The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (49 page)

“It’s a warm day.”

“That’s so but maybe ye’ll be warmer before ye camp tonight.”

“That’s so, d’ye want any work taken to the Divil?”

“Where are ye bound for, Jack?” “To hell, I guess.”

“Take the other train and keep a berth for me, man!”

“Is it ye’re coffin ye’re carrying, Pat?”

“Faith ye’re right; and the coroner’s inquest to the bargain, Jim.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbon wrote that in spite of the banter “the wretched expression of these very men proved that they felt the bitterness of death to be in their chests.”

There were, indeed, some terrible accidents. A youth climbing a hill with a can of explosive stumbled and fell; all that was ever found of him was his foot in a tree, one hundred yards away. A workman in a rock cut handed a can to one of the drillers and as he did so his foot slipped: four men died, three more were maimed. One workman brushed past a rock where some explosive had been spilled; he lost his arm and his sight in an instant. At Prince Arthur’s Landing, an entire nitro-glycerine factory blew up in the night, hurling chunks of frozen earth for a quarter of a mile and leaving a gaping hole twenty feet deep and fifty feet across. And then there was the case of Patrick Crowley, an over-moral Irishman, who objected so strenuously to Josie Brush’s bawdy-house at Hawk Lake that he blew it up, and himself into the bargain.

Under such conditions the only real respite was alcohol. As Michael Haney recalled, “there was not an engineer, contractor or traveller who were not hard drinkers. Practically every transaction was consummated with a glass.” The same was true of the navvies, and, in order to keep the work moving, herculean efforts were made to keep the camps dry. These were not too successful. Prohibition was in effect all along the line, but this did not stop the whiskey peddlers who had kegs of liquor cached at points along the entire right of way. “The knowing ones can obtain a bottle of a villainous article called whiskey by following certain trails into the recesses of the dismal swamps,” the Thunder Bay
Sentinel’s
railway correspondent reported from up the line in the summer of 1877. He added that there were many raids on the peddlers but these were “not altogether
made in the cause of temperance. Not all the whiskey was spilled on the ground.”

Since a gallon of alcohol, which was sold in the cities of the East for as low as fifty cents, could, when properly diluted, return forty-five dollars to an enterprising peddler on the line, business continued brisk in spite of the vigilance of the police. The peddlers hid out in the bush or on the islands that dotted the swampy lakes, moving into the work camps in swift canoes of birchbark and darting away again at the approach of the law. If caught, the peddler generally escaped with a fine since fines were the chief source of income for the struggling towns and villages that were springing up at the end of steel.

A few years later, when the railroad was finished, a
Globe
reporter on a visit to Rat Portage dug up some fascinating background on the good old days when, it was said, whiskey peddling was one of the chief industries:

“…  it is more than hinted that of the enormous amounts collected here in fines and costs, the Dominion Government received only a very small share, while some of the officials would have been rich men ere this had it not been for the large sums they have squandered on profligacy and dissipation. It is also stated on good authority that in some cases whiskey peddlers secured a certain immunity from the severe penalties by contributing regular stated sums, destined to appease the cravings for justice in the breasts of the officers of the Court.”

Harry Armstrong, in his unpublished memoirs, has set down a spirited account of one whiskey trial held in the winter of 1877–78 in which he acted as clerk of the court. The trial was held at Inver on Section Fifteen. A man named Shay was arrested with a toboggan-load of whiskey and placed in charge of the local blacksmith. He was duly arraigned before two Justices of the Peace, one of whom was the government’s divisional engineer, Henry Carre, and the other the contractor’s engineer. It was their first case on the bench – the bench being literally a bench since the court was held in the company mess hall.

“Produce the prisoner,” called Carre, and the blacksmith entered, holding Shay by the coat sleeve and pulling at his own forelock as he announced: “The prisoner, Your Honour.”

The first witness was being questioned when Charles Whitehead, the son of the contractor, acting in his role of prosecutor, “wildly suggested
to the bench that it was probably in order to swear the witness.” It took some time to find a Bible but one was eventually located and the case proceeded. A further delay occurred when it was noticed that Armstrong, as clerk, was taking down the evidence in pencil. With difficulty, pen and ink were found, the evidence retranscribed and the case continued. Without much more ceremony, the prisoner was found guilty. He had formerly been employed as one of Carre’s axemen and was well known to him. Obviously he had come up in the world financially, being attired in a fine suit with a fur collar -“the most distinguished looking man in the room.”

“Shay,” said Carre gravely, “I am very sorry to see you in this position.”

“So am I, Mr. Carre,” replied the convicted man with disturbing nonchalance.

“The decision of the court is that you pay a fine of twenty-five dollars.”

“Well, I won’t pay it. I’ll appeal.”

This was a disconcerting turn of events. There was no jail closer than Winnipeg and no funds to send the prisoner there, and so, after a few days of well-fed comfort in the bunkhouse, the miscreant was allowed to depart without his whiskey.

When Haney took over Section Fifteen his methods of handling the alcohol problem were characteristically his own. He made no attempt to curb the traffic himself but when the men were put on three round-the-clock shifts, whiskey tended to slow down the work. At such times it was Haney’s practice to round up the peddlers and secure from them a promise that they would not sell whiskey as long as the 24-hour shift-work prevailed. Generally this
sub rosa
agreement worked but on one occasion the presence of five hundred thirsty men was too much for the entrepreneurs. Haney came to work one morning to find the whole camp roaring drunk. Work would be tied up for a week. Haney moved with his usual brusqueness. There were four officials working on the section who were technically known as “whiskey detectives.” He called them before him and told them that unless all whiskey peddlers were brought before him by noon, all four would be fired. The peddlers were produced in an hour and haled immediately before a magistrate who was clearly taking his orders from Haney. The law provided increased fines for each recurring offence and the option of jail on a third offence. Haney saw that the maximum fines – a total of thirty-six hundred dollars – were
levelled. The prison sentences were remitted but all peddlers were packed off to Winnipeg with the warning that if they returned they would be jailed. None of them ever came back.

When whiskey was unavailable on the spot the thirstiest of the workmen tried to escape to the fleshpots of Winnipeg. Haney’s best foreman was one of these: every two or three weeks he would be missing. Haney handled this matter with considerable psychology. He kept
forcing
the man to go to Winnipeg As the compulsory trips became more frequent and the foreman grew the worse for wear, Haney continued to insist that he return. Soon the man was coming back, cold sober, on the return train, pleading to be allowed to work. As Haney later explained: “It’s one thing to steal away for a few days of quiet dissipation but it’s quite another to have someone else thrusting these days upon you. He didn’t like anyone deciding that he should get drunk any more than he would have appreciated their efforts to prevent him from becoming so, and as long as we were on that work he was never away another day.”

By the time Haney arrived on the scene, at the decade’s end, the solemn, unknown land through which Harry Armstrong had trudged on his fifteen-mile treks to the job site, had come alive with thousands of navvies – Swedes, Norwegians, Finns and Icelanders, French Canadians and Prince Edward Islanders, Irish, Scots, English, Americans, even Mennonites, all strung out over nearly five hundred miles in clustered, brawling, hard-drinking communities, most of which were as impermanent as the end of track.

Armstrong recalled, not without nostalgia, the days when “life along the railway construction … was like one large family. There was hospitality, helpfulness, gentle friendship, good nature and contentedness all about.” He described Christmas Eve, 1876, spent in a log cabin on the right of way, with a fiddler playing for dancing couples in a room which also contained a kitchen stove and an immense bed. Everything went fine, he remembered, until someone unwittingly sat on the bed and realized that there was a baby somewhere beneath the sheets.

His account contrasts sharply with that of the postmaster of Whitemouth, a railroad community midway between Winnipeg and Rat River, also describing Christmas Eve, just four years later.

“The demon of strong drink made a bedlam of this place, fighting, stabbing and breaking; some lay out freezing till life was almost
extinct. The Post Office was besieged at the hours of crowded business by outrageous, bleeding, drunken, fighting men, mad with Forty-Rod, so that respectable people could not come in for their mail.… It is only a few days since in one of these frenzies a man had his jugular nearly severed by a man with a razor.”

The very impermanence of the construction towns made any kind of municipal organization difficult. In July, 1880, when the end of track moved beyond Gull River, Ignace became the capital of Section A. All the inhabitants of Gull River moved – stores, houses, boarding houses, a jewellery shop, a hotel, a telegraph office, a “temperance saloon,” a shoemaker and a blacksmith shop. Often, though communities changed geographical location and names, they re-elected the same public officials to govern them. When Rush Lake City sprang up as the capital of Patrick Purcell and Hugh Ryan’s Contract Twenty-five, Joseph Ettershank, who had been the mayor of two previous communities, once again offered himself to the shifting electorate. The election was typical of those times: he was beaten by a Liberal but immediately contested the result, charging his opponent with the usual bribery and corruption. The opponent was duly unseated and Ettershank won a moral victory. But he refused on principle to assume office and Rush Lake City found itself without a chief magistrate.

The one really permanent town along the half-constructed line and by far the largest was Rat Portage on Lake of the Woods. With true chamber of commerce fervour it called itself “The Future Saratoga of America.” A less subjective description was provided by a correspondent of the Winnipeg
Times
in the summer of 1880:

“For sometime now the railway works in the vicinity of Rat Portage have been besieged by a lot of scoundrels whose only avocation seems to be gambling and trading in illicit whiskey and the state of degradation was, if anything, intensified by the appearance, in the wake of these blacklegs, of a number of the
demi-monde
with whom these numerous desperadoes held high carnival at all hours of the day or night.”

The town itself, in the words of one observer, seemed to have been “laid out on designs made by a colony of muskrats.” Shanties and tents were built or pitched wherever the owners fancied and without reference to streets or roadways. As a result, the streets were run
between the houses as an afterthought so that there was nothing resembling a straight thoroughfare in town “but simply a lot of crooked, winding trails that appeared to go nowhere in particular, but to aimlessly wander about in and out of shanties, tents and clumps of brush in such a confused and irregular manner as was extremely difficult for the stranger to find his way from one given point to another, even though they might not be over 150 yards apart.”

Rat Portage, with a floating population sometimes bordering on three thousand, was the headquarters for Section B – the famous Contract Forty-two – under the control of Manning, Shields, McDonald and Company. The expense of the administration was borne by the contractors, who built the jail and organized the police force. All fines, however, went to the government. Between April and November of 1880, six thousand dollars were collected in fines. The convictions – highway robbery, larceny, burglary, assault, selling illicit whiskey and prostitution – give a fair picture of Rat Portage as a frontier town.

With both the contractors and the government in the law business, a state of near anarchy prevailed. At one point the company constable, a man named O’Keefe, seized four barrels of illicit liquor but instead of destroying it took it back to his rooms and proceeded to treat his many friends. He was haled before the stipendiary magistrate who fined him for having intoxicating liquor in his possession. O’Keefe paid the fine and then as soon as the magistrate left the bench arrested
him
for having liquor in his possession, an act he was perfectly entitled to perform since he was himself a policeman. He popped the protesting magistrate in jail and when that official asked for an immediate hearing O’Keefe denied it to him, declaring that he meant to keep him behind bars for twenty-four hours because the magistrate “had treated him like a dog and now it was his turn.” With the only magistrate in jail another had to be appointed to act in his place; when this was done the hearing was held and the new magistrate fined the old magistrate one hundred dollars. In the end the local government remitted both fines.

The situation grew more complicated when Manitoba’s boundaries were extended in 1881 and a dispute arose between that province and Ontario over the jurisdiction in which Rat Portage lay. Both provinces built jails and appointed magistrates and constables; so did the federal government. For a time it was more dangerous to be a policeman than a law breaker. Since there were several sets of liquor laws, the policemen began arresting each other until both jails were full of opposing lawmen. Ontario constables were kidnapped and shipped to Winnipeg. The Manitoba jail was set on fire. Anyone who wished could become a constable, and free whiskey and special pay were offered to those who dared to take the job. For a time Rat Portage witnessed the spectacle of some of its toughest characters – men who bore such nicknames as Black Jim Reddy of Montana, Charlie Bull-Pup, Boston O’Brien the Slugger, Mulligan the Hardest Case – actually acting as upholders of the law, or their version of the law. The situation came to a head in 1883 when both provinces called elections on the same day and two premiers campaigned in Rat Portage with such persistence that the Premier of Manitoba actually got more votes than there were registered voters. The confusion did not end until 1884 when Rat Portage was officially declared to be part of Ontario.