The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (22 page)

R. K. Kernighan was introduced to one track-laying gang by a section boss who identified some of them: “Do you see that person yonder,
that man can read and write Greek and is one of the most profound scholars on the continent; that man next him was once one of the foremost surgeons in Montreal, and that man next him was at one time the beloved pastor of one of the largest congregations in Chicago.”

The general run of railroad navvies was far rougher. One eastern reporter found them “ill-bred and offensive in their manners, applying the most obscene epithets to every passerby, jostling with their heavy teams every traveller they meet upon the trail, and in all respects making themselves as disagreeable as they know how to be. In their personal habits they are much more uncleanly than the poorest and most degraded of Indians, and in all respects they fairly represent the class from which they were drawn, that is, the scum and offscourings of the filthiest slums of Chicago and other western cities.”

They were paid between $2.00 and $2.50 a day, which were good wages for the era, and often enough after they had made a little money they quit. Of the twenty-eight men who left Winnipeg in the spring in Beecham Trotter’s telegraph gang, only half a dozen remained by autumn. Swedes who had learned how to lay track in the old country were highly prized. One Broadview pioneer claimed that “if they were given enough liquor they could lay two or three miles of tracks a day.” Liquor, being prohibited by law in the North West, was hard but not impossible to get; it existed in private caches all along the line. “If I were not a total abstinence man,” the Khan wrote in his
Sun
column, “I could get more whiskey in Flat Creek this blessed minute than would float this pork barrel on which I pen these immortal lines from here to Hong Kong.” No law, the Khan believed, would succeed in driving the whiskey peddlers away. Not even the threat of execution or torture with red-hot irons would do it. “Inside of ten hours a daredevil would be selling budge on the sly.” The liquor itself was described as “a mixture of blue ruin, chain lightning, strychnine, the curse of God and old rye.”

The
Sun
recorded one raid in which Major J. M. Walsh, the Mounted Policeman who had literally kicked Sitting Bull in the pants, descended on Flat Creek with a posse of recruits and smashed forty gallon casks of whiskey and eighty bottles of cognac:

“While all this was going on in Reid’s tent a perfect panic took possession of the town. The other whiskey sellers could be seen running in every direction with kegs of whiskey under their arms, throwing them into wells, ditches and holes on the prairie, men cursed and swore, women shrieked, and to make the panic worse rifles and revolvers were discharged into the air.”

As autumn approached, the pace of the railway quickened still more.
At the end of August one of the superbly drilled crews of Donald Grant, the seven-foot-tall track boss, managed to lay four and a half miles of steel in a single day. Next day they beat their own record and laid five miles. It was all horribly expensive, as a worried Stephen reported to Macdonald in September: “This so called prairie section is not a prairie at all in the sense that the Red River valley is a prairie. The country west of Portage la Prairie is broken rolling country, and the amount of work on our road bed is more than double what it would have been had it run along the valley. In short the road … is costing us a great deal more than the subsidy and a great deal more than we expected. We are just about even with the world at the moment, but to reach this position, we have had to find 5 million dollars from our resources.
To enable me to make up my quota I had to sell my Montreal Bank stock.”

There were those who thought that Van Horne “seemed to spend money like a whole navy of drunken sailors.” Actually he counted every dollar. In the interests of both speed and economy he allowed steep grades and tight curves, which he planned to eliminate once the line was operating. In the rolling country to which Stephen referred, the road, in places, was like a switchback; it remained that way until the end of the century.

The contractors did not reach Van Horne’s goal of five hundred miles; the spring floods had frustrated his ambition. By the end of the season, however, they had laid four hundred and seventeen miles of completed railroad, built twenty-eight miles of siding, and graded another eighteen miles for the start of the following season. In addition, Van Horne had pushed the Southwestern branch line of the
CPR
in Manitoba a hundred miles and so could say that, in one way or another, he had achieved the aggregate he sought.

As far as the general public was concerned, he had wrought a miracle. Only the waspish
Globe
refused to be impressed. The paper, which had earlier attacked the company for the lethargy of its progress, now hit out at it for the opposite reason:

“The public has nothing to gain by this breakneck speed.… If … a southerly pass had been found across the Rocky Mountains, there might be some object in making haste across the plains. But from present appearances, the entire Prairie section will be crossed long before it is positively known whether or not there is a better crossing than the Yellowhead Pass.… We are satisfied that the public good would have been better served if the Company had built about 200 miles only of its plains line every year, and had put some of its superfluous energy upon the Eastern Section.…”

There was a modicum of truth in the
Globe’s
carping. In the heart of the Rocky Mountains that summer, Major A. B. Rogers was still plagued with doubts about the feasibility of the Kicking Horse Pass as a railway route. Equally serious was the whole question of the barrier of the Selkirks. The plain truth was that Van Horne and his men had been driving steel all summer at record speed, straight at that double wall of mountains, without really being sure of how they were going to breach it.

4
Edgar Dewdney’s new capital

The Honourable Edgar Dewdney, Lieutenant-Governor of the North West Territories and Indian Commissioner to boot, was a handsome giant of a man. With his fringed buckskin jacket and his flaring mutton chop whiskers (which won for him the Indian name of “Whitebeard”), he made an imposing figure as he stalked about accompanied by his two gigantic Newfoundland dogs, the gift of the Marquis of Lorne. It was not difficult to spot Dewdney at a distance – he stood “like Saul, head and shoulders above most men.” In the late spring of 1882 there were a good many who wanted to keep him in view: The Lieutenant-Governor had been charged with staking out the site for the new capital of the Territories. No more profitable parcel of real estate could be imagined.

Battleford had been the original capital, but Battleford was no longer on the route of the
CPR
. The location of the railway would determine the site of Battleford’s successor – clearly the most important city between the Red River and the Bow. The owners of the railway would have the final word in its selection. Though Dewdney had what amounted to Macdonald’s carte blanche to choose the site, it would be the
CPR’S
directors who would have to confirm it.

For all of the winter of 1881–82, Winnipeg speculators, knowing that the seat of government was about to be changed, had been dispatching platoons of men to squat on every promising location. It is fairly clear that General Rosser himself had his eye on land profits in the vicinity of the new capital; that was one reason why the preliminary survey of the line in Saskatchewan was altered and the location moved about six miles to the south.

A likely townsite along that preliminary survey had been at the crossing of the Wascana or Pile o’ Bones Creek. Wascana is a corruption of a Cree word, “Oskana,” meaning “bones.” Along its banks, the bleached bones of thousands of buffalo lay in heaps. The remains of an old
“pound,” or corral, lay on one side of the stream; it was into this enclosure that the Indians had driven the bison to be slaughtered. For years, on the opposite side, there had been a heap of bones six feet high and forty feet across, laid out with considerable artistry and used, apparently, as a signal station for a native sentry to announce the approach of the herd. Captain John Palliser in 1857 mentioned the presence of these bones, though he did not think much of the surrounding country. There appeared to be little water and there was no fuel at all.

Because water was so scarce, the river bank seemed a probable site not only to the first surveyors but also to the squatters who followed in their wake or even, on occasion, preceded them. There was a well-wooded area at one point, not far from the pile of buffalo bones; it was here that the speculators squatted and it was here that the original line crossed the creek. When the railway location was moved half a dozen miles to the south, across an absolutely treeless plain, the land sharks were left out in the cold.

When the relocation took place on May 13, 1882, there were only three settlers at the spot where the line crossed Pile o’ Bones Creek. One of these, Thomas Sinclair Gore, was himself a former Dominion land surveyor. He had come out from Ontario earlier in the spring and, perhaps because of his calling, had not waited for good weather before striking west. He trekked two hundred miles from the end of steel, reaching Pile o’ Bones Creek on April 27. Gore’s practised eye told him exactly where the new survey might be expected to cross: there was an awkward loop in the northern location that added considerable distance with no observable gain. The new site was “by far the best I have seen in the North West.”

Most speculators and settlers, however – and indeed most Canadians familiar with the country – felt that the only possible site for a capital city of the plains lay a few miles to the northeast near Fort Qu’Appelle in the broad, wooded valley of the Qu’Appelle River, perhaps the loveliest spot on all that sere steppe. Here were the necessary requirements for a townsite: an established community, sweet water and plenty of it, sheltering hills, good drainage, and timber for fuel, lumber, and shade.

The railway, however, was designed to skirt Fort Qu’Appelle. The reason given was that the steep banks of the valley would make construction difficult and costly. An equally strong motive was undoubtedly the company’s policy of bypassing established communities in the interests of greater land profits. After all, if the capital had been established in the valley, it would not have been difficult to run a sixteen-mile spur into the
Community. But the environs of Fort Qu’Appelle were crawling with squatters.

There was a second factor to be considered, although it was mere rumour at the time. Governor Dewdney had an interest in the land surrounding Pile o’ Bones crossing. He and several friends, most of them leading politicians and public officials, had formed at least two syndicates earlier that year and in great secrecy purchased some twenty-eight sections of Hudson’s Bay Company lands – the only land for sale at the time – along the future route of the
CPR
. One of the syndicates, in which Dewdney had a one-eleventh interest, owned four hundred and eighty acres on the very spot that Dewdney selected as the site of the future capital.

Dewdney was a prime mover in much of this land speculation. Something of the atmosphere of the times is revealed, unwittingly, in a letter he wrote to the Prime Minister explaining how one of the Hudson’s Bay land sales was made. He knew of a Hudson’s Bay section “he was sure would be valuable” but, rather than go himself to see Charles Brydges, the Company’s land commissioner, about buying the acreage, sent a friend named Eden, a newly arrived merchant from England who was looking for speculative properties. As he told Eden, “if I go to Mr. Brydges to get them [the properties] he will think I have some good reason in securing them & I shall have to take in all his friends but if you go he will probably let you have them without a word.…”

Dewdney of course did have good reason, since he was in a position to know and to chart the future course of the North West. In the case of the property on Pile o’ Bones Creek he did have to let in some of Brydges’s associates, including his son Frederick and John Balsillie, long a high official of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s land department. Again the property was bought in the name of a trustee, with the ever-present Arthur Wellington Ross, the Winnipeg politician and realtor, handling the details and taking a share. It was to the advantage of the members to have their names kept secret, for most were well-known and several could have been accused of a conflict of interest. Frederick White, the comptroller of the Mounted Police, was one; the
NWMP
barracks would likely be built very close to the property in question. Alexander Galt’s son Elliott, who worked under Dewdney as an Indian commissioner, was another. There were, altogether, five politicians and a future Manitoba judge, J. F. Bain, involved. (Another of Dewdney’s syndicates included Alexander Campbell, the Prime Minister’s former law partner and leader of the Senate.)

Dewdney was himself a surveyor, a Devonshire Englishman who had come out to the Crown Colony of British Columbia in 1859 as a young man of twenty-four. He had helped to survey the town of New Westminster and to lay out the trails and roads between the sparsely settled communities of the early gold-fields. He was also a loyal Conservative who, as a Member of Parliament, had supported Sir John A. Macdonald during and after the Pacific Scandal. In his new post he was reaping the rewards of that loyalty.

He was suffering from rheumatism that May, hobbling about on a stick as he examined the banks of Pile o’ Bones Creek. By the middle of the month, he was certain enough of the site to reveal it to Tom Gore. “Well, Gore, you have hit it off pretty nicely,” were his first words to his fellow-surveyor. “It is just about here that the capital of the North West Territories is likely to be located.”

William White arrived a few days later. He had learned from a knowledgeable friend in Winnipeg that the
CPR
had fired Rosser for speculating in land and had, as a result, changed the location of the line at the creek crossing. White and five others immediately decided to make a dash for the new townsite. They bought a complete farming outfit, a yoke of oxen, tents, wagons, bob-sleighs, and provisions, took the train as far as Brandon and, in mid-April, pushed off into the snows, which were then two feet deep on the trails. The going was so bad that it required six oxen to haul their outfit over one hill near Fort Ellice. The ruts on the Carlton Trail were so deep, the ponds and sloughs so treacherous, that they rarely covered more than a dozen miles in a day. One day it took them seven hours to move two miles. When they reached Pile o’ Bones Creek, they almost drowned when the overloaded ferry sank in midstream; White was saved only when a friend applied artificial respiration. On May 17 they were caught by a shrieking blizzard that imprisoned them for three nights, doubled up in their buffalo robes to keep from freezing. But, like so many who would follow, they persevered and on May 20 reached their mecca.