The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (18 page)

Van Horne had been in office only one month and was still in Montreal
when he fired General Rosser, the courtly and popular chief engineer of the western division of the company. Long before he came to Canada, the new general manager had cultivated the reputation of being able to smoke out incompetence, dissent, and dishonesty in an almost supernatural fashion. A good deal of this sprang from the fact that he could read a telegraph key and thus listen in to the gossip and sometimes disgruntled small talk that clattered over the wires and into the railway offices through which he wandered. On one occasion he discovered by eavesdropping on a key that a group of trainmen had appropriated the cushions from a first-class passenger car and were making themselves comfortable in the baggage car playing poker. When Van Horne reached a station farther down the line, he shot off a message that the cushions were to be returned and that poker playing was not allowed on
CPR
time (he clearly did not include himself and his cronies). For all of their lives the men thus caught in the act were mystified as to how the general manager found them out.

But it required no such prescience to learn that Rosser was using inside knowledge of future railway locations to speculate in real estate. The
Globe
had published the fact the previous fall and Rosser himself apparently did not go to any great lengths to keep it a secret; he appeared to regard it as part of the compensation for the job.

In January, Van Horne came across a letter in which the General had revealed to a railway contractor, John Stewart, the exact location of the terminus of the
CPR’S
Pembina Mountain branch. This was valuable and privileged information. On February 1, Van Horne wired to Rosser that he had seen the letter and on account of his “unwarranted and unauthorized action on this and other matters” he was notifying him that his services were no longer required. (About the same time, Stewart, having acquired the townsite land, sold it to a syndicate which included several government officials.)

Rosser was not an easy man to dismiss. The wire had come at an extremely awkward time. He was about to leave for the western foothills on an ambitious twelve-hundred-mile reconnaissance, which had already received considerable publicity. In making this “difficult and hazardous journey,” Rosser told the newspapers, he and his assistant would be provided with Arctic outfits, such as rabbit-skin robes and Eskimo suits, “prepared to resist any eccentricity of the season and the high latitude.” They planned to cover forty-five miles a day, using husky dogs “with wolf blood in their veins” hitched Eskimo-fashion eight to a sled, each team pulling eight hundred pounds. The party intended to fight its way through the blizzards as far as Fort Walsh, the North West Mounted Police out
post near the Cypress Hills, and, en route, determine a satisfactory crossing of the Saskatchewan River.

This romantic Odyssey, which would have provided the chief engineer with priceless information about the future location of western townsites, was quashed by Van Horne’s blunt telegram. Rosser was forced to postpone his journey. He rushed to St. Paul where he planned to intercept Van Horne who was returning from Montreal. Meanwhile he denied the inevitable rumours. “There is no foundation for the report of my resignation,” he told the St. Paul
Pioneer Press
on February 9. “I have not resigned nor formally tendered my desire to do so. The fact is there has been a little misunderstanding, such as is liable to occur in business matters, and of such a character as to be hardly explainable or interesting to the general public.” The misunderstanding, Rosser said, had grown out of “land department matters.” He expected everything to be adjusted satisfactorily. Meanwhile his assistant had gone on with the dog teams; the General expected to catch up with him at Fort Qu’Appelle.

But matters could not be adjusted. In Van Horne, Rosser was up against an unyielding obstacle. The two met on February 10; Rosser asked the general manager to reconsider; Van Horne gave him a blunt No. He added that he was not disposed to do anything that would unnecessarily injure the reputation of the old cavalryman. On reaching Winnipeg, Rosser would be allowed to resign. Rosser did so on February 13, declaring that he did not care to conform to certain rules with regard to speculation laid down by the directors. He wanted his resignation to take effect on March 10. Again, Van Horne was blunt: he wanted him out immediately, with his desk cleared, that very day. Indeed, he had already replaced him temporarily with his wife’s cousin, Samuel B. Reed of Joliet, Illinois.

Rosser’s dismissal was followed shortly afterward by that of his entire engineering staff. On March 13, a fire destroyed the new Bank of Montreal building, in which the
CPR
had its offices. During the transfer of some of the engineering department’s documents to temporary quarters in the Knox Church it was discovered that some were missing. These included plans and profiles of the contemplated route of the railway west. Van Horne told Reed to find the leak, and if he could not, to fire the whole staff on the spot. At the same time, Reed laid an information against his predecessor, charging that Rosser, “by falsely pretending that he was acting for the
C.P.R.,”
had fraudulently obtained the profiles of the line extending all the way to Calgary.

In the end, the
CPR
dropped the case. When it came to court on June 1,
the company’s solicitors declined to appear and Rosser was immediately acquitted. That might have been the end of matters had Rosser not accidentally encountered Van Horne on a hot July evening in the Manitoba Club. Van Horne was no man to back away from any encounter – as a child in Joliet he had taken on every boy in school. In the
Sun’s
spirited account of the affair, “their slumbering anger broke out in words, and the words would have ended in more than blows had it not been for the interference of a couple of peacemakers.” Winnipeg, in fact, almost witnessed its only Western-style gunfight. Rosser and Van Horne both drew pistols, and a serious battle was averted only when “the better counsels of cooler heads prevailed, and the belligerents were separated before their passions were cooled in gore.”

It was probably this encounter that caused Rosser to sue the
CPR
on August 9 for one hundred thousand dollars. He was awarded, in October, twenty-six hundred dollars on the ground of malicious prosecution. The court held that the railway company, had it chosen to, could have abandoned the case well before it came to trial. The
CPR
had to pay up, but it took Rosser’s defection seriously enough to change slightly the route of the railway west, especially in the vicinity of the site of the new capital of the North West Territories, which would be called Regina.

Harry Armstrong, who was one of the engineers fired (and subsequently rehired) by the company, did not believe that Rosser was really at fault, since he had been told by Stickney that he might speculate in real estate. (The
Globe
estimated that Stickney and Rosser between them had made a total of $130,000 in speculation.) The real villain “who had been outwitting the company,” Armstrong insisted in his memoirs, was that most persistent of land sharks, Arthur Wellington Ross.

2
Five hundred miles of steel

When Van Horne met the
CPR
directors in Montreal, he was able to convince them that he could lay five hundred miles of track during the 1882 season. That was what Stephen wanted to hear: he had already told Macdonald that the company was planning to finish the railway in half the ten-year period allowed by the contract. It was, indeed, essential that the through line get into operation as swiftly as possible, since there would for many years be very little local traffic. The
CPR
would stand or fall on its transcontinental trade – cargoes such as silk, for example, that demanded
speedy dispatch. The Canadian road was far shorter than any United States transcontinental route – the company expected to have an enormous advantage in this area – but it could not turn a dollar of profit on its through line until the last spike was driven.

Van Horne’s announcement was greeted with considerable scepticism. It was, as Charles Drinkwater announced, a “feat unparalleled in Railway history.” During the previous season Stickney had been able to lay only one hundred and thirty miles of track. Van Horne seemed to be promising the impossible.

Back in Winnipeg in mid-February, 1882, with the Rosser nuisance disposed of, he gave no hint that he was embarked on anything remarkable. He told Secretan, who had surveyed four hundred miles of preliminary line as far as Moose Jaw Bone Creek, that he wanted “the shortest commercial line” between Winnipeg and the Pacific coast. He added that he would not only lay five hundred miles of track that summer but would also have trains running over it by fall. Secretan, a great, bulky Englishman with a waxed moustache took a rather lofty view towards his fellow humans. He ventured a modicum of doubt, whereupon Van Horne declared that nothing was impossible; all he wanted his engineers to do was to show him the road; if Secretan could not do that, then he would have his scalp.

The general manager did not care much for engineers, most of whom were inclined to be temperamental, jealous, and often overbearing. He resented, as Secretan noted, their professional interference; it clashed with his own dictatorship. “If I could only teach a section man to run a transit,” he once remarked, “I wouldn’t have a single damned engineer on the road.” Secretan himself (as his memoirs reveal) was as snobbish an engineer as ever took a level; but he admired Van Horne, “the most versatile man I have ever encountered.”

Secretan noticed that as Van Horne talked he had a habit of making sketches on blotting pads, “well worth framing,” which he tore up as fast as he drew them. All his life, since he had been old enough to handle a slate, the artist in Van Horne had struggled to be released; indeed, in another age and another climate – the Renaissance, perhaps – the artist might have won out over the hard-headed man of action. As a small boy, unable to afford paper, he had covered the whitewashed walls of his house with drawings. One of the most telling incidents in his biography is the story of how he fell so much in love with Hitchcock’s
Elementary Geology
that he determined to use his copyist’s skill to make it his own. Night after night by candlelight the determined child copied the book in ink onto
sheets of foolscap – copied every page, every note, and every picture right down to the index. It did great things for him, as he later admitted: “It taught me how much could be accomplished by application; it improved my handwriting; it taught me the construction of English sentences; and it helped my drawing materially. And I never had to refer to the book again.”

In later life, Van Horne the amateur painter attacked great canvases as he attacked the building of the railway – with huge brushes and considerable spontaneity; he believed that work was best done when it was done as rapidly as possible.

Not surprisingly, his art was meticulously literal. His drawings were so real that they could be, and sometimes were, mistaken for actual engravings by other artists. Once he managed to purloin a copy of
Harper’s Weekly
before it reached his mother. With great care, Van Horne transformed a series of portraits of American authors into bandits and did his work so well that they did not appear to have been altered. His mother complained to the mystified editor about his apparent policy of desecrating the images of great Americans. The baffled illustrator, Wyatt Eaton, when shown the same copy some years later was equally indignant. The issue became a collector’s item.

This was the puckish side of Van Horne’s nature. He could not resist a practical joke. Van Horne the artist left one school as a consequence of caricaturing the principal. Van Horne the young telegrapher lost his first job when he set up a ground plate that gave a mild shock to any man who stepped upon it, including the railway superintendent, who fired him. Van Horne the gardener could not resist planting skunk cabbage along the lot line of his neighbour, a clergyman.

He was thirty-one years old when he tampered so expertly with his mother’s copy of
Harper’s
. A colleague described him at the time (he was about to become president of the Southern Minnesota Railroad) as grave and thoughtful: “His constant manner was that of a person preoccupied with great affairs.” But behind that poker face – so useful to him in his swift climb to the top and in those all-night card games along the line of the
CPR
– lurked the curiosity, the high spirits, and the ingenuousness of a small boy. Thomas Shaughnessy in his valedictory of Van Horne said truly that “he possessed the splendid simplicity of grown up boyhood to the end.”

Secretan had reason to like and admire the general manager, for Van Horne saved him from a Spartan existence on the prairies that year. Secretan was a man who loved his food; indeed, he often supplemented the
Standard
CPR
fare with game shot in the field. Before setting off on his western location survey he prepared what he considered to be a reasonably modest list of supplies. But the company’s new chief purchasing officer, a former American army man named Burdick, cut the requirements in half.

Secretan made sure Van Horne heard about the change. The general manager was indignant. Van Horne worshipped food as only a man can who has known what it is to go hungry; as a boy in a family left destitute by the father’s sudden death from cholera he had had bread but seldom butter and sometimes only hominy for three meals a day. In his American railroading days it was understood by all that he would tolerate no eating house along the line unless the food was the very best available. He often tested the quality personally. It was his habit, when travelling, to wire ahead for roast chicken dinners to be set out for two. When he arrived he would eat both of them himself. Once, when asked to sketch his personal coat of arms, he produced a drawing of “A Dinner Horn, Pendant, upon a Kitchen Door.”