The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (68 page)

Warmed by this brief hiatus, the men made ready for the next leg of the journey. “Once more into the breach, my countrymen!” cried Captain Manley of the Grenadiers. He and his men faced another chilling seven hours before End of Track at Port Munro, a construction station and supply depot on the lakeshore, was reached. Only then were the troops able to enjoy their first real sleep.

Here was a deep, natural harbour – “the loveliest scenery that ever met my gaze,” a correspondent called it – dominated by a thousand-foot crag. In the harbour lay the schooner
Breck
, “open at both ends and leaky into the bargain,” capable of sleeping some two hundred troops. Here, the troops slumbered in comparative comfort, huddled together in the hold on mattresses composed of equal parts of hay and dirt, and later of water. The leakage was probably caused by the weight of the human cargo grinding the vessel down through the ice. By the time the Halifax battalion arrived, the floor was afloat and the pumps could not be worked because of the frost. The owner, who gave his consent to use the vessel after being told it would be taken by force if necessary, subsequently charged the government $848.93 for damages; he was awarded $245.50.

The second gap in the line – about twenty miles – began at Port Munro and continued to McKellar’s Harbour, a small inlet near the mouth of the Little Pic River. There were not enough sleighs in the area to carry more than the baggage, and so the troops were forced to march across the glare ice of Lake Superior to the next piece of track, a journey of some eight hours. They began it, generally, in high spirits:

The volunteers are all fine boys and full
of lots of fun

But it’s mighty little pay they get for
carrying a gun;

The Government has grown so lean and the
CPR
so fat

Our extra pay we did not get –

You can bet your boots on that!

The Grenadiers, well fed and rested, moved out onto the ice in light marching order at dawn on Easter Sunday – a long, quavering line of men with the teams drawn up all around the bay. Above them, a cloud of purest white encircling its midriff, towered the black mountain from whose high head the sun’s first rays, red as blood, streamed down on the ice and lit up the crags on the far side of the harbour “with a bright splendour, that compelled admiration and delight.” A bugle sounding the advance, split the sharp morning air. The men began to sing “Hold the Fort for We Are Coming.” The echoes, bounding around the rocky recesses, “produced an effect of the most extraordinary nature.” Out onto the cold bosom of the lake the column of men moved “as if they had not known the hardships of the past few days and were celebrating some joyful occasion.”

That joy was not to last. For the Grenadiers, the very sun that had greeted them that morning was to prove the worst of enemies. For those who had been issued with snow glasses the glare on the ice was searing enough; they arrived at their destination, their faces scorched and blistered sometimes almost beyond recognition. Others managed to make eye-coverings, Indian-fashion, out of strips of birchbark with thin slits cut into them. But there were others who were rendered painfully blind, a red haze blotting out all vision, the corneas smarting as if sandpapered. Colonel Otter himself, at the head of his troops, was almost totally blind when the end of track was reached again.

Harry Armstrong, who was working on this section of the line at the time, described the resultant trek as a sort of “ ‘go as you please march.’ ” The troops, buffeted by piercing winds on one side and blistered by the sun’s glare on the other, were eventually strung out for seven miles across the lake. Marching was almost impossible on the glassy surface; then, after ten miles, the texture changed: deep cuts, broken blocks of ice, and rocks frozen into the surface began to lacerate the feet of the men and officers, especially those who had the misfortune to leave home in light shoes. Some threw their kits away, bit by bit; some collapsed in their tracks; others became temporarily deranged; one man was ruptured. The baggage sleighs, following behind, picked up the casualties.

“You have no idea of the glare of the sun on the snow up here or the piercing wind that sweeps across the Lake,” a member of the Queen’s Own Rifles wrote home. “The track we had to march along was about 9 inches wide and a slip to the side would plunge you into snow 6 to 8 feet deep. I can tell you I’ll never forget that march.… We dared not stop an instant as we were in great danger of being frozen, although the sun was
taking the skin off our faces. One man of our company went mad and one of the regulars went blind from snow glare. We arrived at our destination about 9 p.m. My boots and leggings were frozen to my feet.”

Those units that travelled the same gap by night endured equally fearful conditions. “That night was indeed a terrible one,” a member of A Battery recalled. “You have heard of soldiers in the Sudan wandering away from the column on the march while in a somnambulistic condition. Well that is just how our men were.… The night was dark, the temperature freezing and a heavy snow storm with a wild, piercing wind made the march a fearful undertaking.” Any man who drifted away from the column knew that he faced almost certain death. To prevent this, guards were assigned to ride around the column to head off drifters and stragglers. At that, the night was so dark and the way so difficult that the guide appointed to lead the troops across lost his way and the ordeal was lengthened by several hours.

The travail of the cavalry was again far more strenuous. The infantry was marched across the ice as far as McKellar’s Harbour, where a short piece of line had been laid to Jackfish Bay. But because of the nuisance of loading and unloading horses for such a short distance, the Governor-General’s Body Guard decided to ride or walk their steeds the full thirty-five miles to Jackfish on the ice of the lake.

After about fifteen miles, the baggage sleighs turned off to the right to proceed to the track. The cavalry men halted for lunch, drew their horses up in line, adjusted the nosebags, and then, standing in the lee of their mounts, munched on chunks of frozen bread washed down with lake water drawn from a hole chopped in the ice.

The remainder of the trip was another nightmare. Heretofore the track had been clearly marked by the passage of the sleigh runners; but now the cavalry was on its own. For the next twenty miles they faced “a vast prairie or desert of ice,” with snow and drifts everywhere and no track of any kind. The permanent surface was obscured by a crust under which two or three inches of water lay concealed. Above the crust there was as much as a foot of light snow. This uneven and treacherous surface was broken by equally treacherous patches of glare ice. Through this chill morass the horses, all of them lacking hind shoes, slipped, floundered, and struggled for mile after mile.

At the head of the column rode the commander, Lt.-Colonel George Taylor Denison III, scion of the most distinguished military family in Canada and himself a man of parts. Denison’s grandfather had founded this regiment in the rebellion of 1837, naming it Denison’s Horse. His
father and his brother Frederick had both commanded the unit before him. His father had also helped found the Queen’s Own Rifles, while an uncle had commanded the Queen’s Light Dragoons. Frederick, at that very moment, was in charge of the Canadian Voyageurs in the Sudan. Two other brothers were in the service; one would rise to admiral.

Denison himself was a bundle of contradictions. An impressive military figure – sabre-straight, with bristling moustache and firm military features – he had been expelled from Trinity College, Toronto, for insolence and insubordination. A lawyer who was bored by the law, he had attained a reputation, as senior police magistrate in Toronto, of disposing of scores of cases at the rate of one every minute. His most notable achievement had been his surprising capture of the first prize in a contest sponsored by the Czar of Russia for the best book on cavalry. Denison’s work, translated at his own expense into Russian, was the result of months of secret study in such places as the British Museum and St. Petersburg. Praised by Theodore Roosevelt, it remains a standard and definitive work. Yet Denison preferred the company of writers and scholars to military men. Kipling was a guest in his home; so was Joseph Chamberlain. A staunch Imperialist, almost to the point of caricature, he had in the seventies helped found the short-lived and nationalistic Canada First movement. In his speeches he tended to be bellicose, in his demeanour impulsive; his heroes were Robert E. Lee, Bismarck, and Garibaldi; but his favourite pastimes were bird watching and playing ball with small children among the walks and rose arbours of his Toronto estate.

Denison quickly realized that he was leading his men into a labyrinth. They were miles from shore, in a wilderness of ice and snow-covered islands, and it was clear that a serious blizzard was impending. The urge was to move as swiftly as possible and reach land before the coming storm hemmed them in, but the crust-ice grew so bad that the entire regiment finally came to a halt. Denison fanned his men out, seeking a feasible route through the maze. When one was found, he and his adjutant rode on ahead to pick their way between the hummocks of land and ice. At this point the temperature had dropped to zero and the first flakes were beginning to fall. By good luck, the blizzard held off until, at eight o’clock that evening, the cavalry finally reached Jackfish.

An entirely different but equally uncomfortable set of circumstances presented themselves to the York Rangers. They crossed the same gap in a driving storm of rain and sleet, trudging up to their knees in a gruel of snow and water, in gutters eight inches deep left by the blades of the cutters. At McKellar’s Harbour the men were forced to wait six hours for
the flat cars to return. Fortunately the rain ceased, but the temperature dropped and the soaking wet clothes began to freeze on the men’s backs. They built roaring fires and clustered around them, scorching in front and freezing behind, until the train finally arrived.

These long waits without shelter were among the cruelest privations suffered by the soldiers en route to the North West. The Queen’s Own endured three: a two-hour wait in a blinding sleet storm when a train broke down at Carleton Place, a nine-hour wait in the freezing cold at McKellar’s Harbour, and a four-hour wait in driving sleet at Winston’s Dock. Most of these waiting periods were spent standing up; it was too cold and too wet to sit down.

At Jackfish Bay, where the next gap began, the soldiers, badly sunburned and frostbitten – their faces masses of blisters, their feet bruised and swollen – were billeted in shanties, freight houses, and empty transport cars. Here was more hot food – blackstrap molasses, pork, potatoes, tea, and hard-tack – and then, for the lucky ones, a twenty-seven mile sleighride through the wet sleet to Winston’s Dock, and for the rest another forced march through the heaped snow.

Now the bone-weary troops, gazing from the rims of the cutters and through the slats of the flat cars, began to gain some understanding of Van Horne’s feat of railway construction. At Jackfish they could see the gaping mouth of one of the longest tunnels on the road, piercing a solid wall of rock, one hundred and fifty feet high, for five hundred feet. For miles on end the roadbed had been blasted from the billion-year-old schists and granites – chipped into the sheer surface of the dark cliffs or hacked right through the spiny ridges by means of deep cuts. In some places it seemed as if the whole side of a mountain had been ripped asunder by dynamite and flung into the deep, still waters of the lake.

The voyage between Winston’s Dock and Nepigon was again made on rails laid directly over the snow. The scenery grew grander as the cars crawled along and the soldiers began to stand up in their seats to see “sights which we will never forget” – the road torn out of the solid rock for mile after mile, skirting the very lip of the lake, from whose shores the mountains rose up directly for hundreds of feet above the track. Though the condition of the road was such that the engines were sometimes derailed, the troops did not seem to mind: “The delay was vexatious, and yet accommodated us, for we had ample opportunity as we steamed slowly along to observe and admire the grandeur and grim majesty of the scenery along the line.” On some of the cars, the soldiers produced Moody and
YMCA
songbooks and began to sing.

Did any of them consider, during this brief respite, the high cost of being Canadian? Did any of them pause to question the necessity of shipping them all off on a partly finished railroad through a bleak and friendless land? Did any of them measure the price to be paid in loss of national dignity against the easier passage through the United States? It could, no doubt, have been accomplished just as quickly and no more awkwardly and with a lot less physical suffering. But there is no evidence that anyone – soldier, general, politician, or journalist – ever seriously considered that alternative.

There was one final gap yet to come, and for many it would be the most terrible of all. This was the short march over the ice of the lake between Nepigon and Red Rock. It was no more than ten miles but it took some troops as long as six hours to cover it.

The 10th Grenadiers started out in the evening “into the solemn darkness of the pines and hemlocks,” along a trail so narrow that any attempt to move in column of fours had to be abandoned. It was almost impossible to stay on the track, and yet a single misstep caused a man to be buried to his neck in deep snow. When the troops emerged from the woods and onto the ice of the lake – “the worst ice that ever mortal man encountered” – they were met by a pitiless, pelting rain that seemed to drive through the thickest clothing. The rain had softened the track made by the sleighs, covering it with a slush so deep that every step a man took brought him into six inches of icy porridge. All attempts to preserve distance under such conditions had to be abandoned; the officers and men linked arms to prevent tumbling. To move through the slush the men were forced to raise their knees almost to their waists, as if marking time; in effect, they waded the entire distance.