True Patriot Love (6 page)

Civilization in his view also meant industrial schools of the type used to educate the working class. The first residential schools for Aboriginal children were established in the 1870s. Canada has lived with the consequences—the legacy of physical brutality, sexual abuse and forced acculturation—ever since.

From Fort Ellice to Fort Carlton, from Fort Carlton to Fort Pitt, the convoy travelled northwest across the plains through the hot days of August 1872. Fleming took careful note of every topographical feature that would have to be overcome when the railway came through. Every Sunday, they rested, repaired the wagons, turned the horses loose, lay in the grass and slept, served themselves extra rations and concluded the day with prayer service. The day of rest, Grant thought, brought the men together, eased the quarrels and ill feeling that grew up during the week, and raised the moral tone, though he confessed he still couldn’t get the Metis horsemen to stop swearing.

At Fort Edmonton, a rough plank square that they reached in late August, they all had their photographs taken in their Plains gear, young Frank with a porkpie hat on his head and a carbine under his arm, Fleming with grey beard billowing out from his cheeks and a French kepi on his head, a bearded Grant, in wide riding chaps and a
buckskin coat, covering the stump of his right hand with a broad-brimmed leather cowboy hat, and Moren, the doctor, dressed Metis style with a broad, coloured sash holding up his riding breeches. They look about as happy as men can be.

At Fort Edmonton, they switched the gear from Red River carts to pack horses for the mountains ahead. Forty miles out of Edmonton, on the trail to Jasper, they took on new Metis guides and packers. Their destination, the Yellowhead Pass, was named after a legendary French fur trader whom the Indians called Tête Jaune, the blond one. Fleming’s plan was to meet up with a survey party led by Walter Moberly, who had started out from the Pacific in June and was surveying the approaches from the other side of the Rockies.

The next month, two weeks up to Jasper and two weeks from Jasper down to the Fraser, was the toughest of the trip. The trails zigzagged upward through miles of bog and tightly packed pine forest. The way was blocked by deadfall or rushing water. The footing was poor; horses went lame, kicked over the traces and dumped their packs. The inclines grew steeper every hour. It rained, and the nights grew colder. Ice formed on their water buckets. On the Prairies, Fleming reckoned, they had made forty miles a day. Now they were down to ten if they were lucky, sometimes fewer than that, and if they didn’t keep up
speed, they might be caught in the mountains by the winter snow. At Jasper, they failed to rendezvous with Moberly, which put Fleming in a foul mood. Still, they stripped a spruce overhanging the river and drove a railway spike into the base. It is still there.

Finally, they made it to the Yellowhead Pass, a meadow at thirty-seven hundred feet of elevation, framed by peaks on all sides. As soon as they saw it, Fleming knew the railway should go through this pass and no other. The elevation was low and the valley was wide enough that no blasting would be necessary. In celebration they rested and Grant preached a sermon of thanksgiving.

Next day, they reached the Continental Divide, the rivers behind them flowing north to the Arctic, the rivers ahead of them flowing toward the Pacific. More days of miserable slogging ensued, as they struggled down the slopes of the Rockies, along treacherous, slippery trails that had a way of disappearing or running them in circles, all in increasing cold and teeming rain. By this time, they were battling exhaustion and some measure of homesickness. But their spirits lifted when they finally reached the Fraser. At the junction where the Clearwater River meets the Thompson, they bade farewell to their guides and packers and boarded scows and set off down the Thompson toward Kamloops. They camped that night short of the settlement in one of the meadows in a bend of the river, their sixtieth encampment since Lake Superior, and their last.

As the scows were rowed down the river, Grant observed the Indian camps on the shores. Smallpox had swept through the valleys, decimating the people who made their life along the river. The survivors Grant observed in sweat lodges—steam rising from tents where, around a circle of heated stones, the people would sit breathing in the steam, purifying their bodies and their souls. He also noticed how elaborate the Indian graves were: structures made of poles containing the valuables of the deceased, guns, blankets, food, shawls and flags, canoes and painted images of the dead.

Arriving at the Hudson’s Bay post in Kamloops, the travellers were treated to their first feather bed in a month. At the Sunday service, where Grant gave a sermon, he had a glimpse of the complex racial and ethnic hierarchy of British Columbia. The British colonial elite were a decided minority. The congregation consisted of American prospectors, farmers (who left their Indian wives outside) and the Chinese. The Chinese had come north after the end of construction of the Union Pacific. Already there was strong prejudice against the Asians in Kamloops, a prejudice, Grant tartly observed, that seemed to ignore that they were “cleanly, orderly, patient, industrious and above all cheap.” All his life he was to be a vigorous opponent of anti-Chinese legislation, especially the anti-Chinese immigration quotas. While any state had the right to “keep out bad people,” he wrote, “no nation has the
right to keep out the good of one nation while admitting both the bad and good from other lands.”

They journeyed onward to the sea, taking a steamer from Yale to New Westminster, sharing the trip with the legendary chief justice of British Columbia, Matthew Begbie, who had imposed rough justice on the gold fields, Indian settlements and backwood camps, armed only with a couple of constables and the criminal law of England.

Arriving in New Westminster, Grant and Fleming were greeted as celebrities by the governor, who put at their disposal a steam vessel that they used to explore the coast for the next two weeks. The key question was what place to choose as the eventual terminus of the railway. Was it to be Bute or Burrard Inlet? The local politicians, the governor and the assemblymen all wanted to know— but Fleming kept his counsel as the little steamer methodically plied its way through Howe Sound, down into English Bay and along the Spanish Banks. Apart from a sawmill here and there, there was nothing but primeval forest and silence in the vast inlet surrounded by mountains. The silent, green-flanked harbour Grant sailed through was to become the terminus, and around the terminus would grow the mighty city of Vancouver. When he first saw it, there was nothing there but giant fir trees down to the shoreline, wheeling seabirds overhead and peaks already crested with snow.

They cruised like lords through the Gulf Islands, and when they arrived in Victoria, the province’s capital, a banquet was held in their honour and interviews were accorded the
Times Colonist
. The Victoria of 1872 was an unruly polyglot port town of five thousand people. As Grant toured the downtown, he was amazed to see Greek fishermen, Kanaka sailors from Hawaii, Jewish and Scottish storekeepers, Chinese washerwomen, French, German and Yankee restaurateurs, black waiters and sweeps, and Australian farmers all jostling each other in the streets.

On October 14, 1872, the party said their farewells and boarded a steamer bound for San Francisco, and, five days later, climbed on board the Union Pacific, heading for Chicago and home. At the dusty little railway stations in Nevada and Utah, Grant noticed that the sheriffs had posted Wanted posters with rewards for the capture of local desperadoes. This confirmed in him the contrast between the lawless American West and the peace, order and good government that generally prevailed back home. From Chicago to Toronto, then to Ottawa and finally to Halifax, Grant reached home on November 1, 1872. His long-suffering wife, Jessie, was nine months pregnant, and within days their first child, my grandfather William Lawson Grant, was born.

Three weeks after his return, Grant gave his first lecture to a Halifax audience on the West and its future.
Ocean to Ocean: Sandford Fleming’s Expedition Through
Canada in 1872
was published the next year, and a further edition followed in 1877, with a frontispiece depicting Grant in a clergyman’s homburg and Fleming in a kepi, seated in the middle of a canoe, while the Metis and Iroquois steersmen shot the rapids. The book remained in print throughout Grant’s life. He had found his calling: the promotion of a national dream.

Grant and Fleming returned brimming with confidence that their dream would be quickly realized. The Americans had completed their railway in four years, and they were certain Canada could do it in the same time or less. In fact, thirteen long years were to elapse before the last spike was hammered in at Craigellachie. Provincial publics soured on the project, progress through the muskeg of northern Ontario was achingly slow, the costs escalated beyond the reach of a small, struggling Dominion and governments kept losing their nerve. Worst of all, from Fleming’s point of view, his advice was ignored. The Yellowhead route was discarded in favour of a southern pass.

In 1877, Grant left Halifax and St. Matthew’s and accepted the principalship of Queen’s in Kingston, at that time a Presbyterian college on the brink of financial ruin. He saw an opportunity to give a new country a university of world quality. He took Queen’s by the scruff of the neck
and doggedly remade it in the image of the universities he knew from Scotland and Europe, luring professors from overseas and persuading Fleming to become the chair of the Board of Governors.

In September 1883, Fleming, now on the board of the CPR, went west to see how the work was progressing and Grant went with him. This time, they wanted to be the first Canadians to cross Canada by the pass through British Columbia’s Kicking Horse River valley, the new route discovered by the American railway engineer Major A.B. Rogers. By then, the railway ran to Calgary, and so the journey that eleven years earlier had taken them two months now took a matter of days. Fleming and Grant were disillusioned by what they saw as they journeyed west: the frenzied land speculation, the disintegration of the Western Cree, now reduced to begging at the railway stations, and the toxic resentment of the railway company by the farmers and merchants forced to pay the railway’s monopoly prices for freight.

They missed the joys of the old days, bursting into full gallop on the plains, like schoolboys out for a holiday run, camping at night under the stars and waking the next morning to the Metis cry
“Leve! Leve!”

In Calgary they saddled up pack horses and a team and set off into the Bow Valley, happy to be out on the trail again with wranglers and horsemen and cowboys. But they
were getting a bit old to be playing this game, a university president and a railroad tycoon well into their middle age, and they discovered that the trail up to the Rogers Pass was as tough as anything they had encountered on their earlier trip. The trail was dizzyingly steep, unstable underfoot and encumbered with deadfall. The two men had to muster all their determination to get to the top. Finally, one September afternoon, aching, bruised and dirty, they blundered their way to the summit and found Major Rogers and his survey party awaiting them.

A grand afternoon ensued. A picnic was spread out on the grass. Grant said some prayers, and even Rogers, a famously coarse and hard-driving sinner, bowed his head. Afterward, Fleming broke out Havana cigars and everyone had a celebratory smoke for the occasion, all envisaging the day when the railway would come through the pass and link the provinces into a single nation. As the light began to fade that September afternoon, the festivities concluded with the improbable spectacle of Grant and Fleming, two grand adolescents, playing leapfrog in the meadow, while Major Rogers looked on, smoking his cigar.

Two years later, Fleming journeyed out west again, this time in the company of Donald Smith. The train took them through the Kicking Horse Pass to a ceremony that marked the conclusion of the whole great adventure. Grant doesn’t figure in the famous photograph of the driving in of the last spike—it is dominated by a top-hatted
Fleming and Smith—but he was there in spirit. Even the name that Fleming and Smith chose for the place where that spike was driven had special meaning for a Grant. The name they chose—Craigellachie—happened to be the ancestral home of the Grant clan, and every Grant knew the war cry “Stand Fast, Craigellachie!”

The railway secured Canada’s continental future and guaranteed that the West would not be absorbed by the Americans. Yet Grant knew by then that all national dreams, all acts of nation building, at least in Canada, are achieved at someone’s expense. The railway destroyed a rival way of life. By 1885, the Plains Cree were on reservations. The railway was used to ferry troops to put down Riel’s second rebellion, the last stand of the Metis, French and Aboriginal way of life built on the buffalo hunt and the fur trade. Riel stood trial in Regina that year. The country was bitterly divided over Riel’s fate, with Orangemen in Ontario calling for blood and Quebec demanding a pardon. Grant thought Riel a poor deluded fool and called publicly for pardon. Prime Minister Macdonald bowed to Ontario. Riel went to the gallows, and a martyr, for both the Metis nation and for Quebec, was born.

Riel’s execution caused fury throughout Quebec. The rising star of the Liberal Party, Wilfrid Laurier, took the stage at a rally in Montreal in November 1885, shortly after the execution, and defended Riel in vehement terms,
saying that had he himself been on the banks of the Saskatchewan, he, too, would have taken up a musket against the troops. Protestant Ontario never allowed him to forget those words.

The achievement of Grant’s dream, therefore, drove fissures through the fabric of Canada that remain to this day. Quebec’s leading figures believed that the railway had been used to destroy French society in the West.

In 1890, when the government of Manitoba went so far as to abolish the separate Roman Catholic school system and replace it with a single “national” board, Quebec’s worst fears were confirmed, and for six years, the federation was convulsed by a crisis at once religious, educational and national in character.