The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (6 page)

Alcohol in the seventies was both the national pastime and the national problem. Half of all the arrests in the Dominion were for offences connected with liquor. Toronto had more than five hundred saloons, dispensing whiskey at two cents a shot. Barn raisings, picnics and work “bees” of all kinds were lubricated with barrels of what the flourishing temperance movement was calling “demon rum.” Delirium tremens was a common ailment. Special police patrols were needed in the cities to trundle staggering workingmen off to jail, while others were left insensible or prostrate in the mud of the streets. Leading politicians – those who did not trenchantly advocate temperance – did not seem to mind being seen inebriated, nor did the spectacle appear to affect their popularity. Joseph Howe, D’Arcy McGee and Macdonald himself were all legendary tipplers.

But it was the labouring classes who drank the most. It was the only amusement that came within the reach of their pocketbooks. A newspaper cost five cents – for that price you could get a full quart of beer in a tavern. A minstrel show cost fifty cents and for
that
you could buy a gallon or two of whiskey. The link between strong drink and the grey quality of Canadian life is inescapable.

It is small wonder then that under these conditions many a Canadian looked with longing eyes across the border where the work opportunities were more varied, where social conditions were better, where every man had the vote and where the way to the frontier farmland was not barred by a thousand miles of granite and swamp.

It was a strangely intense love-hate relationship that the country had with the United States. Publicly the Americans were vilified; secretly they were admired. The very newspapers which attacked the hated Yankees published syrupy American serial stories on their front pages instead of solid Canadian news. The very people who scoffed at the ingenious Yankee labour-saving gadgets, such as the eggbeater, were the ones who bought them. Canadians sang Yankee songs, attended Yankee plays, minstrel shows and circuses, read Yankee authors and were beginning to accept Yankee customs – the “boarding house” rather than the British lodging, for example. And almost everybody wanted the return of reciprocity with the United States. It could open up an enormous and attractive market for Canadian products.

The Yankees were thought of as go-getters and, though this propensity was publicly scoffed at, many a Canadian – Alfred Waddington, the railway promoter was one – felt his own country’s business leaders lacked something of the Americans’ commercial zeal. The attitude was well expressed by a British travel writer, who reported
that “in Canada everyone skates well. The Yankee rarely snatches time from his business for such recreation.”

If the Yankees were envied, they were also feared. The memory of the Fenian raids was still green in everyone’s mind; the suspicion lingered that the Americans had secretly encouraged them. Canadians were still moving to the United States in disturbing numbers but, in spite of this – or perhaps because of it — any newspaper could be sure of a hearing if it launched a violent anti-American attack and any politician could secure a following by damning the Yankees. Making fun of the Americans was almost a national pastime and had some of the overtones of latter-day anti-Semitism. The cartoonist’s stereotype, Brother (or Cousin) Jonathan, later to be renamed Uncle Sam, was pictured in unflattering terms in the pages of such shortlived
Punch-style
humour magazines as
Diogenes
and
Grinchuckle
. He was a sharp storekeeper with hard, cold eyes, whittling on a piece of wood. He was a lecherous roué, or an unshaven suitor, rejected by an innocent “Miss Canada.” He was a red-nosed toper, kicked in the pants by a vigorous “Young Canada,” the precursor of Jack Canuck. Yankee speech was lampooned in painfully laborious dialect stories, in which Americans invariably said “wall” for well, “fust” for first, “jest” for just, “thar” for there and never,
never
sounded the final “g.” Americanisms such as “to velocipede” or “specimentary” came under attack from grammatical pedants while such Yankee habits as serving ice water with meals or chewing tobacco – habits also indulged in by large numbers of Canadians – were sneered at in print.

All these attacks on the Yankees underlined the undeniable truth that they were different from the British. Canada-aside from Quebec – was still very much a British nation, with British habits, attitudes, speech, mannerisms and loyalties. Almost all immigrants came from the British Isles, continued to think of the motherland as “home,” and often returned to it. Such disparate public figures as Edward Blake, the Reform leader, and George Stephen, the
CPR
president, would, after spectacular careers in Canada, suddenly choose to move to the old country. The habit of giving three cheers for Queen and Country (the country being Great Britain), and for anyone else who was royal, at dinners, military parades and political gatherings was universal – among French-speaking Quebeckers as well as British born Canadians. Royal and vice-regal visits produced paroxysms of excitement. The Dominion was, indeed, more British than Canadian.
So lightly did some school texts take Confederation that, even in the seventies, they continued to use such obsolete names as Upper and Lower Canada and Rupert’s Land. Cricket had not yet given way to baseball and only a few Canada Firsters thought Canadian scenery worth painting; the leading artists continued to portray English cows and Dutch windmills. Class was important; church and family traditions were often placed above money in the social scale and the “best” families flaunted coats of arms. Titles were coveted by politician and merchant prince alike. That was the great thing about Canada in their eyes: its British background provided the climate for a merchant nobility that served as a bulwark against the creeping republicanism from south of the border, which the newspapers decried so vehemently.

The newspapers, which mixed advertising with news and opinion with fact in the most ambiguous fashion, led the attack on the Americans. They published dire warnings to those who would emigrate south of the border. American commerce was declining, they declared; prices in the U.S. were excessively high; the rates of taxation were crushing. Most of all they harped on the dangers of “republicanism”; again and again they sought to demonstrate that it inevitably led to crime and corruption.

In this attempt to stem the flow across the border, no hair was too fine to split. Witness the Toronto
Leader’s
editorial in the first month of the new decade:

“Are any of our Canadian farmers thinking of migrating to the United States? Perhaps not. Certainly not if they have paid due attention to the intimations we, from time to time, have to make of the differences of living, which are perplexing the settlers in that country and of the distress that pervades all classes. But in case there should be any who will not heed our warnings, it may be well to remind them of a little matter to which we have not yet directed their attention … that farmers in the U.S. are not permitted to sell the produce of their own farms without first taking out a license as produce brokers.…”

It is doubtful if this kind of quibble prevented many young men from quitting the narrow concession roads of Canada for the broader highways to the south. “Antipathy to the Americans,” wrote Goldwin Smith, “…  does not hinder young Canadians from going by the hundreds to seek their fortunes in the United States.” The railways
were running west and prosperity followed them. In those halcyon days the building of a railway was automatically believed to spell good times: anyone who turned his eyes south and west could see that.

But railways meant something more. Out beyond that sprawl of billion-year-old rock lay an immense frontier, of which Canadians were dimly becoming aware. It was now their land, wrested in 1869 from the great fur-trading monopoly of the Hudson’s Bay Company after two centuries of isolation; but they did not have the means of exploiting it. A railway could give them access to that empty empire. Canada in 1871 was a country whose population was trapped in the prison of the St. Lawrence lowlands and the Atlantic littoral. A railway would be the means by which the captive finally broke out of its cage.

4
The struggle for the North West

The North West was, in 1871, an almost totally unknown realm. Until the sixties, it had been generally considered worthless to anyone but fur traders – a Canadian Gobi, barren, ice-locked, forbidding and totally unfit for settlement. In 1855 the Montreal
Transcript
wrote that it would not even produce potatoes, let alone grain. This attitude was fostered and encouraged by the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose private preserve it had been for almost two centuries. The last thing the great fur-trading empire wanted was settlers pouring in. Even bridges were taboo: they might encourage colonists. When Father Lacombe, the saintly voyageur priest, finally had one built at the St. Albert Oblate mission near Fort Edmonton, the Governor himself tried to have it destroyed. At that time it was the only bridge in all of Rupert’s Land.

James Young, the Galt
M.P
., in his reminiscences of those days, recalled that “even the most eminent Canadians were deceived by these representations. For example, up to the time of Confederation, Sir George Cartier strongly opposed its acquisition by this country. The Prime Minister himself, at that time, had no idea of the value of the North West from an agricultural, commercial or manufacturing point of view.”

As late as March, 1865, Macdonald had written to Edward Watkin
that “the country is of no present value to Canada. We have unoccupied land enough to absorb the immigration for many years, and the opening up of the Saskatchewan would do to Canada what the prairie lands are doing now – drain away our youth and strength.”

George Grant, the Halifax preacher, himself a strong advocate of a transcontinental nation, collected, in 1868, a sum of three thousand dollars to alleviate the sufferings of the Red River settlers during the disastrous grasshopper plague of that year. The remoteness of the region struck home to him. “I could have collected the money quite as easily and the givers would have given quite as intelligently, had the sufferers been in Central Abyssinia,” he recalled.

Historically, Montreal had dominated the North West through control of the fur trade; but in the mid fifties, Toronto moved to seize the initiative from its metropolitan rival. The lack of good land was one reason why Toronto’s eyes turned westward; the last block of wild land was auctioned off in western Ontario in 1855. The completion of the Northern Railway to Collingwood on Georgian Bay in the same year was another; as the woodburners puffed into the wilderness, members of the Toronto business community – Allan Macdonell was typical – began to glimpse a new prosperity based on the opening of a trade and transportation route to the Red River and the eventual settlement of the prairie lands.

The leading Toronto expansionist was George Brown of the
Globe
, who had been interested in the North West since 1847 and had referred to it in his maiden speech in the legislature in 1851. In the summer of 1856, at the height of the railway-building spree, Brown launched a campaign designed to educate his readers to the potential of the North West and to make the Hudson’s Bay Company, who controlled it, into the villain of the piece; it was no accident that his brother, Gordon, had an interest in a company planning a line of steamboats on the Lakes. The Browns had the support of the Toronto Board of Trade, which, after a fiery meeting in December, 1856 (addressed by the unquenchable Macdonell), petitioned the government to investigate the Hudson’s Bay Company’s title to the North West. The following year Brown rammed through a plank at the Reform convention in Toronto demanding the incorporation of the Company’s territories into Canada.

It was this Toronto agitation that led to the government-sponsored exploration of the North West in 1857 and the appointment the same year by the British House of Commons of a Select Committee to
examine the whole question of the Hudson’s Bay territories in North America. Twelve years later the company ceded it all to Canada.

There is irony in the attitudes towards western expansion in the years before Confederation. The Brownite Liberals and the Toronto merchants and promoters had set their sights on far horizons beyond the prairies. “It is my fervent aspiration and belief,” Brown said in a speech in Belleville in 1858, “that some here tonight may live to see the day when the British-American flag shall proudly wave from Labrador to Vancouver Island, and from our own Niagara to the shores of Hudson Bay.” On the other hand, the Montrealers and the Conservatives, including Macdonald himself, looked eastward; they were far more concerned with federating the Atlantic provinces with the two Canadas. Yet it was Montreal, in the end, which captured the prize of the Pacific railway, Macdonald who became the advocate of precipitate western expansion and the Liberals, under Alexander Mackenzie (with Brown as his mentor), who opposed it.

Macdonald’s indifference to the North West continued until 1869 when the Red River uprising inflamed the nation and launched the tragic odyssey of Louis Riel. No other figure in Canada’s frontier past has so fascinated historians and writers, not to mention playwrights and even librettists. Villain or hero, martyr or madman – perhaps all four combined – Riel dominates the story of the opening of the prairies.

When he set up his independent state in the heart of North America he was just twenty-five years old, a swarthy figure with a drooping moustache and a shock of curly hair. Some scores of literary scalpels have since attempted the dissection of that perplexing personality. All agree that he was a solitary man with few confidants outside of his priest and his mother. All agree that his Roman Catholic religion – the narrow, ultramontane version absorbed during his college years in Montreal and at his mother’s knee (she saw visions and heard the voice of God) – was a dominant force in shaping him; at the end of his life it was interwoven into his madness. The evidence shows that he was a passionate man with a quick temper and a love of popular adulation who liked to get his own way and who could be violent when crossed; it also shows that he preferred non-violence and on more than one occasion practised it to his own detriment. He could be as compassionate as he was pious but, as everyone knows, he was hanged for a crime which some called murder and others, execution. He was, by turns, politically pragmatic – the murder-execution was more pragmatic than vengeful – and mystically idealistic. A champion who was prepared to sacrifice himself for his people, he was also capable of taking a bribe (to quit the country) in 1871 and of asking for another (to abandon his people and his cause) in 1885. It is small wonder that it took a century before a monument was raised to him in the province he helped to found.

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