The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (4 page)

As Macdonald well knew, there were powerful influences working in the United States to frustrate the building of any all-Canadian railroad. In 1869, a United States Senate committee report declared that “the opening by us first of a Northern Pacific railroad seals the destiny of the British possessions west of the ninety-first meridian. They will become so Americanised in interests and feelings that they will be in effect severed from the new Dominion, and the question of their annexation will be but a question of time.” A similar kind of peaceful penetration had led eventually to the annexation of Oregon.

It was the railwaymen who coveted the North West. “I have an awful swallow for land,” the Northern Pacific’s General Cass told the Grand Trunk’s Edward Watkin (Watkin later reproduced the despised Yankee vernacular as “swaller”). In 1869 – during the Red River uprising – the Governor of Vermont, John Gregory Smith, who also happened to be president of the Northern Pacific, determined to build that line so close to the Canadian border that it would forestall any plans for an all-Canadian railway. In a conversation with Charles Brydges, a leading Canadian railway man, he made no secret of Washington’s willingness to take advantage of the uprising and subsidize the line in order to get possession of the North West for the United States.

By the following year, Jay Cooke, the banker who was the real power behind the Northern Pacific, was so sure of capturing the same territory as a monopoly for his railroad that he was using the idea to peddle the company’s bonds. A Northern Pacific pamphlet decried
the whole idea of a railway north of Lake Superior: the Americans, it said, would send any branches needed into British territory to service their neighbours.

On one side of the mountains, the railway would siphon off the products of the rich farmlands; on the other side it would drain the British Columbia mining settlements. “Drain” was the operative verb; it was the one the Senate committee used. As for the Minnesotans, they saw their state devouring the entire Red River Valley. Their destiny lay north of the 49th parallel, so the St. Paul
Pioneer Press
editorialized. That was “the irresistible doctrine of nature.”

But it was Macdonald’s intention to defy nature and fashion a nation in the process. His tool, to this end, would be the Canadian Pacific. It would be a rare example of a nation created through the construction of a railway.

In the Canada of 1871, “nationalism” was a strange, new word. Patriotism was derivative, racial cleavage was deep, culture was regional, provincial animosities savage and the idea of unity ephemeral. Thousands of Canadians had already been lured south by the availability of land and the greater diversity of enterprise, which contrasted with the lack of opportunity at home. The country looked like a giant on the map, second only in size to China. For most practical purposes, it stopped at the Great Lakes.

The six scattered provinces had yet to unite in a great national endeavour or to glimpse anything remotely resembling a Canadian dream; but both were taking shape. The endeavour would be the building of the Pacific railway; the dream would be the filling up of the empty spaces and the dawn of a new Canada.

2
The dreamers

For almost forty years before Macdonald made his bargain with British Columbia, there had been talk about a railway to the Pacific. Most of it was nothing more than rhetoric. It cost Joseph Howe little, in 1851, to utter his remark about some of his listeners living to hear a steam whistle in the passes of the Rockies. A century later, public figures were prophesying with equal recklessness and incidental accuracy that their children would live to see a man land on the moon. The comparison is a reasonable one: for most colonial Canadians
at mid-century the prospect of a line of steel stretching off two thousand miles into the Pacific mists was similarly unreal.

Thomas Dalton, the editor of the Toronto
Patriot
, has been credited with the first vision. He talked vaguely, in 1834, of an all-steam route by river, rail and canal from Toronto to the Pacific and thence to the Orient. His friends dismissed him as a mere enthusiast, by which they probably meant he was slightly demented. Every far-sighted scheme has its quota of eccentrics and the railway dream was not immune. In 1845, a prodigious pamphleteer who called himself Sir John Smyth, Baronet, popped up in Toronto with a long printed tract urging a line of steam communication around the globe, including a rail and water route through British North America. Smyth was not taken seriously, possibly because of the string of titles he arranged to follow his by-line. These included “moral philosopher” and the initials “
P.L.
,” which, Smyth insisted, stood for “poet loret.” In those days just about anybody could afford to publish a pamphlet.

Between 1848 and 1850, however, a series of works was published by three sets of authors, and these
were
taken seriously. The first of these, and the most prescient, was by another Smyth – Major Robert Carmichael Smyth, a 49-year-old British engineer. A career soldier since the age of sixteen, Carmichael Smyth had just returned to England from service in Canada with the 93rd Highland Regiment. He first posed his idea of an “Atlantic and Pacific Railway” in 1848, in a series of letters to his shipboard acquaintance, the humorist Thomas Chandler Haliburton, creator of Sam Slick. Carmichael Smyth gathered the letters into a pamphlet early the following year and his enthusiastic advocacy of this “great link required to unite in one chain the whole English race” appealed to the imperialism of London editors and their readers. The
Daily Mail
called it “a noble plan,” the
Morning Herald
endorsed the idea and so did the
Economist
, although the latter said that the actual job of building should be left to the colonists and not the mother country. Since Carmichael Smyth had reckoned the cost at seven hundred million dollars and since the colonists at that point had built only a few miles of railway, the suggestion was not immediately practical.

Nevertheless he lived to see his prophecies come true. In his pamphlet he asked: “Who will be the first locomotive engineer to inscribe upon the Rocky Mountains: ‘Engineer A.B. piloted the first locomotive engine across the Rocky Mountains’?” Carmichael Smyth was still alive, thirty-five years later, when on a warm July day,
Robert Mee stepped from his
CPR
cab and, with a can of red paint, answered the query.

Although Carmichael Smyth overestimated the cost of the line, he was uncannily accurate about its route. It took more than ten years of surveys and untold squabbling to arrive at roughly the same location he scrawled across his map. His pencil even crossed the Rockies in the approximate vicinity of the Kicking Horse and Rogers passes, which at that time had not been discovered. And he also saw, quite clearly, that the road could be made to pay for itself through the traffic of the colonists it transported to the new land.

Almost simultaneously, an Irish subaltern in the Royal Engineers, Lieut. Millington Henry Synge, proposed a vast rail and water highway across the continent. Synge, who rose to be a major-general, was a member of the many-branched Millington Synge family, whose genealogical tree is studded with bishops and baronets and not a few imaginative writers of whom John Millington Synge, the Irish playwright, is the best known. His plan, though treated with respect at the time, bordered on the fanciful. Synge was stationed at Bytown near the famous flight locks of the Rideau and this proximity may have been the source of his mind-boggling suggestion for a canal through the Rockies – “steps of still water,” as he airily described it.

Synge suggested importing the surplus unemployed of England to build the railway while Carmichael Smyth had advanced the idea of using convict labour. Both schemes were united, with scrupulous detail, in 1850, in a tome entitled
Britain Redeemed and Canada Preserved
. The authors were F. A. Wilson, an old Hudson’s Bay Company man, and A. B. Richards of Lincoln’s Inn, London. In 556 weighty pages, the authors contemplated the employment of twenty thousand convicts to break ground and rough-hew the line. In addition, a body of sixty thousand volunteers from “among the suffering poor of our most distressed counties” would be signed on for three years, at soldier’s pay. An accompanying fold-out map showed the line running straight as a ruler from Halifax to the Pacific, oblivious of rock, muskeg, lake or mountain. The authors were so enamoured of the idea of a convict work force that they tended to dismiss geographical location.

Wilson and Richards were taking no chances on escapees. To protect the Canadian public there would be a network of forts and garrisoned barracks, constructed of “the gigantic logs of the country,” vigilantly guarded and encircled by moats and palisades. Indian
tribes would be encouraged to scour the country for missing malefactors. Canadian woodsmen would be formed into mounted patrols to assist the guards along the line of route. And, in case any of the fugitives tried to disguise their close-cropped heads with false hair, the promoters of the plan proposed to crop their eyebrows as well.

Once the railway was finished, the miscreants were to be shipped off to the bleak Labrador peninsula because of the “very remarkable and salutary influence which the contiguous climate of Nova Scotia seems to exercise upon the
morale
of persons inhabiting that country.” A legion of five thousand “Pioneer Rifle Guards” would be recruited for Labrador, in case the climate failed in its work of rehabilitation.

These published parlour games were all very well but thus far nobody had invested a single dollar in a road to the Pacific. In 1851, Allan Macdonell, a Toronto mining man and promoter, made the first concrete move: he organized a company and applied to the Legislative Assembly of Canada for a charter to build a railway to the Pacific. It would cost more than eight million pounds, he estimated, and would have to be built in stages, paid for step by step by land subsidies and the tide of advancing settlement. The standing committee on railways reluctantly reported that the plan was premature. The land across which Macdonell’s line would run belonged to the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Macdonell was not finished; indeed, he had only just begun to fight. He was a resolute figure, a lawyer and one-time sheriff who had, during the 1837 rebellion, raised a troop of cavalry at his own expense. He knew the Lake Superior country well, having explored it in an open boat as a prospector before its waters were charted. With his mining background and his eternal optimism, he was, perhaps, the first of that authentic Canadian breed, the Toronto promoter. Nothing, it seemed, could keep him down. His prospectus glowed with the same kind of purple prose and starry-eyed confidence that was to distinguish later speculative literature from Bay Street. Macdonell called upon his readers to hark back to the construction of the pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China, built by “a semi-barbarous people, centuries before the Christian era.” In the light of such marvels, he hinted, the construction of a railway to the Pacific would be mere child’s play: “…  let us not insult the Enterprize of this enlightened age by denouncing as visionary and impractical the plan of a simple line of rails over a surface of no greater
extent, without one-half the natural obstacles to overcome.”

Macdonell
was
denounced as visionary and impractical and his scheme viewed “as an hallucination to amuse for a moment and then to vanish.” Such criticism failed to daunt him. He applied again to the legislature and was again turned down. He applied a third time and was for a third time turned down. He would not quit. He went on the attack, addressing public meetings, denouncing the monopoly of the Hudson’s Bay Company. He fired the Toronto Board of Trade into action. He brought old Red River settlers to Toronto to write letters to the press and speak out against the monopoly. When a government committee inquired into the Hudson’s Bay lands in 1857, Macdonell was one of the chief witnesses before it.

He was perfectly confident that he would get his railway charter and he had reason to be, for the climate for railway building in Canada was undergoing a dramatic change. When Macdonell first applied for a charter in 1851, Canada had built only about two hundred miles of railway – this in spite of the fact that it had chartered thirty-four railway companies with a total capitalization of $12,800,000. The United States, by comparison, had built ten thousand miles. Two years later the dam burst and the country entered into an orgy of railroad building which saw the construction of the Grand Trunk, the Great Western and the Northern. It was, in the words of Thomas Keefer, himself a respected engineer, “the saturnalia of nearly all classes connected with railways.” In this euphoric period was launched the partnership between railways, promoters, politicians and government that became the classic Canadian pattern for so many public works. Francis Hincks, the joint premier of the united Canadas until 1854, held thousands of shares of Grand Trunk railway stock; he was one of that company’s most enthusiastic supporters. His successor, Allan MacNab, was at the same time the president of the Great Western Railway. George Etienne Cartier, who (with John A. Macdonald) became joint premier in 1857, was the salaried solicitor of the Grand Trunk. Three powerful politicians, Alexander Galt, David Macpherson and Luther Holton, all made fortunes out of Grand Trunk construction contracts.

It is no accident that four of these men were leading Tories and another, Galt, became one. Most Conservative politicians were business or professional men who welcomed the idea of a partnership between big business and government to build the country. Profits and politics tended to become inseparable. By 1871, when Macdonald
launched his Pacific railway scheme, there were forty Members of Parliament and twelve Senators – promoters, directors, contractors or company presidents – with vested interests in railroads. The great majority were Conservatives; only eleven of the Members and four of the Senators called themselves Liberals.