The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (8 page)

Meanwhile the government of the united Canadas, prodded by George Brown and the Toronto expansionists, had mounted, in 1857,
a similar expedition under George Gladman, a retired Hudson’s Bay chief trader. Though he was the nominal head, the key men were Henry Youle Hind, a self-assured young professor of geology and chemistry from the University of Toronto, and Simon James Dawson, a sharp-featured civil engineer from Trois Rivières. The following year these two men, without Gladman, co-directed a second expedition made up of several parties which explored the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan river country.

In their separate reports, the Canadian explorers were, significantly, far more optimistic about an all-Canadian railway than the members of the British expedition. Gladman did not feel the difficulties to be “insuperable to Canadian energy and enterprise.” Hind thought Palliser too sweeping in his condemnation of the route across the Shield, which was “of vast importance to Canada.” Hind agreed with Palliser that the Great American Desert had its apex in the Far West but along the wooded valley of the North Saskatchewan and some of its tributaries there was “a broad strip of fertile country.” Hind wrote in his report that “it is a physical reality of the highest importance to the interest of British North America that this continuous belt can be settled and cultivated from a few miles west of the Lake of the Woods to the passes of the Rocky Mountains.” He was impressed enough by that statement to render it in capitals. In Hind’s view this was the route that any railway must take to span the great central plain. He borrowed the magic name of “Fertile Belt,” which Palliser had first used, and the name stuck. To the south was an “Arid Belt” – Palliser’s Triangle, in truth – which Hind, too, felt was unfit for human habitation.

Hind’s enthusiasm for the Fertile Belt was to have a profound effect on the railway planners; from that point on few gave serious consideration to taking the
CPR
farther to the south. Hind also helped promote the North West as a land of promise. “A great future lies before the valley of the Saskatchewan,” he declared. “It will become the granary of British Columbia, the vast pasture field by which the mining industry of the Rocky Mountains will be fed.”

In 1871, a decade after Hind wrote those words, his vision still belonged to the future. The land beyond the lakes had not changed greatly since he and Palliser explored it. To the men of the North West Canada remained a foreign country; their world ran north and south. In the Far West, the mail bore United States postage for it went out to civilization by way of Fort Benton, Montana, a situation that continued until the end of the decade. The Red River settlers’ nearest neighbours lived in Minnesota and the most travelled of the prairie trails was the one that ran from Fort Garry to the railhead at St. Cloud, where the settlers did their shopping.

There were, in point of fact, several “Wests,” each with its own social customs, way of life, traditions and loyalties. The truly wild West of the whiskey traders and wolf hunters in the foothills north of the Montana border bore no relation at all to the cultivated valley of the Selkirk settlers, eight hundred miles to the east. Even the mode of transportation was different: in the Far West bull trains took the place of Red River carts. The Métis buffalo hunters, who were beginning to quit the Red River country for the unsettled plains, had established Tail Creek town, the strangest of all communities, near the site of what is now Stettler, Alberta. Their West was as distinct from that of the Hudson’s Bay traders as Belgium is from Yugoslavia. Beyond the mountain wall lay other “Wests”: the lively camps of the Cariboo miners, complete with hurdy-gurdy girls and wide open saloons, and the fiercely British colony of Victoria with its pretty English gardens and its obligatory rituals of teatime and tiffin.

The whiskey traders lived in impregnable forts, which bore names like Robbers’ Roost, Whiskey Gap and Whoop-up. They fought the nomadic wolf hunters with rifles and cannon and, on one memorable occasion, with the threat of a lighted cigar held over an open barrel of gunpowder. Their folkways reflected the frontier culture of the American West, of which they were a spiritual extension. They carried six-shooters on their hips and they believed that the only good Indian was a dead one.

The traditions of the Selkirk settlers in Manitoba, founded sixty years before by the fifth Earl, and still the only agricultural community in all the North West, were Scottish. The feast days were Scottish, the worship was Scottish, the music was Scottish and the chief mode of transportation, the Red River cart, had a Scottish ancestor.

Tail Creek town, by 1874, was the capital of the western buffalo hunt. Its floating population sometimes reached two thousand. Here, in four hundred huts of sod and log, the language was French, the accent Canadian, the religion Catholic and the institutions peculiarly Métis. When the season was at its height, men and women danced all night to the unceasing screeching of violins which were passed from one exhausted fiddler to the next until the dawn broke. It was a
frenzy that contrasted sharply with the cool precision of the hunts themselves.

One hundred miles to the north lay the palisades of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Edmonton, a minor fief, feudal in its structure, sufficient unto itself. This was the chief centre for the sparse band of missionaries, traders and trappers who travelled the forested belt of the North Saskatchewan. South of that natural boundary lay the empty plains, dominated by the Indian tribes. As late as 1875 not a single white settler had yet ventured there.

To cross the North West, in the days before the railway, was a considerable feat attempted by only a hardy few. The chief form of transportation was by Red River cart, “scrub oak shaganappi and squeals,” as John McDougall, the pioneer Fort Edmonton trader called them. The carts, pulled by oxen, were adapted from Scottish vehicles – light boxes, each perched on a single axle with wheels six feet high. There was one difference: they contained not a single nail nor, indeed, a scrap of iron. Instead, tough strands of buffalo hide – the all-purpose “shaganappi” – were used. The axles could not be greased because the thick prairie dust would quickly immobilize the carts; as a result the wheels emitted an infernal screeching, “the North West fiddle,” as some pioneers dubbed it.

With the clouds of yellow prairie dust that were raised in their wake, the brigades of carts were made visible and audible for miles. Jean d’Artigue, a Frenchman who spent six years in the North West during the seventies, wrote that the sound had to be heard to be really understood: “A den of wild beasts cannot be compared with its hideousness. Combine all the discordant sounds ever heard in Ontario and they cannot reproduce anything so horrid as a train of Red River carts. At each turn of the wheel they run up and down all the notes of the scale without sounding distinctly any note or giving one harmonious sound.”

The carts generally travelled in brigades, some of which were as long as railway trains. The most memorable, and surely the loudest, was the one organized in 1855 by Norman Kittson, the St. Paul trader. It contained five hundred carts and took one month to reach the Minnesota capital from Fort Garry.

The carts left deep ruts in the soft prairie turf, so deep that the wagons tended to spread out, the right wheel of one cart travelling in the wake of the left wheel of the cart ahead; thus, the prairie trails could be as much as twenty carts wide, a phenomenon that helps
explain the broad streets of some of the pioneer towns. Portage Avenue in Winnipeg, the widest thoroughfare in Canada, is actually part of the old trail that led west to Portage la Prairie.

These trails furrowed the plains like the creases on a human palm. The well-rutted trail from the Red River settlement to Minnesota was paralleled in the Far West by a similar trail from Fort Edmonton to Fort Benton, Montana. Another trail ran southwest from the Red River settlement to Fort Benton. The most famous trail of all was the Carlton Trail, the aorta of the plains, winding for 1,160 miles from Fort Garry to the Yellow Head Pass in the Rockies by way of Fort Carlton and Fort Edmonton. It was slow going to travel that famous thoroughfare. It took a good forty days for an ox cart to negotiate the initial 479 miles to Fort Carlton – the halfway point – where the trail branched off for various destinations. But for half a century this was the broad highway used by every explorer, settler, trader or adventurer who set his sights for the West. When the railway was planned, almost everybody expected it to follow the general course of the Carlton Trail. This was not to be, but a later railway did just that: it forms part of the Canadian National system today.

The trails crossed the domain of the buffalo whose numbers, in the early seventies, were still legion. The open prairie was covered with their dried dung, which provided the only fuel for hundreds of miles; often, too, it was white with their bones – so many that, from a distance, it seemed as if a blizzard had covered the grass. As late as 1874, when the newly formed North West Mounted Police made their initial trek across the plains, their colonel estimated, within the range of his own vision, one million head stretching off to the horizon. And the sound of them! To the Earl of Southesk, “the deep, rolling voice of the mighty multitude came grandly on the air like the booming of a distant ocean.” This was a domain which few men ever saw; it could not exist for men. The railway would mark its finish.

For the few who had come, nature might be idyllic but life was harsh. They huddled in drafty cabins, ill-lit by candles made of grease or buffalo chips and heated by a single box stove. They slept on mattresses stuffed with prairie grasses, spread out on bunks fashioned from green lumber whipsawed by hand. The price of groceries was so astronomical that they were, often enough, obliged to do without. In the words of Mrs. David McDougall, who bore the first white child along the Saskatchewan in 1872, it was “meat, morning, noon and night until I could have cried for joy to have seen some fresh fruit.”

The savage blizzards of winter could fell the hardiest, as they did the respected prairie missionary George McDougall in 1876; in summer the clouds of mosquitoes could drive oxen mad. Then there were the great fires that could leave the land a blackened ruin and the grasshoppers that, in plague years, could eat everything, including the curtains on the windows, leaving no green or living sprout behind.

In the East such phenomena were not understood. By 1872, the trickle of settlers westward was reaching the thousands. The soldiers who had struggled over the portages at the time of the Métis uprising, returned with tales of the rich humus in the Red River Valley. Their colonel, Garnet Wolseley, had himself written in
Blackwoods
magazine that “as far as the eye can see, there is stretched out before you an ocean of grass, whose vast immensity grows upon you more and more the longer you gaze upon it.” It brought, he said “a feeling of indescribably buoyant freedom [that] seems to tingle through every nerve, making the old feel young again.… Upon the boundless prairies, with no traces of man in sight, nature looks so fresh and smiling that youth alone is in consonance with it.”

These were heady words but there were headier by far to come. Another dashing and romantic Irishman was back from the North West and very shortly the country would be agog with his descriptions of the region which he called “The Great Lone Land.”

6
Ocean to Ocean

William Francis Butler has been called hot-blooded and impulsive. He does not look it in his photographs; but then one must remember that the photographers of that era had to support their subjects on metal posing stands and hold their heads steady with neck clamps (later removed from the print by a retoucher) so that they could endure the time exposures necessitated by wet plate photography. The glazed eye and the frozen expression became the accepted portrait style. Long after a faster process was invented, people thought they had to maintain a corpse-like aspect, devoid of levity. Butler,
circa
1870, is a solemn, dome-headed young subaltern, the long oval of his face exaggerated by his close-cropped Souvaroff-style side whiskers and moustache. Only the eyes are alive.

But he
was
impulsive. He was stationed in England when he
learned that the Canadian government was mounting an expedition against Riel. The news could not have come at a more propitious moment. A remarkably intelligent officer, who had seen twelve years’ service in India, Burma and Canada (he had been there during the Fenian troubles of 1867), he ought to have been promoted long before. But in those days commissions were purchased, not earned, and Butler did not have the fifteen hundred pounds it would cost him to accept the proffered command of a company.

He was faced with a terrible dilemma: he could serve on as a junior officer, watching “the dull routine of barrack life grow duller,” or he could quit the service and face an equally cheerless existence as the governor of a penitentiary or the secretary of a London club – and worse still, “admit that the twelve best years of life had been a useless dream.” He was positively thirsting for adventure “no matter in what climate, or under what circumstances.” The Red River uprising saved him from an irksome choice. The news of the expeditionary force had scarcely reached England before Butler was off to the nearest telegraph office, dashing off the cheapest possible cable, consistent with politeness, to the expedition’s commander, Colonel Wolseley:
“Please remember me.”
Then, without waiting for an answer, he caught the first boat for North America.