The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (39 page)

When Hagan arrived at Emory in the spring of 1880, there was not much about a newspaper office that he had not mastered. He was prepared to write every word himself, set it all in type, buck the hand-press, and trudge up and down the line between Emory and Yale, a stout staff in his hand, drumming up business.

He had something of the look of a patriarch about him, as befitted a man who was to be the voice of three communities along the Onderdonk contract. His shoulders were stooped and his long hair and scanty beard were flecked with grey. A benevolent smile generally illuminated his otherwise lugubrious features for. like all small-town editors, he was a professional optimist; it was part of his job to be an unrelenting local booster. Apparently he was attracted by railway construction towns. Six years before he had launched another
Sentinel
at Thunder Bay, in the days when Prince Arthur’s Landing was fighting with Fort William to secure the
CPR
terminus. There he had been a firebrand, driving rivals to the wall and ferreting out corruption. A kind of restlessness had caused him to trek across half a continent and start a new paper in the heart of British Columbia.

Hagan got his type second-hand from the
British Colonist
in Victoria. His hand-press was also an ancient second-hand affair, soon replaced by an even more antique machine of French origin, brought to British Columbia, it was said, by a nobleman who had fled his native land after the Napoleonic
coup
of 1851. It had seen service at Victoria and then at Barkerville during the Cariboo gold-rush. The little paper – four pages in size and five columns wide – was published from a storey-and-a-half structure of rough frame on the hillside just above the Cariboo wagon road, immediately opposite the hard, shelving beach, unadorned by wharf or pier, that served as the main steamboat landing for Onderdonk’s supplies.

Looking out from his office at Emory, Hagan could see the sleek steamboats of the rival Irving and Moore lines unloading thousands of tons of steel rails and other railway materials. The rivalry did not last long. Following a memorable race with Captain Billy Moore in the summer of 1880, John Irving had the river to himself. The most colourful steamboater in British Columbia, Irving wagered that his new sternwheeler, the
William Irving
, could outpace Moore’s powerful
Western Slope
on the upriver run from New Westminster. Irving, who had a habit of hiring bands to play on the upper deck and dispensing free beer and whiskey on inaugural trips, won easily, setting a new record and creating a legend. Moore cut rates recklessly in order to beat his rival but succeeded only in bankrupting himself. Irving bought his boat for a song and built another one, the
Rithet
, the queen of the river, complete with electric lights, gilt and plush public rooms, and bunks that were advertised as having real bed springs.

This floating splendour was a symbol of the general ebullience felt by those who flocked to Emory and Yale in the early months of the Onderdonk operation. Yale, in Henry Cambie’s description, became “a curiosity in the matter of vice flaunting itself before the public along the main
streets.” The
Sentinel
proudly boasted that it had “more saloons to the acre than any place in the world,” a fact not to be wondered at, since there were three thousand railroad workers in the vicinity – Swedes, Hindus, Irishmen, French Canadians, and Chinese – “and it requires considerable lubrication to keep them in trim.” A timekeeper with the railway wrote that “everything at Yale ran wide open; the town was the scene of many a riotous night, and not a few men found death or injury as a consequence.” Hagan’s assistant, George Kennedy, always remembered his first sight of Yale. The paper was still being published at Emory when he and Hagan, with the latest edition strapped to their backs, poled and paddled a canoe through the ripples of the canyon the four miles to the neighbouring community.

“The town of Yale was
en fête
that day in a ‘wild and woolly’ sense, and the one long main ‘business’ street fronting the river, presented a scene and sounds, at once animated and grotesque – bizarre and risque. The shell like shacks of saloons, whereof every third building, nearly, was one, fairly buzzed and bulged like Brobdignagian [sic] wasps’ nests, whose inmates, in a continual state of flux, ever and anon hurled in and out, in two’s and three’s or tangled wrangling masses. Painted and bedizened women lent a garish color to the scene. On the hot and dusty road-side, or around timbers, rails, and other construction debris, men in advanced stages of intoxication rolled and fought or snored in bestial oblivion. One drunken duel assumed a gory and tragic guise, when one of the sweating, swearing gladiators started sawing at his antagonist’s neck with a jack knife. A tardy conservor of the peace, at this stage, separated the bloody belligerents, while a handy medicine man did a timely mending job on the lacerated connecting-piece of the chief victim.”

It was a brilliant scene that greeted the newcomers who poured into Yale on John Irving’s steamboats. Every shape of face and every kind of costume was observable along the main street. Long-haired Indians shuffled by carrying freshly speared salmon over their shoulders. Englishmen in bowlers and leather leggings rubbed shoulders with teamsters in broad hats; drillers, known as “cousin Joes,” axemen, tall Swedes, wiry Italians, turbaned Hindus, chattering coolies, and painted women in Paris fashions picked their way between bucking cayuses, mule teams, and yokes of oxen. The saloons, with names like the Rat Trap, Stiff’s Rest, and the Railroader’s Retreat, were packed with gamblers playing faro, poker, chuck-a-luck, and dice. Three-card monte, the confidence man’s game, was to be found everywhere. Against the incessant hammering of drills and the periodic crump of blasting powder, there was a cacophony of
foreground noises-saw, mallet, and hammer, mouthorgan, fiddle, and concertina, blending with the harsher music of rattling wheels. The air reeked with the mingled pungencies of fresh salmon, sawdust, black powder, and tobacco smoke. Yale, in short, was very like any raw frontier town in Wyoming, Montana, or Arizona save for one thing: all the saloons were shut tight on Sunday.

The Irish were everywhere. There were five local characters named Kelly, all unrelated. Big Mouth Kelly had the contract for burying dead Chinese. Kelly the Rake was a professional gambler who seemed to have been sent out by a casting office: he dressed totally in black from his wide sombrero and knotted silk tie to his leather leggings and narrow boots. Silent Kelly was so called because he played solitaire day after day. Molly Kelly ran a bawdy house. Long Kelly worked for her.

The Toronto
Mail
dispatched a man to examine the phenomenal community. He observed that “people don’t walk in Yale, they rush. Yale is no place for a gentleman of leisure. From ‘peep o’ day’ til long into the night the movement of men, horses and wagons along the one business street goes on scarcely with intermission. As we gaze at the hurrying throngs we wonder how on earth they all find beds or even space in which to lie down when they at last seek repose. It seems that the sides of the buildings might burst from a plethora of inmates.”

The
Mail’s
reporter had arrived on a payday and was able to report that “the ‘boys’ with the month’s wages burning holes in their pockets are making matters lively, keeping the constable’s hands full of business and giving the honorary J.P. (Mr. Deighton) no opportunity to attend to his legitimate calling.” Although prices were double and triple those in San Francisco, nobody seemed to grudge spending a dollar. Hagan continually warned his readers – one suspects in vain – of the dire consequences of spending all their wages the day they received them: “Those with robust constitutions may stand it for a time, but such abuse will undermine health and leave disease and want in train. Once the money is squandered very little care need be expected and … a premature death is the result.… Let those unfortunately addicted to strong drink take heed.…”

In spite of his pride in the quantity of Yale saloons, Hagan was enough of a newspaperman to understand the value of a crusade for prudence and morality. He called, equally vainly, for stricter liquor laws: “Public houses will, in the end, suffer by administering to depraved appetites. The law of the land should be upheld and common decency respected. Unless this is done the strong hand of authority must step forward and check natural depravity.”

A Mr. N. Shakespeare of the Independent Order of Templars came to town and delivered “a very interesting and instructive lecture on the question of total abstinence,” but since he was speaking to the converted in the Methodist Church this had little effect on the sporting fraternity. Liquor convictions were rare and explanations ingenious. A Mrs. Conklin, one of the busiest bootleggers in town, argued that she did not know she was breaking the law by serving liquor without a licence – she had been told, she said, that she could charge twenty-five cents for a cigar and throw in a free drink. Out along the line, the coolies were busily making and selling a concoction known as “Chinese gin,” while white vendors were peddling more familiar brands with little fear of apprehension.

“It is thought that far too many of those who should be zealous to keep order along the line have ‘a weakness for the cup’ and wink at selling to others while they themselves receive free drinks,” Hagan wrote. Later, the paper revealed that a series of camps along the line between fourteen and eighteen miles from Yale “had continuous scenes of drunkenness and riots.” At one camp, a bootlegger was able to operate within a hundred yards of the company boarding house, “where the men spent the last cent of their money for liquor, which was often carried in bottles into the … tents.” At Tunnel City, an enterprising Chinese operated a bootlegging establishment
inside
the company boarding house; he had rented a room next to the dining room and was dispensing liquor during mealtimes from a secret supply.

Hagan took an equally high moral attitude to the practice of working on the Lord’s Day. When the railway officials announced that there were “no Sundays in railway building times,” Hagan declared that nine-tenths of the railway work was unnecessary. The “violation of the laws of God and man” had wrecked the good name of the community, he insisted; travellers had formed “a low estimate of our people”; the practice of Sabbath desecration was having “a very demoralizing effect upon the Indian population,” not to mention the heathen Chinese. The editorial aroused the church-going members of the community to action: they mounted a public meeting demanding that all work cease on Sundays. To their protestations Onderdonk made one of his oblique replies: he would, he said, be very glad to co-operate in reducing work on the Lord’s Day, but unfortunately the steamboat schedule on the river made that impossible. Hagan, who knew a good campaign when he saw one, did not give up. In the summer of 1883 he was still hammering away: “…  the Sunday work system places an effectual bar to all religious influences. It debars every class from the worship of God, it starves the soul, hardens
the heart and destroys every germ of life in the whole being.”

It was a strange and rather artificial world the people of Yale inhabited. Almost all of them must have known in their hearts that it was a temporary existence, but no one voiced that feeling. Hagan wrote optimistically about the town’s great future from vague mining properties once the railroad had passed by; perhaps he actually believed it, for he was an enthusiastic amateur mineralogist who had amassed, from all over Canada, an impressive collection of specimens of which he was very proud. In his editorial columns there was a growing peevishness towards the Onderdonk company as the railway out of Yale neared completion. The feeling of optimism gave way to a kind of carping against established forces. On May 3, 1883, following a rumour that the roundhouse and machine shops were to be moved, Hagan called a meeting to discuss “this desertion of the town.” But a year later, he too was forced to desert.

The impermanence of the community was underlined by the shifting population and by the terrible fires that ravaged the business section, so that Yale in 1881 presented an entirely different appearance from the Yale of 1880, while the Yale of 1882 bore no physical resemblance to the Yale of 1881. Seen from the steamer, the chief characteristic of the community was its newness. The buildings were always new; so were the fences, the sidewalks, and the people. Yale had no opportunity to grow old.

In its brief, three-year joy-ride, Yale suffered two disastrous fires, both started by drunks. On July 27, 1880, a third of the town was burned to the ground, only a month after Hagan had warned the townspeople of the dangers of just such a conflagration: “Frame buildings … burn rapidly when fairly started. Yale is at present very much exposed; a spark has laid the principal parts of larger towns in ashes. Why not meet at once and organize, at least, a hose and bucket company …?”

Yale was no different from scores of similar frame settlements on the edges of civilization, from Fernie to Dawson; but ebullient communities rarely look to the future, being concerned with the pleasures and profits of the moment. Hagan was a Cassandra whom everyone ignored. It took a second fire in August of 1881, which reduced half the town to ashes in three hours, before there was any serious talk about gathering funds to buy a steam pumper. A grand ball was held, supposedly to symbolize the phoenix-like spirit of the community; unfortunately the weather turned cold and wet and only a handful of merrymakers turned up.

The newly acquired fire engine was of little use in the summer of 1883 in keeping a bush fire away from Michael Haney’s powder works, a mile and a half from town. The entire building blew up in a series of explosions so powerful that nearby houses were flattened and one woman was blown right out of the window of a neighbouring shack.

The news of such disasters took some time to leak to the outside world for, in spite of the human traffic, Yale existed in a kind of vacuum. There was no telegraph or telephone service; as a result, almost every item carried in the weekly
Sentinel
was a local one. Mail from the East came by way of San Francisco and took weeks to arrive. Much of the news from Europe was two months old. A simple journey from Victoria could be an exhausting undertaking, as Michael Hagan discovered in the fall of 1883.