The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (50 page)

Harry Armstrong, making camp in the summer of 1884, pulled a heap of green boughs over his fire to keep it going and discovered, to his horror, that they had concealed a half box of explosives, the side of which was already ablaze. His first impulse was to flee, but fearing that he would not get far enough before the box exploded, he picked it up, raced
to the lake, flung it in, and escaped. John Macoun had a similar close call that same year while walking the line near Rossport with his son. He arrived at one cutting to discover that the men were heading for a shelter because of the impending blast. Macoun’s fleeter-footed boy gained cover, but the botanist was caught on a plank crossing a stream and deluged by a shower of stones.

Macoun wrote that his journey down the unfinished line of the railway that year was “indescribable, as we were tormented by flies, and our path was not strewn with roses.” Yet there was a kind of perverse grandeur about the country through which the steel was being driven. The dark, contorted rocks – riven at times as if by a giant cleaver and tinted each summer with the bright accents of lily, rose, and buttercup – and the sullen little lakes wearing their yellow garlands of spatterdock had a beauty that was peculiarly Canadian; it existed nowhere else in the world. Superintendent John Egan found himsef waxing poetical about it to the press: “The scenery is sublime in its very wildness; it is magnificently grand; God’s own handiwork stands out boldly every furlong you proceed. The ravines and streams are numerous and all is picturesqueness itself. As to the character of the work, it will remain an everlasting monument to the builders.”

To the men on the job – throats choked with the dust of shattered rocks, ears ringing with dynamite blasts, arms aching from swinging sledges or toting rails, skin smarting and itching from a hundred insect bites, nostrils assailed by a dozen stenches from horse manure to human sweat – the scenery was only a nuisance to be moved when it got in the way. The summers were bad enough but the winters were especially hard; in the flat light of December, the whole world took on a dun colour, and the cold wind blowing off the great frozen inland sea sliced through the thickest garments.

Even festive days had an air of gloom about them. One navvy described Christmas Day, 1883, at End of Track out of Port Arthur:

“Somehow Christmas Day fell flat. Here and there a group were playing cards for ten cent points. Some few melancholy-looking Englishmen were writing letters. I was smoking and cursing my stars for not being at home in the family group. I wondered how many men were in the same mood. Instead of having a good time, that Christmas afternoon was gloomy. Some of us turned it into Sunday and began darning socks and mitts. By and by a fair-haired boy from the old sod approached with a sigh: ‘Where were you, old fellow, this time last year?’

“ ‘Never mind,’ I answered, ‘Where were you?’ ”

The boy replied that he was driving his girl behind a spanking team to see his family. Then he blurted out the rest of the story: “It was an old tale. Someone drew a herring across his track, a fit of jealousy, etc., etc., which ended in his leaving home, and now he was sitting in the gloom beside a rough coon like me dressed only as a bushman or a railroader can dress and pouring into my ears a long love story.”

There was an interruption. A Finn tried to hang his shirt and socks on the navvy’s peg by the stove. A bitter argument followed, and the Finn withdrew.

“The evening was as melancholy as the afternoon. Our room was almost deserted.… A few of us … lingered around the stove, and Ned, who had no heart to ramble, finished his love story. No friendly whiskey peddler came around that night.… We brewed some punch out of hot water, sugar and pain-killer, but still we were a gloomy party, and all was stale, flat and unprofitable.

“At last, Ned, just as we were going to bed, rummaged in his box and brought forth a small packet of photographs, mostly of the opposite sex. One was remarkably good looking – at least we thought so then, for many of us had not seen a woman for months. As the photograph went round, it fell at last into the hands of a grim old railroader. He had not seen a petticoat for ages, he said. We watched his face as he eyed the fair damsel, and it was a picture. We ceased talking and awaited his comment, which was long in coming. ‘Here,’ he said, handing back the photograph at arm’s length and spitting a quid of pent-up tobacco to the other end of the room. ‘Here, take it back.’ He straightened himself and with an expression I shall not soon forget he said to himself, ‘My God – but women are fine things.’

“I thought I heard the old sinner sigh as he went off to his bunk.

“Christmas Day was over and many of us lay awake later than usual that night and were not sorry to be at work on the dump the next day.”

Because of the isolation, conditions in the camps north of Lake Superior were undoubtedly the worst of any along the line of the railway. The track-laying gangs on the prairies enjoyed the relative comfort of the boarding cars. Together with the mountain crews, they were supplied directly by rail from Winnipeg. But the navvies who drove steel across the Shield lived like men on another planet in gloomy and airless bunkhouses, which were little better than log dungeons.

The traditional Canadian bunkhouse was a low-walled building, sixty feet long and thirty feet wide, built of spruce logs chinked with moss and plastered with clay or lime. Into these hastily constructed, temporary
structures, often badly situated and inadequately drained, between sixty and eighty men were crammed. They slept in verminous blankets on beds of hay in double-decker bunks that extended around three sides of the building. The atmosphere was oppressive and the ventilation meagre. The faint light that entered from two small windows at either gable was rarely sufficient for reading or writing. The nights were fetid with steam from the wet clothes that habitually hung over the central stove. In the summer, the air was rancid with smoke from burning straw and rags set afire to drive off the maddening hordes of mosquitoes and black flies. The board floor was generally filthy and the roof often leaked. Baths and plumbing were unknown; men washed and laundered or not as they wished. Medical attention was minimal.

Although Van Horne believed in feeding his men well, the conditions north of Superior, especially in the winter, made for a monotonous and unhealthy menu. The only real delicacy was freshly baked bread; otherwise the staples were salt pork, corned beef, molasses, beans, potatoes, oatmeal, and tea, varied by the occasional carcass of frozen beef. There was little if any fresh or green food to lighten this excessively coarse and heavy diet which, when it did not lead to actual scurvy, produced in most men a feeling of sluggishness and lassitude.

In spite of these circumstances it was not usually difficult to get cheap labour. Economic conditions were such that, in the summer of 1883, ordinary shovel men were being paid $1.50 for a ten-hour day along Lake Superior and in some instances as little as $ 1.00 a day, which was the going rate in the eastern cities. (“Mr. Ross is trying to reach the $1 without a strike,” Van Horne informed John Egan in June. “It may take him some weeks to do it.”) Any attempt at labour organization brought instant dismissal; Van Horne had a reputation as a union buster. In the rare instances when strikes did occur, they were quickly broken.

When Van Horne was told that James Ross had posted notices at Duluth offering two dollars a day for ordinary labour in the Rockies, he dispatched a crisp note pointing out that the offer had “caused great demoralization among John Ross’s men on the Lake Superior section.” Van Horne felt that labour was so plentiful the mountain superintendent ought to be able to keep the rate down to $1.75: the difference would mean a saving of between one and two million dollars for the
CPR
.

As the winter of 1883–84 approached, however, the company discovered that, in spite of considerable unemployment, prospective navvies were not keen to be locked up for an entire season on the Lake Superior line. Wages rose again to $1.75 a day for shovel men and $2.00 for rock
men. Board, however, was increased to four dollars a week; as Van Horne put it, “the difference in wages … will not amount to much on account of the difference in board but it looks much better to the men.”

The cost of board was only one of several factors that made the pay seem better than it was. Men were paid only for the days on which they worked; if the weather, sickness, or construction delays kept them in the bunkhouses, they received no wages. Eight wet days a month – a not uncommon situation – could reduce a navvy’s net pay, after board was deducted, to four dollars a week. In addition he had the cost of his clothing and gear, much of it purchased at company stores at inflated prices, and sometimes his meals and transportation en route to the site.

The company held him in thrall because the company controlled both the shelter and the transport. If he complained, he could be fired out of hand. If he wanted to quit, he had to continue to pay board until the company was ready to transport him to civilization; then he had to pay his fare out as well. Under such a system it was difficult for a man to accumulate much money.

Yet the conditions of the wage earners were far superior to those of the men who worked for themselves on small subcontracts, grading short strips of right of way with shovel and wheelbarrow, or clearing the line of brush and stumps for fixed prices, arrived at by hard bargaining. Such work might involve two men working as partners, or a group of a dozen or more. These subcontracts had one apparent advantage: the men were their own bosses. They could work or not as they wanted. The advantage was generally illusory; most of the self-employed men worked much longer hours under worse conditions than the wage earners, yet made no more money. The real beneficiaries were the larger contractors, who got the job done at minimal cost.

Living arrangements for those employed on small subcontracts were especially squalid. Harry Armstrong came upon one such camp of French Canadians that he thought was the worst he had ever seen. It was a log cabin without windows or floor. The only light was supplied by a sort of candle made from a tin cup filled with grease with a rag as a wick. The men ate at a long, hewn plank table. In one corner stood a cookstove. In another was a straw mattress occupied by an injured man waiting for a doctor. There was nothing in the way of a floor except black mud, kept thawed by the heat of the stove. To bridge the mud there were several scattered poles across which the men were supposed to pick their way; if they slipped off the poles they sank into the mud to their ankles. Armstrong had dropped in looking for something to eat. Dinner was
over, “but I was welcome to best they had, all the refuse from table had been scraped off after each meal which didn’t improve the mud.”

Many of the French Canadians lived this way, in traditional shanties built by themselves without chimneys – merely a hole in the roof from which the smoke of the “camboose” fire was supposed to escape. No wonder that a reporter, moving up the line, noted that “the men look badly smoke dried.”

The camps of the Italian immigrants – who suffered badly from scurvy – were even worse. One group, which took a contract clearing the line, lived during the winter in a kind of root cellar, dome-shaped and without windows. To enter, they crawled through an opening in the bottom, and there they lay most of the time, playing cards, but going out into the snow when the sun shone to do a little work. Once a week they bought a sack of flour and a little tea on credit. By spring they had managed to clear half an acre; the proceeds may or may not have paid for the winter’s provisions.

These hovels were in sharp contrast to the quarters of the major contractors, who lived in relative luxury. One of them, James Winston, in the Nepigon area, had a home complete with Brussels carpet and a grand piano. Another, one Erickson, near Port Caldwell, had his own cow and was able to dispense milk punches to his guests on festive occasions. The contractors and the senior engineers enjoyed another privilege: they had their wives and children with them and so escaped the aching loneliness that settled like a pall over the men in the bunkhouses.

Under such conditions the navvies turned inevitably to alcohol. By special act, the government had banned the sale of liquor along the line of the railway as far as the Manitoba border. Here as everywhere else in Canada, government agents fought a running battle with whiskey peddlers. In May, 1881, the Thunder Bay
Sentinel
estimated that no fewer than eight hundred gallons of spirits were sold every month to the twenty-five hundred people living between Whitemouth River and Lake Wabigoon. The price was fifteen dollars a gallon. (In Toronto a gallon of whiskey sold for as little as fifty cents.) The methods used to deceive the police were as ingenious as those employed on the prairies and led to much greater lawlessness.

“If the slightest laxity should be shown in the enforcement of the law, there would be no possibility of living among these men,” a
CPR
official declared in May, 1884. The North West Mounted Police did not patrol the Ontario section of the line; the job was left to the local constabulary, some of whom were plainly corrupt. A regular count made by the company
revealed that there were five thousand revolvers and three hundred shotguns and rifles, together with the same number of dirks and bowie knives, in the possession of railroad workers on the Lake Superior line. “With so many men of such a class and so generally armed, it is impossible to say what crimes would be committed if the whiskey peddlers were not rigidly repressed.…”

The peddlers tried every possible scheme to stay in business, even going to the length of getting railway foremen drunk and bribing them with cheap liquor to act as salesmen. Another method derived from the American frontier tradition of seizing control of the local police force and thus controlling the town through a “vigilante committee.” Both Peninsula Harbour (described by one visitor as “the worst place in the world”) and Michipicoten were for several months under the control of gangs of desperadoes who terrorized the citizens and held a tight rein on the whiskey trade, keeping out all competition and running the community for their own personal profit.