Read The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 Online
Authors: Pierre Berton
For one Scotsman, there is a special reason to celebrate. Donald A. Smith, late of Labrador, has just won a federal seat in his adopted province’s first election. It is a significant victory. The events set in motion by the decisions of 1871 will change the current of Smith’s life and enshrine his likeness in the history books of a later century, linking him forever with a symbolic railway spike in a distant mountain pass
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That pass is one thousand miles to the west of the Red River and for all that thousand miles scarcely a light flickers or a soul moves. Awesome in its vastness and its isolation, the newly acquired North West – the heart of the new Canada – sleeps beneath its blanket of snow. Walled off from the Pacific by the vertebrae of the Cordilleras and from the settled East by a granite Precambrian wasteland, the great central plain is like an unconquered island
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The North West! The name is beginning to take on overtones of romance. In the winter, when the blizzard strikes and the heavens are blotted out, it can be a white hell; in the summer, by all accounts, it is an enchanted realm. One can travel for days, they say, along the ruts of the Carlton Trail between Fort Garry and Fort Edmonton without encountering human kind – only ridge after ridge of untrammelled park land rolling on towards the high arch of the sky. Out there, they say, the eye can feast upon acres and acres of tiger lilies and bluebells, stretching to the horizon “as if a vast Oriental carpet had been thrown across the plains.” The prairie chickens, they say, are so numerous that they mask the sun, while the passenger pigeons roost so thickly on the oaks that the very branches snap beneath their weight. And there are exquisite lakes, speckled with geese and swans, broad meadows where the whooping cranes stalk about in pairs, and everywhere the ultimate spectacle of the buffalo, moving in dark rivers through a tawny ocean of waist-high grass. Only a privileged few have gazed upon these marvels; the events of 1871 will ensure that they will soon be just a memory
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How many white men inhabit this empty realm? Perhaps twenty-five hundred. Nobody knows for certain because there has never been an accurate census. The North West is a scattered archipelago of human islets, each isolated from the others by vast distances and contrasting life-styles – Scottish farmers, Métis buffalo hunters, Yankee whiskey traders, French missionaries, British and Canadian fur merchants. In the lonely prairie between these human enclaves the nomadic and warlike Indian bands roam freely
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For all of the decade, this wild, misunderstood domain will be the subject of endless speculation, curiosity, political manoeuvre and debate. There are few Canadians yet who care greatly about it; most provincial politicians, indeed, are “either indifferent or hostile to its acquisition.” Yet by the fact of its acquisition, the young Dominion has set itself upon a new course. The Conservative Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, has just promised British Columbia a great railway across the North West to Pacific tidewater. Once that decision is confirmed, as it must be in this pivotal year of 1871, nothing can ever again be the same
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Chapter One
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An act of “insane recklessness”
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The struggle for the North West
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The ordeal of the Dawson Route
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An act of “insane recklessness”
Its political opponents pretended to believe that the Macdonald government had gone mad. “Insane” was the word the Liberal leader, Alexander Mackenzie, used, time and again for most of the decade of the seventies, to describe the pledge to build a railway to the Pacific. It was, he said in the House that spring of 1871, “an act of insane recklessness,” and there were a good many Canadians, including some of John A. Macdonald’s own supporters, who thought he was right.
Here was a country of only three and a half million people, not yet four years old, pledged to construct the greatest of all railways. It would be longer than any line yet built – almost one thousand miles longer than the first American road to the Pacific, which the United States, with a population of almost forty million, had only just managed to complete.
The Americans had more money, shorter mileage and far fewer obstacles than the Canadians. For one thing, they knew where they were going: there were established and sophisticated cities on their Pacific coastline. But neither John A. Macdonald nor his surveyors had any idea where they were headed. The only settlement of account on the Canadian Pacific coast was on an island; the indentations in the mainland were uncharted, the valleys were unexplored, the passes were unsurveyed.
For another thing, the United States was not faced with any barrier as implacable as that of the Precambrian Shield. If the railway followed an all-Canadian route, its builders would have to blast their way across seven hundred miles of this granite wasteland, pocked by gunmetal lakes and overlaid with a patchy coverlet of stunted trees. There were ridges there that would consume three tons of dynamite a day for months on end; and, where the ridges ended, there was another three hundred miles of muskegs, which could (and would) swallow a locomotive at a single gulp. This was land incapable of cultivation. There were many who held with Alexander Mackenzie that to build a railway across it was “one of the most foolish things that could be imagined.”
After the Shield was breached, the road was to lead across the North West – a tenantless empire of waving grass (which many thought to be unproductive desert) bordered by the thinly forested
valley of the North Saskatchewan River. Every sliver of timber – railroad ties, bridge supports, construction materials – would have to be hauled, league after league, across this desolate land where, it seemed, the wind never ceased.
At the far limits of the plains the way was blocked by a notched wall of naked rock, eight thousand feet high. Beyond that wall lay a second wall and beyond that wall a third. Here were gloomy trenches to be bridged, cataracts to be thwarted and alpine buttresses to be dynamited. At the end of that sea of plumed mountains lay the unknown coastline, tattered like a coat beyond repair. George Etienne Cartier, acting for his ailing leader, had promised British Columbia that the railway would reach that coastline, ready to operate, within ten years. It was, cried Edward Blake, the intellectual giant of the opposing Liberal (or Reform) Party, “a preposterous proposition.”
Some of Macdonald’s parliamentary followers tended to agree with Blake. The Prime Minister was absent in Washington during the debate over the railway in April, but Alexander Morris, his Minister of Internal Revenue, reported to him that it was the hardest fight since Confederation. Some twenty Government supporters, enough to cause the administration’s defeat, were “weak kneed and alarmed.” Morris rallied them with a tough speech, telling the caucus it was no time to stab an absent leader in the back; but the decision to build the great railway was a near thing.
The Government had promised the railway to British Columbia in order to lure that colony into the new confederation of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Manitoba. Macdonald’s vision of Canada did not stop at the Great Lakes; his dream was of a transcontinental British nation in North America – a workable alternative to the United States. To achieve this dream, the railway was a necessity, or so the Prime Minister insisted: it would stitch the scattered provinces and empty territories of the West together, as the government-owned Intercolonial was intended to do in the East; it would be the means of colonizing the prairies; it would forestall American expansion; it would be the spine of empire, an Imperial highway linking the British Isles with the Orient and avoiding the appalling voyage round the Horn.
There were, almost certainly, more pragmatic reasons. Macdonald needed the diversion of the railway to maintain himself in office. The project was clearly a gamble; but the stakes were high. If he succeeded
in fulfilling his pledge, the Conservative Party could probably look forward to a generation of power. No other
fait accompli
, even that of Confederation, could compete with such a triumph. The Government had bungled its handling of Louis Riel, the Métis leader whose prairie uprising in 1869–70 had brought about the formation of the new province of Manitoba. It could not afford to stumble again in the case of British Columbia; the terms to that colony had to be generous. That may have been one reason why, in the summer of 1870, the Government actually offered more than British Columbia asked for. The delegates who visited Ottawa that summer would have been content, initially at least, with a wagon road from the Rockies to the Pacific; it was Cartier, the tough little Quebecker, who talked them into demanding something more ambitious. “No, that will not do,” he told them. “Ask for a railway the whole way and you will get it.” The Government’s explanation was that, since a railway was inevitable, it would be cheaper to build it immediately and save the expense of a road. The Prime Minister, in fact, had already settled on the idea of a transcontinental line. It was to his political advantage to have British Columbia insist upon a railway; it made it easier to convince a sceptical public that the national dream demanded it.
The sceptics had considerable logic on their side; Macdonald had emotion. Could a country of three and a half million people afford an expenditure of one hundred million dollars at a time when a labourer’s wage was a dollar a day? Perhaps not; but Macdonald meant to persuade the country that it could not do without a railway if it wanted to be a nation in the true sense of the word. Besides, the Government insisted, the railway would not bring any rise in taxes: it could be paid for with land from the North West.
Why the fixed date of ten years? As Macdonald’s opponent Mackenzie said, most of the railway would run through an uninhabitable wilderness: “It wouldn’t be necessary to construct the greater portion of the line for another thirty years.” That was also perfectly true; but Macdonald’s attitude was that there might be no nation in thirty years without a railway. The corner-stone of his transcontinental policy was the settlement of the North West and he and his Ministers pressed the view that without a railway the land would remain empty until the Americans moved in to fill the vacuum. Besides, they had the assurance of the chief British Columbia delegate, Joseph Trutch, that the ten-year clause was not a “cast iron contract” but more a figure of speech; the province would not hold the Canadian government to the letter of the wording.
It was the apparent insistence on an all-Canadian line that brought the harshest criticism. Few Canadians really believed that any railway builder would be foolhardy enough to hurdle the desert of rock between Lake Nipissing and the Red River. No white man had ever crossed it on foot and few reliable maps of the region existed. Macdonald’s opponents were all for diverting the line south of Lake Superior, through United States territory, and then heading northwest into Manitoba from Duluth. If North America were one nation that would be the sensible way to go. But Macdonald did not believe that Canada could call herself a nation if she did not have geographical control of her own rail line. What if Canada were at war? Could troops of a belligerent nation be moved over foreign soil? The memory of the Métis uprising of 1869 was still green in the Prime Minister’s memory. Unable to use the colonists’ route through St. Paul, the troops sent to the Red River had taken ninety-six days to negotiate the forty-seven portages across the Canadian Shield. A railway could rush several regiments to the North West in less than a week. Macdonald did not rule out another rebellion or even a border dispute with the Americans. The Fenian brotherhood had, since 1866, mounted a series of skirmishes across the boundary and would try again on the Manitoba border in the fall of 1871.
The Prime Minister, as he was to say so vehemently on more than one occasion, was born a British subject and meant to die one. His nationalism had two sides. On the positive side he was pro-Canadian which, in those days, was much the same as being pro-British. On the negative side he was almost paranoic in his anti-Americanism. The Americans, to Macdonald, were “Yankees” and he put into that term all the disdain that was then implied by its use: the Yankees were upstarts, money grasping, uncouth, anti-British; and they wanted to grab Canada for themselves, throw off the monarchy and turn solid Canadians into shrill, greedy, tinsel copies of themselves.
Macdonald’s opponents might feel that the price of holding the newly acquired North West was too high to pay, but he himself was well aware that some Americans, especially those in Minnesota, saw it as a ripe plum ready to fall into their hands. He believed, in fact, that the United States government “are resolved to do all they can, short of war, to get possession of the western territory.” That being so, he wrote in January, 1870, “we must take immediate and vigorous
steps to counteract them. One of the first things to be done is to show unmistakeably our resolve to build the Pacific Railway.”
There was reason for Macdonald’s suspicions. In the very year of Confederation, W. H. Seward, the United States Secretary of State, fresh from his successful purchase of Alaska, had told a Boston audience that the whole continent “shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American union.” His successor, Hamilton Fish, was an expansionist, as was the President himself; though they were not prepared to fight for a piece of Canada, they were delighted to countenance, if not to encourage, a powerful group of Minnesota businessmen and politicians who saw their burgeoning territory extending north of the 49th parallel as a concomitant of the Red River uprising of 1869. In J. W. Taylor, Washington’s undercover agent in Winnipeg, they had an ardent sympathizer.