The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (57 page)

Yale was all but finished as a community, as even the
Sentinel
admitted. “Business,” it wrote, “…  is gradually declining and we hear from nearly all classes of their intention to go and seek their fortunes elsewhere shortly.” Kamloops was the new mecca. Van Horne, who knew a bit about the politics of diplomacy when it did not interfere with railroad matters, pronounced himself on arrival as pleased to find that Kamloops had “such a thriving and progressive look.” He expressed great faith in the city’s future although, at that point, it was a one-street community of shacks with few civilized amenities. “For water,” one resident wrote, “you went to the river and dipped in a bucket and carried it back.” The railroad tracks ran directly down the main street and the
CPR
, as Morley Roberts noted, “was the all-absorbing topic, some prophesying prosperity, and some universal ruin and desolation as its result.”

The community was delighted to see the general manager. An attempt was even made to change the name of neighbouring Savona’s Ferry to Port Van Horne in his honour. He would have none of it. When he noticed the new signboard on the station he growled out: “Somebody pull that thing down.” But Kamloops, which had suffered a decline after the gold rush, perked up with his announcement that it would be a divisional point and the site of extensive yards and railroad facilities. Here were repeated all the spectacles attendant on the construction period – the hotels jammed with men, some sleeping in the bar room and some on billiard tables, some gambling their savings away and some drinking them up. Cambie had noted the previous month that there were so many drunken men in town he was loath to leave his hotel room. The courts were crowded with liquor cases, presided over by the former premier, little George Walkern, himself no mean toper. “Judge Walkern carried away dead drunk at 7 a.m. when everybody was looking on,” Cambie scribbled in his diary one day, noting, however, that Walkern recovered sufficiently
to open court at 10.30 a.m. and, presumably, to levy the usual fines for intoxication.

It was Onderdonk’s job to continue the railroad for the
CPR
from the end of the government section at Savona’s Ferry to meet the railway builders coming from the east, probably in the vicinity of the Eagle Pass in the Gold Range. On August 11, Van Horne, together with Major Rogers and S. B. Reed, set off along the route of the line that would take them directly through Eagle Pass and then on across the mountains to the Columbia. A wagon was expected to meet them at Sicamous Landing to convey them as far as the road was completed; when it failed to arrive on time, Van Horne insisted that the expedition set off on foot in the drenching rain. Rogers went ahead, leading a cayuse loaded with the party’s baggage. Reed followed, with his coat and vest rolled into a small package. The general manager brought up the rear, enveloped in a waterproof and smoking the inevitable long cigar. The
Sentinel
reported that his air was jaunty and that he was taking “a philosophical view of the situation, but, no doubt, mentally contrasting the difference between crossing the Gold Range on foot and the luxury of the manager’s car on the other side of the mountains.”

It was a truly fearful trip. The members of the party were forced to leave most of their spare clothing at End of Track and push on by freight team, scow, and, finally, pony train. An early fall of snow had deposited three feet of slush on the mountain trails, already littered with the cast-offs of other travellers – blankets, saddles, personal belongings, and the corpses of pack ponies. Sometimes Van Horne found himself sinking waist deep in icy mud. At Three Valley, young Jack Stewart, the future contractor and major-general, ferried the party across the stream in a scow so old and rotten that the legs of Van Horne’s horse fell through. Young Stewart and a helper struggled successfully to free the animal and were rewarded with a five-dollar tip each from the general manager himself. While crossing Summit Lake, Van Horne tumbled into water that was only a degree or so above freezing. John Stevens the engineer, who was present, wrote: “I have never forgotten, after 48 years, the vigorous and breezy comments about the country and everybody connected with it which he made when we had pulled him back onto the raft.…”

The entire trip from Kamloops to the Rockies was one that few people had ever made. Fleming and Grant were probably the last to traverse the full trail (the previous year in the other direction). In another fifteen months the railway was complete and it was no longer necessary to make the journey on foot.

The party was without food for two days, probably as a result of Rogers’s eccentric provisioning. When they finally arrived at the most forward of the camps on Rogers Pass, the general manager’s sensitive nostrils detected the aroma of ham cooking. “It was then,” he later recalled, “that I learned that a man can smell ham ten miles away.”

On this journey several new Van Horne legends were forged. When the general manager reached the Mountain Creek trestle he was told that a few days before several men had crashed to their deaths in the ravine below. The floor of the trestle, suspended one hundred and sixty feet above the torrent, consisted at that time of two loose planks and nothing more. One of the general manager’s companions was barely able to negotiate the bridge by crawling inch by inch on his hands and knees, but Van Horne stepped confidently out on the shaky planks, strode across the trestle, and returned just as imperturbably.

At Seven Parsons Coulee he and Reed suffered another icy ducking when the driver of their wagon missed the ford. Van Horne spent the rest of the day in a construction camp, apparently oblivious of a borrowed pair of trousers which, being too small for his rapidly expanding girth, had been split up the seam at the back.

He liked to take curves on the newly constructed road at the highest possible speed. Once, with a dangerous trestle looming up ahead, the engineer balked at taking the locomotive across.

“Here,” Van Horne said, “get down and I’ll take her over myself.”

“Well,” said the engineer, “if you ain’t afraid, guess I ain’t neither.”

When the general manager left the mountains and rolled across the prairies in the comfort of his private car, he was able to witness the byproducts of his handiwork: Calgary, Medicine Hat, Moose Jaw, and Regina slowly changing from tent and shack towns to permanent communities; crops being harvested; sod houses going up; and a veneer of civilization spreading out over the raw prairie. “Society in Calgary is yet in its infancy, but its people should at once adopt it as part of their creed that the moral tone of our town should have in it the ring of purity,” the
Herald
had solemnly opined. As he sped towards Winnipeg (a city of twenty-five thousand, of whom six thousand were dependent on the railway) Van Horne could note at every siding along the line the bleak symbols of a vanished past – great stacks of buffalo bones being loaded into box cars. The general manager had made his gardening expertise pay off in a minor way for the hard-pressed railway. Cleaned and bleached in the sun, the bones were shipped to Minneapolis where they were sold as fertilizer for seven dollars a ton.

Back in his Montreal office, he plunged once again into the routine of
executive decisions. Had Alexander Mackenzie been impressed by his trip to the North West? Then a letter giving his impressions would be “of very great use in killing the villanous [sic] slanders that are being published about ‘alkali deserts,’ ‘sandy stretches,’ etc.” He suggested that Henry Beatty, who knew Mackenzie well, persuade the former prime minister to issue a public statement on the matter. Jim Hill, Van Horne learned, had spies within the company and was boasting that he was in possession of full reports on all the business the railway did at Port Arthur. The general manager moved swiftly to stop the leakage: “Cautious steps should be taken at once towards finding out the person in fault, and if found he must be promptly kicked out.” George Stephen had been dismayed at the recklessness with which baggage trucks were trundled around the platform at Toronto. That would never do! “He seemed to think that the men handling the trucks took a delight in frightening passengers,” Van Horne advised William Whyte, the general superintendent of the Ontario and Quebec line. In British Columbia, Arthur Wellington Ross, the railway’s real estate representative, had overstepped the bounds of propriety and had taken a piece of property on the Hastings Mill Tract in trust for Van Horne, with some secret agreement involved. The general manager declined to accept the property. “I do not like transactions of this kind and do not intend to take any chances whatever of having my name smirched by my connection with them,” he told Ross.

As always, no matter was too small to occupy the general manager’s attention. “I am afraid I shall never get exactly what I want until I take up wood engraving myself,” he informed Thomas H. Lee of the American Bank Note Company after poring over some drawings and engravings of the mountain section. He wanted to see steam and not black smoke issuing from the locomotives pictured in the foreground of Mount Stephen; that would give more emphasis to the presence of the railway.

He could be cutting. When Major Rogers, the following February, continued to complain bitterly about Marcus Smith’s interference, Van Horne dispatched a chilly answer:

“Replying to yours of the 8th instant about Mr. Marcus Smith, I have to say that when we wish you to consult anybody or to take anybody’s suggestion about your work, you will be advised from this office.

“I will say further that I do not care to receive any more letters of this description.”

He could also be sarcastic. To Harry Abbott he shot off a withering note:

“You have on your Engineering Staff an inspired idiot by the name of
Gribble, who is writing letters here complaining of the desecration of the Sabbath Day by barbarians in your employ. These letters are very long and must have taken a considerable time to write; if they were written during the work the time must have been stolen from the company’s time, if they were written on the Sabbath he too must have desecrated the Sabbath.

“It would be well to sit down on him very solidly in order that our friends in Montreal may not be bothered any more by his complaints.”

And then there was his forthright reply to George Wainwright, who wanted to launch a winter carnival at Winnipeg, complete with ice palaces, dog trains, and Indian mushers.

“You will pardon me,” Van Horne wrote, “if I express my opinion very strongly on this subject.

“I think the combination of attractions referred to would have the most damaging possible effect upon the North West. Ice Palaces, Indians and Dog Trains are not popular features in our foreign advertising, and I think the less said about them in Manitoba, the better.

“For some inscrutable reason nearly everybody in Canada has his photograph taken in furs with salt scattered over to represent snow. Many of these go abroad and few people in England have ever seen a Canadian picture except in Winter dress. For this reason the name of Canada is almost universally associated with an Arctic climate and this idea is one of the most difficult to remove from the minds of people abroad.

“Individually I will be disposed to contribute liberally to a ‘shirt-tail’ carnival and will furnish a large proportion of the necessary linen dusters and palm leaf fans; but when it comes to the other thing, the like of which has already worked more harm than good in Montreal, I must decline any aid or encouragement.

“All the advantages, for the time being, to the hotel keepers and the Railways would not outweigh the loss to the North West of one settler.”

More and more, however, Van Horne was concerned with the need to keep costs down. Over and over, in his wide-ranging correspondence, he used the phrase “we have not a dollar to spare.” That was only too true. The matter of late estimates from John Ross on the Superior section, for instance, had been a subject of grave concern earlier that year: “We are dependent upon our estimates from the Government for all the money necessary to keep the work going, and when the estimates are behind time or deficient in amount we are severely cramped.” Staffs were reduced to the bone: “…  we are at all points discharging every man who can be possibly spared.” Repairs to locomotives were cut back to the minimum:
“The financial situation pinches us severely and every corner must be clipped now, even if it costs in the end.” A request from the Premier of Manitoba to help depressed conditions there by purchasing a large quantity of coal had to be rejected: “… we have not a dollar to spare and like most of our friends in the North West have to skin along the best we can.” Costs on the Kamloops Lake section of the railway had to be shaved drastically, even though the quality was better than on Onderdonk’s government work: “Please go over the matter carefully and see how low it can be figured – every dollar counts,” Van Horne instructed Cambie. Similar orders went to John Ross: “By cutting every corner and cheapening the work in every practicable way, we may be able to build the line for the money available.… If we cannot do that, we must stop the work. I would like very much to see all of the work done in a first class manner and to have it beyond criticism, but that is impossible.”

As the months went by Van Horne’s communications with his deputies in the field became more and more insistent. “The money saved on the Mountain Section is being rapidly absorbed on the Lake Superior Section and we are again very near our
danger line”
he informed John Ross in October. Failure to complete the work within the limits of the government loan would be “disastrous.” All pretence at building a first-class line had been abandoned. Van Horne was appalled to find men still quarrying rock. The company could not afford to lay a single block of cut stone. Even the ballasting of the rails had to be discontinued except where it was necessary to preserve them from damage. The roadway would be made safe for trains running at a moderate rate of speed and nothing more. The ballasting would have to be completed at a later date, say in ten years, when the resources of the
CPR
permitted it. Van Horne issued instructions to all general superintendents limiting their power to spend money. From November 1, his own authority would be required before a single siding or siding improvement could be undertaken. No structure could be moved without Van Horne’s permission; not even a fence could be built, nor a nail driven. That was how tight money had become.