The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (36 page)

Summing up, Fleming wrote that the Bute Inlet route was the only one open for selection if it be considered of paramount importance to carry an unbroken line of railway to … Vancouver Island.

“If, on the other hand, the object be to reach the navigable waters of the Pacific simply by the most eligible line,” then the Fraser Valley-Burrard Inlet route was preferable.

Fleming was scarcely telling the politicians anything they did not already know. What he was really saying was that the decision was now theirs to make. In case they could not make up their minds, he had a suggestion. There was another, perhaps better, choice at the mouth of the Skeena River, a harbour five hundred miles closer to the Orient than the other two. The Admiralty’s experts had dismissed it but “their opinions are expressed guardedly, for the reason that no proper or laudable surveys have been made there as yet.” Curiously, the one naval objection to Burrard Inlet also applied to the harbour at the Skeena’s mouth: both were very nearly within cannon shot of United States territory, Burrard being in the shadow of San Juan Island and the northerly harbour nudging the Alaska panhandle. But the latter demurral did not seem to occur to anybody.

Even after Admiral de Horsey, the following October, dismissed the Skeena harbour as “totally unfit for the Ocean Terminus,” Fleming in his cautious way refused to eliminate the northern route: “The Government should, I think, have something more, if possible, than an opinion, however strongly expressed … it would be desirable to have on the record data sufficient to enable anyone to judge … the propriety of completely rejecting a northern terminus.…” In short, more surveys – and more surveys there were.

Fleming, at this time, was an absentee engineer-in-chief. He was a
robust man who thought nothing of warding off a bear with an umbrella or unrolling his blankets in two feet of snow, as he had done on his twenty-fourth birthday, but by 1876, in his fiftieth year, he was exhausted. A Fifeshire Calvinist, who prayed aloud on the tops of mountain peaks, he had as a boy copied out a maxim from
Poor Richard’s Almanack:
“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.” Fleming loved life; he held gay parties in Ottawa and was perfectly prepared to join in an Indian dance in the wilds, a wolfskin draped over his head; he was fond of champagne and kept it by the case in his office; he loved rich food – oysters were a favourite; and he certainly did not believe in squandering time. Between 1871 and 1876 he held down two man-killing jobs: he was chief engineer of both the Intercolonial and the Canadian Pacific. Thus he could devote only half of his working day to the transcontinental line. He had taken the second job reluctantly and at no extra pay, because that would have meant a total salary higher than that received by the cabinet minister over him. “I … felt the weight of responsibilities that were thrown upon me and I laboured day and night in a manner that will never be known,” he told Charles Tupper. After all, Poor Richard had said: “…  the sleeping fox catches no poultry … there will be sleeping enough in the grave.” The boy Fleming had written that down, too.

When the Intercolonial was completed in 1876, Fleming’s doctors ordered a complete rest. He had suffered two accidents, one of which nearly killed him, and he was worn out. He was granted a twelvemonth leave of absence and went off to England but was twice recalled by the Government, once to write the monumental 1876 report and again as a result of a hurry-up call to deal with his deputy, the bristly Marcus Smith. The leave stretched out over a two-year period.

For nineteen months, between the spring of 1876 and 1878, Fleming was absent and Marcus Smith was in his place. Smith had the job but he did not, apparently, have the authority, nor – as he bitterly complained – the salary. During his visits back to Canada, Fleming would countermand his deputy’s instructions or disagree with his views. The personality clashes within the department seemed to be continual. More and more, as the months went by, Fleming and Smith failed to see eye to eye. Much of this was due to Smith’s furious championing of a single railway route through British Columbia from the Pine Pass to Bute Inlet. But Smith was never an easy man
to get along with. Some of Fleming’s personal appointees, now working under Smith, clashed with him. James Rowan, who had been Fleming’s chief assistant before Smith took over, ignored for eighteen months the letters that Smith sent out to him on the north shore of Lake Superior.

“I was obliged to detail [to the Minister] his most ungentlemanly conduct and language to me,” Rowan later testified, adding that “other members of the staff have been treated in the same brutal manner in my presence.”

Fleming himself said, when he finally returned in 1880, “I found my staff demoralized and many things had been allowed to drift into a state of confusion.”

Smith would not give up on Bute Inlet. The obvious impracticality of a causeway across the strait had not cooled his ardour for “his” route. “I feel confident that a steamboat properly constructed could take a railway train on board and pass safely all seasons of the year from any convenient point on Bute Inlet to a good landing on Vancouver’s Island, near Seymour Narrows,” he wrote in an appendix to the report of 1875. Originally he had thought of the railway running to Bute Inlet through the Yellow Head Pass, which his absent chief favoured, but by 1877 there had taken shape, in the back of that mysterious mind, a preference for the Pine Pass, which Horetzky had first explored. In April of 1877, he wrote to Mackenzie, in his capacity of Minister of Public Works, asking permission to probe the pass with three survey parties; he added that he himself would like to go along. Smith pointed out that the land on both sides of the Yellow Head “is a dreary barren waste,” while the Peace River country adjacent to the Pine Pass was much more promising. Mackenzie, who was trying to slash expenses in his department, turned him down, whereupon the irrepressible Smith determined to go ahead secretly without authority.

He wrote to Henry Cambie, who had replaced him as chief of surveys in British Columbia, to send Joseph Hunter to the Pine River country with two or three men and some packers. The trip was to be completely confidential: “You will understand … that we are not pretending to favour this route but simply extending the northern exploration from River Skeena to get a geographical knowledge of the country.” Cambie was put on his guard, especially against John Robson, the former
Colonist
editor who had been appointed paymaster and chief of commissariat for the
C.P.S.
in British Columbia.
Robson “rushes everything into the
Colonist,”
Smith pointed out. If Robson snooped, Cambie was simply to say that Hunter was extending his explorations of the Skeena country.

Meanwhile Smith went himself out to British Columbia and returned full of enthusiasm for the Peace River country. In October he warned Hunter, from Victoria, to continue to keep his mouth shut: “I have simply to ask you to give no opinion about your work to anybody but bluff them off with
chaff.”
Smith’s tour of British Columbia took on some of the aspects of a political campaign. Two years later, Robson told Mackenzie that one reason he had lost votes in the province was “the insolence of Marcus Smith, who in passing through the district in the fall of 1877 everywhere and most industriously spoke of your railway policy as shuffling, bumbling, declaring that you had really not the slightest intention of going on with the work in British Columbia and predicting very positively the return to power of the Conservatives, the only men, he said, from whom Columbia could hope for a railway – statements which coming from such a source were
bound
to have considerable influence.…”

Smith now accelerated his behind-the-scenes manoeuvres to get “his” route approved. On December 7, he wrote to Hunter that Mackenzie and Dufferin were “moving Heaven and Earth” to get the Fraser River-Burrard Inlet route adopted. He instructed Hunter that the time had arrived for him to leak some information to the press about his Pine Pass explorations
“but not official information
on my authority.” Hunter was to allow himself to be pumped into describing the country which he had explored, but was not to give an opinion about the route. With this letter, Smith enclosed a release marked “For the press” and headed “
PACIFIC RAILWAY ROUTE
.” It began: “Notwithstanding that the matter has been kept very quiet, it has leaked out that the explorations of the acting Engineer-in-Chief, Marcus Smith, from the East, and Mr. Hunter, from the West, last summer have been most successful.” The press release went on to say that the Fertile Belt continued right to the foot of the Pine Pass, that the pass itself was shorter and lower than the Yellow Head and that it would connect most favourably with Bute Inlet.

The same day Smith wrote to Dr. John Sebastian Helmcken, a prominent Victoria politician, son-in-law of Sir James Douglas and one of the original British Columbia delegates to Ottawa during confederation negotiations. Helmcken, like everyone else, had been speculating in land and was a strong advocate of the Bute Inlet route. Smith warned him against raising a public clamour for an immediate
start on the railway; if he did, the Burrard Inlet route would certainly be accepted, but if matters could be delayed, Smith was sure his own views would prevail. After all, Admiral de Horsey had approved the Bute Inlet route. “Mackenzie and Dufferin are furious and wish to prevent the Report reaching the British Government” – Mackenzie, indeed, had thrown it away in a rage – but he, Marcus Smith, would send a report of his own and then “I feel certain that no company under the sun will construct a line by the Yellow Head Pass and Fraser and that none dare attempt it without incurring certain destruction.” In closing, Smith suggested that Helmcken also let the press know about Hunter’s explorations.

An accomplished intriguer himself, Smith was a man who saw dark plots and sinister motives everywhere he went. He lived in a cloak-and-dagger world of the mind in which he imagined himself desperately staving off, at great personal and financial risk, the sombre forces or treason and corruption.

“I see now that the storm is going to burst as regards myself,” he wrote to Fleming on December 7, 1877 (it was his third letter on the subject that day). “At Victoria, I found out about this Burrard Inlet mania, which is a huge land job in which the Minister and his friends are concerned – the latter certainly are from the Lieutenant Governor downwards. It was first started by Lord Dufferin in 1876 while you were in England and I was away north of Lake Superior. His Excellency was much amazed at not succeeding in gaining the leading men of Victoria over to his views – that is to abandon the Railway and leave its carrying out to the good faith of the Canadian Government.… ”

In Smith’s dark view, the Governor General, cheated of a victory that “would help him much in his diplomatic career,” promised the Burrard terminus to the mainland as an act of revenge.

Meanwhile, Henry Cambie in British Columbia had been caught up in the intrigue. Mackenzie, unable to budge Smith, had gone around him and wired direct to Cambie, a friend of Dewdney’s, to commence the survey of the Fraser, which the Governor General had so urgently recommended on his return. Cambie, who was an advocate of the Fraser route to Burrard Inlet –
“crazy
about it,” in Smith’s contemptuous words – uneasily complied. When Smith returned from the West, he found himself snubbed by Mackenzie, who was closeted with Cambie, “pumping him, flattering him and getting him to show off his opinions.”

At length, Mackenzie asked Cambie for a written report on the
Fraser. This put Cambie in a dilemma. Properly, reports should go to the Engineer-in-Chief, who would read and assess them all and then write a report of his own. Cambie was being asked to go over Smith’s head. He brought his plight to the crusty Smith who gave him a fierce reception: after all, Cambie was a Burrard Inlet man and therefore the enemy. Cambie said he would much prefer to give his report to Smith but could not very well quarrel with the Minister “on account of his bread and butter.” He would like to send the report through to Smith so that Smith could put his remarks on it. “I told him I would not look at it until I had a report from all my subordinates and then I would give them a dressing all round,” Smith reported to Helmcken.

Smith also reported to Fleming. “I told him [Cambie] that I had been all along aware of the endeavour to favour that route to advance his own ‘interests’ – but I also have bread and butter to provide and I think I know how to defend myself. Of course I know the Minister can and will dismiss me and he is trying to do so at a month’s notice – but I am determined
to die hard
and shall expose his tricks. The whole thing is a trick to get votes and enrich his friends.”

The strange spectacle of a Cabinet minister (and Prime Minister to boot) trying to circumvent his own department head in order to obtain information from a subordinate continued all that month. Mackenzie continued to ignore Smith and meet secretly with Cambie. For the wretched Cambie, the squeeze was getting tighter. He was a bearded Tipperary Irishman, with a craggy hawk’s face and a touch of brogue in his speech, privately witty, publicly grave, a pillar of the Anglican Church and an experienced engineer who had worked on both the Grand Trunk and the Intercolonial. As a Canadian Pacific surveyor he had trekked over most of British Columbia from the Homathco to the Skeena. He had been in some tight fixes in his time. Just that summer he had taken a leaky boat, caulked only with leaves, for 150 miles down the rivers of the Rocky Mountain Trench, one man bailing furiously all the way. But never had he encountered a situation fraught with such tension. Cambie kept putting off his written report to Mackenzie. Mackenzie kept demanding it. He did not, however, ask for any special report from Marcus Smith. “He shall get one nevertheless whether he likes it or no,” Smith remarked, grimly.

Smith firmly believed that Cambie was being used as a tool by Fraser Valley speculators to push the Burrard route. Cambie, cross-examined
by Smith, admitted that he had expressed a preference for the route but said he thought he ought to have a right to his opinions. Smith replied, with some truth, that Cambie should not be expressing opinions in public; if he had any, he should express them to his immediate superior, Smith. (Smith, of course, did not always follow his own advice.)