The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (38 page)

In January, 1884, the
Sentinel
reported that “a number of railway Chinamen are in old buildings along Douglas Street (the Chinese quarter of Yale), some of them in very poor circumstances.” The paper reported that when somebody in a store on Front Street threw out some frozen potatoes one “poor old Chinaman” was seen to stand out in the cold picking out those few that were not decayed. “Persons that witnessed the scene thought the sight a pretty hard one.”

Not all of the Chinese who came to Canada with the hope of securing financial independence achieved their dream. The sudden completion of the Onderdonk contract made return to Asia impossible for thousands who had not been able to raise the price of passage home or the minor fortune of three hundred dollars that they had expected to amass. Although a Chinese labourer was paid about twenty-five dollars a month on the railway, it was difficult for him to save much more than forty dollars in any one year. First of all, he was not paid for the three months of winter when work was at a near standstill. Then there were expenses: for clothes, $130; for room rent, $24; for tools and fares, $10; for revenue and road taxes, $5; for religious fees, $5; for doctors and drugs, $3; for oil, light, water, and tobacco, $5. These typical expenses (given to a Royal Commission by an informed Chinese witness) left the average coolie with exactly forty-three dollars after a full year of toil on the railway. That scarcely covered his debt to the steamboat company.

At the peak of Onderdonk’s operation he had an estimated seven thousand Chinese in his employ. There must have been a considerable turnover. Between 1881 and 1884, a total of 10,387 coolies arrived from China together with an additional 4,313 from Pacific coast ports. (Not all, of course, were employed on the railway.) Most of the immigrants from American ports were probably able to return to the United States.
But the census figures of 1891 indicate that some five thousand coolies were unable to go back to Asia in the years following the completion of the Onderdonk contract.

Because the Chinese left home expecting to return in a few years, they made no attempt to learn the language or alter their mode of life. They clung to the simple coolie jacket, loose trousers, cloth slippers, and pigtail. They kept to their own ways, for they had no intention of losing their character in what they believed would be a temporary abode. Thus they were forever strangers in a foreign land and their continued presence gave to British Columbia a legacy of racial tension that was to endure for the best part of a century.

An incredible preamble to the province’s Chinese Regulation Act, enacted in 1884, conveys the mounting feeling against the coolies as the Onderdonk contracts neared completion. The Chinese, it says, “are not disposed to be governed by our laws; are dissimilar in habits and occupation from our people, evade the payment of taxes justly due to the Government; are governed by pestilential habits; are useless in instances of emergency; habitually desecrate graveyards by the removal of bodies therefrom and … are inclined to habits subversive of the comfort and well being of the community …”

The act was declared
ultra vires
the following year but other discriminatory laws followed until, by 1904, the head tax imposed on incoming Chinese had risen to a prohibitive five hundred dollars.

The railway workers who remained left few descendants (since they brought no women with them) and few, if any, memories. Some, however, returned to Kwang Tung and then came back to Canada with their families to settle permanently in British Columbia. One of whom there is some slight record was a farmer from Toyshan named Pon Git Cheng. One of his sons became a houseboy for Benjamin Tingley Rogers, the Vancouver sugar magnate. And one of
his
sons, Dr. George Pon of Toronto, was in 1971 a leading scientist in the employ of Atomic Energy of Canada. Dr. Pon was told something of his family background and was able to return to China to visit his grandfather’s village in Toyshan. But he never discovered exactly what it was his grandfather did on the railway-how he was hired, where he worked, or what he felt about the strange, raw land which was to become his home. Such details were not set down and so are lost forever – lost and forgotten, like the crumbling bones that lie in unmarked graves beneath the rock and the rubble high above the Fraser’s angry torrent.

3
Michael Haney to the rescue

Cheap Oriental labour undoubtedly saved Onderdonk from bankruptcy. Without the Chinese it is probable that he could not have completed his contract. He would have had enormous difficulty in finding enough manpower to do the job, and the competitive market would certainly have forced up the cost of white labour. Between 1880 and 1884, at their lower rate of pay, the coolies saved him between three and five million dollars. Their presence also acted as a damper on wage demands. During the mosquito season, whites and Indians fled the line, but the Chinese continued doggedly to work away. In 1884, when workmen near Port Moody struck and demanded a raise from $1.75 to $2.00 a day, they were instantly replaced by a gang of Chinese rushed down from Yale. (“Some of those most active in the anti-Chinese movement found themselves under the disagreeable necessity of ‘bossing’ these Mongolians,” the Port Moody
Gazette
reported.)

The Governor General believed that the presence of the Chinese was keeping costs down by at least twenty-five per cent, but even with this advantage Onderdonk’s operation was a marginal one. “I can’t imagine how Mr. Onderdonk has got anything out of his contract as yet,” His Excellency wrote to the Prime Minister in the fall of 1882. By 1883 Onderdonk was clearly in financial trouble. Marcus Smith, the government engineer who acted as Ottawa’s watchdog on the line, reported that winter that “it was painfully apparent to myself and even to outsiders that the men were not working to advantage nor were they being well directed.…” Smith had his staff estimate the amount of work being done per man and found – on the basis of cubic yards of earth moved – that the averages were very low. Unless some drastic changes were made, he felt, Onderdonk could not pull through without heavy loss.

By March, 1883, when Onderdonk in desperation hired Michael Haney, he was showing a book loss of two and a half million dollars on the work completed. Haney, who had made his reputation as a cost-cutter on Joseph Whitehead’s contract on the line out of Thunder Bay, was given the management of the entire Onderdonk contract from Port Moody to Kamloops.

The crusty Marcus Smith was of two minds about Haney. “He seems to fully realize the gravity of your position and is anxious to improve it,” he told Onderdonk, but he also warned that if Haney thought he could save the situation by evading or curtailing essential portions of the works, “he is bordering on dreamland.”

“I hope Mr. Haney has not caught the disease of the American mind to do something rapid or astounding,” Smith wrote. Haney, after all, was known as an impulsive Irishman, given to bold escapades that had left him with the reputation of being accident-prone. He did, however, know a good deal about saving money. Many of Onderdonk’s problems, he quickly discovered, had come about through slack organization, slow handling of materials, and delays in transportation. He immediately tightened up discipline and speeded deliveries. He introduced his invention, the wing plough, which unloaded gravel from a line of open cars at bewildering speed. He developed a large nitro-glycerine factory at Yale, and when it blew up, breaking every window in town, he rebuilt it. He travelled the line on horseback, using relays of steeds so that he could inspect as much as a hundred miles of track a day. In this way all of the work in progress came under his personal inspection twice each month.

One of the chief reasons for the delays, Haney discovered, was the inordinate amount of trestle bridging required. Timbers had to be shaped and cut at each bridging point, always at enormous cost. Haney streamlined the operation by building a mill capable of producing one hundred and fifty thousand board feet of lumber a day – every stick marked and numbered for its exact position on the bridge for which it was destined. By this method, the great trestles, prefabricated in advance, were sent forward ready for immediate erection. At the scene, an ingenious foreman named Dan McGillivray had worked out a method of sending each marked timber to its destination by means of a cable and pulley system stretched across the trestle.

Haney was a man who did everything with flair, a characteristic that helps explain why he was viewed as a kind of walking accident. On the Thunder Bay line he had survived at least four brushes with death. When the new governor general, Lord Lansdowne, came out to inspect the line shortly before its completion, Haney insisted on taking him on a wild ride to the coast. The viceregal train rattled along at seventy miles an hour, careering around the tight curves which the government had insisted upon in the interests of cutting costs. Lansdowne, a quiet man, scarcely uttered a word as Haney enthusiastically pointed out to him how well the track was laid. Finally, when they stopped at a small station to take on water, His Excellency spoke up:

“How far is it to Port Moody?”

Haney replied that it was another forty-eight miles.

“Will we be running as fast the balance of the way?”

Haney responded that he thought he could better the pace.

“I have a wife and family in Ottawa and I am rather anxious to see
them again,” the Governor General replied, “so if you are continuing that rate of travel, I think I will just stay here.” A chastened Haney brought the train crawling into Port Moody.

It was inevitable that Marcus Smith, the most irritable engineer in the service, would tangle with Haney, who was doing his best to cut corners in order to get the track-laying completed and so reduce the staggering costs of freight to the contracts on the upper river. Smith poured out his feelings in a letter to Onderdonk, charging Haney with using “supercilious language irritating to the engineers, and stating that the specifications & contract are mere matters of form without vital importance. That his
vast
experience and
high
standing are a sufficient guarantee that he will make a good railway in his own way.… It is evident that your chief superintendent has quite mistaken his position which is to carry out the works to the best of his ability under the
directions of the engineers
, and I shall take care that you are not asked to spend one dollar unnecessarily.…”

In spite of Smith’s watchfulness, Haney’s cost-cutting, and cheap coolie labour, Onderdonk’s financial problems continued. In the fall of 1883 he set off for Ottawa to lobby for a further subsidy for the unfinished line. In Victoria he ran into James Hartney, who had been cutting timber for him and who had not yet been paid. It says something for the state of Onderdonk’s finances that the railway builder, who had a continent-wide reputation for prompt payment, kept putting Hartney off. He was preparing to leave for San Francisco with his family on a Sunday evening, but just before the ship sailed, Hartney served him with a writ. Thus was the island community treated to the strange spectacle of the province’s biggest employer of labour being pulled from his bunk at two in the morning, hauled back to shore, and lodged in jail where he languished for two hours before his friends bailed him out.

4
The
Sentinel
of Yale

The optimism of frontier communities along the line of the railway in the 1880’s knew no bounds. The transitory aspect of railway building did not seem to impress itself on those who settled in the small towns, which boomed briefly and just as quickly faded. When it became clear that the Pacific railway was finally to be built and the details of the Onderdonk contract were made public, the price of lots rose swiftly in Emory, the steamboat landing at the head of the navigable section of the Fraser – a
town that had seen an earlier period of prosperity flare and fade during the gold rush of 1858.

Emory, the real estate ads announced, “cannot fail to become one of the most important and prosperous Cities on the Pacific slope.” Even before Andrew Onderdonk set foot on the Fraser’s banks, lots were auctioned off for as much as five hundred and fifty dollars apiece, demonstrating, according to the
British Colonist
, “a confidence in the future of Emory that is thoroughly justifiable.” The newspaper added that “it would be no matter of surprise to learn within the course of a few months that any one of the lucky speculators yesterday had bought himself suddenly rich.” The speculators included the pioneer merchant David Oppenheimer, who would one day be mayor of Vancouver, and the
Colonist’s
former editor, John Robson, proprietor of the New Westminster
Dominion Pacific Herald
(later renamed the
British Columbian)
and a future premier of the province. It was Robson and Oppenheimer who with the offer of a free lot induced a black Irishman named Michael Hagan to start a newspaper at Emory. “We expect by the time Emory is a city, to have an enlarged daily, issued by steam,” Hagan confidently announced in the first issue of the
Inland Sentinel
. But Emory was not destined to be a city. It soon became clear that the real centre of the Onderdonk operations would be at Yale. “Next summer will be a boom for Emory sure,” Hagan wrote wistfully in January, 1881. But in May the
Sentinel
itself moved its offices to Yale – a roaring, wide-open community which for the next three years was to be the railway centre of British Columbia. Then it too would fade as merchants, workers, and major institutions – once again including the
Sentinel
– packed up and moved to Kamloops.

Hagan belonged to that vanishing breed, the itinerant journeyman newspaper jack-of-all-trades. His memories went back to the journalistic days of the martyred Thomas D’Arcy McGee, who had once been his associate – though to the meticulous Hagan it was an unsatisfactory partnership, because McGee had a habit of putting subscription and advertising payments in his pocket and, in all innocence, forgetting about them.