The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (26 page)

In the election of 1882, Macdonald found himself caught between the Canadian Pacific and the Grand Trunk. He confidently expected that his railway policy would win him the election; the dream of a Pacific railway had been a Conservative project from the start and now that the dream was coming true in such spectacular fashion, it could be seen as a political asset. On the other hand, Macdonald needed Grand Trunk support, especially in Ontario where he faced a hard fight. The older railway’s political muscle in that province was considerable. Among other things it told its employees exactly how they must vote, and, according to Stephen, Hickson’s control of the provincial government of Oliver Mowat amounted to a scandal Stephen tended to see sinister plots everywhere where the
CPR
was concerned, but Macdonald agreed with him. “Mowat
has sold himself to the
GTR
and passes everything they ask,” he told Stephen. “That must be put down – and we
must
defeat Mowat & Co.…” It was the first of a series of continuing hints, at first gentle and then progressively blunter, that the
CPR
must become politically involved, as the Grand Trunk was.

With Hickson, the Prime Minister did not hedge. He openly solicited his political assistance. “I have, as you know, uniformly backed the
GTR
since 1854 and won’t change my course now,” he reassured him in February, 1882, as the campaign started to warm up. In May he was writing to ask him to “put your shoulder to the wheel and help us … in the elections.” Four days later he was naming specific candidates he wanted the Grand Trunk to back: “All your people must vote for Robert Hay. He is
my
candidate and will be elected. He will follow my lead and do as I ask him.” Hay, a furniture manufacturer running for Toronto Centre, was, among other things, a director of the Credit Valley Railway, which the C
PR
controlled.

Hickson appeared happy to comply: he put a private car at Macdonald’s disposal for four weeks of the campaign; but he was determined to exact a price for his support. On the very eve of the election he sent a letter to Macdonald by special messenger and asked for a reply by telegraph. In it he asked the Prime Minister to put a stop to the
CPR’S
invasion of Grand Trunk territory in Ontario: “Mr. Stephen and his friends … strong in the conviction that they are more powerful than the government or the Grand Trunk Company, continue to pursue a course of irritation and injury.” Specifically, Hickson was talking about the Ontario-Quebec line. The government, he was convinced, “have the power to put an end to these wanton attacks on British investments and could do so if they wished.… Now is the time to call a halt if the foolish course being pursued is to be abandoned.”

Hickson was careful to add: “I believe you have never had cause to complain of any action of mine in political matters. I do not intend you have so as long as I remain in my present position.”

Here was a delicate matter for a party leader to face on election eve. Macdonald, who liked to seek refuge in delay, wired Hickson that he could not reply by telegraph but would write by the next mail – “meanwhile you may depend on my exertions to conciliate matters.” In a later wire he was a little more specific: “Government not committed to any adverse line you may depend upon what I can possibly do personally to meet your views.” With that fuzzy promise Hickson had to be content. Later Macdonald told him that he was overrating the government’s influence with the
CPR;
“they are quite independent of us.” Hickson scarcely believed that convenient remark. Macdonald, he declared, had created a power which believed itself to be stronger than either the government or the rival railway. “The result will be serious trouble in a good many quarters in the near future.” The Grand Trunk was moving into the Liberal camp.

Meanwhile, Hickson was attacking on a second front. The Grand Trunk’s chief rival in southwestern Ontario was the Great Western, which operated a network of lines between Toronto, London, Hamilton, and Windsor. Hickson, by aggressive competitive tactics, brought the Great Western to its knees and forced an amalgamation in August, 1882, outbidding the
CPR
which also wanted to acquire the line. Hickson now controlled every rail approach to the United States. If he linked up with the Northern Pacific at Duluth he would shortly be part of a transcontinental through line that could undercut the Canadian Pacific.

Hickson struck again in Quebec. The
CPR
now owned half of the Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa and Occidental Railway – the section between Montreal and Ottawa. Hickson, in a swift coup, bought the other half – the “North Shore Line” – to prevent the
CPR
from getting into Quebec City. The story at the time was that the Canadian Pacific, which was negotiating for the line with Louis-Adélard Sénécal, the railway’s superintendent, had tried to force down the asking price by getting the bank to call a demand note for a quarter of a million dollars on a day’s notice. The angry Sénécal sold out to the Grand Trunk.

In London, William Abbott, a Grand Trunk shareholder and its former secretary who had helped negotiate the merger with the Great Western, kept up a propaganda barrage aimed directly at the
CPR
. “The attacks here on the country as a place for settlers to go are abominable,” Stephen reported to Macdonald in January, 1883, “and everything that the
G.T.R
. people in Canada can find in any wretched sheet against the country, is sent over here for republication by Abbott the notorious. The worst feature for us in Canada is that there is hardly a newspaper in the whole country which is in a position to say a word against the
G.T.R
. no matter what it may say or do against the country – without losing Hickson’s advertising.… I will yet pay off Hickson and his road for the unfair weapons they have used against me.”

The insidious Abbott, according to Stephen, was saying aloud that Hickson had such complete control of the press and of the Canadian parliament that he could do anything he liked. (In Canada, Hickson was doing his best to damage the
CPR
by making the same charges against Stephen.) The “enemy,” as Stephen was now calling them – “because no
other word expresses their opposition” – was producing a stream of pamphlets declaring that the Canadian Pacific could never pay its investors but must inevitably lose money. The pamphlets harped on the foolhardiness of crossing the country north of Lake Superior. It was “a perfect blank, even on the maps of Canada. All that is known of the region is that it would be impossible to construct this one section for the whole cash subsidy provided by the Canadian Government for the entire scheme.” A letter planted in the
Money Market Review
and signed “Experience,” declared that “no more hopeless project than that line, or a more baseless speculation than its land grant … was ever started to enveigle the British public.” Stephen decided to fight back with a weekly paper of his own, “avowedly devoted to Canadian interests”; and thus the
Canada Gazette
was born. Its editor was Thomas Skinner, chairman of the Canada North-West Land Company.

Before the new paper was published, the Grand Trunk held its semiannual meeting in London and here its president, Sir Henry Tyler, made what Stephen called “an official declaration of war against all Canadian Pacific interests.” (“My policy of contemptuous silence has bothered them very much,” Stephen proudly confided to the Prime Minister.) Tyler attacked the
CPR
for invading Grand Trunk territory and entering “upon schemes of aggression.” Abbott, the pamphleteer, charged that the railway was shirking its commitments north of Lake Superior. There were threats about the purse-strings of England being closed to the Canadian Pacific.

Stephen, “our somewhat impulsive friend,” as Rose called him, was temperamentally incapable of taking this lying down; he abandoned his policy of contemptuous silence and fired off a circular letter to Grand Trunk shareholders replying to Tyler’s charges and declaring he and his colleagues had done “all in their power to discredit and damage the
C.P.R
. Company in the eyes of the British public.”

Sir John Rose attempted, and almost achieved, a conciliation between the two antagonistic presidents. On April 6, 1883, Tyler and Stephen were persuaded to sit down together and hammer out an agreement which, in effect, reserved all traffic to the Pacific for the
CPR
but gave the Grand Trunk Ontario. The purpose was “to avoid competition and work together in all respects for mutual benefit.” Both men came reluctantly to the bargaining table. Rose’s velvet glove hid an iron hand, which he revealed to Stephen when he told him that “he had got to the limit of financial support.” His own firm, Morton, Rose and Company, had reached the limit of the load it would assume, and Stephen could not expect any more aid on the continent or in New York. As for Tyler, he, too, was “completely
under stock exchange influences, and they saw what a serious blow these new arrangements could be if promoted in a hostile spirit.”

The rapprochement did not last long. In Montreal the
CPR’S
directors could not stomach what they conceived to be surrender in eastern Canada. Van Horne was one who thought it sheer madness to abandon the projected line between Toronto and Montreal. The board vetoed the arrangement. “I consider the course of Mr. Stephen and his friends as extremely foolish,” Hickson remarked, “for the simple reason that they have gone out of their way to bring about a collision with the Grand Trunk and those interested in it.”

The
GTR
stepped up its propaganda campaign while the Canadian Pacific moved to acquire more lines in Ontario and Quebec. Van Horne said bluntly that he would match Hickson foot for foot if necessary.

But in the matter of passenger and freight rates, business was still business and profits were still profits. Much of Van Horne’s invective against Hickson in the years that followed was confined to charges that Grand Trunk personnel were breaking rate-fixing agreements which the two companies, in spite of their public enmity, had secretly entered into in eastern Canada. Such rate cuts, in Van Horne’s words, were “simply idiotic.” He gave orders that any
CPR
agent who dropped rates below those established by the two companies should be subject to instant dismissal – and he wanted the same understanding from his rival.

Had the newspapers and general public, who watched the battle of the two giants like spectators at a prize fight, been privy to some of the general manager’s private correspondence with his adversary, they might have viewed the contest with more cynicism.

“I fully agree with what you say about the desirability of friendly and frank intercourse between the officers of the two companies,” Van Horne wrote to Hickson on one occasion. “…  we are earnestly in favor of the maintenance of all rates and agreements and nothing that will secure them will be left undone on our part.… I have again instructed our traffic officers not to fail on any occasion to meet those of your company in the most friendly spirit and to join in any movement calculated to secure net earnings rather than gross tonnage.”

And again: “…  I will be very glad to see the Passenger Agents of the two Roads following the practice of the Freight Agents and meeting at regular intervals for the purpose of discussing and adjusting their differences and I have indicated to the officers of our Passenger Department my wish that they should do so. I do not think there ought to be any difficulty in absolutely maintaining rates between the two Companies.…”

In areas where direct revenue was not concerned, Van Horne continued
to do battle with Hickson. When the Grand Trunk played down the
CPR’S
route on its own folders, Van Horne instructed Alexander Begg, the company’s general emigration agent, to strike back with a map of his own. He told Begg to show the
GTR’S
Toronto-Montreal road as a faint line and to drop out their Toronto-Chicago line entirely. In the matter of cartography, the general manager was quite prepared to smite his rivals; but free enterprise in the nineteenth century did not extend to the costly competition of a rate war.

*
When Sinclair Lewis, the American novelist, visited Regina he was taken for a drive through the Qu’AppeIle Valley and, impressed by its beauty, asked why the capital had not been placed there instead of on an arid plain. “Political skulduggery, likely,” Lewis commented.

Chapter Four

1
“Hell’s Bells Rogers”

2
On the Great Divide

3
The Major finds his pass

4
The Prairie Gopher

5
“The loneliness of savage mountains”

1
“Hell’s Bells Rogers”

One of Jim Hill’s several executive strengths was an ability – it verged at times on the uncanny – to settle upon the right man for the right job at the right moment. His choices, however, were not always obvious ones. Certainly his decision to employ a former Indian fighter to find a practicable railway route through the Rockies and Selkirks must have seemed, at the time, to be totally outrageous. For one thing, Major A. B. Rogers had never seen a mountain; he was a prairie surveyor, used to the rolling plains of the American midwest. Yet here was Hill, sending him off to British Columbia to explore the most awesome peaks in the cordilleran spine of the continent and expecting him to succeed where dozens of more experienced engineers had failed! For another thing, Rogers was perhaps the most heartily disliked man in his profession. Few were prepared to work under him for more than one season and many quit his service in disgust or fury before the season’s end. He fed his workmen wretchedly, drove them mercilessly, and insulted them continually. There were some who considered him an out-and-out sadist; all agreed that he was, to put it mildly, eccentric. Admittedly, he was honest; he would have scorned to engage in the kind of real estate profiteering that had intrigued General Rosser. He pared corporate expenses with a fealty that almost amounted to fanaticism. He was also ambitious, not for money but for fame; and it was this quality that clearly attracted Hill when he called him into his office in February, 1881, and proceeded, with great shrewdness, to dangle before him a chance at immortality.