The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (71 page)

At this very moment, with the strongest force for law and order incapacitated, the men struck and began marching en masse up the line towards Beavermouth. Thousands, it was said, were joining in the work stoppage. The situation was inflammable. All that Steele could do was to send some
of his policemen to meet the strikers and advise them to abstain from any lawless act.

The news of the work stoppage had barely reached him when a frantic wire arrived from the Mayor of Calgary: the entire North West seemed to be up in arms; Riel and Dumont had struck; the Crees under Big Bear and Poundmaker were on the verge of joining the rebellion; Crowfoot and his braves were camped on the very edge of Calgary. “For God’s sake, come; there is danger of an attack by the Blackfeet!” Everything seemed to be crowding in on Steele at once. He could only reply that the situation at Beavermouth was so dangerous that he could not spare a man. He had only eight as it was.

The workmen had not been paid because the contractors had not been paid. Those who quit first were in the farthest outpost of the section of the line then under construction. They set out to march to End of Track, gathering others to their cause as they passed through the various camps. By the time they reached Mountain Creek, they numbered several hundred.

Track-laying, which had come to a halt with winter’s onset, was about to recommence. Carpenters were strung out on top of the great Mountain Creek trestle, trying to complete it before the track reached that point. The strikers massed on the edge of the ravine below and called to the men to stop work and come down off the bridge. The carpenters, intent on finishing the job, refused. One of the strikers seized an axe and slashed the rope that held the block and tackle used to hoist bridge materials to the top of the trestle. That meant the carpenters could do no further work.

William Mackenzie’s bridge manager, a man named Balfour, called his engineer, Turner Bone, to the construction office to discuss the situation. Before they could talk they were surrounded by a horde of strikers. A reluctant spokesman was pushed forward and a moment of silence followed until he gained his voice. Then he made it clear that there would be no more work done on the bridge until the men were paid. Balfour was forced to call his carpenters down.

The strikers moved resolutely on to Beavermouth, gathering strength as they went. They were now threatening violence to the road and destruction of property. The ailing Steele received a deputation and warned them that “if they committed any act of violence, and were not orderly, in the strictest sense of the word, I would inflict upon the offenders the severest punishment the law would allow me.” James Ross, Donald Mann, and Herbert Holt all tried to reason with the strikers and succeeded in convincing
some to return to the job. The remainder refused and stayed at Beavermouth where, in Steele’s words, “a large number of loose characters were ready to urge them to any mischief.”

Three hundred of the strikers, armed with revolvers, began to police the line, ordering the tracklayers to cease work, the teamsters to leave their teams, and the bridge workers to lay down their hammers. A train-load of men sent to End of Track was driven back. James Ross himself mounted the engine, told the engineer to put on all steam, and ran it through the armed mob as bullets whistled past his cab. The train entered the narrow canyon of the Beaver, an easy place to defend with a few men. Here the track-laying began again.

On came the strikers, firing as they advanced, while the tracklayers worked in the canyon. Steele’s second in command, a thickset sergeant with the appropriate name of Fury, drew his party across the mouth of the canyon to meet the advance. When they arrived, Fury announced that he would shoot the first man to cross the line. An uproar followed, but the strikers were cowed and returned to Beavermouth, allowing the tracklayers to finish their day’s work.

Sergeant Fury returned at the end of the day and reported to his bedridden superior. Steele, still racked by fever, rose unsteadily and sat down in a camp-chair. Both men were awaiting Constable Kerr, who had gone to the end of track for a supply of medicine for the ailing inspector. Kerr attempted to arrest a contractor named Behan, “a well known desperado,” for being drunk and disorderly but was immediately attacked by a crowd of strikers who threw him to the ground and forced him to retreat without his prisoner.

No Mounted Police officer could allow such humiliation to go unremarked. Said Steele: “…  we must take the man at any cost. It will never do to let the remainder of the gang know they can play with us.” He told Fury to take what men he needed to arrest Behan. Fury set off with two constables to arrest the offending contractor, whom they found in a saloon “in the midst of a gang of drunken companions.” The constables seized their quarry and dragged him out, surrounded by an angry mob of two hundred armed men. Fury was hesitant about using his pistol; as a result, the strikers were able to retrieve Behan and the police retreated.

Fury, badly mauled and with his jacket torn, returned to the police barracks and asked Steele for orders. “Take your revolvers,” Steele said, “and shoot anyone who interferes with the arrest!”

Events were now building to a climax. Steele, still bed-ridden, was too weak to watch what happened from the window, but the local stipendiary magistrate, George Hope Johnston, gave him a running account. He watched Fury and three policemen start off for the bridge across the Beaver that separated the
CPR
store and police barracks from the saloon town on the other side. The men entered the log community and disappeared between the cabins. A few moments later the sharp crack of gun-fire echoed through the valley.

“There is one gone to hell, Steele,” Johnston said.

Sick or not, Steele had to see for himself. He forced himself out of bed and crawled to the window in time to see two of his men dragging a prisoner across the bridge. The prisoner was “fighting like a fiend, while a woman in scarlet followed … with wild shrieks and curses.” Sergeant Fury and the third constable brought up the rear, trying to fend off the crowd, which had swollen to seven hundred.

It was time for Steele to act. He called on Johnston to get the Riot Act and, seizing a Winchester from the constable on guard at the jail, ran to the bridge, levelled his rifle at the crowd, and told the strikers to halt.

“Look at the.…,” someone cried; “his own death bed makes no difference to him!” Nonetheless, everybody stopped. One of the constables knocked out the struggling prisoner with a heavy blow and pulled him by the collar the rest of the way, “insensible as a rag.” The woman in red started to scream: “You red-coated.…!” Steele turned to his men: “Take her in, too!” Then he started forward onto the bridge to face the sullen mob.

Johnston had been forced to kick the orderly-room door in, the constable with the key having been too busy with the riot. He arrived at last, took up a position beside Steele, and opened the book at the Riot Act. Said Steele: “Listen to this and keep your hands off your guns, or I will shoot the first man of you who makes a hostile movement.” There was silence. Sergeant Fury had already put a bullet into the shoulder of a man who tried to keep him from taking his prisoner.

After the Riot Act was read, Steele spoke again:

“You have taken advantage of the fact that a rebellion has broken out in the North West and that I have only a handful of men, but, as desperate diseases require desperate remedies, and both disease and remedy are here, I warn you that if I find more than twelve of you standing together or any large crowd assembled, I will open fire upon you and mow you down! Now disperse at once and behave yourselves!”

Steele’s full force of eight Mounted Police now stood in line behind them, rifles cocked. Steele stood his ground with Johnston and watched the grumbling mob slowly break up. The following morning the town and
all the line “was as quiet as a country village on Sunday.” Steele arrested all the ringleaders in the riot, brought them to court, and fined them each one hundred dollars or six months in jail.

The men remained off work until arrangements were made to pay them, but there was no further violence. Steele, still convalescent, donned his uniform and headed for Calgary. James Ross implored him to come back, but this was not possible. The North West was at war. Three columns of troops were preparing to move north to the fertile valley of the Saskatchewan, now held in thrall by roaming bands of Crees and a more disciplined force of Métis under Riel and his adjutant general, Dumont. Out from Calgary went Major-General T. Bland Strange, brought out of retirement from his ranch to keep the restive Blackfoot in check with the six hundred volunteers of the Alberta Field Force. North from Qu’Appelle marched the first division of the North West Field Force – nine hundred men under General Middleton, determined to strike at Riel’s headquarters in Batoche. The second division – five hundred men and two hundred teamsters – entrained for Swift Current and then moved north under Colonel Otter (happily recovered from his snow-blindness) to relieve the besieged stockade at Battleford. Steele himself was given a unique command. His task was to organize, as swiftly as possible, a cavalry detachment known as Steele’s Scouts and strike off in pursuit of the rebel Cree chieftain, Big Bear. It was, perhaps, the most remarkable case on record of instant recovery from Rocky Mountain fever.

4
The eleventh hour

When Stephen learned from Van Horne on April 16 that the
CPR
pay car could not be sent out, he immediately wired the news in cipher to John Henry Pope in Ottawa. Van Horne had hinted at the imminence of a “serious catastrophe.” Another riot, similar to the one at Beavermouth, was likely if wages were again held up. The Minister of Railways was Stephen’s last hope. Not long before, the
CPR
president had sat in Pope’s drawing room, his head in his hands, and said to Rufus, Pope’s son: “We are ruined – there is only one man who understands the seriousness of our position and that is your father – It is through him that we must be saved.”

John Henry Pope was, on first acquaintance, a curiously unimpressive man – angular of feature, ungainly in manner, slow in speech, awkward
of gesture, and hesitant in his parliamentary oratory. He had only elementary schooling, a deficiency that made his correspondence seem almost childlike. Yet he was one of the most powerful men in the Government. There was, as John Willison said, a patriarchal simplicity and dignity about him which inspired liking and respect. There was something a bit Lincolnesque, not only about his features – the prominent cheekbones, the sensitive nostrils – but also about his manner. He might be an awkward speaker but he did not fall into the trap of making dangerous admissions; nor could he be provoked into hasty or angry statements. Macdonald listened to him and trusted him.

Pope went straight to the Prime Minister with Stephen’s decoded telegram and again pointed out the obvious: if the
CPR
went bankrupt, the Government could not survive. At last the vacillating party leader was forced into a décision. Until this moment he had believed, not without good reason, that any further relief to the company would be politically disastrous. The exhausting debate of 1884 had been bad enough but it would be nothing compared to the national uproar occasioned by further public handouts to a faltering railroad. Whichever course Macdonald took, he knew he was going to face a storm. If the
CPR
collapsed, it would undoubtedly touch off a wave of bankruptcies and personal tragedies – men without pay, suppliers over-extended, entire communities facing depression, the country demoralized by the failure of its great national endeavour. And then there was Blake, the man who always had the facts and figures at his finger-tips and who used them to devastating effect. Blake, the vindicated prophet, would remind the nation of his famous prediction that the
CPR
would never pay for its axle grease; Macdonald did not care to face that taunt. He had two choices, both of them politically unpalatable; but one was slightly less distasteful than the other. With very little heart he decided that, once again, he must help to bail out the
CPR
.

Fortunately, the mood of the country was beginning to change. Because of the swift action of the railway, the government had a good chance of localizing the Saskatchewan Rebellion and preventing it from spreading throughout the North West. In the most bizarre and perverse way something
had
turned up for Old Tomorrow. Macdonald’s earlier procrastinations in the matter of Indian and Métis rights had produced a situation that made his later procrastinations in the matter of railway financing seem almost prescient.

First, however, there was a nasty wrangle in the caucus. The majority of Macdonald’s followers were in favour of the government taking over the road. McLelan resigned, as he had said he would. Macdonald had to
use all his charm and all his political muscle to bring the party into line. He personally spoke or wrote to every recalcitrant Conservative, threatening his own resignation if they failed to back his proposal for another loan to the railway, in the words of another Pope (Joseph), “with no very good grace the Ministerial supporters swallowed the pill.”

In one crowded week, events took on momentum of their own. The railway still had no money to pay its men and not much hope of getting any, in spite of Macdonald’s change of heart; the relief bill, which the Prime Minister had not yet laid before the House, would not be passed before a long debate in Parliament. Macdonald privately asked the Bank of Montreal to advance five million dollars to the
CPR
, explaining that he intended to bring some resolutions before Parliament regarding financial aid “at an early date.” That was not good enough for the bank; it bluntly refused to advance a nickel to the faltering company.

The same day – April 24 – at Fish Creek, a coulee not far from Batoche, a handful of Métis under Gabriel Dumont fought General Middle-ton’s superior force to a standstill. The Métis lost six men, the Canadians, fifty; Middleton was immobilized for a fortnight. There was better news from Battleford, where the five hundred people cooped up in a stockade less than two hundred yards square were finally released by Colonel Otter’s division. In London the Grand Trunk, eying events in Canada, was waiting to pounce on its hapless rival. Sir John Rose wrote to Stephen of the
GTR’S
intense ill will, not just to the railway but also to “everything Canadian.” On April 27, Sir Henry Tyler told a Grand Trunk meeting that the
CPR
was finished – that it would be taken over by the government and when that happened his company would gladly come forward and
“assist.”