The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (47 page)

Tenders were called in the fall of 1878 and were due to be opened the following January 30 in order that the successful bidder could make an early start in the spring. Number Forty-two was a lucrative contract, running to an estimated four million dollars. The bidding was expected to be highly competitive.

Early in January, George D. Morse, a Toronto cattle exporter, and three partners decided to bid for the contract. None of them knew much about railways but they did know something about political influence. They intended to buy that from Patrick Close, a Toronto merchant and politician who was an intimate friend of leading Conservatives and a staunch contributor to party funds. Morse offered Close two per cent of the total amount of the contract if he could use his political influence to get it for him. Close agreed; two per cent would mean about eighty thousand dollars in his pocket. He, in turn, brought in a Conservative party fixer named John Shields; the two planned to split the commission.

Shields was a leading railway contractor whose services to the party would be many and varied. When the voters of Bracebridge needed to be lubricated, it was John Shields who arrived at a local hotel with five trunks full of whiskey to do the lubricating. When General Butt Hewson sued John A. Macdonald for a party debt, it was Shields who arranged to pay him off quietly, thus establishing, in the sardonic words of the Ottawa
Free Press
, “another claim to the good will and gratitude of the poor, persecuted Premier.”

Shields advised Morse to make his tender as low as possible so that it would have to be accepted. He explained that Morse could make up the difference later by having friendly engineers on the ground authorize extra charges. Morse took the suggestion to heart. He set the price absurdly low and, at the last moment, lowered it still further.

He did not know that his adviser was playing a double game. Shields’s own contracting firm – all its members were powerful Conservatives – was also bidding on the contract.

Morse’s firm had the lowest bid. Marcus Smith ran his keen and always sceptical engineer’s eye over the tender and reported at once that it was excessively low and inconsistent with a knowledge of the country. Nor did he believe that the second lowest bidder, Andrews,
Jones and Company, an American firm, could carry out the work without losing money. Fleming agreed with Smith and advised the department that the two low tenders should be passed over. A fortnight’s delay ensued while Fleming was asked to make further inquiries. Thus at a critical time of the year two valuable weeks were lost; the Department of Public Works was not able to do what any private company would have done – adopt the report of its engineers and accept promptly the lowest offer of any firm believed capable of doing the job.

In spite of the engineers’ objections, Morse was given the contract. He decided to relinquish it. His plan was to form a secret partnership with the second lowest bidder, the American firm of Andrews, Jones, and let them be awarded the job by default – at a bid almost half a million dollars higher than his own. The department now believed it was dealing with Andrews, Jones who promptly informed it that the required security of two hundred thousand dollars would be deposited at once. This was a bald lie. Neither the Americans nor their silent partners had a dollar. What they had was an influence peddler in the person of another American, Colonel J. N. Smith, the agent in Canada of a New York banking house. Smith was persuaded – in return for an interest in the contract – to play a double game and urge his New York employers to put up the security.

At this point John Shields, whose bid was fourth lowest, decided to join forces with the third lowest bidder, a Nova Scotian firm. The object of the new combination was to remove the two lowest tenderers from the scene and gain the contract for themselves. Patrick Close was also playing a double game. He was supposed to be helping Morse by raising security money. Shields bribed him out of the Morse camp by offering him a one-twenty-fourth interest in the contract – about twice the amount Morse had promised.

The scene now shifts to the Russell House at Sparks and Elgin Streets, the great listening-post of Ottawa and for half a century its leading hotel. Beneath the giant chandeliers of its vast dining hall, in the whispering galleries of its stairwells and corridors, or among the overstuffed settees of its drawing room, half the deals in the capital were worked out. Every politician of stature stayed at this deceptively plain, three-storey colonial Georgian inn. So did every gilded visitor, every prominent businessman and every major contractor, “manipulating some scheme or organizing some enterprise” as that literate traveller Peter O’Leary remarked in 1877. Its halls, one
visitor noted, were “a thorough Parliamentary lobby” and its bar derived “a particularly brisk custom from convivial legislators.” Here William Kersteman had spotted George McMullen dining with Senator Asa B. Foster in Christmas week of 1872 and wondered what kind of deal was afoot (Foster was dickering with McMullen for the Allan correspondence). Here some years later a chance encounter between Senator Frank Smith and a despondent George Stephen would help save the
CPR
from bankruptcy. And here John Shields’s partner, John J. McDonald, had dinner with Samuel St-Onge Chapleau, his secret pipeline into the Department of Public Works.

Chapleau had been meeting daily with McDonald for months and these meetings had been highly profitable for both, for Chapleau was correspondence clerk in the department and, being in charge of the record room, was privy to all its secrets. His appointment was obviously a political one; he was the brother of Joseph Adolphe Chapleau, the Conservative premier of Quebec. Chapleau
frère
knew a good thing when it was handed to him. One of his “arrangements” was with George M. Mowbray, the pioneer manufacturer of nitro-glycerine. Mowbray paid Chapleau between thirty and forty dollars a month to keep him informed concerning contracts on rock work. That sum was alone was roughly equal to fifty per cent of Chapleau’s government salary.

At one of the Russell House’s long, glittering tables, where the fare was diverse and virtually unending – a multi-course meal could be had for about fifty cents – Chapleau brought his friend up to date on the details of the contract which would be awarded officially to Andrews, Jones once the security was deposited. It developed that Chapleau was a close personal friend of Colonel Smith, who was then on his way to New York to arrange financing for the successful bidder. McDonald offered Chapleau four thousand dollars to go to New York and give Smith’s principals a bad report and thus prevent the American contractors from getting the job.

Shortly after this Andrews, Jones, unable to raise any security in New York, decided to throw in the sponge. However, Morse, their secret partner, wanted to hang on; it was his task to prevent the department from knowing that the successful tenderer was out of the picture. If he and his associates could continue that pretense and raise enough security, they could grab the contract for themselves in the Andrews, Jones name. They actually raised one hundred thousand dollars, which they deposited, forging the name of Andrews,
Jones to the necessary documents. Morse expected to get the rest through his friend Close, not knowing that Close had been bought off. When no further security arrived, the department gave the contract to the third lowest bidder – the Nova Scotians. Nobody yet knew – at least officially – that this firm had made a secret arrangement with Shields.

That was not quite the end of the negotiations and delays on Contract Forty-two. The whole of the following summer was wasted in quarrels between the Shields group in Toronto and their Nova Scotian partners, the Toronto members doing their best to oust the Maritimers but, as the Winnipeg
Times
put it, “finding great difficulty in raising the amount which had been advanced by these gentlemen, and also paying them what they considered a just consideration by their retirement.”

Finally, in September, more than seven months after the tenders were opened on the contract for Section B, Shields and his partners bought out the interests of the Nova Scotians for $52,500. To raise the money they had to bring in three other contractors as partners. Only then could they get on with the business of building a railroad.

4
Bogs without bottom

“We began the work of construction of Canada’s great highway at a dead end,” wrote Harry William Dudley Armstrong, a resident engineer along the half-completed Fort William-Selkirk line in the mid seventies. It was true. One chunk of railway was begun at the Red River and run hesitantly eastward towards the muskegs on the Ontario-Manitoba border. Another was built westward from Fort William, literally to nowhere. These two pieces were useless because they did not connect. The railway builders were at work in the empty heart of Canada without rail transportation to supply them, in a country scarcely explored; they were forced to rely on steamers, flat boats, canoes and barges to haul in supplies and construction materials. Four years later, when other contractors began to fill in the 181-mile gap between, every pound of supplies had to be taken in over the lakes by canoe and portage because the end of steel was still a good hundred miles from the water route. Steam shovels, horses, even locomotives and flatcars had to be hauled by sleigh in the winter-time
over the frozen lakes, the ice-sheathed granites and the snow-shrouded muskegs. Joseph Whitehead had a quarter-million dollars worth of machinery – steam drills, boilers and the like – which had to be transported in this manner at prodigious cost. Indeed, some of it could not be got into the Cross Lake country at all until the road was in a condition to carry traffic; it lay along the line of railway out of Winnipeg for months, eating up interest charges. On Section B (Contract Forty-two), eighty thousand dollars were spent just moving in supplies before a foot of road was graded or a single rail laid.

The distance between Fort William and Selkirk was only 435 miles as the surveyors plotted the line. But no one, not surveyors, not contractors, and certainly not politicians, knew the problems that lay ahead. It took seven years before through rail communication was completed from the lakehead to the Red River.

Armstrong, in a private memoir, wrote of those early days when his nearest neighbour was nine miles away, when he walked as far as fifteen miles to work and back again each day, when in the absence of any doctor he acted as midwife at the birth of his first child. Like almost everybody else who recalled those times he remembered the mosquitoes and blackflies rising from the stinking, half-frozen swamps in clouds that blotted out the sun. On one occasion, wading between the stumps of a spruce and tamarack swamps, the water four feet deep, the frozen bottom covered by a foot-thick sponge of moss, Armstrong, who was carrying a level on his shoulder, looked at the forefinger of his left hand, curled around the tripod. There were on the second joint alone no fewer than nine mosquitoes “with their bills sunk to the hilt on that space and they were equally thick on any exposed part of face or hands.”

The land that the railway builders set out to conquer was beautiful in its very bleakness. At the western end of Lake Superior it was almost all rock – the old, cracked rock of the Canadian Shield, grey and russet, striped by strata, blurred by pink lichens, garlanded by the dark vines and red berries of kinnikinnick and sparkling, sometimes, with the yellow pinpoints of cinquefoil. From the edges of the dun-coloured lakes that lay in the grey hollows there protruded the spiky points of the spruce, jet black against the green clouds of birch and poplar. Sometimes there were tiger lilies, blue vetch, briar rose and oxeye daisies to relieve the sombre panorama; but in the winter the land was an almost unendurable monochrome of grey.

As the line moved west, the land changed and began to sparkle. Between the spiny ridges lay sinuous lakes and lesser ponds of bright blue or olive green from which the yellow flowers of the spatterdock glittered. The lakes became more numerous towards the west, the bright sheets of water winding in chains between the broken, tree-covered vertebrae of granite, with here and there a chartreuse meadow of tall, rank grass. This lake country, smiling in the sunshine, gloomy in the frequent, slashing rains, would one day become a tourist mecca; but in the seventies it was a hellhole for the railway builders who saw their fortunes sink forever in the seemingly bottomless slime of the great muskegs.

The muskegs came in every size. There were the notorious sinkholes – little lakes over which a thick crust of vegetable matter had formed and into which the line might tumble at any time. There was one sinkhole near Savanne, north of Fort William, so legend has it, where an entire train with a thousand feet of track was swallowed whole. Sometimes new sinkholes would appear in land thought to be as solid as Gibraltar. This was partly due to an imperfect knowledge of frost conditions. During the winter the railway builders would construct enormous fills – work that looked as if it would last forever. But this would cause the frozen muskeg beneath to melt and the entire foundations would begin to heave and totter. Time and again these new holes would be filled only to reappear once more.

Worse than the sinkholes were the giant muskegs, like the Poland Swamp or the incredible Julius Muskeg, the most infamous bog of all – a vast bed of peat six miles across, depth unknown, sufficient, it was said, to supply the entire North West with fuel. From these deceptively level, moss-covered stretches the naked trunks of dead tamaracks protruded, their roots weaving a kind of blanket over a concealed jelly of mud and slime. Across these seemingly impassable barriers the road was carried forward on log mattresses floated on top of the heaving bog – unwieldy contraptions of long, interlaced timbers, which would sometimes run for eight hundred feet. Later on the muskegs were filled in.

Then there were the apparently placid lakes that seemed so shallow, whose bottoms consisted of solid, unfathomable muskeg – muskeg that swallowed up tons of earth and gravel fill, month after month. The problem was that there seemed to be a bottom where there was no bottom at all. The real lake bottoms were concealed by a false blanket of silt which had never been properly probed during the hasty surveys. On Section B, Lake Macquistananah devoured
250,000 yards of earth fill. Farther up the line a second lake swallowed two hundred thousand yards. On Section Fifteen the hapless Joseph Whitehead saw his dreamed-of profits slowly pouring into the notorious Cross Lake in the form of 220,000 yards of gravel at a cost of eighty thousand dollars. And still the line continued to sink.