The Approach to a Big Task
Salvaged from a “Highland Clearance” in the North of Scotland, and
brought out to the Red River country in 1812, a colony of Scottish
crofters settling midway across British America became the corner-stone
of the stately edifice now known as Western Canada. These people were
brought out after a harsh landlordism had displaced them from their
tenant farms and replaced them by sheep, as more remunerative occupants
of the strath. The plight of these evicted tenants, whose humble homes
were burned to bar their return, excited the compassionate attention of
that gentle, but heroic, nobleman, the Earl of Selkirk, and he,
obtaining a controlling interest in the Hudson’s Bay Company, brought
them to the Red River and placed them on land there. Lord Selkirk’s name
liveth for evermore, not only because his friend, Sir Walter Scott,
wrote that he never knew a man more fitted for high-souled undertakings,
but because the colony he then planted was destined to prove to the
world that the West was a land worth possessing as an illimitable area
which would some day be the granary of the Empire. Moreover, those early
settlers laid foundations for the future in religion and education. They
builded churches and they erected schools. They were of that strong
creed which believed that without moral sanctions and intelligence no
country’s business future could be secure. With these elements in a
community, prosperity will be fostered and of such a country great hopes
will be entertained.—
“It dreads no sceptic’s puny hands
While near the school the church-spire stands;
Nor fears the blinded bigot’s rule
While near the church-spire stands the school.”
The steady progress of that old colony on the Red River and the somewhat
hectic development of British Columbia, the latter not through
colonization so much as by gold rushes and trade exploitations, were the
leading factors in drawing the attention of Eastern statesmen to the
enormous possibilities of the West. In consequence the Canada that was
formed by the four old provinces in the East felt that the wide
West-land must also be brought into the Dominion that was to stretch
from sea to sea.
As one born in that old Selkirk Colony, where my father was one of the
original settlers, I confess to finding some amusement in the theories
of later arrivals as to the opening up of the West. Some, for instance,
allege that the Hudson’s Bay Company had kept the West closed against
colonization and gave out the impression that the country was not fit
for agriculture. In refutation of that charge we have the fact that it
was the Hudson’s Bay Company that founded the first colony and protected
it through all the difficult years till it demonstrated that the country
was worth while. And it was the Hudson’s Bay men at posts all over the
vast North-west who cultivated plots around their posts and sent to
scientific schools evidences of the country’s fertility. It matters not
that Sir George Simpson, or some other individual man of the old
company, said that the prairie country was exposed to dangers as to
grain crops. In our own day people in Eastern Canada said the same thing
and commiserated their friends who left Ontario to settle in what they
called “hyper-borean regions.” The real fact is that settlers would not
come into the country until some railway communication was assured, and
no lesser force than that of Confederation in Canada could undertake to
build a railway into the West. Until that was done the country was
closed by an isolation which could not be remedied except as indicated
above. Few people would care to face the hardships and sufferings of the
Selkirk colonists, who were nearly ten years in the country before they
got enough from the soil to furnish subsistence. But they, as stated
already, endured till they demonstrated the value of the country. And
when the statesmen who saw and understood, conceived the plan of the
Canadian Pacific Railway to traverse and develop the West I feel that a
new glory was shed on the work of the old pioneers. I am glad to
remember that my father, one of the last survivors of that early colony,
lived long enough to see the iron horses pass the Red River on the steel
trail to the Pacific across the plains where he had seen the buffalo
roaming, and on over the mountains where some of his intimate friends,
like Robert Campbell, of the Yukon, had gone on their great
explorations. These early settlers had done their part, and rejoiced to
know that others were making real the things of which they, in the
pioneer days, had so daringly dreamed.
A quite extraordinary linking up of events makes it possible for us to
say that, historically, the old Red River colony was not only by its
demonstration of the value of the West a procuring cause of the building
of the Canadian Pacific Railway, but that the old colony was the means
of bringing into special prominence, and enthusiasm for the West, the
famous engineer, Sandford Fleming, who directed all the preliminary
surveys for this pioneer trans-continental road.
It happened on this wise. Fleming’s interest in the problem of
transportation was known to Mr. James Ross and Mr. William Coldwell,
both of whom I remember as publishers of the _Nor’Wester_, the first
paper in the Red River colony. These newspapermen had large influence
locally, and got the colonists interested in making an application to
the Imperial and Colonial Governments for a roadway from the Eastern
Provinces to the Red River and on to the Rocky Mountains. The idea was
to have a through route on British soil, and the plan was to begin with
a wagon-road as the forerunner of a transcontinental railway. Mr.
Sandford Fleming, though at that time he had not visited the Red River
colony, had advocated the undertaking as far back as 1858, in a lecture
which he published. So it came that when, in 1863, Mr. Fleming severed
his connection with railway building in Ontario, he was asked, on behalf
of the Red River colonists, to present and support a memorial to the
Canadian and Imperial Governments praying them for the establishment of
communication between East and West. The memorial was prepared by James
Ross and William Coldwell, and bears the mark of their literary skill as
well as their strong devotion to British interests. After outlining the
plan which the memorial desired to see adopted, it goes on to indicate
that such a road with its commerce and traffic would fill “Central
British America with an industrious, loyal people. Thus both politically
and commercially the opening up of this country, and the making of a
national highway through it, would immensely subserve Imperial
interests, and contribute to the stability and the glorious prestige of
the British Empire.” This memorial was adopted by the Red River
colonists at a mass meeting—a fact which suggests that despite their
isolation of half a century there were men amongst them who had the
vision of “a grand confederation of loyal and flourishing provinces
skirting the United States’ frontier and commanding at once the Atlantic
and the Pacific.” Verily, the colonization plan of the high-souled Lord
Selkirk, which some men of his time called visionary and Utopian, was
justifying itself in these Red River settlers, who not only laid a
foundation of solid moral worth in a new land and demonstrated its great
resources, but were also doing their part in welding together the links
of a far-flung Empire under the British flag. This gives the noble
founder of the colony, as well as the colony itself, an assured niche in
the temple of our country’s fame.
Mr. Fleming was very enthusiastic over this memorial, and presented it
to the Hon. John Sandfield Macdonald, then Premier of the Canadian
Government. He accompanied it by a strong appeal in writing to Mr.
Macdonald, in which he visioned the great importance of the road across
the continent. Immediately thereafter, Mr. Fleming, at the request of
the Red River people, proceeded to the Old Country, where he presented
the memorial to the Duke of Newcastle, then Colonial Secretary. From his
visit to Canada three years before, with the Prince of Wales, the Duke
was familiar with the situation and discussed it with Mr. Fleming with
great interest and freedom.
This visit to the Duke of Newcastle in 1863, while not productive of
immediate results, was, according to the opinion of Mr. Lawrence J.
Burpee, who writes an excellent biography of Mr. Fleming, the
turning-point in Fleming’s career. It made him an Empire figure and
intensified his worthy ambition to aid in building and consolidating
into one vast commonwealth the scattered colonies under the red cross
flag. Mr. Fleming’s later achievements in this regard are known to
history. They brought him the esteem of his generation, the appreciation
of his sovereign and the well-won and worthily-borne honour of
knighthood. Mr. Fleming had barely returned to Toronto from his visit to
the Colonial Secretary in the interests of a transcontinental roadway,
when he was summoned by the Premier, John Sandfield Macdonald, to come
to Quebec, then the Canadian capital. The result of that visit was that
Mr. Fleming, with the cordial support of all the governments concerned,
including the Imperial Government, represented by the Duke of Newcastle,
was placed in charge of the surveys for the projected Intercolonial
Railways in 1864. With his work on that important undertaking, till its
completion, we cannot deal in this story. But we have traced the
connection from the old Red River colony in the West to Mr. Fleming’s
visit abroad on its behalf—a visit that led in large measure to his
work on the Intercolonial, which, in turn, led to his being appointed in
1871 to the gigantic position of engineer-in-chief of the proposed
transcontinental, the Canadian Pacific Railway. All this was preliminary
and was part of Canada’s approach to a colossal task. In the next
chapter we shall look more closely into the inception of an enterprise
which now belts the globe.