Time Lord (10 page)
Authors: Clark Blaise
Fleming’s professional mission as surveyor was combined with a political mission to the Charlottetown Conference, a meeting to discuss the issue of confederation, held in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, on September 1, 1864. On his return to Quebec, he brought along J. W. Wood, the conference’s recording secretary, a young Englishman whose surviving file of letters is a moving record of an almost mystical period in Canadian nation-building. Mr. Wood’s summer, which he spent in the forests, in wagons and on horseback, in canoes and on foot, in isolated villages and the gracious homes of its leading citizens in
the company of Sandford Fleming, remained with him for the rest of his very long life.
On one level, it is a record of Fleming’s effective networking, securing a political base for unification among the colonies’ leading citizens. On another level, what comes through even forty years later in Wood’s recollections is that those weeks in 1864 were a blessed summer in which he (Wood) leveraged his way, however modestly, into a significant chapter in British (never, to him, Canadian) history. He was present at the inception, if not quite the birth, of a nation. It’s hard not to imagine Wood and Fleming as figures in a vast landscape painting, two young men on horseback following a muddy trail through a dark forest, a salmon stream to one side, purple hills in the distance, smoke rising from the chimney of a nearby cottage.
History does not provide official records of the Charlottetown deliberations. It comes as a supririse, then, to learn—through Wood’s letters—just how fanciful, or perhaps merely enthusiastic, some of the ideas were. The most persuasive orator of the confederation cause, Fleming’s close friend, D’Arcy McGee, proposed the unification of the various colonies of British North America under a prince of the English royal house and a daughter (if there be one) of the royal family of France. Fleming, according to Woods, endorsed the idea whole-heartedly:
[The proposal] would have the happiest influence upon the destinies of the North American Provinces. It would be received by the French portion of the people as a high compliment to themselves. It would bury, by amalgamation with their present feelings of allegiance to England, any still lingering memories of the land from which they have sprung.… At least it would appeal in a powerful manner to those sentiments which are so accessible to the French temperament and would increase immensely that feeling of common interest
and common country which is so desirable to foster and develop.
Although no degree of mutual ignorance between the two founding peoples of Canada should be surprising, the idea that French-Canadians, by then a hundred years removed from French authority, remnants of a pre-Revolutionary French culture, Catholic heretics (Jansenists) raised on a dogma that characterized post-Revolutionary France as the devil’s own breeding ground, would tolerate a pretender from the French royal house exists only on the furthest shore of probability.
Wood soon returned to England, and “the current of his destinies,” as he called it, took him to India for the next forty years, building the Bombay, Baroda & Western. In the two years leading up to confederation, he had an opportunity to reflect on the impossibility, even the futility, of the Canadian project. Every now and then he expressed seditious thoughts, begging his old friend not to hold it against him. In 1866, from Bombay, Wood wrote:
Although I usually do not feel sure that it is of very great importance either to England or the world at large whether the great country now forming our territories in North America is thoroughly opened up in the British interest, or not, so long as it is opened up for the benefit of mankind, I, looking on as an outsider, (and I fear you will say an unsympathising one, though it is not so) can imagine a much worse fate befalling our North American Provinces than absorption into the United States, and I am inclined to think that this will come sooner or later. The U.S. will in time want the whole country, at least they will, after a while, become full-blooded again and agitate this and other questions, and though of course, while bound in honor to do so, England would fight the battle with
the colonies in case of war, I cannot, I confess, see that such a risk is worth running either for the colonies or for England.… And, looking to the development of the unopened country, it seems to me comparatively a matter of indifference in the interest of humanity whether it is done by people called Englishmen or by people called American.
Wood faithfully reflects the English, not Canadian, view. The least confrontation, the least complication, the better. Canada was Britain’s to give away, if necessary, not to nurture into independence.
If Canadians did not destroy their own prospects of confederation by petty jealousies or dynastic fantasies, the United States could be counted on to erect every barrier legally available, short of invasion, to derail it. But American pressures, economic and diplomatic, in many ways proved counterproductive to the aim, considered an inevitability, of annexation. It forced confederation and hastened the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway.
When Secretary Seward purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, it was in great part to discourage Canadian unification and to limit the extension of a British coastline on the Pacific. Alaska, a much-ridiculed purchase (“Seward’s Folly,” “Seward’s Icebox”), was not an end in itself but a strategic building block in the eventual Americanization of the entire North American landmass. (It might be said that the only thing that inhibited overt American action was an unchallenged belief in its inevitability, as shown in a
Chicago Tribune
editorial as late as September 5, 1884: “It is not necessary to discuss it in this country or to seek to force or even hurry annexation. All the elements—commercial, financial, social and political—are gravitating Canada towards the American Union, to which she naturally and geographically belongs.”) Seward’s powerful colleague, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Charles Sumner, termed the Alaskan acquisition “a visible step in the occupation
of the whole North American continent.” At the time of his exit from government, in 1869, Seward was negotiating with Denmark for the purchase of the Virgin Islands (which were finally bought in 1917, at some coercion) and Greenland.
It may seem bizarre today, but relations between Canada and the United States suffered through decades of rhetorical abuse, moments when Canada’s historic fear of absorption matched America’s frustration with the very idea of an alien, bordersharing presence. Throughout the 1870s and eighties, so long as Manifest Destiny remained and even grew as a living cause, faithful newspapers like the
Chicago Tribune
could be counted on to keep the temperature just short of boiling, should Canada persist in ignoring the inevitable:
If ever there should be any serious misunderstanding between the United States and Great Britain, it would take but little time before an irresistible American army would cross the frontier, and annexation would be brought about so quickly that it would make the head of the Marquis swim [i.e., the Marquess of Lorne, the governor-general].
And, later:
We are willing to put up with many things the Canadians do which we would not tolerate if the British were the immediate agents. The Canadians now divide with the United States the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. We permit them to line our frontier for 3,000 miles with their custom-houses where American goods and American people are subjected to an Inquisitorial process; we permit them to disrupt our frontier; we submit to very many annoyances, with patience, because of the feeling that they are weak, and that it would be ungenerous in us to get angry with them. But let “the majestic” form of the United Empire intrude itself between the two
countries, and the United States may decide that the Nation should go in and twist the British Lion’s tail.
Fleming’s managerial history exposes another curious trait. Not just as an engineer, but in all aspects of his life until the standard-time movement, he was a curiously reticent, or ambivalent, leader. He allowed others to take the credit; perhaps we can say he was an engineer, that tragic profession, to his bones.
In 1872, Stanford Fleming was appointed Chief Engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, the major financial undertaking of nineteenth-century Canadian history. He delegated authority to crew chiefs who later attacked him. When he cofounded the Canadian Institute in 1850, he chose the role of secretary-treasurer rather than the presidency. On his first surveying tour of the West for the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1872, he installed his closest friend, Reverend George Grant, as expedition historian, the result being Grant’s classic account,
Ocean to Ocean
. As he gathered support for confederation, J. W. Wood wrote the letters, D’Arcy McGee made the speeches. At the Prime Meridian Conference—
his
conference, in many ways—he was “attached,” like a satellite, to the British delegation as the representative of Canada, a country that did not exist. Even in his final years, rather than write an autobiography, he practically dictated a biography,
Empire-Builder
, to his friend Lawrence Burpee.
He often expressed himself on the engineer’s calling as a kind of secular religion. Its codes were no less rigorous than the Hippocratic oath. In his view, engineering had a noble, almost tragic nature. In 1863 he’d extolled the profession in terms that recall the Book of Isaiah (every valley shall be exalted). “It is one of the misfortunes of the profession to which I am proud to belong that our business is to make and not to enjoy; we no sooner make a rough place smooth than we must move to another and fresh field, leaving others to enjoy what we have accomplished.” By 1876 his views had only deepened:
Engineers, as you all know, are not as a rule gifted with many words. Men so gifted generally aim at achieving renown in some other sphere.… Silent men, such as we are, can have no such ambition; they cannot hope for profit or place in law, they cannot look for fame in the press or the pulpit, and, above all things, they must keep clear of politics. Engineers must plod on in a distinct sphere of their own, dealing less with words and more with deeds, less with men than with matter; nature in her wild state presents difficulties for them to overcome. It is the business of their life to do battle against these difficulties and make smooth the path on which others are to tread.
It is their privilege to stand between these two great forces, capital and labour, and by acting justly at all times between the employer and the employed, they may hope to command the respect of those above them equally with those under them
. [Italics added.]
Those last words proved as much prophetic as elegiac. Almost as though he had seen into his own future, he had delivered a judgment against the state of affairs in Canada, and his role on the Canadian Pacific Railway. He could no longer interpose himself between the demands of politics and capital, and his oath as an engineer.
Engineers are not paid to play Hamlet—if they must play the prince, better to take direction from Machiavelli. Parliament did not interest itself in engineering complications. The unsurveyed muskeg swamps between Lake Superior and the Manitoba border were found to be inland seas of gelatinous peat, capable of swallowing tons of sand and gravel and whole trains without ever reaching bottom. In one area, seven layers of rail lay buried, one upon the other. Three hundred miles of Ontario muskeg could absorb the personnel and resources—nine thousand men worked on the Lake Superior section alone—of two thousand miles of prairie track. There was no existing text, no standard
of engineering to which anyone could appeal. Blasting, filling, and bridging through the Canadian Shield cost upwards of $700,000 a mile. The economical solution, sharing lines between Chicago and northern Minnesota, was of course politically unworkable.
The closing act in the engineering career of Sandford Fleming was his inability to decide on a proper route through the Rockies, the northern Yellowhead Pass (west of today’s Edmonton), or the southern Kicking Horse. Unable to resolve it, he wasted years in surveys and second and third opinions, and a second personal survey. His indecision kept construction and surveying parties paid and provisioned, but often idle through the harshest winters on the continent. In that robust, high-wage, labor-scarce railroad-building era, it was difficult to keep crews together, especially when the chief himself appeared to be dithering in Ottawa and London. Some members defected, some complained to Fleming or to parliament. One built the street railroads of Oslo. Others left for India and the West Indies. Many more signed on with American railroads.
The Decade of Time, 1875–85
BY THE MIDDLE
of the 1870s, the assertion of human reason over the processes of nature was yielding discoveries and inventions in all the arts and sciences that lent that famous Victorian confidence to the notion that man was no longer the passive inheritor of an ordained “natural” universe. All of nature was his to discover and mold. The ability to communicate instantaneously by voice, to light the dark, the luxurious trans-Atlantic steamers, the transcontinental railroads, a new personal printing press called the typewriter, bound the world in exciting and, for some, alarming new ways. But the outworn shell of time, those heavy boots inherited from tradition, from nature, were impeding progress. Societies were moving faster than their ability to measure.
Before railroads began serving every “civilized” part of the globe (as the Victorians were fond of calling it), the sun had set the temporal rhythm. Two cities set one hundred miles apart maintained an eight-minute temporal separation. But a train could cover a hundred miles in less than two hours—so which town’s “time” was official? Which standard should be published? The train itself might have originated in a city five hundred miles distant. Who, therefore, “owned” the time—the towns along the route, the passengers, or the railroad company?
