming’s original route of 1871 was selected. On the other hand, the cost of probing the muskegs in advance seemed to Fleming so great that he decided he could not afford it; in that instance, further exploration would have paid off. The price of steel rails seemed so low in 1874 that he ordered far more than he needed, only to see the price go even lower – at a loss to the public of some two million dollars – while the unused rails rusted away. In all of this expensive penny-pinching, Mackenzie was Fleming’s partner, but there is no evidence that the Engineer-in-Chief ever resisted the Minister or even argued with him. For a good deal of the time he simply was not available and his deputy, Marcus Smith, was not on speaking terms with his political master. These displays of temperament were costly and confusing. In November 1877, for instance, Joseph Whitehead wanted to change the work on certain portions of his contract from temporary trestlework to permanent earth and sand embankments (which were more costly and, of course, more profitable to Whitehead). The district engineer, James Rowan, endorsed the change, which was approved by Fleming who then left for England. Mackenzie, meanwhile, decided not to accept Fleming’s recommendation but he did not inform Smith. The work proceeded on its own momentum without authority.

Political expediency, as Fleming himself admitted, forced the premature start of construction between Fort William and Selkirk in 1875. The Red River community was clamouring for it; so were the commercial interests of Thunder Bay. Mackenzie rose in the House that year to insist that “a most elaborate survey had been made” of Section Fifteen. “It would be impossible,” he said, “to have a more careful survey, a closer examination or a more careful calculation than had been made on these thirty-seven miles.”

But the surveyor himself, Henry Carre, later gave the lie to that statement: “We just ran through, using the men that packed the provisions, on days when we were not moving the camp, to chop out a line which I ran with my eye and a pocket compass; then as soon as the transit men came along they ran the transit level over it and plotted it; then I put down the location line, and the location men ran that line. If the profile showed a practicable line, then I was satisfied. I never went back over it again, so that I never actually saw the country after the line was located.… I never gave the estimate as an
actual estimate of the cost. If I had been asked to estimate the actual cost of the work, I would have refused point blank to pretend to give it. No mortal man could give it.”

Yet mortal men did give estimates on those perfunctory surveys and other mortals tendered on the basis of those estimates. Mackenzie, during the election, had boasted that “under our wise and economical system of contracts” the total cost of the Thunder Bay-Red River section would amount to $24,535 a mile, or about half the cost of the Intercolonial. But by the time the Government changed, the estimates had risen to $38,092.

The Royal Commission put most of the blame on Fleming’s shoulders. It was not all warranted. Horetzky was one of the witnesses the commissioners paid attention to. His testimony was venomous: “Mr. Fleming stands convicted of deliberate and malicious falsehood. His malevolence has been directed against me ever since I brought the Pine Pass under his notice. In doing so I unconsciously wounded his vanity, which could not brook the idea of any one but himself proposing a route.”

Only a few months before giving this testimony, Horetzky had written to Fleming offering his friendship while attacking Tupper, whose protégé he had been in 1872 (“I have it in for Tupper and will follow him to the last. I shall never forget in a hurry his insulting language to my wife.…”). Fleming received “three extraordinary letters in which he volunteered to pledge me his lasting friendship provided I would assist in getting him the money he demanded from the Government, at the same time vowing vengeance if I failed to recommend payment.”

Horetzky, who was not an engineer, thought he ought to be paid as one and this was one of the bones of contention between him and his former chief. Fleming’s method of handling Horetzky was, to put it mildly, oblique. He refused to do battle with him. Horetzky would write, demanding his money. Fleming would reply with great courtesy that it was not in his power to grant the raise – the matter was up to the Minister. Horetzky would write Tupper, who would reply with equal courtesy that the government had no power to pay except on a certificate from the Engineer-in-Chief. Fleming had no intention of certifying a larger amount for Horetzky, but he did not make this clear to him. Horetzky managed to get the matter raised in the House, where he heard himself praised by Simon J. Dawson as “a very capable and energetic officer”; but he did not get his money.

Fleming’s lack of confidence in Horetzky cost the public money. When Marcus Smith, in 1874, on the strength of Horetzky’s explorations decided that a further examination of the Kitlope valley would be a waste of funds, Fleming sent along a second and much more expensive expedition anyway. It was a decision that enraged the temperamental Horetzky. As for Smith, Fleming blamed him for much of the extra cost on the contracted work west of Lake Superior, which, he pointed out, was done in his absence. It was, he said, “startling … alarming … unaccountable … incomprehensible.” Smith, who arrived on the scene from British Columbia after some of the locations were established and the contracts let, blamed Fleming. Often enough, he claimed, when he tried to adjust matters during Fleming’s absences, the men under him would insist that they were following the chief engineer’s instructions: “I had on several occasions to complain to the responsible members of the staff of a want on their part of systematic and intelligent direction of the works and their leaving too much to juniors. But all these gentlemen were high in their esteem of the Engineer-in-Chief, and specially appointed by him to the important positions they held. This may account in some measure for their neglect in reporting to me as often as I wished.”

Fleming was eased out of office in February, 1880, before the Royal Commission commenced its hearings. The government provided for him handsomely. Since the Minister of Public Works was paid five thousand dollars a year and Fleming, as chief engineer of the Intercolonial, was already receiving forty-eight hundred, it had been considered impolitic to raise his salary when he assumed the double burden. But the government sent him on his way with an additional thirty thousand. It also offered him a titular post with the railway, but this Fleming declined; he did not care to be a figurehead.

When the Royal Commission finally made its report it came down very hard on the former engineer-in-chief but by then the construction of the railway was proceeding apace. Fleming went off to the International Geographical Congress in Venice to ride in gondolas and deliver a paper entitled “The Adoption of a Prime Meridian.” Greater glories followed. His biography, when it was published, did not mention the petty jealousies, the bursts of temperament, the political jockeying, the caution, the waste and the near anarchy that were commonplace in the engineering offices of the public works department under his rule. He survived it all and strode into the history books without a scar. The story of his term as Engineer-in-Chief is tangled and confused, neither black nor white, since it involved neither villains nor saints but a hastily recruited group of very human and often brilliant men faced with superhuman problems, not the least of which was the spectre of the Unknown, and subjected to more than ordinary tensions including the insistent tug of their own ambitions.

If there is a verdict on Fleming it is an indirect one. When the railway was finally organized as a private company, most of his surveys were discarded and an entirely new line was mapped out across the Shield, north of Lake Superior, through the southern prairies and across three mountain ranges. The matter was handled with dispatch, certainty and even foolhardiness. William Cornelius Van Horne boldly drove his steel across the prairies and straight at the mountain wall before his engineers were even certain that a pass in the Selkirks existed. He hustled his surveyors on, following their line of location so swiftly that they were hard pressed to stay ahead of him. It was madness, perhaps, but it got the entire job done in exactly half the time it took Fleming and his political colleagues to make up their minds about a route through British Columbia.

But, then, the times were different; the circumstances were different; the economics were different; and the men were different, too.

3
The Strange Case of Contract Forty-two

The influence peddling, the bribery and the brokerage in contracts did not cease in the Department of Public Works under the Macdonald government. If the Strange Case of Contract Forty-two is any indication, it grew worse. Of all the unconscionable manoeuvres connected with the awarding of work on the government road, this was the most labyrinthine. It helps explain why the government was so anxious to get out of the railroad business and turn the task over to a private company.

Mackenzie’s government had built the railway westward from the head of Lake Superior and eastward from the Red River, but there remained a gap of 181 miles between the two railheads. The new administration decided to let contracts on this section immediately, in order to give the Red River community access to the East through Canadian territory as swiftly as possible. There were two contracts,
numbered Forty-one and Forty-two. Contract Forty-one, for Section A of the railroad, ran from English River to Eagle River, a distance of 114 miles; Contract Forty-two (Section B) ran for 67 miles through more difficult country from Eagle River to Keewatin.