The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (48 page)

Cross Lake was to prove Whitehead’s undoing. The contractor began work on it in 1879 and was still pouring gravel into it when, with his capital used up, the government relieved him of his contract in March, 1880. It seemed a simple matter to run a line of railway across the narrows – just a shallow expanse of water through which an embankment could easily be made. Yet ton after ton of sand and gravel vanished into that black and monstrous gulf without appreciable results. Sometimes the embankment would be built up five or six feet above the water; then suddenly the lake would take a gulp and the entire mass of stone, gravel and earth would vanish beneath the waves.

At Lake Deception – eloquent name! – James Ross’s huge force of horses and freight cars moved gravel into the water, using the first steam shovel to operate on the
CPR
, working at top speed, but the banks slid away faster than the gravel could be poured in. Ross built massive retaining walls with rock blasted out of one of his tunnels. One day in the space of a few minutes the banks settled some twenty-five feet, pushing the protective bulwarks of rock out into the lake for almost one hundred feet “as if they had been straws,” and so swiftly that the men and horses barely had time to jump clear and save themselves. Ross tried hammering pilings deep into the lake bottom, building a trestle above them, and filling in the trestle with gravel and rock. One June day, just after a work train had rumbled across the causeway, the pilings sank fifty feet. There seemed no end to the depth of these incredible swamps. In one muskeg, piles were driven ninety-six feet below the surface before any bedrock was found.

A mile from Bonheur, a construction crew believed it had filled a muskeg hole when the entire track suddenly vanished into the black mud. Trainload after trainload of gravel was dumped into that apparently bottomless pit while men sweated with timbers to shore it up. Finally a track was laid and a locomotive was able to venture across. As the engine moved, the wobbly line behind it slowly rose while the ballast beneath squeezed out on both sides like pitch from a pot. A pole driven down showed there was thirty feet of quivering muskeg
directly beneath the track, which was acting as a kind of pontoon bridge floating on a sea of slime. Of the gravel there was no trace.

Even after the muskegs were conquered, the rails anchored and through traffic established, the roadbed tended to creep forward with every passing train. When a heavy engine, hauling thirty-five cars, passed over the track, the rails crept about two feet in the direction the train was moving. As a result track bolts broke almost daily. An actual series of waves, five or six inches deep, rippled along the track and was observable from the caboose.

Temporary trestles were filled by dragging giant ploughs along a line of gravel-filled cars, by means of a cable powered from the detached locomotive. From each side of the bow of the plough there descended cataracts of sand but the track was often so uneven that the plough would catch onto the end of the car, stand on end for an instant and then topple thirty feet to the ground below. From there it would have to be dragged back by the cable to the far end of the trestle and up the bank, ready to be loaded again onto a car.

The most effective plough was the “wing plough” designed on the spot by Michael J. Haney, the colourful Galway Irishman who took over the running of Section Fifteen for the government after Whitehead’s downfall. A lean, hard man with high cheekbones, cowlick and drooping moustache, Haney was described by Harry Armstrong, the pioneer engineer, as “a rushing devil-may-care chap who did things just as he chose without regard to authority.” Haney almost lost the little
Countess of Dufferin
locomotive and his own life by displaying too much daring. He had drained a lake near Kalmar, about twenty-five miles from Cross Lake, and laid a mattress of timbers across the mud bottom to carry the track over it. But when the rails were laid and the cars backed onto them, the whole heaving mass began to sink. Jack Anderson, the engineer on the
Countess
, refused point-blank to take her out onto the quivering track so Haney boldly announced he would do it himself. With the cars uncoupled he began pushing them very slowly out along the track with the locomotive. The mattress began to subside; the engine tilted wildly until it looked to bystanders as if a ten-pound weight would pull her right over and into twenty feet of ooze. Haney, realizing his predicament, started to back up gingerly towards solid ground. It was nip and tuck, since the mattress had sunk so deep he was forced to propel the locomotive up an incline that rapidly grew steeper and steeper. By using sand on the rails and all the steam he could muster he managed to reach the top
of the bank, but by then the incline was so steep that the pilot scraping against the rails was torn from the frame. Haney astonished everybody by admitting that the move was damn foolishness. It was the only occasion in forty years’ acquaintanceship, Armstrong recalled, that he had known Haney “to admit anything he did wasn’t right.”

Haney, though accident-prone to an almost unbelievable degree, had as many lives as a cat. At one point he was pitched off his horse and badly injured. On another occasion he caught his foot in some wire attached to the rails and a train ran over his toes. On July 18, 1880, he was riding an engine out of Cross Lake when the tender jumped the track and the locomotive with Haney in it rolled over a twenty-foot embankment. Clouds of scalding steam poured out of the wreck but Haney, who was in the fireman’s seat, emerged without a scratch. Two months later he had another close call en route from Lake Deception to Cross Lake. He had just stepped out of the fireman’s seat to get a drink of water and was raising it to his lips when the engine rounded a steep curve. Haney was knocked off balance and thrown, head foremost, into a rock cut. The train was travelling at twenty miles an hour and everyone assumed Haney was dead; he escaped with a flesh wound in the forehead.

Haney’s particular brand of derring-do was hard on him physically – after two years on Section Fifteen he was a sick man and his doctor ordered a complete rest – but it certainly got results. When Whitehead finally withdrew in February, 1880, matters were in a dreadful snarl. The men had not been paid and another in what had been a series of ugly strikes was in progress. The men were in a black mood when Haney arrived, called them together and told them that they would all receive their money as soon as pay sheets could be made up. Some decided to stay on the job, others to strike. Haney warned the strikers that the loyalists would be paid first. Then he set off for Winnipeg to get the needed funds. There he was besieged at his hotel by some of the strikers, demanding their money at once.

Haney was adamant: “I told you what I’d do and I’m going to do it. I told you the men who stayed would be paid first and you can bet your last dollar that they’ll all be paid before any of you get a cent.”

The leader of the group swore that Haney would not be allowed out of Winnipeg with a penny until the strikers got their money. Haney boldly told him that he intended to row across the river to St. Boniface, pick up an engine there at midnight and steam back to the job. “You can do whatever you please about it,” he said bluntly. He was
as good as his word. With forty thousand dollars in cash on his person he set off down the track in the dead of night. It was a measure of the man that, in spite of all the threats, none dared stop him.

Back on the job Haney found himself faced with a series of dilemmas. Whitehead’s caches were bare of provisions and yet Haney must keep four thousand men working without cessation. He and Collingwood Schreiber, Fleming’s replacement, estimated that one thousand tons would be needed – and this amount had to be distributed immediately over some of the roughest country in Canada. It was March 1. Spring was on its way. In a very short time the trails would be so rutted that a wagon would be shaken to pieces in less than ten miles. Hauling could be done only over roads made of hard-packed snow. But teams were in short supply, too. There simply were not enough horses or wagons. Schreiber figured it was impossible but Haney was not a man to cry surrender. Off he set on a voyage of importunity, moving from farmhouse to farmhouse, browbeating, cajoling, pleading and promising. Within a few days he had hired every team in the country, and by March 15 he had accomplished the impossible.

Haney’s ability to scrounge material became legendary. He was not a believer in proper channels or in red tape. When he wanted something he took it. On one occasion when Section Fifteen ran short of spikes Haney made up his mind to seize two carloads that were, he knew, sitting on the sidings in Winnipeg destined for another section. He knew the car numbers, so, on one dark night, he took a light engine with a regular crew and conductor into the yards. Haney located the cars, after a considerable search, untangled them from the array in the yard and spirited them away behind his train. There followed a wild night ride during which the spikes were unloaded at strategic points and the cars slipped back into the Winnipeg yards without anyone being the wiser. The incident baffled Schreiber more than anything else that occurred that year. The cars had been checked into the yards loaded and, after Haney’s secret expedition, were checked out loaded; yet the spikes never reached their destination. Schreiber spent most of the summer tracing the two cars all over the continent. He finally caught up with one in Georgia and the other in Texas, but of course there was no hint of where the spikes had gone. The matter continued to prey on Schreiber’s mind: how could two loads of railroad spikes suddenly dissolve out of two freight cars? The matter became so nagging that it dominated his conversation.
“What I can’t make out is what became of those spikes,” he said one day in Haney’s hearing.

“Why didn’t you ask me about it?” Haney asked.

“What in the devil would you know about it?” Schreiber exploded. “Didn’t I tell you they were checked in and out of the Winnipeg yards?”

“Well,” said Haney, “if you care to walk back a mile or so along the track I think I can show you every one of those spikes.”

Schreiber’s undoubtedly explosive retort has not been recorded but it was probably tempered with understanding. Haney’s methods were unorthodox but they produced indisputable results. When he took over Section Fifteen there was a deficit on the books of almost four hundred thousand dollars. Under his management this was cleared up and a balance of $83,000 appeared on the black side of the ledger. Haney, of course, was a salaried man. The $83,000 was paid by the government to Joseph Whitehead.

5
Sodom-on-the-Lake

In the dismal land west of Lake Superior, nature seemed to have gone to extremes to thwart the railway builders. When they were not laying track across the soft porridge of the muskegs they were blasting it through some of the hardest rock in the world – rock that rolled endlessly on, ridge after spiky ridge, like waves in a sullen ocean.

Dynamite, patented in the year of Confederation, was as new as the steam shovel and, though the papers were full of stories of “dynamiters” using Alfred Nobel’s new invention for revolutionary purposes, the major explosive was dynamite’s parent, nitro-glycerine. This awesomely unstable liquid had been developed almost thirty years before the first sod was turned on the
CPR
but was only now beginning to replace the weaker blasting powder, being ten times more expensive not to mention more dangerous. It had been in regular use as a railway-building explosive only since George M. Mowbray in 1866 demonstrated its efficiency in the building of the Hoosac Tunnel – the successful results there having sprung largely from the development of a new kind of detonator, electrically fired. It had never before been used as extensively as it was west of the lakehead in the late seventies.

Here the technique was to pour the explosive into holes drilled often by hand but sometimes with the newly developed Burleigh rock drill, worked by compressed air. The liquid was then poured into the holes, each about seven feet deep, and set off by a fuse. In less than two years some three hundred thousand dollars was spent on nitroglycerine on Section Fifteen, often with disastrous results. There was among the workmen an almost cavalier attitude to the explosive. Cans of nitro-glycerine with fuses attached were strewn carelessly along the roadbed in contravention of all safety regulations, or carried about with such recklessness that the fluid splashed upon the rocks. Whole gangs were sometimes blown to bits in the resultant explosions, especially in the cold weather, because the chemical was notoriously dangerous when frozen; the slightest jar could touch it off. Under such conditions it was kept under hot water and at as uniform a temperature as possible.

It could not be transported by wagon; the jarring along those corrugated trails would have made short work of the first drover foolhardy enough to risk it. It had to be carried in ten-gallon tins on men’s backs. The half-breed packers and the Irish navvies remained contemptuous of it. Armstrong, the engineer, saw one packer casually repairing a leak in a tin by scraping mud over it with his knife, oblivious of the fact that the tiniest bit of grit or the smallest amount of friction would blast him heavenwards. Sometimes the packers would lay their tins down on a smooth rock and a few drops would be left behind from a leak. The engineers travelling up and down the line watched the portage trails with hawk’s eyes seeking to avoid those telltale black specks which could easily blow a man’s leg off. On one occasion a teamster took his horse to water at just such a spot. The horse’s iron shoe touched a pool of nitro-glycerine and the resulting blast tore the shoe from his foot and drove it through his belly, killing him and stunning the teamster.

In drilling holes for the explosive, it was the practice to fill them first with water and then pour in the heavier liquid; the water then floated to the top and acted as tamping. Often, however, some of the explosive ran out, causing secondary explosions later on when the cut was trimmed. The number of men killed or maimed by accidental explosions was truly staggering. In one fifty-mile stretch of Section B, Sandford Fleming counted thirty graves, all the result of the careless handling of nitro-glycerine. Mary Fitzgibbon, on her way to homestead in Manitoba, watched in awe as a long train of Irish packers
tripped gaily down a hill, each with a can of liquid explosive on his back, making wry, funereal comments all the while: