The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (41 page)

The most singular settlement of all was Cannington Manor, founded forty miles south of Moosomin and named for a village in Somerset. Here a group of former English public school boys, led by a British officer, Captain E. M. Pierce, attempted to re-create the folkways of the aristocracy on the bald prairie. In its hey-day Cannington Manor boasted a twenty-two-room mansion, a private race track (complete with imported steeplechase jockeys), and a hunt club replete with authentic foxhounds and thoroughbred horses. The residents played cricket, rugger, and tennis, engaged in amateur theatricals, raised game chickens, and established a stock farm, a pork packing plant, two cheese factories, and a variety of village trades. But when the
CPR
branch line, which all had hoped for, was built ten miles to the south, Cannington Manor became a ghost town.

Few settlers arrived in the North West with the advantages of the residents of the Manor. Many were almost destitute. There exists a touching description of a scene at a wayside “refreshment station” where a man was seen to order lunch for himself and his small boy. He was given a chicken leg, three cakes, and a cup of weak tea, most of which he gave to his son. A three-course roast beef dinner could be had that year for a quarter at McConkey’s, Toronto’s finest restaurant, but the price of that
prairie snack came to fifty cents. It was all the immigrant had left and he was still two hundred miles from his destination.

The immigrants brought everything to the prairies from pet kittens to canaries. One enterprising arrival from Ontario, sensing the loneliness of the settler’s life, brought in a crate full of cats. They were snapped up at three dollars apiece. An early pioneer, Esther Goldsmith, always remembered the wild scene at the Brandon station when a birdcage was sucked from a woman’s hand in the scramble for the train. Another recalled her first real view of the prairie driving eighty-five miles north from Broadview with a canary in a cage on her lap. A typical menagerie was that brought to Moosomin in April 1883 by the Hislop family. It included two horses, four cows, three sheep, a little white sow, a dog, a cat, eleven hens, and a rooster.

“Freedom?” wrote William Oliver sardonically. “There never was such a thing; every acre was won by hard toil and the sweat of man.” The breaking up of the prairie sod was gruelling work. Oliver noted that the land was dotted with small rosebushes, whose interwoven roots added to the toughness of the turf. A man with a good team of oxen was lucky if he could till three-quarters of an acre in a day. It was a harsher life than many would-be pioneers had bargained for. Oliver, who was a carpenter, was asked by one well-to-do young Englishman to build him a home not far from Regina on two sections of land. It was a substantial house for those parts, complete with carpeting, window drapery, and furniture imported from England. When the job was finished, the settler’s wife arrived with two maids and a manservant and stared at the results with something approaching horror. “I cannot describe her arrival,” Oliver wrote. “It was pathetic in the extreme.” She lasted exactly six months and then left her husband who, having wasted a fortune, could not face returning to England and instead took a job with the Indian Department.

Few homes were as palatial as his. Most settlers counted themselves fortunate that first year if they could construct a hovel out of the hard-packed sod of the plains. A typical one, built near Regina in 1884, consisted of a big cellar dug out of the side of a hill over which were laid poles in the shape of a gable roof, the ends resting on the ground. On top of these was placed hay to the depth of a foot, and over the hay, huge squares of sod chinked with dried earth. At the ends of the gables were small poles, plastered together with a mortar of yellow clay and straw. A tiny window was cut in one end, a door in the other. The floor was a mixture of clay and straw and water, about six inches thick, tamped tightly to the ground. The inside walls and ceiling were plastered with
mud and then whitewashed. In such cave-like dwellings entire families existed winter after winter.

The central piece of furniture and the sole source of heat in all pioneer homes was the cookstove. Few settlers saw the inside of a general store more than once or twice a year. For most, a shopping trip meant an exhausting journey, fifty or a hundred miles by ox cart. Pork was the staple meat, when meat was available at all. Molasses did duty for sugar. Coffee was often synthetic, made from roasted barley, rye, or wheat – or even toast crumbs. Many a settler lived almost entirely on potatoes, bread, treacle, porridge, and rabbit stew. Under blizzard conditions more than one family went hungry. John Wilson of Saltcoats always remembered the winter of 1883 when, as a boy of seven, he and the other members of his family were reduced to a single slice of bread each three times a day. The snow was so deep they could not reach their nearest neighbour, six miles distant.

One of those who set down her memories of those times was Mrs. Hartford Davis, born May Clark, who at the age of nine arrived in Regina from England with her family on a soaking wet day in May, 1883. The Clarks had expected to find a “town” in the old country sense; they discovered, instead, a ragged cluster of tents rising from the muddy prairie, and when they were sent to a hotel, they found it was a tent too, with nothing between their bedroom and the next but a partition of stretched blankets.

Regina that spring was largely a city of women and children; most of the men were off on the prairie prospecting for homestead land. After several days, Septimus Clark located a suitable quarter section some thirteen miles to the northeast. The family – there were six of them at the time – packed all its belongings, including pigs and chickens and a bowie knife to ward off wild Indians, into a prairie schooner and set off across the hummocky plain behind two oxen, with a milk cow bringing up the rear.

They seemed totally unfitted for pioneer life. Mrs. Clark was sickly and frail; her husband, thin-faced and pale, had never driven a team before. The family, used to the gentle beauty of the English midlands, was appalled by the sweeping loneliness of the prairie. The homestead, when they finally located it (they camped at first, in ignorance, on the wrong piece of property), seemed as remote as a desert island. The far horizons enveloped them and in all that immense circle there was no sign of human kind. Off to the north was a vague smudge, which the children were told was a copse of trees. In three other directions the prairie rolled off to its
distant rendezvous with the sky, a green and tenantless carpet glistening with small ponds and sloughs.

The Clarks spent most of their first summer tilling a few acres of soil and trying to build a log house. It was a time of troubles. Septimus Clark overstrained himself putting up the log walls and was confined to his bed. When he recovered he found he did not know how to build the roof, doors, or windows. There was never quite enough to eat. The children were sometimes so hungry they tried to fill their stomachs with wild leaves and berries. Polly, the cow, refused to give milk. On one memorable night, both parents became lost on the open prairie and the children spent a terrifying twelve hours alone in the tent wondering if they would ever see them again.

Yet, in spite of it all, the family survived and thrived, improving in both health and spirits, the hard work, fresh air, and open life acting as a tonic on parents and children alike. They were driven back to the city that winter, but they returned again to prosper. Mrs. Davis’s memoirs are remarkably sunny, illuminated by sensuous little scenes that stayed with her for more than seventy years – the flash of sunlight on prairie ponds, for instance, and the sensation of awakening in the bright mornings and feeling “the delightful newness and strangeness of everything” – the spectacle of acres of tiger flowers spangling the plains in midsummer, the taste of wild strawberries and prairie plums and, perhaps above all, the feeling of being present at the beginning of a new life. That life may have been harsh but it was clearly invigorating: when Mrs. Davis published her memoirs at the age of eighty-one, four of the five Clark children were still alive to share them.

Government land, such as the Clarks’, was free up to a limit of a quarter section; the homesteader who worked it for three years was given title to it and could, in addition, pre-empt an adjoining quarter section; that is, he could take an option to purchase it in the future and thus prevent himself from being hemmed in. Those immigrants who bought
CPR
land in the forty-eight-mile belt along the railway paid five dollars an acre but were rebated all but $1.25 if they cropped three-quarters of it within four years; if they put up buildings as well, they did not need to crop more than a half.

“I do not expect each immigrant to cultivate at first anything like the whole of his allotment,” George Stephen wrote the editor of the London
Spectator
in the spring of 1883. “But it is easy for any man to till enough land of his own to supply his family with food, and then in the great amount of spare time he will have on his hands, to earn handsome wages,
either as a railway labourer, or by hiring himself out to work on some of the large wheat farms which are springing up with incredible rapidity throughout the Northwest Territory.”

Stephen was far more interested in filling up the land and providing future traffic for the railway than he was in making money from land sales outside the townsites. In London, his general emigration agent, Alexander Bcgg, had launched an advertising campaign worthy of a Barnum to boom the Canadian North West. He had folders advertising “free homes for all,” together with maps and pamphlets, translated into German, French, Dutch, Finnish, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Welsh, and Gaelic, which he distributed through thousands of agencies in Great Britain and more than two hundred centres in northern Europe. In six months he managed to circulate one million pieces of literature. The
CPR
, in addition, took extensive advertising in 167 British journals and 147 continental papers. In London, would-be emigrants were treated to ambitious displays of prairie products and soil samples in the company’s offices. Begg’s men moved about the British Isles, especially Scotland, nailing posters to the walls of railroad stations, hotels, and other public places and giving lectures illustrated by that new-fangled toy, the magic lantern.

By the autumn of 1883, Begg, surely one of the earliest public relations men in Canada, had worked out a way of distributing carefully selected news items to the British and Irish press; he compiled them himself from clippings sent over from the Montreal office. Five hundred journals received free service, all of it designed to paint the North West in the most glowing colours. In addition Begg’s staff kept a complete record of all publications in England, checking every item detrimental to Canada and counteracting it immediately. Begg published a small newsletter entitled
Along the Line
, dealing with news from western Canada; this he sent to all leading hotels and reading rooms. And he never failed to enter a stand of Canadian produce in the major exhibitions and agricultural fairs – thirty in all. He even gave away samples of Canadian grain.

In the North West, as the rails pushed steadily towards the mountains, new communities began to take shape. “These towns along the line west of Brandon are all the same,” the Fort Macleod
Gazette
reported. “See one, see all. There are some board houses, but most of them are board frames (rough) with a canvas roof.” Both Moose Jaw, with its “bare, freckled and sunburnt buildings” and Medicine Hat, another canvas town in a coulee of that name, were in this category. The former, in spite of its youth, already had three newspapers by 1883. The latter, by July, boasted six hotels, though most of them were mere tents sheltering half a dozen bunks.

This was Sam Steele’s territory. The remarkable Mounted Policeman had been named acting adjutant of the Fort Qu’Appelle district the previous year and placed in command of detachments along the line of
CPR
construction. As the rails made their way from the coulees of Saskatchewan to the final spike at Craigellachie, Steele would always be on hand to keep the peace. A huge man with a deep chest and a bristling moustache, Steele’s background was solidly military: one ancestor had fought with Wolfe at Quebec, another with Nelson at Trafalgar, a third with Wellington at Waterloo. At seventeen, Steele had joined the militia, serving against the Fenians in 1866 and taking part in General Garnet Wolsclcy’s Red River Expedition against Riel in 1870 (when he managed to hoist three-hundred-pound barrels of flour onto his massive shoulders to negotiate the portages of the Precambrian Shield). Steele was a perennial volunteer. When the first permanent force unit was formed in 1871, he rushed to the colours. When the North West Mounted Police were organized in 1873, he joined them immediately, becoming the force’s first sergeantmajor. He had a habit of being present when history was being made: he took part in the thousand-mile march to the Rockies in 1874; he bargained with Sitting Bull after the Custer affair; now he was presiding at the building of the first transcontinental railway; he would go on to become “the Lion of the Yukon” during the Klondike gold-rush. Steele was the prototype Mountie, one of several who gave the force its traditions and turned it into an international symbol of the Canadian frontier. Even his name had a ring of romance to it: “Steele of the Mounted.” James Oliver Cur-wood, the American novelist, borrowed the phrase for one of his books about the North.

Steele, in his capacity as police magistrate, worked without rest under primitive conditions. In Regina his courtroom had been a marquee, sixteen by fourteen feet. It was so cold that winter that the water froze in the bathtubs and the clerks had to keep their ink-bottles on the tops of stoves. Between Moose Jaw and Medicine Hat Steele had no courtroom at all. At Swift Current he tried cases while seated on a Red River cart, with planks stretched across it for a bench and the evidence taken down on the flap of his dispatch bag. As he worked he counted the trains roaring by to End of Track, loaded with ties, rails, and spikes. He could tell by the number how many miles were being laid that day.