_Recounting midwinter episodes of location and operation in empty
country._
The average outsider of railway travail may envy the official who,
he thinks, continually revels in the luxuries of a private car; but
nobody has suffered the pangs of jealousy because he could not share
in some of the midwinter pleasures of the railroading pioneer in a
Western Canada which, when all’s said and done, is not a banana belt
in the earliest and latest months of the year. Between the Lake of
the Woods and the Rocky Mountains winter develops more rigours than
the poets sing; bracing though it undeniably is, and so dry, before
and after prohibition, that you don’t feel the cold.
In railway operation some of the more recent mechanical arrangements
of trains have made a day on the rail vastly superior to a day on
the trail. Engines don’t die as often as they did when the Canadian
Northern was an infant of days. Perhaps it should be explained how
engines go dead, lest some reader be as bare of railroad lore as the
director of a famous company was who, going on a trip to England,
asked the general manager of his line to prime him with a few
interesting facts about the system. If investors and others became
inquisitive over there, what would he say?
“Oh,” replied the manager, “tell them that we have a fine line with
first-class equipment--all eighty-pound rails.”
“Good point,” agreed the director, “eighty pounds to the mile, I
suppose?”
In these days, locomotives are equipped with automatic fire-box
doors, which operate without producing the intermittent glare that
used to light up the sky at night when the fireman opened the door to
shovel in fuel. Then, with the temperature down to thirty or forty
below zero, the opening of the firebox door would let in such a rush
of air that, if the boiler tubes were becoming thin, they would begin
to leak.
Cold air seems to have a faculty of doing damage, even inside a
glowing firebox, possibly on the principle which preserves the
heat of a ray of sunlight, as it passes through an intensely cold
atmosphere, so that it will penetrate thick glass, and warm a room.
The leaking tubes put out the fire, or reduce its vehemence so that
steam cannot be maintained at driving pressure. The stricken engine
coughs herself into impotence, and the train stalls. Only in a
roundhouse during weather that begets such a casualty is there hope
of resurrection for the dead iron horse.
It has been told how the superintendent of the Lake Manitoba Railway
and Canal Company almost lived on the line, nursing business with
the solicitude of a mother doing her best for difficult twins. No
spacious private car tended to make him feel like a monarch of all he
surveyed. The nearest approach to winter luxury was the stove in the
freight conductor’s caboose. If the superintendent wanted to make the
most of his operating force, he could count some of the section men
twice--first as maintenance-of-way men, and secondly as way freight
agents at the sidings which, as already remarked, furnished more
stops than stations.
One bitterly cold night in February, 1897--our first winter on the
baby road--we were coming down from Dauphin to Gladstone and Portage
La Prairie, when, as we approached Glenella siding--a place whose
hopes were linked with the name of Lady Mann’s sister--the engine’s
sighing betokened a probable halt, for which force would be no
remedy. Billy Walker, our first and faithfullest engine-driver, was
at the throttle, and managed to induce his leaking horse to crawl
into the siding. We were thirteen and a half miles from Plumas and
from the possibility of wiring to Portage la Prairie for a fresh
engine. The other locomotive of the system was at Dauphin. It was
thirty below zero in God’s free air, and the witching hour of
midnight was written on the watch. It was unsafe to sing “We won’t go
home till morning”.
Near the siding was a recently-arrived settler who, we knew, had a
team of horses. We roused him and he promised to drive me to Plumas.
Sitting in the bottom of a wagon box, set on a home-made jumper
sleigh, we drove off, over the trailless snow, with never a star
overhead to give us a pointer; the driver saying he knew the way, and
his passenger muffled to the forehead, solemn as the grave.
The driver gave signs of being almost as dead as the engine; but as
he re-asserted that he knew the way to Plumas, he was allowed to
pursue unquestioned the wiggling tenor of his way across the flat and
hoary plain.
Doubt arose in the passenger’s mind. Somehow, it seemed that instead
of going southeast towards Plumas we were making southwest for
Neepawa, and that, after awhile, instead of being on the open prairie
we should enter hilly, timbered country where the going would be more
difficult, and direction impossible to maintain in the leaden gloom.
To my doubts the farmer was indifferent, probably not being awake
enough to appreciate what was said. After about three quarters of an
hour I charged him with heading for Neepawa, and then he threw up his
hands and confessed he knew not where we were.
He was bidden to turn around the team, and let them go where they
supposed their stable to be. After half an hour of this exhilarating
travel I perceived a red light away to the east, and knew it to be
the gleaming tail of the stricken train. We reached it at half-past
one. I bade the farmer good morning, asked the conductor for his
replenished kerosene lamp, requested him to stay with his train till
another engine appeared, and started to walk the ties to Plumas.
Nothing is comparable to a situation like that to make a man rely
on his own resources, and to exalt meditation into a consoling
art--especially when he finds himself exactly where Moses was when
the light went out. Something special was in the conductor’s
kerosene--the anti-freeze was frozen. After less than a mile’s walk
the lamp was as functionless as the helpless engine. Stumbling along,
I reached the bridge over the Jumping Deer River, the ties on which
were covered with a perfect film of perfect ice. It was soon proved
to a demonstration that the foot cannot say to the hand: “I have no
need of thee.” I am not sure whether the feet and hands did not have
to rely more on their neighbours, the knees, than was customary in
most spheres of transportation. With the combined cumbrousness and
comfort of a fur coat, fur cap, and mitts that would have done honour
to Greenland’s Icy Mountains, the treacherous trestle was safely and
thankfully negotiated; and the hope of Plumas flickered once more in
a lonely human breast.
Thanks to a pair of fairly long legs, and the remains of an Original
Seceder’s faith in final perseverance, I made Plumas station at half
past five, woke the agent, wired Portage, whence the Manitoba North
Western superintendent sent an engine to Glenella, while I slept
until noon in the hotel across the way.
After twenty-seven years, the adventure looks rather entertaining
from the meridian of King and Yonge. Then it was regarded as part of
the evening’s work--a chore that might have to be done any day of
the week--a commonplace which takes a long time to assume the hue of
frosty romance.
Comparatively, the zero hours of railway operation are less perilous
than their counterparts in the life of the constructor who has
to spend winter days and nights in empty country, far from his
sheltered base. The general local administration of Canadian Northern
construction was mainly in the hands of Rod Mackenzie, eldest son
of the President. He was not technically an engineer, but had been
almost continuously on his father’s work since boyhood. I believe
he spent some time in the mountains when The Farmer Outfit was
building snow sheds for the C.P.R. To my knowledge, he was in charge
of contracts from 1898, when the first 125 miles guaranteed by the
Manitoba Legislature was completed by extending the line 25 miles
from Sifton Junction to Winnipegosis.
Rod Mackenzie was one of the most likeable men in railway service.
He had a good deal of his father’s remarkable driving force, and
attracted to himself a larger quantity of genial companionship. He
was a member of Mackenzie, Mann, Limited, though it was not generally
known that the firm included more than the two senior principals. My
own official relationship was entirely with the railway company, so
that I did not come as closely in contact with him as with the chief
engineer of the Canadian Northern, who became general manager.
Some day, perhaps, fitting tribute will be paid to the railway
engineers who have wrought so magnificently to transform the face of
Canada. They scarcely ever seem to think of their work as, in any
degree, romantic, or bookworthy. What more prosaic than a blueprint?
unless it be a blue-stocking? But what goes into many a blueprint
which shows how a river is to be crossed, or a bridge is to be built?
At this writing, the City of Toronto is concerned over a viaduct
along its waterfront, which was the subject of a Railway Commission
order ten years ago, and is now the subject of a revision by an
engineer of whose highly distinguished career the public knows
little. The scheme to build the viaduct east of Yonge Street as
originally planned, and to construct bridges west of Yonge, instead
of the Moyes viaduct, is the work of Mr. M. H. MacLeod, officially
the special consulting engineer of the Canadian National Railways
with headquarters at Toronto.
Mr. MacLeod is the quietest man who ever devised a solution for
a troublesome and expensive problem. He had no previous official
connection with this matter; but, returning in the autumn of 1923
from a trip to Europe, he saw in the press that it was once more
eruptive. Without seeing a plan, or knowing more of what was proposed
than any non-technical outsider could gather from the newspapers, he
walked over the ground, alone, using the eyes and experience of the
builder of more miles of railway in Western Canada than any other
man, and the deviser of the entrance into Winnipeg of the Canadian
Northern and Grand Trunk Pacific railways, and of their great Fort
Garry Union Station.
The waterfront scheme as adopted by the Canadian National and
Canadian Pacific Presidents is the MacLeod scheme, worked out on his
own study of the problem on the ground. I have been told by one
who was present at a meeting of prominent business leaders which
discussed it closely, that Sir Edmund Walker, who was there, told his
colleagues that he had known Mr. MacLeod for twenty-five years, as
an engineer, and his bank would back any scheme he devised up to ten
million dollars.
It was one of the constant satisfactions of twenty-two years out
of twenty-six of a Canadian Northern and Canadian National railway
experience to be a colleague and friend of Mr. MacLeod, as it is one
of the deepest pleasures of a period of reminiscence to draw upon an
episode of his service of the Canadian Northern which, on the whole,
I think, typifies, better than any other that comes to mind, the
quality of that distinguished service.
MacLeod is a Hebridean, from the Isle of Skye. He came to this
continent as an infant, and went to school mainly in the United
States. His early engineering experience was gained in the vicinity
of Toronto. He has recently told of his first meeting at Kirkfield
with Sir William Mackenzie, over forty years ago, when he was sent
to look over the country through which it was proposed to build a
railway from Lindsay to Bracebridge. He was working on the Superior
division of the C.P.R. in 1883. He built the line up the east shore
of Lake Temiskaming; and was in charge of construction in the Crow’s
Nest Pass.
MacLeod became chief engineer of the Canadian Northern in the spring
of 1900. We had the line from Gladstone to Erwood, on the way to
Prince Albert, with a branch to Grandview, westerly from Dauphin.
We also had the South Eastern, on which the Muskeg Express hauled
firewood to Winnipeg from the Lake of the Woods. When MacLeod came
to us from the C.P.R. our mileage was 600. Before he asked for
relief from strenuous duty his jurisdiction as Vice-President of the
National Railways, in charge of construction, covered over 17,000
miles.
So far as the scheme for a main line connecting Winnipeg with
Edmonton had been developed in 1900, it was intended to make the
route via Prince Albert. MacLeod’s view was that a really big line
must be built where the C.P.R. main line had first been projected;
and that our track from Grand View should be extended to where the
old and still used telegraph line to Prince Albert from Qu’Appelle
ran from the station at Humboldt towards the South Saskatchewan
River, fifteen miles north of and below Saskatoon, then a little
station mainly used for traffic to and from Battleford, the former
capital of the North West Territories, eighty miles from any railway.
During the summer of 1901 it was determined to prospect the route
from Prince Albert to Edmonton, and also to apply for a charter
for a main line to be built from Grand View via Humboldt and the
Battleford country, keeping to the south of the North Saskatchewan
River west of Battleford. While the preliminaries of the application
to Parliament were proceeding in the East, MacLeod was to find
river crossings--one of the South Branch, about fifteen miles below
Saskatoon, and such crossings of the North Branch, in the Battleford
country as might seem desirable.
So, on December the fifteenth MacLeod and C. R. Stovel, our right of
way man, who was married to a half-sister of Sir William Mackenzie,
drove out of Prince Albert to prospect a line to Battleford and
beyond, and to locate crossings. To-day a branch line connects Prince
Albert with North Battleford, and covers almost precisely the ground
that MacLeod and Stovel examined in very hard weather. Very few
people were in the country; but it was possible to find a stopping
place every thirty or forty miles. They carried their own bedding,
mainly of rabbit robes. They came through the wooded country to
Shellbrook, then through the Thickwood Hills, traversing parts of two
Indian reserves.
A settler with whom they stayed told them he hauled his grain eighty
miles to Battleford--a three days’ journey. They came round the north
of Redberry Lake, and after dark on Christmas Eve were descending
the slope to the North Saskatchewan River about where Brada now is.
They could see the dim lights of the old capital, across the valley,
on the tongue of land just above the confluence of the Battle and
Saskatchewan rivers. Between untrailed snow and tired horses, it was
nine o’clock before they reached the town, intending to rest the team
over Christmas.
Battleford’s Christmas joy did not please them; and at noon they
decided to pull out and look for a crossing up the river. The
original C.P.R. survey was kept south of the North Branch, to take in
Battleford. But MacLeod had learned that this meant crossing twenty
lateral streams, with expensive bridging of each, and most of them on
land that was too slippery to afford comfortable economical safety.
His idea was to make two crossings of the North Branch, one near the
Elbow, where the great current sharply changes its direction from
southeast to northeast, and the other above Battleford--which has
been done advantageously from every point of view, as everyone knows
who is familiar with the country on both sides of the river.
Christmas Day, then, MacLeod and Stovel left Battleford. Twenty-five
miles west was Bresaylor postoffice, their objective for more
information. The postmaster was Mr. Taylor. He and his neighbours,
Bremner and Saylor, had trekked all the way from the Portage Plains,
looking for a good location, and had settled thus near the great
Saskatchewan because the country was the most like the Portage Plains
they had seen. The postoffice name was a compromise--the first
syllables of Bremner, Saylor and Taylor, as the Canadian National
time table of to-day discloses.
But what about the river valley to the west, which must be explored
for many miles for a suitable crossing? Beyond Bresaylor the only
habitation was a shack in which two boys were living while wintering
Bresaylor cattle on hay which had been put up during the summer,
near the Big Gully; the tributary beyond which it was not desirable
to bridge the Saskatchewan. The shack was about thirty-five miles
west by north of Bresaylor, and almost straight north of the present
town of Maidstone. A trail to it was visible in the deep snow. But it
had scarcely been travelled, and the going was heavy, and slower for
horses than a used road was for a walking man.
The two pathfinders spent Christmas night in Bresaylor postoffice.
All next day they drove for the shack. Darkness fell with no
indication of dwelling or cattle. For five more hours the weary team
was driven over the scarcely discernible trail. Between nine and ten
o’clock MacLeod and Stovel stopped, intending to endure the cold of a
very bad night, in the petty shelter of a poplar-and-willow thicket.
As they were making ready they heard a bark--it was the ranchers’
dog; and comfort and food for men and beasts were assured.
Next morning the search for a crossing must be made by MacLeod alone.
There was no way of getting the team and sleigh through the river
bottom, two hundred feet below the plain. Off the ice the bush,
brush, tortuous banks of the stream, and drifts of snow would make
the travel tediously slow. Driving on the ice was impossible. Where
the current was extra-swift--and the Indian name of the Mississippi
of the North means “Swift-flowing-water”--the ice was far too thin to
carry anything as heavy as a pair of horses. So, Stovel must drive
along the southern edge of the river valley for, say, fifteen miles,
and watch for his chief coming down the ice. Then he could keep pace
with him, for a meeting at dusk, and Bresaylor could be made for the
night.
MacLeod left his fur coat with Stovel, and taking a couple of
bannocks for lunch he travelled in moccasins and a heavy pea jacket.
The day was intensely cold. Speed was doubly of the essence of the
programme--to cover the ground in the time allotted, and to keep
from freezing. At the turn of the year, in the Battleford latitude
daylight is done about four o’clock.
Once more, the day’s work seemed commonplace enough to the men
who did it. From fireside and radio, twenty years afterwards, it
looks what it was--a daring adventure, in an empty country, with a
temperature that made lonely human travel more hazardous than most
people ever know, and the possibility of a blizzard starting without
warning, to the extremest risk of life and limb. Indeed, only a few
days after MacLeod all alone, with a walking suit, two bannocks,
a box of matches, a compass and a jack-knife, his only exterior
defenses against disaster, hurried down the valley looking where
to place an imagined bridge, a C.P.R. engineer named Bass, who was
making a trial line for the C.P.R. below Battleford, was frozen to
death quite near his camp.
MacLeod strode over the ice till noon, seeing no place where a
railroad might advantageously be brought down the north bank, a
bridge built over the wide current, and conducted up the southern
escarpment. He ate his bannocks, resting long enough to be warned by
Thirty Below that further repose was impermissible. He trudged again
till three o’clock, and then, tired enough, he sat on the ice for a
smoke. Seeing Stovel and the team, on a bare knoll, overlooking the
vale, about three miles behind him, he assumed that all would be well.
He resumed his walking; and as dusk was falling began to leave the
river bed. But a wolf’s bark, which seemed to give notice to a pack,
warned him to keep somewhat longer on the ice. When he did climb up
a partially wooded ravine, and reached the top, the seeing was not
good. Evidently he and Stovel must each be searching for the other’s
tracks.
MacLeod found nothing, and being very weary, and among bluffs where
dry wood was, he tried to light a fire. The wind, which was moving
the snow in the wreathing gusts which every driver and walker
over the uncharted wintry plain knows so well, prevented any such
consolation, and the cold prohibited a stop in one spot for more than
two or three minutes. So MacLeod walked for warmth in the darkness,
searching as well as he could for a sleigh track, and finding
nothing, and bearing eastward towards Bresaylor. At last he came to a
fence, and vainly tried again to make a fire.
The night before, Stovel and he had been saved by a dog. Providence
was again to use the friend of man; for, as the isolated engineer
was in motion to avoid being frozen stiff, and was longing for the
moon to rise so that he could read his compass, a dog barked; an
indubitable dog. In a little while MacLeod was inside a house, the
good lady of which set food before him.
Stovel had been there about two hours before, very much excited, and
saying that he had lost sight of his friend, and failed to find him.
Afraid something was amiss on the ice, he had gone to Bresaylor for a
fresh team, and human help.
An hour later there was a knock at the door--it was Stovel and the
postmaster’s son; and all was clear for another night alongside Her
Majesty’s mails.
Next morning the examination of the riversides was continued, the
team again following the Saskatchewan’s southern skirt. About nine
miles above Battleford, in the afternoon, MacLeod reached the mouth
of a wide and wooded ravine, which seemed to offer prospect of the
only good crossing he had seen in a tramp of nearly fifty miles.
While he was exploring the ground, he saw Stovel above him, making
all sorts of frantic appeals for company. Thinking that some calamity
had befallen, MacLeod abandoned his job, to render aid to his
distressed and distressing colleague. Nothing was the matter, except
that the solicitous Stovel was afraid MacLeod would stay too long
below; and he himself was determined to run no risk of recent history
repeating itself with a dog’s bark.
The two drove into Battleford, and stayed at the hotel then kept by
Albert Champagne, who became Battleford’s first mayor three years
later, sat a term in the Assembly of the North West Territories, and
was M.P. for Battleford from 1908 to 1917. Next day the team of
horses rested; but the team of men sought no repose. They walked up
the river to the ravine where the search had been stopped overnight.
The site of the great crossing was there and then determined. Stovel
used to say he never walked so fast, in snow or out of it, all his
life, as he did on that eighteen mile trip before dinner. Twenty
years ago MacLeod was in splendid condition, and a terror to go when
his walking mood was on. Stovel had a notion that MacLeod was giving
him a silent admonition not to repeat the fears of the day before.
Stovel was a good guesser.
On the same trip the Elbow crossing and the one on the South
Saskatchewan, at Clarkboro, just east of Warman, were located. On the
best available information Armstrong’s surveying party was working
on preliminary surveys for a bridge about thirty miles below the
Elbow. But as soon as MacLeod had found the crossings that best met
the demand for economical grading and bridging, and for good farming
country alongside the location, he drove to Armstrong’s camp, and
moved the party south, up the valley.
It was the fifteenth of January when MacLeod and Stovel forsook
their horses for the train, after a full month of hardship which
they didn’t regard as hardship. Indeed, if MacLeod sees this account
probably he will wonder why so much has been made of so ordinary an
expedition.
The transference of Armstrong’s party contains the genius of
MacLeod’s genius. The information that took them thirty miles
below the Elbow to survey a crossing was the best information
available--until MacLeod himself looked over the ground. What his
unassisted eye discerned, the blueprints, the finished bridge, the
grades and the daily trains confirmed. It would be the same in
Toronto.
My old friend and colleague is a born, incurable, unconquerable
pathfinder. We proved it over and over again. He would go out to look
for country well adapted for settlement, and a settlers’ railway,
and not only find what he wanted, but on the way would discover
some improvement in his staff’s locations of other lines that
saved thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in
construction.
From the interior of our organization, it has been extracted by a
faithful memory that MacLeod was later than he expected, returning
from an observatory trip in this same Battleford country, where
outfits were waiting to begin grading. The few days’ delay meant
changed locations over fifty miles of track, on the strength of his
overlook of other men’s conscientious and able work. They had the
efficiency of training. He had the insight of genius. In instance
after instance the stakes that were driven on his observation were
found to be in the very spots where the precise levels determined the
final location.
One who has been chiefly devoted to operation does not regard
himself as an authority on construction. But, in a long generation
of experience one learns something of the fundamentals of railway
engineering in a country as vast as ours. For finding a road and for
building it with the least possible expense and the greatest possible
efficiency MacLeod may have had an equal, though I have never met the
man who met him. MacLeod certainly has had no superior.
The winter of 1906-7 was one of the worst in western railroad
history. It didn’t linger in the lap of spring; it pushed the spring
out of its place. Long after the time for the singing of birds had
come, an extra-special sleetstorm covered one section of track with
so thick a glaze of ice that the only way to get trains over it was
to pickaxe the ice from the rails.
Immigration was at the flood that spring. Cities and towns everywhere
were preparing for big construction programmes. Something of
a blockade was inevitable; but a breakdown in one part of our
organization let us into more trouble than honest men deserve. An
effort was made to clear up a congestion that was worsening every
day, by picking out from as many congested sidings as possible, cars
that were most urgently wanted, and making up special trains to meet
special urgencies. The result was congestion worse congested, because
it took longer to segregate the cars required than to move the whole
multitude. Our bill for per diem charges on foreign cars held by us
was appalling.
When our interior trouble was fully understood, primarily as the
outcome of Mr. Mann and the third vice-president going to Winnipeg
to probe the situation, we changed the managerial method, put
our superintendents and men on what may be called a course of
inter-emulation; with ten days as the time set for abolishing the
blockade.
In eight days all was clear, through a zeal on the part of the whole
staff which was beyond praise, and almost beyond belief. I never
saw such a mess, or such a recovery. In fourteen days the Northern
Pacific at Emerson was shouting for us to dam the tide of empties
that was flowing back to their American owners.
This blockade precipitated the appointment of M. H. MacLeod as
general manager, without relinquishing his other post. There was,
of course, some outside surprise at so unusual a fusion of offices.
It was even said that MacLeod hadn’t force of character enough--by
those who did not know what can come from the lone sheiling of the
Hebrides. But MacLeod was all there, all the time and all the way. He
was sometimes like electricity--hardly noticeable till you touched
him. He seldom kicked; but when he did there was no misunderstanding
the stroke.
Shortly before he died Sir William Mackenzie was asked what he
thought of the revised Toronto viaduct scheme. He replied that of
course it should go through, because it was MacLeod’s; and being
MacLeod’s the saving of millions, which it showed on paper, would be
a saving of millions on the contract. Sir William’s latest estimate
of MacLeod was only in keeping with long experience. He may not
have kept them as Major Rogers kept the C.P.R. cheque, but he was
given more than one letter by Sir William, signing as President of
the Canadian Northern, authorizing him to spend on betterments sums
running beyond seven figures, on his sole discretion and authority.
Similar instances of executive confidence may be recorded elsewhere,
but I scarcely think so.
The quality of the railway pathfinder is essentially the same whether
he walks alone, in the depth of winter, on Saskatchewan ice, looking
for a place to build a steel bridge a thousand feet long, or whether
he is poking around a waterfront littered with shipping warehouses,
and considering how to get twenty trains an hour into and out of a
station. It works with a seeing eye and a building hand. MacLeod has
them both. He is in his own class; but he is of a great company of
engineers to whom ungrudging tribute is richly due, and too seldom
paid.