The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (9 page)

When Butler reached Canada he found to his chagrin that there was no job for him. Butler suggested one: that of an intelligence officer who, by travelling through the United States, might possibly enter Riel’s stronghold from the south. Wolseley liked the idea and Butler leaped into his assignment with enthusiasm. He slipped past Riel and his men at the Red River, returned to the rebels’ headquarters where he interviewed Riel himself and then, following the old voyageur route, paddled his way east to the Lake of the Woods where he made his report to Wolseley.

When the troops entered Fort Garry, Butler was with them; but he found the subsequent anti-climactic weeks irksome. One night during a dinner at the home of Donald A. Smith, he suddenly announced that he was returning to Europe to resign his commission and join the French forces at that time embroiled in the Franco-Prussian war.

Smith had a better idea. Out along the North Saskatchewan there had been continuing disorders, which the local Hudson’s Bay Company factors had been powerless to prevent. The Indians were being ravaged by smallpox and cheap whiskey, to what extent no one knew.
Something in the way of troops might be needed. Why not send Butler to make a thorough report?

Shortly thereafter, the Lieutenant-Governor, Adams Archibald, sent for Butler, outlined Smith’s plan and suggested he think it over.

“There is no necessity, sir, to consider the matter,” responded the impetuous officer. “I have already made up my mind and, if necessary, will start in half an hour.”

It was typical of Butler that he made his mind up on the instant, regardless of the circumstances. He would not wait for the summer, when the trails were dry, the grouse plentiful, the shadberries plump and juicy, and the plains perfumed with briar rose. It was October 10 “and winter was already sending his breath over the yellowed grass of the prairies.” With a single Métis guide, Butler set off on a cold and moonless night, the sky shafted by a brilliant aurora, prepared to travel by foot, horseback and dog sled across four thousand miles of uninhabited wilderness.

“Behind me lay friends and news of friends, civilization, tidings of a terrible war, firesides, and houses; before me lay unknown savage tribes, long days of saddle-travel, long nights of chilling bivouac, silence, separation and space!” Butler loved every minute of it.

He acquitted himself handsomely. It was his recommendation to the government, following his return, that led to the formation of the North West Mounted Police. But it was his subsequent book,
The Great Lone Land
, with its haunting descriptions of “that great, boundless, solitary waste of verdure” that caught the public’s imagination. The title went into the language of the day. For the next fifteen years, until the railway made the land lone no longer, no description, no reference, no journalistic report about the North West seemed complete without some mention of Butler’s poetic title. It was as well that the
CPR
was built when it was; long before the phrase was rendered obsolete, it had become a cliché.

But Butler’s description of what he saw and felt on that chill, solitary trek across the white face of the new Canada will never be hackneyed:

“The great ocean itself does not present more infinite variety than does this prairie ocean of which we speak. In winter, a dazzling surface of purest snow; in early summer, a vast expanse of grass and pale pink roses; in autumn, too often a wild sea of raging fire. No ocean of water in the world can vie with its gorgeous sunsets; no
solitude can equal the loneliness of a night-shadowed prairie: one feels the stillness and hears the silence, the wail of the prowling wolf makes the voice of solitude audible, the stars look down through infinite silence upon a silence almost as intense. This ocean has no past – time has been nought to it; and men have come and gone, leaving behind them no track, no vestige, of their presence.”

Butler went back to England eventually, returned to write a second book, this one called
The Wild North Land
, and pursued, for the remainder of his years, a distinguished military career. Wealthy or not, his calibre was such that they had to make him a general and, when the great British river flotilla went up the Nile in its vain attempt to save Gordon from the Mahdi, Butler was in charge of it. He gathered many trophies and not a few decorations but his book was his monument and his closing words rang down the corridor of the decade like a trumpet call:

“Midst the smoke and hum of cities, midst the prayer of churches, in street or
salon
, it needs but little cause to recall again to the wanderer the image of the immense meadows where, far away at the portals of the setting sun, lies the Great Lone Land.”

Butler’s book was published in 1872. The following year another work on the North West made its appearance. It was so popular that it went into several editions and was serialized in the newspapers. Its title,
Ocean to Ocean
, also became part of the phraseology of the day. It was the saga of two bearded Scots, who, in one continuous passage by almost every conveyance available travelled entirely through British territory to the Pacific Coast – a feat which captured the public’s imagination.

The author of
Ocean to Ocean
was a remarkable Presbyterian minister named George Monro Grant, who was to become one of the most distinguished educators and literary figures of his time. He was already an outstanding preacher whose sermons, at St. Matthew’s, Halifax, were so eloquent and forceful that sinners of the deepest dye were seen to emerge from their pews actually beaming after suffering the scourge of his tongue.

Grant was Sandford Fleming’s choice for the post of secretary to the transcontinental expedition that the Engineer-in-Chief organized in 1872 to follow the proposed route of the new railway. The surveyor had determined to see the country for himself and discuss the
progress of the field work at every point with the men on the ground. He could scarcely have chosen a better companion, for Grant had the same breadth of vision as his own. Many of his parishioners agreed with the elderly lady who said that Grant was “far too much taken up with the affairs of the world ever to have been a minister.” In 1867 he had been a strong advocate of Confederation, a cause not popular with all of his congregation; one of them told him bluntly to “stick to your damn preaching and leave the politics to us.” But Grant was already a Canadian first and a Nova Scotian second; he did not believe that the future of his province lay in petty sectionalism; the prosperity of the part, he was certain, depended on the development of the whole. His odyssey with Fleming resolved in his mind “the uneasy doubt … as to whether or not Canada had a future.”

In Grant, Fleming had a trail-mate who was leather-tough and untroubled by adversity, a good man in the best sense, from whose bald brow there always seemed to shine the light of Christian good humour, in spite of an invalid wife and one retarded son. He himself had come through the fire, having been thrice at death’s door in the very first decade of life: scalded half to death, almost drowned and given up for dead and mangled by a haycutter, which cost him his right hand. This accident-proneness – it sprang out of bubbling high spirits and an incurably restless energy, which saw him engaged in a score of boyhood scrapes – had a maturing effect on him. His mother firmly believed that God had a purpose in sparing him; Grant himself said that without the loss of his hand he would not have achieved the success that was later to be his. Confined by his accident, the handicapped boy brought to the world of books the same zestful curiosity with which he had examined the haycutter. At college he was known as an outstanding and intensely competitive student, debater, orator and, in spite of his missing hand, a good football player.

Grant was, in a London journalist’s phrase, “the realized ideal of Kingsley’s muscular Christian.” When he joined Fleming’s expedition, he was in the prime of life – a lithe thirty-seven, with a high, savant’s dome, flat straight nose, intense Scottish eyes and the inevitable beard. He stood, at that moment, at the threshold of a great career which would lead him to the principal’s chair at Queen’s. The notes for
Ocean to Ocean
were transcribed late at night, at the end of a hard day’s travel, by the light of a flickering campfire, but the
book itself, a polished and readable polemic for the new Canada, bore no sign of haste or hardship. In the words of Grant’s son, “it revealed to Canada the glories of her northern and western territories, and did not a little to steel the hearts of many through the dark days that were to come.”

The expedition set out across the Great Lakes by steamer into the stony wasteland of the Shield where Fleming’s surveyors were already inching their way – and sometimes meeting their deaths – in a land untouched by white men’s moccasins. The party included Fleming’s son and a Halifax doctor friend of Grant’s, Arthur Moren. Soon another remarkable figure was to be enlisted.

Not long after embarkation, Fleming’s attention was attracted by the enthusiasms of an agile and energetic man with a brown beard and twinkling eyes. This creature invariably leaped from the steamer the instant it touched the shoreline and began scrambling over rocks and diving into thickets, stuffing all manner of mosses, ferns, lichens, sedges, grasses and flowers into a covered case, which he carried with him.

It was only because the steamer whistled obligingly for him that he did not miss the boat. Sometimes, indeed, he was forced to scramble up the side after the ship had cast loose from the pier. The sailors called him “the Haypicker” and treated him with an amused tolerance, but his enthusiasm was so infectious that he soon had a gaggle of passengers in his wake, scraping their shins on the Precambrian granite, as he plucked new specimens from between the rocks.

This was John Macoun, a botanist on the staff of Albert College in Belleville, enjoying a busman’s holiday in the wilds. Fleming asked him casually if he would care to come along to the Pacific and Macoun, just as casually, accepted. Timetables in the seventies were elastic and, though the prospect of a twenty-five-hundred-mile journey across uncharted prairie, forest, mountain peak and canyon might have deterred a lesser man, it only stimulated Macoun, in the garden of whose lively mind the images of hundreds of unknown species were already blooming.

Macoun was a natural botanist, almost entirely self-taught. As a child he had been credited with the sharpest eyes among his fellows, able to find more strawberries and birds’ nests than any other boy in the school. At thirteen he had quit school and shortly after that departed his native Ireland (then in the throes of the ghastly potato famine) to seek his future in Upper Canada. He began his new life as a farmhand but he could not resist the lure of plants. He determined to become a teacher in order that he might devote his spare hours to a study of botany. It tells something of the educational system of those days that he had little trouble in achieving his ambition. After a three-day study of a plain grammar text, Macoun left his job, walked forty-three miles in the dead of winter to the home of the county school inspector and was given to understand that he was practically qualified. He received his certificate in just three weeks and began his new career teaching, of all subjects, astronomy.

In his spare moments, this enormously energetic and dedicated Irishman read his way through the standard scientific tomes, collected specimens by the hundreds, hobnobbed with every botanist he could find, talked botany with anyone who would listen, built himself a herbarium and, partly by trial and error, partly by osmosis, and partly by sheer, hard slogging, slowly made himself a botanist of standing in both Europe and America.

In 1869, just ten years after he had left the farm and set himself on his chosen path, John Macoun was offered the chair of Natural History at Albert College. That summer he began the series of Great Lakes vacation-studies that brought him, three years later, into the ken of Sandford Fleming.

This accidental meeting between Fleming and Macoun was immensely significant. Macoun, the perennial enthusiast, became enamoured of the North West. It was he, perhaps more than anyone else, who eventually convinced the Government, the public at large, and, finally, the men who built the Canadian Pacific Railway, that Hind and Palliser were wrong – that the land to the south of the Saskatchewan River was not an arid belt but a fertile plain. In doing so he helped change the course of the railway and thus, for better or for worse, the very shape of Canada. It is possible that the south Saskatchewan farmers, eking out an existence along the drought-stricken right of way during the 1930’s, might have cursed his memory, had they been aware of it.

By the time they left the steamer and headed out across the rock and muskeg towards the prairie, Macoun, Grant and Fleming had become a close triumvirate. It makes a fascinating picture, this spectacle of the three bearded savants, all in their prime, each at the top of his field, setting off together to breast a continent: the comradeship was warm, the prayers earnest, the talk stimulating and the way challenging.

Of the three, Fleming was easily the most remarkable as well as
the most impressive physically. He was forty-five years old at the time and he still had half of his life ahead of him in which to complete the Intercolonial and plan the Canadian Pacific, devise a workable system of standard time, plan and promote the Pacific cable, act as an ambassador to Hawaii, publish a book of “short daily prayers for busy households,” become Chancellor of Queen’s University, girdle the globe, and cross Canada by foot, snowshoe, dog team, horseback, raft, dugout canoe and finally by rail.

Fleming was a dedicated amateur whose interests ran the gamut from early steamboats to colour-blindness. (He himself was colour blind and once courted his future wife unknowingly wearing a pink suit.) He had a fling at a wide variety of pastimes and pursuits. A competent artist, he was rarely without his sketchbook. He dabbled in town planning and was a better than average chess player. He once acted as an amateur lawyer in a civil litigation. Indeed, if this insatiably curious yet singularly cautious man had a fault, it was that he had too many interests. He always seemed willing to take on something more, at a cost to his health and his abilities in his chosen profession of engineering. He loved his work and apparently saw himself as a strong, silent scientist – a doer and not a talker. “Engineers,” he once said, “…  are not as a rule gifted with many words. Men so gifted generally aim at achieving renown in some other sphere – the pulpit, the press, the bar … politics.… Silent men, such as we are, can have no such ambition.… Engineers must plod on in a distinct sphere of their own, dealing less with words than with deeds, less with men than with matter.…”