THE CANADIAN PACIFIC--BEGINNINGS
Across Continent in 1841--Early Stages--The Survey--The Allan
Project--Mackenzie's Policy--Macdonald's Policy
On March 3, 1841, Sir George Simpson, governor-in-chief of the Hudson's
Bay Company's domains, left London on a journey round the world. All
the resources of a powerful and well-organized corporation were at his
disposal, and his own reputation for rapid travelling gave assurance
that on the actual journey not an hour would be lost. A fortnight's
sail brought him from Liverpool to Halifax, and thence he journeyed by
steamer to Boston, by rail to Nashua, by coach to Concord, and by
sleigh to Montreal. The portage railway from St John to Laprairie was
on his route, but it was not open in winter.
From Montreal Sir George and his party set out on May 4 in two light
thirty-foot canoes, each carrying a crew of twelve or fourteen men. At
top speed they worked their way up the Ottawa and the Mattawa out to
Lake Nipissing, {110} and down the French River into Georgian Bay.
They camped every night at sunset, and rose each morning at one. Their
tireless Canadian and Iroquois voyageurs worked eighteen hours a day,
paddling swiftly through smooth water, wading through shallows, or
towing the canoes through the lesser rapids, or portaging once to a
dozen times a day round the more difficult ones. Each voyageur was
ready to shoulder his 180 pounds, strapped to his forehead, or to ferry
passengers ashore on his back. They reached Sault Ste Marie on May 16,
only to find Lake Superior still frozen. They picked their way very
slowly through the opening rifts along the shore, made the Company's
post at Fort William in eleven days, exchanged their large canoes for
smaller craft, and paddled and portaged through the endless network of
river and lake to Fort Garry, which they reached on June 10,
thirty-eight days out from Montreal.
[Illustration: Sir George Simpson. From a print in the John Ross
Robertson Collection, Toronto Public Library]
From Fort Garry a fresh start was made on July 3, on horseback, with
baggage sent ahead in lumbering Red River carts. Past Fort Ellice and
Fort Carlton, they pushed on with fresh supplies of horses at the
topmost speed that the limitations of their convoy of carts would
permit. Band after band of Plains {111} Indians, adorned with
war-paint and scalp-locks, crossed their trail, but mosquito and
sand-fly proved more troublesome. The travellers passed a band of
emigrants making slowly for the Columbia, and everywhere found
countless herds of buffalo. In three weeks from Fort Garry they
reached Fort Edmonton. Here forty-five fresh horses were in readiness
for riding, pack-horses took the place of carts, and the journey was
continued to the south-west. The Rockies were crossed through Kootenay
Pass, and at last--after many a halt to find straying horses, and after
continuous annoyance from mosquitoes and venomous insects 'which in
size and appearance might have been mistaken for a cross between the
bulldog and the house-fly'--Fort Colville on the Columbia was reached
on August 18. Their long horseback ride was over. Favoured by
wonderfully fine weather, in the saddle eleven to twelve hours a day,
they had made their way through open prairie and rolling plain, tangled
thicket and burning forest and rushing river, and had covered the two
thousand miles from Fort Garry in six weeks and five days. From Fort
Colville they reached the waters of the Pacific at Fort Vancouver
(Washington) in another six days. The {112} continent had been crossed
in twelve weeks of actual travelling.
Sir George Simpson's journey stood as the record for many a year. For
a generation after his day the scattered travellers from Red River
westward were compelled to rely on saddle-horse and plains cart and
canoe. From Montreal and Toronto the railway could be utilized as far
as Collingwood, and thence the steamer to Port Arthur. Then for a time
the government opened up a summer route to the Red River, beginning it
in 1869 and maintaining it until 1876. The Dawson route, as it was
called, included forty-five miles of wagon-road from Port Arthur to
Lake Shebandowan, then over three hundred miles of water travel, with a
dozen portages, and again ninety-five miles of wagon-road from the Lake
of the Woods to Fort Garry.[1] In 1870 it took ninety-five days to
transport troops from Toronto to Fort Garry over this route. Such
makeshifts could not serve for long. South of the {113} border the
railway was rapidly pushing westward, and in the new nation of the
north, as well, its time had come.
Ever after the coming of the locomotive, it needed only imagination and
a map to see all British North America clamped by an iron band.
Engineers like Bonnycastle and Synge and Carmichael-Smyth wrote of the
possibility in the forties. Politicians found in the theme matter for
admirable after-dinner perorations--colonial governors like Harvey in
1847, colonial secretaries like Lytton and Carnarvon in the fifties,
and colonial premiers like Joseph Howe, who declared in Halifax in
1851: 'I believe that many in this room will live to hear the whistle
of the steam-engine in the passes of the Rocky Mountains, and to make
the journey from Halifax to the Pacific in five or six days.'
Promoters were not lacking. In 1851 Allan Macdonnell of Toronto sought
a charter and a subsidy for a road to the Pacific, and the Canadian
authorities, in {114} declining, expressed their opinion that the
scheme was not visionary and their hope that some day Great Britain and
the United States might undertake it jointly. Seven years later the
same promoter secured a charter for the Northwest Transportation,
Navigation, and Railway Company, to operate between Lake Superior and
the Fraser river, but could get no backing; four years previously John
Young, A. N. Morin, A. T. Galt, and John A. Poor had petitioned in vain
for a similar charter. Then in 1862, on behalf of the Red River
Settlement, Sandford Fleming prepared an elaborate memorial on the
subject. Edwin Watkin, of the Grand Trunk, negotiated with the
Hudson's Bay Company for right of way and other facilities, but the
project proved too vast for his resources.
[Illustration: Sir Sandford Fleming. From a photograph by Topley]
Two things were needed before dreams on paper could become facts in
steel--national unity and international rivalry. Years before
Confederation, such far-seeing Canadians as William M'Dougall and
George Brown had pressed for the annexation of the British territories
beyond the Lakes. After Confederation, all speed was made to buy out
the sovereign rights of the Hudson's Bay Company. Then came the first
Riel Rebellion, to {115} bring home the need of a western road, as the
_Trent_ affair had brought home the need of the Intercolonial. The
decisive political factor came into play in 1870, when British Columbia
entered the federation. Its less than ten thousand white
inhabitants--deeming themselves citizens of no mean country, and kept
to their demands by the urging of an indefatigable Englishman, Alfred
Waddington--made the construction of an overland railway an
indispensable condition of union, and Sir John Macdonald courageously
accepted their terms.
The other factor, international rivalry, exercised its influence about
the same time. In the United States the railway had rapidly pushed
westward, but had halted before the deserts and the mountains lying
between the Mississippi and the Pacific. The rivalry of pro-slavery
and anti-slavery parties in Congress long brought to deadlock all plans
of public aid to either southern or northern route. Then the Civil War
broke the deadlock: the need of binding the West to the side of the
North created a strong public demand for a Pacific road, and Congress,
so stimulated, and further lubricated by the payment, as is proven, of
at least $476,000 in bribes, gave lavish loans {116} and grants of
land. The Central Pacific, working from Sacramento, and the Union
Pacific, starting from Omaha, met near Ogden in Utah in 1869--or rather
here the rails met, for the rival companies, eager to earn the high
subsidy given for mountain construction, had actually graded two
hundred superfluous miles in parallel lines. In 1871 the Southern
Pacific and the Texas Pacific were fighting for subsidies, and Jay
Cooke was promoting the Northern Pacific. The young Dominion was
stirred by ambition to emulate its powerful neighbour.
These factors, then, brought the question of a railway to the Pacific
on Canadian soil within the range of practical politics. Important
questions remained to be settled. During the parliamentary session of
1871 the government of Sir John Macdonald decided that the road should
be built by a company, not by the state, that it should be aided by
liberal subsidies in cash and in land, and, to meet British Columbia's
insistent terms, that it should be begun within two, and completed
within ten, years. The Opposition protested that this latter provision
was uncalled for and would bankrupt the Dominion, but the government
carried its point, though it was forced to hedge {117} later by a
stipulation--not included in the formal resolutions--that the annual
expenditure should be such as not to press unduly upon the Dominion's
resources.
The first task was to survey the vast wilderness between the Ottawa
valley and the Pacific, and to find, if possible, a feasible route. So
able an explorer and engineer as Captain Palliser, appointed by the
British government to report upon the country west of the Lakes, had
declared in 1863, after four years of careful labour in the field,
that, thanks to the choice of the 49th parallel as Canada's boundary,
there was no possibility of ever building a transcontinental railway
exclusively through British territory. The man chosen for the task of
achieving this impossibility was Sandford Fleming. Appointed
engineer-in-chief in 1871, he was for nine years in charge of the
surveys, though for half that time his duties on the Intercolonial
absorbed much of his energy. Mr Fleming possessed an unusual gift of
literary style, and his reports upon the work of his staff gave the
people of Canada a very clear idea of the difficulties to be
encountered. His friend, the Rev. George M. Grant, who accompanied him
in a rapid reconnaissance in 1872, gave, in his book {118} _Ocean to
Ocean_, a vivid and heartening record of the realities and the promise
that he saw.
It had been decided, in order to hold the balance even between Montreal
and Toronto, to make the proposed Pacific road begin at some angle of
Lake Nipissing. From that point nearly to the Red River there
stretched a thousand miles of woodland, rugged and rock-strewn, covered
by a network of countless lakes and rivers, interspersed with seemingly
bottomless swamps or muskegs--a wilderness which no white man had ever
passed through from end to end. Then came the level prairie and a
great rolling plain rising to the south-west in three successive
steppes, and cut by deep watercourses. But it was the third or
mountain section which presented the most serious engineering
difficulties. Four hundred miles from the Pacific coast, and roughly
parallel, ran the towering Rocky Mountains, some of whose peaks rose
fifteen thousand feet. Beyond stretched a vast plateau, three or four
thousand feet above sea-level, intersected by rivers which had cut deep
chasms or, to the northward, wide sheltered valleys. Between this
plateau and the coast the Cascades interposed, rivalling the Rockies in
height and {119} rising sheer from the ocean, which thrust in deep
fiord channels. At the head of some one of these fiords must be found
the western terminus.
[Illustration: Fleming Route and the Transcontinentals]
Early in the survey a practicable route was found throughout. Striking
across the wilderness from Lake Nipissing to Lake Superior at the river
Pic, the line might skirt the shore of the lake to Fort William, or it
might run northerly through what is now known as the clay belt, with
Fort William and the lake made accessible by a branch. Continuing
westward to the Red River at Selkirk, with Winnipeg on a branch line to
the south, the projected line crossed Lake Manitoba at the Narrows, and
then struck out northwesterly, through what was then termed the
'Fertile Belt,' till the Yellowhead Pass was reached. Here the Rockies
could be easily pierced; but once through the engineer was faced by the
huge flanking range of the Cariboo Mountains, in which repeated
explorations failed to find a gap. But at the foot of the towering
barrier lay a remarkable deep-set valley four hundred miles in length,
in which northwestward ran the Fraser and southeastward the Canoe and
the Columbia. By following the Fraser to its great southward bend, and
then striking {120} west, a terminus on Bute or Dean Inlet might be
reached, while the valley of the Canoe and the Albreda would give
access to the North Thompson as far as Kamloops, whence the road might
run down the Thompson and the lower Fraser to Burrard Inlet. The
latter route, on the whole, was preferred.
While this route was feasible, the mountain portion promised to be
extremely expensive. This factor, together with the uncertainty of
government policy and the desire of Victoria to have the road built to
Bute Inlet and thence, by a bridge across Valdes Strait, carried down
to Esquimalt, made it necessary to seek untiringly, year after year,
for alternative routes. The only important change made, however, until
after 1880, was the deflection of the line south of Lake Manitoba to
serve existing settlements.
Who was to build the road? It would be a tremendous task for either
the government or the private capitalists of a nation of four million
people. The United States had not begun its Pacific roads till it had
over thirty millions of people, and wealth and experience to
correspond. It was estimated that the Canadian road would cost
$100,000,000, and it was certain that the engineering difficulties
{121} would be staggering. In Canada few roads had paid the
shareholders, and though some had profited the contractors, the new
enterprise meant such a plunge in the dark that contractors and
promoters alike hesitated. In the United States, however, the Pacific
roads had proved gold-mines for their promoters. The land-grants were
valuable, and the privilege of granting contracts to dummy construction
companies controlled by themselves and thus reaping larger profits was
still greater.
It was not to be wondered at, therefore, that the first offer came from
American capitalists. Alfred Waddington, enthusiast rather than
practical promoter, sought at Ottawa a charter for the road he had done
so much to secure, but his bill went no further than a first reading.
At Ottawa he was met by G. W. M'Mullen, a Canadian residing in Chicago,
who was visiting the Dominion on a canal deputation. M'Mullen became
interested, and with his Chicago partners endeavoured to enlist the aid
of the men behind the Northern Pacific--Jay Cooke, General Cass, W. B.
Ogden, T. A. Scott, and others.[2] {122} M'Mullen soon found that
Waddington had exaggerated his influence, and that the government was
not yet prepared to discuss terms. Sir Francis Hincks, stormy petrel
of railway building, whom Sir John Macdonald had just made his finance
minister, suggested to Sir Hugh Allan of Montreal that he should get
into touch with these Americans and provide the substantial Canadian
interest which was essential.
Sir Hugh Allan was then the foremost business man in Canada. He was
head of the great Allan steamship line, and had become interested in
railways shortly before, when rumours of the intention of the Grand
Trunk to establish a rival steamship line to Great {123} Britain had
led him to assist in promoting the North Shore from Quebec westward, to
compete with the Grand Trunk and ensure traffic for his steamers. He
now opened negotiations with the American capitalists through M'Mullen,
came to terms, and then sought associates in Canada. Here difficulties
arose: Ontario objected that Allan's control would mean a Quebec rather
than an Ontario terminus, and that the Northern Pacific directors with
whom he was associated were simply conspiring to get control of the
Canadian road, in order to delay its construction and prevent it
becoming a rival to their own northerly route. Sir George Cartier,
too, powerful in the Cabinet and salaried solicitor of the Grand Trunk,
was a stumbling-block; he declared himself emphatically opposed to
control by any '_sacree compagnie americaine_.' But Sir Hugh,
believing much in money and little in men, resolved to buy his way
through. He soon started a backfire in Quebec which brought Cartier to
terms. Ontario rivalry was harder to control: D. L. Macpherson and
other Toronto men organized the Interoceanic Railway Company to oppose
Allan's Canada Pacific Company. Both companies sought charters and
aid. Allan {124} pretended to drop his American associates; Macpherson
charged that the connection still existed. The government endeavoured
to bring about an amalgamation, with Allan as president, and, failing
this, to organize a new company. In the meantime Allan was spending
money so freely that even his New York associates were astounded. The
Dominion elections were held in August 1872, and Macdonald, Cartier,
and Langevin drew heavily on Allan's funds, $162,500 in all, with a
promise from Cartier that 'any amount which you or your Company shall
advance for that purpose shall be re-couped to you.' After the
election a new company, the Canadian Pacific, was organized, with
representative men from each province as directors; and the new board,
of its own motion, it was declared, elected Allan president. To this
company the government granted a charter, promised a subsidy of thirty
million dollars and fifty million acres of land, but insisted upon
excluding the American interests. Allan acquiesced, and, repaying the
advances made, informed New York that negotiations were ended.
M'Mullen and his associates, angry at this treatment, conveyed rumours
to Opposition leaders, and finally Allan's confidential {125}
correspondence, stolen by a clerk in the office of J. J. C. Abbott,
Allan's solicitor, was made public.[3] The fat was in the fire.
With the political controversy which followed we are not here
concerned. In Sir John Macdonald's defence it could be said, that
though Allan's money was taken no {126} special favours were shown in
the contract made; and that all that Allan secured by the government's
victory was the certainty that the railway project would not be
postponed or dropped altogether, and that he would be given control.
Sir Hugh Allan had said with much force: 'The plans I propose are in
themselves the best for the interests of the Dominion, and in urging
them on the public I am really doing a most patriotic action.'
Undoubtedly Sir John Macdonald sincerely held a similar opinion.
{127}
The Allan Company gave up its charter, unable to raise capital in face
of financial depression and political upheaval. The Liberal party, led
by Alexander Mackenzie, and swept into power by a wave of popular
indignation, first endeavoured to induce other capitalists to take up
the work. But the government's offers of $10,000 in cash and of 20,000
acres of land for each mile, plus an undetermined guarantee, had no
takers in the years of depression that followed. Mackenzie then
decided that the government should {128} itself build the road. He
planned to build at first only the indispensable sections, using the
waterways wherever possible, and hoped, but in vain, to secure British
Columbia's consent to an extension of the time set for completion. His
first step was to subsidize the Canada Central, which ran from Ottawa
via Carleton Place to Pembroke, to extend its line as far as Lake
Nipissing, in order to connect with the proposed eastern terminus of
the Pacific road, and to award a contract (it was afterwards cancelled)
for a branch from this junction point to Georgian Bay. Passing by for
the time the country north of Lake Superior, he next let contracts for
the greater part of the distance between Fort William and Selkirk and
for a road from Selkirk to Emerson, on the Manitoba border. Here
connection was to be made with an American line, the St Paul and
Pacific, of which more will be heard presently.
When Mackenzie left office in 1878 the work of location or construction
was well advanced in all three sections. For two years the new
administration of Sir John Macdonald carried on the same policy of
government construction at a moderate pace. The work in hand was
continued and the gaps in the road {129} between Port Arthur and
Selkirk were put under contract. The line was made to pass through
Winnipeg--instead of striking west from Selkirk, as the engineers had
previously advised, and thus side-tracking the ambitious city growing
up around old Fort Garry. Contracts were let for two hundred miles of
the extension westward from Winnipeg. Two seasons passed before the
new government could make up its mind as to the British Columbia
section. Late in 1879 it decided to adhere to the route chosen under
the Mackenzie administration, through the Yellowhead Pass, down the
Thompson and the Fraser to Port Moody on Burrard Inlet. The difficult
section from Yale, the head of navigation on the Fraser, to Savona's
Ferry, near Kamloops, was shortly afterwards placed under contract.
The ten years' time allotted for the construction of the Canadian
Pacific was nearly gone and there was little completed work to show.
Hard times, depression in the railway world, changes of government and
political upheavals, disputes as to route and terminus, had delayed
construction. The building of the link north of Lake Superior,
necessary for all-rail connection between East and West on Canadian
territory, had been indefinitely postponed. {130} Something had been
done, it is true. Manitoba was being linked up with the East by a road
south to Minnesota and by another line to the head of Lake Superior,
and a start had been made in British Columbia. Some day, under some
administration, the gaps would be filled up and the promise to British
Columbia would be redeemed.
Suddenly, in June 1880, Sir John Macdonald, speaking at Bath, made the
announcement that a group of capitalists had offered to build the road,
on terms which would ensure that in the end it would not cost Canada a
single farthing. Four months later a contract was signed in Ottawa by
which the Canadian Pacific Syndicate undertook to build and operate the
whole road. An entirely new turn had been given to the situation, and
the most important chapter in Canada's railway annals, if not in her
national life, had been begun.
[1] 'Lord Strathcona may still remember the man who came into his
office at Winnipeg and said: "Look at me; ain't I a healthy sight?
I've come by the government water route from Thunder Bay, and it's
taken me twenty-five days to do it. During that time I've been
half-starved on victuals I wouldn't give a swampy Indian. The water
used to pour into my bunk at nights, and the boat was so leaky that
every bit of baggage I've got is water-logged and ruined. I've broke
my arm and sprained my ankle helping to carry half a dozen trunks over
a dozen portages, and when I refused to take a paddle on one of the
boats, an Ottawa Irishman told me to go to hell, and said that if I
gave him any more of my damned chat he'd let me get off and walk to
Winnipeg."'--W. L. Grant in _Geographical Journal_, October 1911, p.
365.
[2] The Northern Pacific was at many stages in its history closely
connected with Canadian affairs. It had originally been projected in
New England: the first proposal was to use the Central Vermont and a
Canadian road to be built or acquired as the eastern links, then,
crossing into Michigan, the railway was to strike northwestward to the
Pacific. When control fell into the hands of New York and Philadelphia
interests, these plans were dropped, but later the new management
negotiated with Governor Archibald of Manitoba, as well as with Sir
John Macdonald, to endeavour to put through an international road, the
first section running through Canada to Sault Ste Marie, the second
through Michigan and Minnesota, the third through the Canadian plains,
and the fourth through the Rockies to the sea on American territory.
Nothing came of the negotiations, though it may be noted that the
Canadian Pacific to-day has carried out precisely this plan, in
addition to its all-Canadian line.
[3] This correspondence will be found in the Journals of the House of
Commons, vol. vii, 1873. In no other documents available to the public
has the connection between politics and railway promoting in Canada
been made so evident. The following are a few brief extracts from
letters addressed by Sir Hugh Allan to various American associates
during 1872:
Thinking that as I had taken up the project there must be something
very good in it, a very formidable opposition was organized in Toronto,
which for want of a better took as their cry 'No foreign influence; no
Yankee dictation; no Northern Pacific to choke off our Canadian
Pacific,' and others equally sensible.... I was forced to drop
ostensibly from our organization every American name, and put in
reliable people on this side in place of them.... Mr M'Mullen was
desirous of securing the inferior members of the Government, and
entered into engagements of which I did not approve, as I thought it
was only a waste of powder and shot. On a calm view of the situation I
satisfied myself that the decision of the question must ultimately be
in the hands of one man, and that man was Sir George E. Cartier, the
leader of the French party, which held the balance of power between the
other factions.... It was evident that some means must be adopted to
bring the influence of this compact body of men to bear in our favour,
and as soon as I made up my mind what to do, I did not lose a moment in
following it up. A railroad from Montreal to Ottawa, through the
French country, north of the Ottawa river, has long been desired by the
French inhabitants; but Cartier, who is a salaried solicitor of the
Grand Trunk road, to which this would be an opposition, has interposed
difficulties, and by his influence prevented it being built.... The
plans I propose are in themselves the best for the interests of the
Dominion, and in urging them on the public I am really doing a most
patriotic action. But even in that view, means must be used to
influence the public, and I employed several young French lawyers to
write it up in their own newspapers. I subscribed a controlling
influence in the stock, and proceeded to subsidize the newspapers
themselves, both editors and proprietors. I went to the country
through which the road would pass, and called on many of the
inhabitants. I visited the priests and made friends of them, and I
employed agents to go among the principal people and talk it up. I
then began to hold public meetings, and attended to them myself, making
frequent speeches in French to them, showing them where their true
interests lay ... and I formed a committee to influence the members of
the Legislature. This succeeded so well that in a short time it had 27
out of 45 on whom I could rely, and the electors of the ward in this
city, which Cartier himself represents, notified him that unless the
contract for the Pacific Railway was given in the interests of Lower
Canada he need not present himself for re-election....
The policy adopted has been quite successful, the strong French
influence I succeeded in obtaining has proved sufficient to control the
elections, and as soon as the Government realized this fact, which they
were unwilling to admit and slow to see, they opened negotiations with
me.... Yesterday we entered into an agreement, by which the Government
bound itself to form a Company of Canadians, only according to my
wishes. That this Company will make me President, and that I and my
friends will get a majority of the stock, and that the contract for
building the railroad will be given to this Company, in terms of the
Act of Parliament. Americans are to be carefully excluded in the fear
that they will sell it to the Union [_sic_] Pacific, but I fancy we can
get over that some way or other. This position has not been attained
without large payments of money. I have already paid over $200,000,
and will have at least $100,000 more to pay.
[Illustration: Railways of Canada, 1880]
{131}