The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (69 page)

As the rain increased, the lights of Red Rock, beckoning in the distance, winked out behind a wall of water. Now and then a man would tumble exhausted into the slush and lie immovable and unnoticed until somebody stumbled over him. Captain A. Hamlyn Todd, of the Governor-General’s Foot Guards, counted some forty men lying in the snow, many of them face down, completely played out.

Some actually fell asleep as they marched. “One brave fellow had plodded on without a murmur for three days. He had been suffering, but through fear of being left behind, in the hospital, refrained from making his case known. He tramped half way across … reeling like a drunken man, but nature gave out at last, and with a groan he fell on the snow. There he lay, the pitiless rain beating on his upturned face, until a passing sleigh stopped behind him. The driver flashed his lantern … [and] said
he was dead. ‘Not yet old man,’ was the reply of the youth as he opened his eyes. ‘I am not even a candidate for the hospital yet.’ ” The soldier – he was a member of the 10th Royal Grenadiers – was placed on a sleigh and carried the rest of the way.

Some men who fell by the wayside could not speak. A member of the York Rangers described one such case: “On the way across one of the boys of the 35th was so fagged out that he laid down on the sleigh and could not move an inch. Captain Thomson asked him to move to one side but not one inch would he stir, so he caught hold of him like bag and baggage, and tossed him to one side to let him pass.”

When Red Rock was finally reached, the men were like zombies. They stood, uncomprehending, in ice-water ankle-deep, waiting for the trains; and when these arrived they tumbled into cars – not flat cars this time, but real passenger cars – and dropped in their tracks, lying on the floor, twisted on the seats all of a heap, sleeping where they fell. One man, the son of a British general, crumpled up onto the floor in such a position that his head was under the seat “and no amount of shaking would wake him to improve his situation.” There was tea ready for them all but, cold and wet as they were, many did not have the strength to drink it. The ordeal was at an end; the track, as they well knew, lay unbroken all the way to their destination at Qu’Appelle. There would be no more marching until the coulees of Saskatchewan were reached – time enough then to reckon with Dumont’s sharpshooters. For the moment, at least, they had no worries; and so, like men already dead, they slept.

Chapter Nine

1
A new kind of Canadian

2
Stephen throws in the towel

3
Riot at Beavermouth

4
The eleventh hour

5
A land no longer lonely

6
Craigellachie

1
A new kind of Canadian

William Van Horne was not a man given to rash or boastful promises. When he said that he could move troops from eastern Canada to Qu’Appelle in ten days, he was actually giving himself a cushion of twenty-four hours. The first regular troops to entrain on March 28 arrived in Winnipeg exactly one week later. Within two days they were on the drill ground at Qu’Appelle. Two hundred and thirty miles to the north at Batoche, Riel was in control, resisting Dumont’s repeated requests to cut the line of the railway and institute guerilla warfare. Battleford was under siege by Poundmaker’s Indians – five hundred and twelve persons, some three hundred of them women and children, confined to the stockade. Big Bear’s Crees, following the massacre at Frog Lake, were roaming the country around Fort Pitt, killing, looting and taking prisoners; the surrender of the fort had given them the supplies necessary to carry on. But by mid-April, not much more than a fortnight after Duck Lake, the entire Field Force, save for the tardy Halifax Battalion, was in Saskatchewan and ready to march north.

The rebellion wrenched the gaze of settled Canada out to the prairie country and focused it on the railway. Every major newspaper sent a war correspondent with the troops, and for weeks the pages of the dailies were full of little else. The hardships, the condition of the soldiers, the state of over-all morale – together with those illuminating tales of human interest that are the journalist’s grist – all these were reported. But interlaced with such dispatches there was something else – a new awareness of the land and of the railway’s relation to it, comments on the thoughtfulness and courtesy of the
CPR
attendants, which Van Horne had been at such pains to foster, amazement at the engineering marvels along the lakeshore and at the speed and efficiency with which the troops reached Winnipeg. (“The men feel that they have made magnificent time,” one soldier wrote home.) For week after week in the columns of the daily press, as the journalists digressed on the grandeur of the scenery, the impressive size of the newly created cities, and the wonders of the plains, Canadians were treated to a continuing geography lesson about a land that some had scarcely considered part of the nation. Until 1885, it had been as a foreign country; now their boys were fighting in it and for it, and soon anyone who wanted to see it could do so for the price of a railway ticket.

The Halifax Battalion was especially delighted and surprised to discover so many fellow Nova Scotians working along the line and living in
the western towns. To them, Desolation Camp was known as Big Rory’s camp, because the contractor in charge was from Nova Scotia. “Some of the men about were from our own province and told us that many of the responsible people in the employ of the Syndicate, as well as some of the contractors, are Bluenoses,” the
Morning Chronicle’s
reporter revealed. “Several of us fell upon quasi-acquaintances – men whose friends we know or who knew us or our relations.”

In spite of Morley Roberts’s description of Winnipeg the previous year as “an entirely execrable, flourishing and detestable business town, flat and ugly and new,” the farm boys and fishermen’s sons from the Atlantic, who had never gazed on London or Chicago, were impressed by the Manitoba capital. “I was surprised at the size of the city of Winnipeg,” a member of the Halifax Battalion wrote home, “and the magnificent character of the buildings and the splendid wide streets, three times as wide as in Halifax. The stone and brick stores on every hand indicate a surprising degree of enterprise in this city.… The police have the finest body of men I ever saw, and the fire department is in an excellent state of efficiency.… There are a great many Nova Scotians in both the police and fire departments.” No longer would these Maritimers think of the North West as the exclusive property of Ontario.

The traditional frontier hospitality hit home to every soldier and was the subject of many letters and reports:

“Brandon was reached … and here the grandest reception of all was received. Half the population seemed to be assembled at the station, and as many as could do so entered the cars to welcome the volunteers, a number of the prominent ladies of the town bearing baskets of provisions, which they liberally distributed. Those having friends in the district from which the troops came were anxious in their enquiries about them, and nearly all had something kind to say as they passed through. The young ladies … overcame their native shyness and conversed quite freely. One having announced her determination not to leave the Ottawa car until she had shaken hands with everyone in it, stayed so long that two young gallants had to lift her off the train before it started. The kind action of the Brandon folk and their manner of carrying out their wishes in person does them great credit, and will not soon be forgotten by those who were their guests.”

Until the coming of the railway, all of the North West and the land beyond the mountains had been like a great desert with scattered oases of population, separated by many days’ travel, and each sufficient unto itself. Now, the cross-fertilization process had begun. At last Canada had an
accessible frontier from which to draw new strength, new blood, and new ideas. (“There is no longer any reason why Canada’s sons should ‘go to the States’ to make a new start in life,” the
Quarterly Review
wrote in an article on the
CPR
shortly after it was completed.) A new kind of Canadian, the “Westerner,” was making his first impact on the men from the sober East. He belonged to a more open-handed and less rigid society; over the century that followed he would help to change the country.

One war correspondent’s description of a prairie town, written that April – it could have been Moose Jaw, Medicine Hat, Swift Current, or a dozen smaller settlements – mirrored the astonishment of an Ontario city man on first coming up against western life:

“Here is where the man who has a turn that way can study the human face divine, and the human dress astonishing. Men well dressed, fully dressed, commonly dressed; awfully dressed, shabbily dressed, partly dressed; men sober, nearly sober, half drunk, nearly drunk, quite drunk, frightfully drunk, howling drunk, dead drunk; men from Canada, the States, the United Kingdom and from almost every state in Europe; men enormously rich and frightfully poor, but all having a free and easy manner which is highly refreshing to a man fresh from the east who is accustomed to the anxious expressions of men in our silent streets at home.”

The western Canadian was still in embryo, living often in a hovel of sod or earth or in one of those lusty, tented dormitories that had no counterpart in the East. “The ‘Hotel,’ itself,” wrote the
Globe
, “is a revelation. It is of canvas and is like nothing under the earth. The beds are in tiers one above the other and a man generally bursts into tears when he gets into one of them. In such a camp there is always a poker saloon, a billiard saloon, and a number of the most villainous whiskey dives under canvas that can possibly be imagined. In the poker saloon the ‘chips’ are always iron rings with a hole through them.… In any other place on the face of the earth they are either ivory composition, or paste board. In the camps, however, they use these iron chips, and as the keeper of the den always wins by hook or by crook the unfortunate who objects in too enthusiastic a way is liable to a volley of these terrible missiles, often receiving cruel wounds.…” (Apparently the
Globe’s
reporter had never seen a washer.)

In such crucibles was the western character tempered. Its influence had yet to be felt, but here and there in the growing settlements were men who would help to shape the country: Pat Burns out in Calgary, laying the basis of a fortune by selling meat to
CPR
contractors; James Lougheed, the lawyer, hanging out his shingle in the same city; Charles Whitehead,
a railway contractor’s son, in Brandon; the Sifton brothers, sons of another railway contractor, also in Brandon, setting out to practise law together; Rodman Roblin, late of Prince Edward County, Ontario, a future premier of Manitoba and the grandfather of another premier, tilling his farm near Carman. The railway, or the promise of the railway, had brought them all to the North West.

If Riel’s rebellion helped change eastern attitudes to the prairies, it also helped change them towards the
CPR
. Van Horne was later to remark in his dry way that the railway should have erected a statue to the Métis leader. As early as April 6, he was able to tell a friend in Scotland that “there is no more talk about the construction of the Lake Superior line having been a useless expenditure of money, nor about the road having been built too quickly. Most people are inclined to think it would have been better had it been built three or four weeks quicker.”

Yet – and Van Horne must have felt the irony of the situation — the
CPR
was in worse financial shape than ever. It had cost almost a million dollars to ship the troops west, and that bill was not immediately collectable. (The
CPR
charged the government $852,331.32 for the entire job; in July, 1886, after the inevitable war claims commission had duly deliberated, the government paid $760,648.13.) The railway, in Van Horne’s words, was making sacrifices “to the great detriment of our regular business,” keeping engines under steam and cars waiting empty for as long as twenty-four hours at a time when it had scarcely a dollar in the bank.

It was a strange situation: at the moment of its greatest triumph, while the troops were speeding west on the new steel to the applause of the nation, the
CPR’S
financial scaffolding was collapsing, and scarcely anybody in Ottawa appeared to be concerned. Indeed, on April 11 Van Horne discovered to his dismay that, in spite of his contribution to the nation, somebody in the government service was continuing to send surveyors, freight, and public officials to Manitoba by way of Chicago on the Grand Trunk rather than by the
CPR’S
Toronto and St. Thomas line, which connected with the Canada Southern and Michigan Central at London. While the Canadian Pacific was straining every effort to move the troops, its rival was pocketing a profit.

2
Stephen throws in the towel