The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (65 page)

Van Horne’s own future was secure enough. As a friend told him at the
time, he could always return to the United States, where several good posts were available for him. To this suggestion he made a characteristic answer: “I’m not going to the States. I’m not going to leave the work I’ve begun, and I am going to see it through. I’m here to stay and I can’t afford to leave until this work is done no matter what position is open to me.…”

On March 18, Stephen made an official application to the Privy Council for a loan of five million dollars. He asked the government to take fifteen million dollars worth of five per cent railway bonds, at par, and seven and a half million acres of land at two dollars an acre. The application was considered and, at length, rejected. Stephen vowed that he would leave Ottawa, never to return. The railway was finished. Its directors were ruined men.

Van Horne this time made no attempt to hide his feelings. Percy Woodcock, an artist friend who painted with him, remembered that his hobby no longer was powerful enough to take his mind off the railway’s troubles: “…  sometimes in the middle of a joyous bit of painting the thought of the road would come to him like a shock and hang over him, holding him totally absorbed and still.”

Collingwood Schreiber recalled with some emotion a scene in his office with Van Horne – “the only time I believe his iron nerve was ever shaken.” A close friendship had grown up between the two as a result of their several journeys together, especially the hard excursion along the shores of Lake Superior in the summer of 1884. Now the general manager looked up at Schreiber and then, very slowly and very softly, he revealed the depth of his despair: “Say, if the Government doesn’t give it [the loan] we are finished.” Van Horne, who had never cast a vote in his life, felt that he had been beaten at the one game he did not understand – the game of politics. He had come within an ace of commanding the greatest single transportation system in the world, and now his ambition had been thwarted, not by any act of his but by a combination of subtle forces which he could not control. No one had seen him reveal his feelings to such an extent since that dark day, so many years before, when his small son William had died, and his friend John Egan, driving him in absolute silence to the funeral, noticed a tear fall onto his hand.

And then, as if the railroad itself had given the cue, succour came from the North West in the most perverse and unexpected form. The Métis under Louis Riel had raised the flag of insurrection.

Earlier that year, Van Horne had held a significant conversation with John Henry Pope.

“Why not put us out of our misery?” Van Horne asked the minister. “Let us go off into some corner and bust?”

Pope replied that the Government was so concerned about Riel and his followers that it could not undertake further entanglements. An outbreak was possible.

“I wish your
CPR
was through,” Pope said.

Van Horne wanted to know when the government might expect to have troops ready to move to the North West. Pope told him it might be in the first or second week in March. Van Horne immediately declared he could get troops from Kingston or Quebec, where the two permanent force units were stationed, to Qu’Appelle in ten days.

In late March, Van Horne was reminded of this promise when Schreiber remarked to him that Macdonald seemed more concerned about the troubles in the North West than he did about the railway. The thought occurred to the general manager:
How could the government refuse to aid a railway that sped troops out to the prairies, took the Métis unawares, and crushed a rebellion?

Van Horne immediately offered to the Privy Council the services of the railway to move troops, if needed, from Ottawa to Qu’Appelle. He made only one stipulation: he and not the army was to be in complete control of food and transport. His experience in moving troops during the American Civil War had taught him to avoid divided authority and red-tape interference.

It sounded like a foolhardy promise. There were four gaps, totalling eighty-six miles, in the unfinished line north of Lake Superior. Between the unconnected strips of track – much of it unballasted and laid hastily on top of the snow – was a frozen waste of forest, rock, and hummocky drifts, whipped up by the icy winds that shrieked in from the lake. Could men, horses, artillery pieces, and military supplies be shuttled over the primitive tote roads which crossed that meeting place of blizzards? The members of the Council refused to believe it.

“Has anyone got a better plan?” Macdonald asked. There was no answer. Van Horne was told to prepare for a massive movement of men, animals, arms, and equipment.

The first intimations of the impending Saskatchewan Rebellion appeared in fragmentary reports in Ontario newspapers on March 23, jammed in between the inevitable advertisements for such patented curealls as Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparillan Resolvent, which promised cheap and instant relief for every known disease from cancer to salt rheum. By the following day, Van Horne’s plan was in operation. His deputy on the
eastern end of the Lake Superior line, Harry Abbott, was told to be ready to move four hundred men as far as the end of track at Dog Lake. Joseph-Philippe-René-Adolphe Carón, the Minister of Militia and Defence, was still unsure the plan would work. “How can men and horse cross Nepigon – answer immediately,” he wired Van Horne. Van Horne assured him that it could be done. On March 25 Abbott announced that he was ready and that John Ross, in charge of the western section of the unfinished line, was also ready and did not expect that there would be any delays. The engagement at Duck Lake took place on March 26; when the news burst upon the capital, the country was immediately mobilized. The first troops, Caron told Abbott, would be on the move on the twenty-eighth.

In Ottawa on the very morning of the Duck Lake tragedy, George Stephen had just finished scribbling a note to Macdonald confessing failure and asking that the Privy Council decision rejecting his proposal be put into writing, so as “to relieve me personally from the possible charge of having acted with undue haste.” There was nothing more that the
CPR
president could do. The fate of the
CPR
now lay with the railway itself. If Van Horne’s gamble worked, then the politicians and the public would have the best possible proof that the presence of a transcontinental line could hold the nation together in time of trouble.

4
Marching as to war

On March 27, all of settled Canada learned from its newspapers that a bloody rebellion had broken out in the North West. Ten members of Crozier’s mixed force of police and volunteers lay dead at Duck Lake. Thirteen more were wounded, two mortally. The names of some of the dead were distinguished: a nephew of Joseph Howe, the Nova Scotia statesman, a cousin of Edward Blake, and a nephew of Sir Francis Hincks, the former minister of finance under Macdonald. The victory of the half-breeds under Gabriel Dumont’s generalship was beyond dispute. The Indians, waiting for just such a moment, were about to rise. Prince Albert, Fort Carlton, Batoche, Fort Pitt, and perhaps Fort Qu’Appelle, Calgary, Edmonton, Moose Jaw, and Regina, were all threatened. A wave of apprehension, anger, patriotism, and excitement washed over eastern Canada.

The government had already called out A and B batteries stationed in Quebec and Kingston – the only permanent military force in all of Canada;
on March 27, several militia regiments were ordered to be ready to move immediately to the North West. This aroused a flurry of speculation: How on earth were they to get there? In Kingston, the
British Whig
pointed out that if the soldiers travelled on the Grand Trunk through the United States they would not only have to be disarmed but would also have to travel through foreign territory in civilian clothes as private citizens, with their rifles and artillery pieces boxed for separate shipment to Winnipeg. There was a rumour, however, that this awkward and disagreeable passage might be avoided by an equally awkward and disagreeable passage over the partially completed Canadian Pacific Railway. This possibility was considered very remote. How could troops, baggage, guns, horses, and equipment be shuttled over those trackless gaps? “A gentleman recently through that country was met and asked how long it would take to cover the unrailed section. ‘Oh,’ he laughingly replied, ‘until July.’ ”

In Toronto, the chief engineer of another railway, J. C. Bailey, who had just returned from Lake Nipissing, reported that there was at least four feet of snow along the track and that “there would be considerable trouble getting through.”

Van Horne was nevertheless determined to move 3,324 men from London, Toronto, Kingston, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec, Halifax, and a dozen smaller centres; in fact, he expected to have the first troops in Winnipeg no more than ten days after the news of the Duck Lake engagement. Harry Abbott and John Ross were not in the least perturbed by the problem Van Horne faced them with; they had regularly moved seven hundred workmen over gaps in the line during the winter. Caron warned Abbott to be ready to receive eight hundred troops on March 28. The remainder would move on a staggered schedule over a two-week period.

When the news was confirmed that the entire force was to be shipped west on the new railroad, a kind of frenzy seized the country. To a considerable extent the social life of the cities and towns of settled Canada revolved around the militia. Young officers were in demand at the highly stratified winter sports that marked the era: the snowshoeing and bobsledding parties, the great skating fêtes, the ice-boat excursions, and the outings of toboggan clubs.
The
great social event of the year was the militia ball. One saw uniforms everywhere: at the opera house (and every town of any size had an opera house), at the garrison theatricals, and at those strange social rites known as conversaziones. Tailors’ advertisements featured military fashions over civilian, and the most popular weekend entertainment for the general public was watching the local militia parade through the streets or listening to a military band concert in the park.

Now, suddenly, the militia was parading through the streets for the first time in earnest, for the country had not yet fought a war of any kind. Never before had Canadians witnessed the kind of spectacular scenes that took place in every major town in the East during late March and early April – the cheers for Queen and Country, the blare of martial music, the oceans of flapping banners, the young men in scarlet and green marching behind the colours, the main streets jammed with waving thousands, the roll of drums, the troop trains puffing through the small towns and off into the Unknown – the singing, the cheering, the weeping and the kissing and the bitter-sweet good-byes. All this sound and spectacle, pumped up by a fanfaronade of military oratory – together with the terrible news on April 2 of a massacre of priests and civilians by Big Bear’s Indians at Frog Lake – kept the country on an emotional binge for the better part of a fortnight.

The first militia units called out were the Queen’s Own Rifles, the Royal Grenadiers, and the Infantry School, all of Toronto. The orders came at 9.30 on the evening of Friday, March 27; the troops were to be on parade the following morning in greatcoats, busbies, and leggings – the Grenadiers
at the Armoury at eight, the Queen’s Own and the Infantry School at the drill shed, St. Lawrence Market, at nine and ten respectively. All that night, with the temperature hovering at freezing, officers in hired hacks rattled up and down the dark streets “at breakneck speed,” rousing their men. Long before dawn, the entire city was awake, thanks in part to the newly invented telephone of which there were more than four hundred in the city.

Well before 8.30 that Saturday morning, West Market Street was jammed with people while the entrance to the drill shed on Jarvis Street was “filled up to the throat.” In the words of the
Mail
, “all the world with his wife was on the way to the drill shed to see the unusual sight of militia men being called out and paraded for active service.” Many of the men had learned of the muster only on their way to work and had come straight to their stations in civilian clothes. Most believed that they would be shipped directly to the North West, but when the troops were drawn up they learned that they would not be leaving until Monday, March 30.

In the early hours of Monday morning, uniformed men began to pour into Toronto from the outlying corners of the town and the country. “From palaces and humble homes, they came in ones and twos, the number of brothers who were drafted being a conspicuous feature of the contingent. Further on they joined like converging streams until at the main arteries of the city the military uniforms formed a conspicuous picture in the streets which, even at that early hour, were crowded. Many of them took streetcars, one of these saying that he wanted to give this luxury a fond goodbye.”

At the drill shed, the crowd of onlookers was so dense that the soldiers themselves had trouble forcing their way through. The commissariat and supply system of the fledgling army was in considerable disarray. The men had to supply their own boots, socks, shirts, and underwear and even their own lunch. Few were really aware of what was needed. Some arrived with extra boots in their hands, and all had packs bulging with pies, rolls, and cooked meat. Some had tin cups hanging at their belts, and most were armed with a revolver of some kind stuck into a pocket. An enterprising salesman squeezed his way into the shed and began selling footwear to those who had not brought a second pair of boots.