The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (11 page)

It must have been a stimulating two days. Both Van Horne and Hill were insatiably curious. Hobbies with them became obsessions. Hill had made himself one of the continent’s leading experts on coal. Van Horne was an amateur geologist who constantly chipped away at rock cuts in his search for new fossils, nine of which carry to this day the descriptive suffix “Van Hornei.” Once, in Alton, Illinois, he had been tantalized for several weeks by the spectacle of a fine trilobite embedded in a slab sidewalk until, unable to resist the impulse, he had smashed at the pavement with his hammer and borne the trophy away.

Of the two, Van Horne was the broader in his interests. Hill usually made his curiosity work for him in a business sense; transportation, fuel, forwarding attracted him. But Van Horne indulged his varied fancies for the sheer love of it. He was a first-rate gardener (roses were his specialty); he was a caricaturist; he was a conjuror; he was a mind reader; he was a violinist; he was a practical joker; he was a gourmet; he was a marathon poker player.

He was also the more sybaritic of the two. Both Hill and Van Horne were furious smokers but the latter’s long Havana cigars were to become such a trademark that a brand was named after him, his likeness on every band. All his appetites appeared to be gargantuan. He ate prodigiously and was known as a man who fed his workmen generously. He could sit up all night winning at poker and go to work the following morning without showing a trace of fatigue. He liked his cognac, his whiskey, and his fine French vintages, but he did not tolerate drunkenness in himself or others. Inebriates were fired out of hand. So were slackers, dunces, cravens, cowards, slowpokes, and labour organizers. Van Horne did not suffer laziness, stupidity, inefficiency, or revolt.

He was probably appalled by what he found between Winnipeg and Thunder Bay. The vast muskegs were bad enough; they had swallowed thousands of tons of gravel, miles of track, and even, on occasion, entire locomotives. But the black ridges of the Canadian Shield, rolling on for mile after mile through a land as desolate as the moon, were worse. Later Van Horne was to describe a section of this desert east of Fort William, as “200 miles of engineering impossibilities.”

It may be that, at this juncture, he shared Hill’s belief that it would be madness to try to push a railroad across the Shield, when the country south of the lake was easy of access and more arable. Did he actually damn the Lake Superior route, as Hill wanted him to? William Pearce, the land commissioner, believed that he did. “I have no doubt he carried out what he was asked to do,” he wrote in a memoir years later. But Van Horne at the time was not a committed officer of the company, nor had he yet fallen under the spell of George Stephen.

Events, however, were moving rapidly. The pressure was on him to leave his job in Milwaukee and take over the Canadian railway. It was an enormous risk. His prospects south of the border were as bright as those of any rising young railway executive in the country. He could, almost certainly, have had the pick of half a dozen sinecures; yet he chose the
CPR
. Certainly the salary that Hill was dangling before him was attractive, but it was not really the money that turned William Cornelius Van Horne into a Canadian. The Canadian Pacific Railway company was launched on a breath-taking gamble. The line had been diverted south of the Yellow Head Pass. The steel was creeping across the prairie like an arrow pointed at the successive bulwarks of the Rockies and the Selkirks. At that moment, no one knew exactly how the rails were to penetrate those two mountain series or, indeed, if they could get through the Selkirks at all. The railway’s future depended on that eccentric little wisp of a surveyor,
Major Rogers, who, all that summer, had been clambering over the naked peaks looking for a notch in the rampart. Few Canadian engineers believed he would find what he was seeking, but Van Horne, the poker player, had talked to Rogers. The gamble, the challenge, the adventure, the desire “to make things grow and put new places on the map” were too much for a man of his temperament to resist.

Just twelve days after Van Horne returned to St. Paul with Hill, the first rumours appeared in the press announcing his imminent departure from the Milwaukee road. A day later a second rumour in Winnipeg named him the new general manager of the
CPR
. The following day, October 25, Alpheus Stickney announced he would retire from the post of general superintendent at the end of the year. He had, he insisted, only consented to hold the position temporarily until the company could find someone else to fill it; as it was, he had remained longer than he intended.

Van Horne’s appointment was confirmed on November 1. He paid a second visit to Winnipeg on November 11 and arrived to stay on New Year’s Eve, 1881. He began work on January 2, 1882, in the
CPR
offices in the new Bank of Montreal building. By that time the astonishing real estate boom, which swept across all of western Canada from the Red River to Fort Edmonton and electrified most of the continent, was at its height. On the very day that Van Horne arrived to take up residence, the
Free Press
carried a description of Winnipeg as seen through the eyes of a Dr. Gouinlock of Seaforth, Ontario:

“The bustle and stir can only compare to Wall St., New York. The sidewalks are thronged from morning to night by shrewd anxious looking men, hurrying hither and thither, and intent only on their own business and speculations while the streets are crowded with vehicles of every description.”

The smell of money was in the air. Expensive sea otter coats “for New Year’s calls” were being advertised along with costly oil paintings “from the brush of Canada’s greatest painter, W. L. Jodson.” Stickney’s employees had little trouble raising a thousand dollars among themselves to pay for a handsome silver service as a departing gift for the retiring superintendent. For the past several months, ever since the founding of Brandon, the people of Manitoba had seemed to be going stark, raving mad over real estate. When Van Horne arrived the insanity had reached a kind of crescendo. It would continued unabated until the snows melted and it was snuffed out by the angry floods of spring.

*
After the line was shortened, the figure was eighteen hundred miles.

Chapter Two

1
The great Winnipeg boom

2
Fool’s paradise

3
Towns cannot live of themselves’

4
The bubble bursts

1
The great Winnipeg boom

Van Horne’s first official act, on assuming office, was to place a small advertisement in the Winnipeg newspapers cautioning the public against buying lots at prospective stations along the line until he had officially announced their locations. All but five sites, he pointed out, were still temporary. Future townsites would be chosen by the company and by the company alone, “without regard to any private interest whatever.”

This clear warning to real estate speculators that they could expect no aid or comfort from the
CPR
fell largely on deaf ears. The little ad was almost lost in an ocean of screaming type, trumpeting unbelievable bargains in lots on townsites many of which were non-existent and in “cities” that could scarcely be found by the most diligent explorer. Such ads had fattened Winnipeg’s three dailies, the
Free Press, Times
, and
Sun
, for all of the latter half of 1881; they would continue to dominate the press for most of the first half of 1882. “
MAKE MONEY
!” the advertising shrieked.
“GET WEALTHY!” “GOLDEN CHANCES! GOLDEN SPECULATIONS!” “MILLIONS IN IT!”

The boom had been launched the previous June with the opening sale of lots in Brandon. By January, the value of those lots had tripled, the town had been sold seven or eight times over, and the price was said to be rising at a rate of one hundred dollars per lot per week. In March, lots on Brandon’s main street were selling at $140 a front foot. In Portage la Prairie the price was $230 a front foot. In Winnipeg, on Main Street the price rose as high as two thousand dollars a front foot for choice locations. This meant that real estate in Winnipeg was more expensive than it was in Chicago. An idea of the inflated values of that spring may be gained from a study of modern real estate prices in the same city. By 1970, real estate at the corner of Portage and Main was again worth two thousand dollars a front foot; but in 1882 the dollar value was worth at least four or five times its 1970 value. In short, the cost of land in Winnipeg was never higher than when the city was in its infancy.

The town was said to have been surveyed into city lots for ten miles – enough real estate to support a population of half a million. In St. Boniface, across the river, the value of land had quadrupled in three months. In three years, farm land in the vicinity had soared from twelve to one hundred dollars an acre. By April, when the boom began to decline, it was estimated that fifteen million acres of land had changed hands. To eastern ears this was little short of miraculous. In all of southwestern Ontario,
which had a population seventeen times that of Manitoba, there were only eleven million acres of land.

Winnipeg, with a population of some sixteen thousand, supported no fewer than three hundred real estate dealers. Its population had doubled in a year, its assessment had tripled. Buildings were popping up like toadstools; the air was thick with sawdust; along Main Street, half-finished buildings echoed to the sound of mallet and chisel. Accommodation was at such a premium that the smallest building – a storey-and-a-half structure, thirty feet by thirty – could rent for five thousand dollars a year before it was completed. A new courthouse, a new government house, and a new legislative building were all being erected. In 1881, more than two millions had been poured into building improvements. In 1882, the figure was expected to exceed five millions.

“Winnipeg … looks as if it had been laid out by a man in delirium tremens,” the
Globe’s
reporter on the scene told his Ontario readers. “The result is that the business portion of the city must be along the line of the old Indian trail now known as Main Street … the frontage on Main

Street will be as valuable as that of King Street.… Winnipeg will have half the population of Toronto in five years.…”

The news from Winnipeg caught the imagination of the continent. On March 7, the New York
Graphic
devoted two full pages to “the wondrous city of northwestern Canada.” “Think of $1000 a front foot!” exclaimed the Fargo
Argus
. “If you haven’t a lot in Manitoba you had better buy one at once,” cried the London, Ont.,
Herald
. “If you find yourself among a group of four or five citizens you will discover that you are quite ‘out of form’ unless you have something to relate about your speculation.” The Thunder Bay
Sentinel
editorialized that in Winnipeg there was “more money to the square inch than in any other city on the continent double or quadruple the size.”

The Toronto papers were crammed with advertisements from Winnipeg real estate men who had come east offering lots. “The woods are full of them,” the
World
reported. “You can’t turn a corner without seeing a Manitoba man with a tin case full of maps, St. James, St. John’s, St. Boniface and the everlasting Kildonan, anything from the heart of Winnipeg to its outer skin. There were five land brokers at the Queen’s and three at the Rossin yesterday.” The
Globe
, noting that auction rooms dealing exclusively in Manitoba lots were springing up in towns and cities all over Ontario, warned its readers of “the necessity of receiving with very heavy discount the rose-coloured descriptions and prognostications of interested agents.”

The eastern press covered the Manitoba boom as if it were a war, sending correspondents into the front lines. Some stayed to speculate themselves. “I have yet to hear of any one who has not made money,” the reporter for the St. Catharines
Journal
enthused to readers at the end of January. “The ‘race for wealth is a neck and neck one.’ Every one dips in. Some of the more godly wrestle with the Lord with the left hand and gamble in land with the other. I suppose they don’t let the left know what the right hand doeth.”

“Unsophisticated people from Ontario, when they land in Winnipeg go through several stages,” another correspondent reported. “First they deem you all, well, crazy. You all have lots and big figures on the brain. Presently they come a little to themselves.… They gradually begin to think there is something in it. You are not all quite demented.… [Then] they go the whole hog, and talk ‘lots’ at breakfast, dinner and supper, and all intervening times during weekdays, and on Sunday, doubtless meditate on what their ‘lot’ will be in the next world. The boom strikes them sooner or later.”

Stories of fortunes made and lost excited the nation. There was, for instance, the tale of one elderly man who owned a parcel of fifty-four acres of land on the outskirts of the city. In 1880 he had tried, unsuccessfully, to sell it for seven hundred dollars. He moved to Toronto and tried to sell it there, again without success. In 1881 he returned to Winnipeg, intending to pack up and leave the country. Soon after his arrival two strangers knocked on his door and asked if he wanted to sell his land. The old man was afraid to ask for seven hundred dollars for fear of driving them away. Seeing him hesitate the visitors jumped in with an offer of forty thousand dollars. The old man, concluding that he was in the presence of lunatics, shooed them off his property and then went to his lawyer with tears in his eyes and told him that a couple of scamps had been poking fun at him. It was some time before he could be convinced that the offer was genuine. By the time he had been persuaded to sell, the price had risen by another five thousand dollars.