The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (73 page)

The debate had dragged on for the best part of a month. The morning of July 10 came and the bill still had not passed the House, which did not sit until 1.30 that afternoon. According to O. D. Skelton, Van Horne’s sometime confidant, the four-hundred-thousand-dollar debt was due at three o’clock. There were the usual maddening parliamentary formalities before a division could be taken, but at two that afternoon a majority of the Commons voted in favour of railway relief. That affirmation of confidence was good enough for any creditor; the measure would become law in a matter of days. With the Lake Superior line complete and only a few dozen miles remaining in the gap between the Selkirks and the Gold Range, the railway was saved – as always at the eleventh hour. It is doubtful if history records another instance of a national enterprise coming so close to ruin and surviving.

In England, Tupper was working on the great financial house of Baring to market the new
CPR
bonds when they were issued. Here, too, the climate had changed. Though there was still a persistent campaign by the Grand Trunk to convince the financial world that the
CPR
“was a disastrous concern that must break down, or be thrown upon the Government,” both Tupper and Tilley were able to convince Barings that the Government meant to support a railway that had performed such a signal service during the rebellion. Stephen was on board ship when at last the
CPR
relief bill received royal assent on July 20. By the time he reached London, he found Tupper had done his work for him. Baring Brothers took the entire issue of the bonds, half at ninety and the remainder at ninety-one. In Canada, the
CPR
got the money it needed to finish the line; and it never had to ask for a government loan again.

For once, luck was with the company. The bond issue was floated at exactly the right moment. The brief British boom was short lived, and Barings had trouble disposing of the issue, only half of which was actually subscribed by the British public. The remainder of the bonds were taken up by members of the firm and by George Stephen and Donald A. Smith, who bought half a million dollars worth between them. It was small wonder that the
CPR
changed the name of the new town at the second crossing of the Columbia from Farwell to Revelstoke, after the peer who headed the financial house that got the railway its money.

5
A land no longer lonely

The frontier was melting away before the onslaught of steel. The old, free days when whiskey peddlers hid in every copse, when gambling ran unchecked, when towns were constructed of tents and logs and the prairies were unfenced, were vanishing. On the heels of the railway came Timothy Eaton’s new catalogue, devised in 1884 by that most revolutionary of merchants. For as little as two dollars the ladies of Moose Jaw or Swift Current could order one of several models of the new Grand Rapids Carpet Sweeper (“makes no noise, no dust, sweeps clean; a child can use them”), or for twenty-five cents a patented Hartshorn window shade with spring rollers.

A rough kind of sophistication was making itself felt. Methodist halls where temperance speakers held court invaded the old frontier. Amateur theatricals came into vogue, along with skating carnivals, musical recitals, and educational lectures. The sudden transformation of Winnipeg from a muddy little village into a glittering metropolis astonished the soldiers who poured through on their way to do battle with Dumont and Poundmaker. They were “surprised at the splendid buildings and enormous plate glass fronts of Main street, which is said to remind one of Boston or New York.” A Halifax man marvelled at the silks in the windows, selling for as much as $9.50 a yard: “…  all kind of goods that would rot in the stores of Halifax are sold here every day, and the prices of most American goods are about the same as at home. The streets are all lighted for miles by the electric light and the horse cars run about every five minutes on the principal streets. The number and magnificence of the saloons, etc., is very noticeable.”

This was still the West, high, wide and handsome, but it was no longer the frontier. It would have been unthinkable in 1885 for Van Horne to pull a gun on General Rosser in the Manitoba Club, as he had done only three years before. The violent days were over – gone with the buffalo and the antelope, gone with the whooping crane and the passenger pigeon, gone with Red River carts and the nomads who used to roam so freely across a once unbroken ocean of waist-high grass.

The native peoples of the plains had made their final futile gesture against the onrushing tidal wave of civilization in the deep coulees of the North Saskatchewan country in May and June. (The whites did not revolt, W. H. Jackson maintaining an attitude of strict neutrality.) The impetuous Gabriel Dumont, restrained only by a leader who was becoming increasingly mystic and irrational, finally broke out and met the militia at Fish Creek on April 23, luring them into a kind of buffalo pound and vowing to treat them exactly as he had the thundering herds in the brave days before the railway. Here his force of one hundred and thirty Métis, armed for the most part with shotguns and muzzle-loaders, held back some eight hundred trained men under General Middleton, the bumbling and over-cautious British Army regular. On May 2, at Cut Knife Hill, Chief Poundmaker and 325 Cree followers emerged victorious against cannon, Gatling gun, and some 540 troops under Colonel Otter.

These were the last contortions of a dying culture. The Canadian government had eight thousand men in the field, transported and supplied by rail. The natives had fewer than one thousand under arms, and these were neither organized nor in all cases enthusiastic. Riel, the prairie prophet – some called him a prairie pontiff – planned his campaign according to the spiritual visitations he believed he was receiving almost daily. The more practical and pugnacious Dumont used his knowledge of the ground, his skill at swift manæuvre and deception, and his experience in the organization of the great hunts to fend off superior forces. It is possible, had Riel given him his head, that he might have cut the main
CPR
line, derailed the trains, and harried the troops for months in a running guerilla warfare that could have blocked western settlement for a period of years; but the outcome in the end would have been the same.

In mid-May Dumont fought his last battle at Batoche. It lasted for four days – until the Métis’ ammunition ran out. It was remarkable, among other things, for the use of the first and only prairie warship. It also brought about Riel’s surrender and the flight of his adjutant general, who subsequently re-enacted the incidents of 1885 in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

In the weeks that followed, the Indian leaders surrendered too, or fled over the border – Poundmaker, Little Poplar, Lucky Man, Red Eagle, Poor Crow, Left Hand, Wandering Spirit and, finally, Big Bear. There was no place any longer for a wandering spirit, as Crowfoot, the wisest of them all, had thoroughly understood. Two days before the Duck Lake engagement, a worried Macdonald had asked Father Lacombe to try to ensure the neutrality of the Blackfoot chief and his followers. Crowfoot, who believed he could get more from the government by remaining loyal, forbore to take up arms. His steadfastness was rewarded in various ways, not the least of which was the present of a railway pass from Van Horne. Thus was seen the ironic spectacle of the withered Indian riding back and forth across the prairies on the same iron monster that had changed
his people’s ways and caused them to be driven into the corrals of the northern reserves.

Deep in the broad, evergreen valley between the Selkirk Mountains and the Gold Range, through which the olive Columbia flowed on its southerly course to the sea, the old frontier life still existed along the line of the unfinished railway. The last rail was laid on the Lake Superior section on May 16, so that the troops would be able to return to the East in considerable comfort; but in British Columbia construction continued for most of 1885. As the months wore on the gap between the two groups of tracklayers decreased. On the Onderdonk side, the rails were ascending the western slope of the Gold Range from Eagle Pass Landing on Shuswap Lake. On James Ross’s side, the rails were moving up the eastern slopes of the same mountains from Farwell, on the Columbia, soon to be renamed Revelstoke.

It was said that the population of Eagle Pass Landing was sober only during the monthly visits of the stipendiary magistrate from Kamloops. Everybody, it was claimed, purposely avoided drink on those occasions so that they might enjoy it with greater licence the rest of the time. The community’s existence was short but merry. In order to prevent cardsharps from corrupting the settlement, it was an unwritten rule that packs of cards be thrown out of the window after every game and a fresh pack opened. A visitor reported that they lay in heaps in the dirt “until the road was actually covered with hearts, spades, diamonds and clubs.”

At Farwell, on the second crossing of the Columbia (named after the government surveyor who originally laid out the townsite), board shacks and cabins, euphemistically named “hostess houses,” sprang up, presided over by such interesting ladies as Madame Foster, an enormous black woman, and Irish Nell, described as being “tough as nails but with a heart of gold.”

In this disputed territory the federal and provincial governments clashed over the sale of liquor. The federal liquor laws were enforced by a federal stipendiary magistrate, George Hope Johnston, and a force of constables, including some Mounted Police. The British Columbia liquor laws were enforced by a provincial stipendiary, J. M. Sproat, and a force of provincial police. In June, a federal man, Constable Ruddick, seized sixteen dozen bottles of beer. Johnston fined the owner and confiscated the bottles. The owner charged Johnston and his men with theft. The provincial magistrate, Sproat, then ordered his police force to break into the federal jail, seize the beer, and arrest the federal constables. The provincial constable involved was in turn charged by Johnston with assault
and given fourteen days in jail. Sproat replied by swearing out a warrant for the arrest of Johnston, Ruddick, and a Mounted Police constable. Johnston himself was seized and thrown into jail. The wires buzzed between Ottawa and Victoria, the federal government insisting on its jurisdiction under what was known as the Peace Preservation Act (designed to prevent the sale of liquor along the line of the
CPR
) and the British Columbia government proclaiming that the act was unconstitutional. Both governments announced that their only interest was in preventing drunkenness among the railroad navvies. The British Columbia government went so far as to declare that Sproat had taken precipitate action because “he found liquor selling in full blast in the presence of Dominion officers whose special business it was to suppress it.” The spectacle of two sets of policemen arresting each other was too comical to contemplate for long. The matter was settled in the end at the grass-roots level by the diplomacy of James Farquharson Macleod, the Mounted Police superintendent, who came up from Calgary, sat the two warring magistrates down with a bottle of good Scotch, and solved the dispute amicably without further straining federal-provincial relations.

In Farwell, as in every other new community along the line of the railroad, the
CPR
brooked no opposition from local merchants or speculators in the matter of real estate profits. A. S. Farwell, the surveyor, had secured one hundred and seventy-five acres for himself on the banks of the Columbia; as he had anticipated, the railway location went right through his property. However, he refused the terms offered by the
CPR
, and a long and expensive lawsuit followed, which he eventually won. For practical purposes, he lost. The company followed its practice of moving the location of the station and laid out another townsite which became the heart of the business section of Revelstoke.

What the
CPR
wanted in British Columbia was a gift of land in return for establishing a town or divisional point. “When locating the stations we will be governed so far as circumstances will permit by the liberality of the different parties in this respect,” Van Horne told Henry Cambie in March. “We shall try to confer benefits where we have met with decent treatment, and the reverse where we are not.” The general manager had no intention of locating the smallest station where “it will benefit anybody who has imposed upon us in the matter of the right of way.” He struck a hard bargain. In Kamloops, the pioneer merchant John Andrew Mara, a powerful politician who had once been speaker of the British Columbia legislature, was pressing for the railway to establish a terminal on his property. Van Horne was willing, but only on condition that Mara give
the company free land for all shops, sidings, stations, and so on, together with a half interest in
all
his other property. If Mara agreed, he told Cambie, “we’ll probably trade with him, otherwise we must look elsewhere.” It was Van Horne’s principle that the entire cost of setting up a divisional point should be recouped through the sale of adjacent real estate donated by grateful citizens who were really beholden to the railway for the future prosperity of their community.

In his dealings with William Smithe, the Premier of British Columbia, the general manager was equally hard-headed. He knew that the provincial government was anxious to see the
CPR
extend its line to a new terminus at Granville on Burrard Inlet because it would help the sale of public land in the area. In return, Van Horne asked for almost half the peninsula on which the present metropolitan area of Vancouver is situated. He settled for an outright gift of six thousand acres from the government, including almost all of the waterfront between the Second Narrows and the military reserve, which shortly became Stanley Park. In addition, the Hastings Mill had to give up immediately four thousand acres of land and an additional one thousand acres annually in return for an extension of its lease to 1890.