The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (51 page)

But in the early seventies, no one took Jim Hill seriously. Perhaps it was because he talked so much. There he sat in his old chair in front of his coal and wood store talking away, a stocky, powerful man with a massive, leonine head, the hair almost down to the shoulders, a short-cropped beard, a face scorched by the prairie sun and that single black eye – a glittering orb that, like the Ancient Mariner’s, burned itself into the listener’s consciousness.

Napoleon was his hero. He first read his biography back in Canada at the age of thirteen and nothing else that he read (and he seemed to read everything – Byron, Plutarch, More, Gibbon) made such an impression on him. From that moment, he believed that when a man set his mind to something it was already half done. Later in life, when he had built a mansion in St. Paul and stocked it with costly paintings, he began to think of himself as a Bonaparte, or perhaps a Genghis Khan. But in those early days, long before he fought his own Borodinos with Vanderbilt and Villard, he simply brought his Napoleonic determination to bear on the matter of the decrepit railroad. Hill saw it not as two streaks of rusted iron but as the nucleus of a transcontinental line. It was, everyone agreed, a crazy dream, but then Jim Hill had always been a dreamer – a “romancer,” in the phrase of a boyhood companion. He had played hooky at the age of nine to read histories of the days of chivalry. He had sung old Scottish songs of love and derring-do while his Irish father played them on the flute. He had wild ambitions. He was going to be a doctor. He played at wild Indians until an arrow through the eye ended his medical future. But the romantic ambitions remained. He was going to be a sailor before the mast. He was going to run a steamboat line in India. He was going to conquer the world.

He was Canadian by birth and a Celt by heritage – half Scottish, half Irish. He was born in a log house at Rockwood, Ontario, and was much influenced by his teacher, the great Quaker educator, William Wetherald, father of a leading Canadian poetess. Wetherald was the founder of the Rockwood Academy, famous enough to be preserved in the next century as a National Historic Site. He taught young Jim Hill the value of books and of study and for all of his life Hill remained a student. He studied scientific treatises, classical art, geology, finance – everything he could get his hands on. Rockwood could not hold him; at eighteen, his heart fired by the idea of adventure, he set off for the Orient, wearing a new felt Horace Greeley hat, which was blown off at the Grand Trunk station in Toronto. He worked his way through New York State as a farm labourer, pushed on to Philadelphia (where he went straight to the opera and emerged much impressed) and then south to Richmond, seeking the ship, the tall, white ship, that he thought would take him to India.

But there was no ship in Richmond that would employ him. Hill turned to a closer frontier, the American West. When he reached St. Paul in July 1856, it was the jumping-off place to nowhere; the serpentine brigades of Red River carts, caked with the grime of the prairies, attested to that. Hill’s imagination spanned the plains in a single leap and he saw the blue Pacific beckoning. He would join a brigade of trappers and go overland to the coast where he could find a ship bound for India. He looked at the steamboats pouring into St. Paul – three hundred in a single season – and again he began to dream. He would build a steamboat line on the Ganges, or the Hooghly, or the Brahmaputra. But he was too late; the final brigade had left for the season. And so Jim Hill stayed in St. Paul for a year, and then for another year – and another. The accident changed the pattern of his life, not to mention the pattern of the city he made his own.

For eight years, while he worked at a variety of jobs in St. Paul, he read and he studied; and when he was not reading he was trying his hand at painting. His first job was as a clerk on the levee and he read his way through that. He read voraciously, at all hours and in every setting. Once, the mother of a sick friend whom Hill was attending
found him devouring a book on engineering. She asked him if he intended to be an engineer. Hill replied that he did not know what he might be: “You see I am only a young man yet, and a little knowledge of engineering might prove useful some day.” It was the sort of thing Horatio Alger was putting into his books, but then Hill is the perfect Alger hero. When the long five-month winter of isolation settled upon St. Paul and others found amusement in saloons, Hill read his way through that, too. One winter he took a job as a watchman on a steamboat wintering on the levee. He arrived with an armful of books, ranging from Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall
to several difficult scientific treatises. When he emerged the following spring he had read and annotated them all.

By the time he decided to try his hand at business, Hill’s knowledge was encyclopaedic and his memory prodigious. He could repeat page after page of Byron or Plutarch. Years later, when he was wealthy enough to possess a herd of blooded cattle, he could cite the pedigrees of each one of them for generations back.

One of the things Jim Hill studied was the Toonerville operation out of St. Paul; and one of the things he learned was that whoever owned the railway could come into possession of two and a half million acres of the richest agricultural land in the American midwest. The time would come, Hill reckoned, when the railway could be bought for a song. It was all a matter of waiting.

2
“Donald Smith is ready to take hold”

In Winnipeg, Donald A. Smith had a similar idea. The community, which he represented in Parliament, needed a railway, and, perhaps more important, the Hudson’s Bay Company, with nine million acres of land to sell, needed one, too. In 1873 the Canadian Pacific was dead by the hand of Sir Hugh Allan; a transcontinental line lay far in the future; but the Red River needed a lifeline to the East. If such a line could be built from Selkirk to the border and if the bankrupt American line out of St. Paul could somehow be revived to meet it, that connection would be effected.

Smith, like Hill, was a man who liked to look ahead: a month sometimes, a year perhaps, even a decade or more. He saw, for instance, the coming extinction of the buffalo and kept some captive
animals in a corral at Silver Heights against the day when they should vanish, as they did with dramatic and almost supernatural suddenness in 1880. When he emerged from Labrador as a junior factor on his first visit to Montreal, Smith decided to learn to cook, for he saw future advantages in that art. He took a job in a bakery and another later in a restaurant to absorb culinary techniques, which at the time were non-existent in the wilderness. He returned and gave all his employees and colleagues instruction in cooking and serving wholesome meals in order to preserve their health and sometimes their lives in the wilds. More, he picked up a knowledge of primitive medicine and learned to make an antiseptic for wounds by boiling the inner bark of the juniper tree. It was this kind of preparedness that undoubtedly saved Smith’s own life when his guides faltered and died on the snow-blind journey back to Mingan, and on many other occasions as well. No matter what the weather, Smith always had the foresight to carry extra warm clothing and additional provisions with him wherever he went. When a blizzard sprang up, Smith was always ready for it; he was generally ready for any eventuality.

Like Hill, he foresaw the death of the steam packet at a time when the river trade seemed to be at its height. Smith also saw the threat to the fur trade as he and his colleagues had known it, even when the fur trade seemed invulnerable. As early as 1860 he predicted that the Company could not go on forever sealing off the North West from the rest of the continent; and he realized that once the Company’s charter was modified or cancelled there would have to be a railway from Lake Superior to the Red River.

“You will understand that I, as a Labrador man, cannot be expected to sympathize altogether with the prejudice against settlers and railways entertained by many of the western commissioned officers,” he said in 1860. “In all events it is probable that settlement of the country from Fort William westward to the Red River, and even a considerable distance beyond, will eventually take place and with damaging effect to the fur trade generally.” It was a remarkable statement for the time, especially when it fell from the lips of a Company officer. And it was significant that, as a fur trader, Smith thought geographically in horizontal terms, and not on a vertical, north-south axis, as the Red River farmers did. The furs moved laterally from west to east but the grain went south.

Thirteen years after that forecast was made, Smith contemplated the twin streaks of rust out of St. Paul and saw in them the nucleus of
a line to the Canadian North West. The twin railway companies (one was known as the St. Paul and Pacific, the other as the First Division of the St. Paul and Pacific) were in a terrible legal and financial snarl. One was in receivership, the other was about to go into trusteeship. There were suits and countersuits by unpaid contractors, chagrined stockholders and swindled bondholders. It was not easy to fathom the complicated financial situation, since there were several classes of bonds for the two lines and most of these were held out of the country by Dutch investors.

The railway was thought by the experts to be as dead as the
CPR
but Smith was looking farther ahead than the experts. A parliamentary colleague told him that his constituency seemed ill-fated in the matter of railways: “The Canadian Pacific is shelved for another generation and no capitalist will ever touch that Yankee railway to the south of you; those Dutchmen would do well to come over and sell those rails for old junk.” Smith gave him a bleak smile. “The railway isn’t dead,” he said quietly. “A traveller isn’t dead when he sits down by the wayside to rest.” He went on to predict that both of them would be riding on the Canadian Pacific within ten years. Already he was seriously considering the revival of the “Yankee railway to the south.”

In the fall of 1873, on his way through St. Paul en route from the Red River to that stormy session in Ottawa, Smith had dropped in on “Commodore” Norman Kittson, the Hudson’s Bay representative and the president of the steamboat line which, with the Company’s secret connivance, held a monopoly on the river.

The two men were old friends and they had much in common. Both sprang from the harsh background of the fur trade. It was in their blood: Smith’s uncle, John Stuart, had been at Simon Fraser’s side when that nerveless Scot took his canoes to tidewater down the great river that bears his name. Stuart became master of New Caledonia, the fur-trade empire that stretched from the Rockies to the sea coast and as far south as Oregon; Stuart Lake and the Stuart River enshrine his memory. Kittson’s antecedents were equally spectacular; his grandfather was Alexander Henry the elder, the fur trader whose book of travel and adventure among the Indians became a primary source for early historians.

In 1873 and 1874, when Kittson and Smith discussed the St. Paul railroad and its prospects, Kittson had already reached his sixties – a patriarchal figure with a long grey beard and bright searching eyes, which peered out of a face long battered by the elements. Reserved, reticent and largely unlettered, he was a respected leading citizen of St. Paul. He had been a member of the Minnesota Territorial Council in the days when it required a snowshoe trip of five hundred miles to attend a session. In 1858 he was elected mayor of St. Paul. He, too, was born a Canadian but he had left his home in Sorel, Quebec, at the age of sixteen to seek his fortune with John Jacob Astor’s fur company.

By 1843, semi-independent, he was king of the border, brazenly bank-rolling Canadian merchants to bootleg furs out of Red River under the very noses of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which held the legal monopoly. Within five years, Kittson’s very existence near Pembina threatened not only the Company’s fur trade but also its control of the valley. It tried every means short of assassination to knock him out of business. Price wars, harassment, legal action – none of these could budge the stubborn upstart. In the end the Company employed the tactic it always adopted: it swallowed Kittson whole. Miraculously, the thorn in their side was transformed into one of the Company’s most honoured traders.

It was in this capacity that Donald Smith first came to know and admire Norman Kittson. He never failed on his journeys through St. Paul, between the Red River and Montreal, to look in on his old friend. Now he wanted a favour: could Kittson find out everything possible about the financial and legal position of the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, especially about the bonds held in Holland and the various prices the Dutch were asking? If the price was right, Smith thought, he might consider raising the money to buy the line, complete it to the border and join it to the Canadian railway that he hoped to build from Winnipeg south. Or perhaps he could convince the Dutch to take over the line and complete it themselves. Smith was not a railwayman; he saw the line of steel merely as a means to link his constituency with eastern Canada. He did not really care who controlled the route.

The project did not interest Kittson personally. He was well-to-do; he was getting on in years; it was all too rich for his blood. But he mentioned it to his other silent partner, Jim Hill, and it was as if a light had flashed on above that lion’s head. Of course! For all these months Hill had been grappling with the puzzle of the bankrupt railway, wondering where the money would come from when the time was ripe to buy it. Now he had the answer: Smith was one of the chief officers of the Bank of Montreal as well as of the Hudson’s Bay Company. He was wealthy in his own right. Smith was his man.

From that moment on, Hill became a monomaniac on the subject of the St. Paul and Pacific, especially to his friend Henry Upham, a clerk in the bond department of the First National Bank. Upham was Hill’s next-door neighbour and confidant; he knew a great deal about finance and specifically he knew a great deal about the various bond issues of the St. Paul road. It was a profitable friendship.