Getting up Speed
Whether a protective tariff brings real or fictitious prosperity, and
whether it enriches the few or the many, are questions which are
fortunately outside the scope of this book. But, anyway, the fact,
historically, is that with the advent of Sir John Macdonald and his
National Policy of protection in 1878, there came quite a pronounced
outburst of new faith in the future possibilities of Canada. There were,
no doubt, other subsidiary causes, and some even hold that lean and fat
years come in cycles. But, in any case, there was a decided restoration
of public confidence in all legitimate business enterprises, and, what
was still more important, there came a distinctive national sentiment
and pride which made the vast project of the Canadian Pacific Railway
from ocean to ocean a distinct possibility.
Portions of the railway had already been under construction by the
Mackenzie Government, as we have seen. These portions were mainly east
of the Red River, but surveys had been carried on with far-reaching
results in the mountain region of British Columbia. These surveys were
under the general direction of Mr. Marcus Smith, an engineer of
remarkable experience and ability. He had done work in the British Isles
and Spain before coming to this side of the ocean, where he was on
service in South America, as well as on the Grand Trunk and the
Intercolonial in the older parts of what is now Eastern Canada. The
other day here, through the kindness of Mr. Newton Ker, now head of the
Coast Department of Lands for the Canadian Pacific, I had the privilege
of reading a scrap book kept by Mr. Marcus Smith over many years, and
willed by him to Mr. Ker. This book indicates that Mr. Smith had a very
wide interest in social, civil and political life, as well as in his own
special vocation of engineering. The man who gathered that collection of
articles together had a big outlook on things, and would regard his work
in the mountains as of national significance.
The remarkable explorations of Mr. Walter Moberly, who later discovered
the Eagle’s Pass by watching the flight of eagles evidently following a
fish-stream, had produced good results and his experience in connection
with the building of the famous Yale-Cariboo wagon road made his later
services specially valuable. Mr. Henry J. Cambie, and Mr. Thomas H.
White, his personal assistant and associate in solving the engineering
problems through the Fraser River canyons, are still, happily, living in
Vancouver, highly regarded as citizens who did their share of nation
building. Other noted engineers of that period in British Columbia were
H. T. Jennings, H. P. Bell, Henry MacLeod, C. E. Perry, G. A. Keefer,
Joseph Hunter, L. B. Hamlin, W. F. Gouin, C. F. Harrington, E. W.
Jarvis, John Trutch, C. Horetzky, C. H. Gamsby and, later on, Major
Rogers, after whom Rogers’ Pass was named, although Moberly always
contended that the pass had been discovered by Albert Perry, one of his
assistants in a survey in 1866. Of course there were many others, but
these are representative of the famous body of men who made their way
along the dangerous rivers, through the tangled forests, by precipitous
cliffs and across terrific canyons, until they finally found safe
location for the steel trail through a region that many had pronounced
to be impenetrable—a sort of supernatural barrier interposed between
the prairies and the Western sea. Most of these men have, as already
intimated, passed over the Great Divide into the Unseen; but, at great
cost to themselves in hardship and suffering and privation, they made it
possible for the people of to-day to travel in rolling palaces where
once they themselves trod with aching and weary feet. Let us highly
honour the memory of the engineers and surveyors and their men, who were
the forerunners of the mighty engines which now thunder through the
echoing mountain passes, along which these heroes of the transit and the
chain, long years ago, pursued their painful and precarious way.
The Macdonald Government came back into power in 1878, as we have seen,
on the wave of the National Policy movement. But, for two years, they
worked on the lines of their predecessors and linked up some of the
disconnected portions of the road which Mr. Mackenzie had constructed in
various localities, mainly between the Lakes and the Red River. Then Sir
Charles Tupper, that militant and aggressive Minister of Railways, took
the bold plunge and let to Andrew Onderdonk, a young American railroader
of San Francisco, contracts to build portions of the Canadian Pacific
through “the sea of mountains” in British Columbia. Canada was young at
the railway business, as indicated by the fact that it was an American
who got the contract to build the first parts of the mountain road.
Later on, as the construction of the road from ocean to ocean began to
get under way, Canadians developed by the score into great practical
railway builders. Young men who had begun by chopping in the bush grew
into contractors for getting out ties for the track-layers, and finally
themselves took contracts for actual building of the railway over rock
and boulders, through mountain vastnesses and quaking bogs until the
steel reached tide water. It was in itself an act of splendid audacity
for a people of less than four millions in number to start on the task
of throwing a railway across an immense and almost uninhabited continent
to the shores of the Western sea. And this daring on the part of the
young Dominion was backed gallantly and effectively by scores of
native-born Canadians who, with genuine Canadian initiative, learned a
new trade and followed it with tremendous energy and skill.
It has been my good fortune and privilege to meet many of these men.
Some of them made money and some of them did not. The task of
calculating the cost of a piece of work over a given stretch of country,
where unexpected obstacles emerged, was not easy. There were stretches
on the North Shore of Lake Superior where the old Laurentian rocks had
to be blasted to pieces at a cost of half-a-million a mile. There is a
well-known muskeg east of Winnipeg where seven tracks went under, till a
solid foundation was secured in what looked for a while like a
bottomless pit. And there were tunnels and bridges and cuttings in the
mountains which challenged the resources of a race of Titans. So, we
say, these contractors did not, by any means, always make money. But my
knowledge of them leads me to say that very few of the contractors or
engineers cared for the money end of it in any case. They felt that they
were engaged in a work of significance, not only to Canada and the
Empire, but to the world, and that was an inspiration worth while. I
recall being told by the secretary to one of the most famous of these
railway builders that, so intent was this railway man on his work, that
he very often forgot to have money enough in his pocket for personal
necessities. In one sense he handled millions; but, only for the
precaution of his secretary who knew his ways, this railway magnate
would often have been personally stranded. “He thought so little of
money,” said the secretary, “that he hardly ever carried any with him.
But he was generous withal. The real fact was he was so engrossed in the
great enterprise of helping to build a road across Canada that he forgot
his own personal needs.”
Going back to Mr. Andrew Onderdonk, it is interesting to recall his
influence on the social life of British Columbia by his importation of a
few thousand Chinese coolies to work on railway construction. Mr.
Onderdonk claimed that he was unable to get enough white men who were
willing to do that particular kind of work. Be that as it may, the
present fact is that we have a very large Chinese population in this
Province which faces the Orient. It is equally sure that the presence of
so many Orientals causes many serious problems. It is fashionable for
some people who do not know the history, to lay the responsibility for
the presence of Chinese here on the Canadian Pacific Railway Company.
But the fact is that it was Mr. Onderdonk who imported these Oriental
coolies while the road was still under Government supervision, two or
more years before the Canadian Pacific Railway Company was formed. It is
only fair always to apportion praise or blame justly, so that every one
shall bear his own burden of responsibility without having to carry more
than his share. Hence, the company, be it known, was not the originator
of the importation of Chinese coolies for the construction of the road.
On this subject we are not now moralizing either way, but are simply
making a statement of historical fact.
In any case, Mr. Onderdonk knew the business of railway construction and
kept steadily on, taking over some portions from other contractors, till
he had the steel laid from Port Moody to Kamloops, and made a creditable
record for railway building across an exceedingly difficult section of
Canada. In fact, Sir Charles Tupper, the militant Minister of Railways,
said quite openly that, though the construction of a piece of the road
on the Pacific Coast would not mean much till it was linked up with the
Eastern part of Canada, he wanted to get the mountain section under
construction without delay for certain reasons. One was that the
construction of that exceedingly difficult section, if successfully
accomplished, would show the possibility of the whole task of the
transcontinental being completed in due time. The other, of course, was
that the people of British Columbia, fortunately for them, had several
ably-insistent and politely-vociferous leaders who would give no rest to
any Government till the work of railway construction had actually begun
on the Coast. There were some prominent men elsewhere who did not look
at things in the same light. An Opposition in Parliament opposes the
party in power as a sort of a constitutional principle, nominally at
least, for the safety of the country, which otherwise might have unwise
legislation imposed on it. But even apart from that, we need not now
look with undue criticism on the record of men like the Hon. Edward
Blake, a statesman of great ability and integrity who, when Onderdonk
was going ahead with his contracts in the mountains, moved in the House
of Commons in 1880 that “the public interests require that the work of
constructing the Pacific Railway in British Columbia be postponed.”
Others of his party took the same stand, and it must be admitted that,
apart from the prerogative of an Opposition above indicated, the whole
project seemed vast enough to appal men who did not personally know the
West well enough to visualize its illimitable future. The gigantic
undertaking, as already mentioned, looked well nigh quixotic for less
than four millions of people, and the fact that there were, in the years
following, times when the whole effort seemed on the verge of disaster,
ought to restrain our wholesale condemnation of early sceptics.
Incidentally, it ought to bring us to the salute when we think of the
railway builders who fought their amazing difficulties and, by fighting,
gathered strength to win out in the end.
Andrew Onderdonk in the mountains and other contractors between Lake
Superior and the Red River, were doing good work, but their detached
pieces of road ended in the air. And Sir John A. Macdonald was quick to
see that something more had to be done. Accordingly, at a Cabinet
meeting at the close of the first session after his return to power, Sir
John brought up the question of building railways in the North-West in
order to attract immigrants. Sir Charles Tupper, who, being at the head
of the Department of Railways, had made special study of the situation,
agreed with Sir John that something should be done at once and neither
one of them was in love with the idea of Government ownership and
operation of railways. Sir Charles thought the policy of a
transcontinental should be again emphasized, and that a responsible
company should be secured to build it. Sir John said that was always his
idea; but it was a “large order” and they had better take a week to
think it over. On the appointed day Sir Charles submitted a carefully
prepared report in favour of a through line, built, owned and operated
by a chartered company. Putting it in brief form, the suggestion was
that the Government should complete and hand over to such a company the
parts of the railway then built or under construction, estimated at
about seven hundred miles, which, when finished, would have cost about
thirty-two millions of dollars. The portions of the road then built, or
being built, were the lines from Port Arthur to Winnipeg, from Kamloops
to Port Moody and the Emerson Branch on the east side of the Red River,
from the boundary-line to St. Boniface and Winnipeg. In addition to
getting possession of these portions, the company would receive a cash
grant of twenty-five millions of dollars, and fifty (later reduced to
twenty-five) million acres of land along the railway.
The suggestion was heartily agreed to by Sir John, and the Cabinet was
unanimously in favour of the plan proposed. The Cabinet adjourned
immediately after the decision was made. The members thereof had good
reason to call it a day. The Rubicon had been crossed and the country
was on the march to a new destiny. There were to be many obstacles
encountered before the objective would be reached. It was a mighty
venture of faith, but men of thought and men of action would clear the
way.
Meanwhile the contractors on the portions under construction carried on,
but the Government was looking eagerly to the financial magnates of the
Old Land to form a company to carry out its policy. Yet, despite a visit
of Sir John, Sir Charles and the Hon. John Henry Pope to London, there
was no rush on the part of British financiers to build a railway across
a vast, thinly populated continent. And when it looked as if there was
going to be a disappointing set-back, there arose a small group of men
on our own continent who were destined to lead in making the projected
transcontinental what Lord Shaughnessy, a few hours before his death,
called so finely, in a conversation with President Beatty, “a great
Canadian property and a great Canadian enterprise.” We shall, in the
next chapter, meet the men who came to the rescue.