Opening the Door of the West
DO YOU see that rough man with a key in his hand? It looks like a spade,
you say—and so it is; but it is doing the work of a key. He strikes it
into the soil; he digs up a sod. That is all you observe, till your
imagination awakes—and then you see that he is opening the door of the
West. He has turned the first sod of a railway line from the East.
The saving of the West from destruction, the swift suppression of revolt
when delay might have rallied all the Indians to the rebel flag, was
only made possible by the railway. But when the railway was planned
there was no idea that it would be needed for such a purpose. It was not
built for its military value.
True, the safeguarding of our country and our Empire in case of war had
always been one aim of those far-sighted men who looked forward to a
transcontinental railway on British soil. Such a line, enabling troops
and munitions to be carried from Atlantic to Pacific in a few days,
would clearly be a priceless advantage, and might even be the deciding
factor in a life and death struggle; we know the immense help it gave in
the life and death struggle we were plunged into a few years ago.
Yet the reasons which decided Canada to carry out this tremendous
railway scheme were wholly peaceful—to open up a land of homes for
loyal people on the plains, and to join the East and Centre with the
farthest West; to unite our scattered little communities in one great
Dominion.
There was only one thing uniting these three regions—a sentiment. They
all knew and felt that they were members of one great brotherhood, the
royal republic known as the British Empire. The British Columbians could
have “paddled their own canoe” and remained separate from the Canadians
if they had wanted; but they did not want. Their legislature unanimously
and wisely voted in favor of federating with the newly formed Dominion
of Canada in 1871—on condition that within ten years a railway should
be built connecting that far western province with the railway system of
Eastern Canada.
The colony on the Pacific, with a small population, hemmed in both north
and south, would have found it hard to maintain an independent existence
if she had not joined forces with her fellow-countrymen in the East.
British Columbia, too, was the only possible gateway of Canada to the
West. Without a transcontinental railway, the rest of our country would
have been cut off from its natural and necessary outlet to the trade of
the Pacific, a trade already large and destined to become enormous.
Just as urgent was the need of this railway to open up the land between
the Rockies and the Lakes for the millions of British folk and others
who desired new homes under the British flag, which stood then, as it
stands to-day, for the union of steadfast liberty with steadfast law.
The United States, face to face with the same problem, had just solved
it by completing in 1869 a transcontinental railway system which linked
California with New York and at the same time opened up the western
plains of that country to the home-maker. That was not only an example
but a warning.
The United States, of course, had plenty of land, enormous territories
of its own to fill up; but the evil habit of coveting a neighbor’s
possessions is found among those who have plenty as well as among those
who have little. South of the line were many who looked with covetous
eyes on the fertile land in the north. Their plan to “jump the claim” to
this land might have become a serious danger if no one had been living
here except fur traders and Indians.
What staved off the danger, to begin with, was the settlement of the Red
River district, by the energy and self-sacrifice of Lord Selkirk. The
settlers were only a handful; but they “held the fort” and set an
example, and after a while others began to dribble in, as you have heard
already. The situation would again have become serious, however, when
the Union Pacific Railway brought settlers and adventurers crowding into
the Western States, if an easy way had not been provided for our own
people to settle our own western territory from Eastern Canada and from
overseas.
If the prairie had passed into the control of an alien power, the
Canadian people, and the people coming from overseas to join them, would
for ever have been prevented from expanding westward, just as the
American colonists themselves a hundred years before had found their
westward expansion blocked by the French occupation of the Mississippi
valley—only on that occasion, as we have seen, the Americans were able
to break down the obstacle by the British mother-country coming to their
rescue.
The very existence of Canada, then, as a complete Dominion worthy of the
two great enterprising races which had laid its foundations, and worthy
of the civilizing British brotherhood in which it had achieved
self-governing membership, depended on the prompt connection of all its
parts by a national railway line.
The puzzle was, how to do it? The line would have to be built through an
almost uninhabited wilderness, and the cost of construction was bound to
be enormous.
The Canadian people, though rich in faith, in courage, and resources,
were not rich in money. With the strong right arm and heroic heart they
had tamed the wild East, but was their arm strong enough and long enough
to reach out and tame the wild West? At first it seemed not. The
building of the railway, by the agreement with British Columbia, should
have commenced by 1873. It was 1875 before construction began, on a line
from the head of Lake Superior towards the West; and even then the
Federal authorities could only make up their minds to an instalment
plan, giving contracts for the building of sections here and there, and
trusting to navigation on the Great Lakes and Lake of the Woods to
complete a chain of mixed land and water communication between East and
West. No provision was made for the necessary land line north of the
Lakes.
In 1880, when nine of the ten years had gone by and less than 700 miles
of track had been laid, the scheme of a Government railway was given up
as hopeless. A little group of men was found to guarantee the building
of a line by private enterprise and finish it within ten years. Most of
these men were Canadians of Scottish birth, of the same class that had
already done so much for the exploration of the West and the carrying on
of its ancient fur trade. In fact, the moving spirits in the enterprise
were Donald Smith, the head of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who had spent
most of his life in the northern and western wilds, and his cousin
George Stephen. Though it was not to be officially a Government line, it
was built to provide the great national highway which the country
required, and Parliament decreed that a majority of the directors must
always be British citizens.
It was a great adventure and a costly one, the building of that line; so
costly, indeed, that again and again the Company was nearly ruined
before its task was done, even with a large grant of money and western
land from the Government. The prophecy that it would never pay for its
axle grease sounds absurd now that the railway has proved itself perhaps
the most conspicuously successful enterprise ever undertaken in Canada,
and one of the most famous in the world. In its early years, however,
the capitalists, outside the group of resolute men who had launched the
scheme, could hardly be persuaded to put any money in it, they thought
its chances of success so small.
Blasting, cutting and levelling, building a track to carry heavy trains
through mountain passes and along the sides of precipices where even a
mountain goat never ventured before, demanded the highest degree of
skill, endurance, and dogged defiance of danger. Towering heights and
raging torrents, hard rock and dense forest, crumbling gravel and
avalanching snow, all were encountered and all were overcome.
Besides the mountains and chasms of the Far West, there was the long
mountainous stretch north of Lake Superior, where the thrilling grandeur
of the scenery may suggest to the admiring passenger some feeble idea of
the tremendous toil which alone made possible his enjoyment or indeed
his very sight of it. Here 200 miles of railway track cost $12,000,000,
of which $2,100,000 was used for dynamite alone. A dynamite factory had
to be established on the spot. The bridges, tunnels and galleries along
the face of the cliff for three miles at Jackfish Bay cost $1,500,000. A
single mile cost $700,000.
There was only one town of any size in the whole length of the line,
from eastern Ontario to the British Columbian shore; and Winnipeg itself
had not 8,000 inhabitants when the work began in 1881. Practically every
company and battalion of the great army of railway builders was hundreds
of miles from its base of supplies. The fighting line, far longer than
all the battle lines on the French, Italian and Russian war fronts put
together, stretched for over 2,500 miles through an almost uninhabited
and untilled wilderness.
With such tremendous energy and enthusiasm was the work pushed on, that
in less than half the promised time it was finished. The discovery of a
useless North West Passage had taken centuries; the creation of an
infinitely useful North West Passage overland had taken only five years.
The first sod had been turned on May 2, 1881; the prairie section
reached Calgary on August 18, 1883; the last gap north of Lake Superior
was closed on May 17, 1885, giving a continuous line of steel from
Montreal to the Rocky Mountains; and on the 7th of November in the same
year the last spike was driven at Craigellachie, 85 miles west of the
Selkirk summit in British Columbia. The first through passenger train,
from the head of Atlantic navigation on the St. Lawrence to the head of
Pacific navigation on Burrard Inlet, left Montreal on the evening of
June 28, 1886, and finished its memorable journey at Port Moody on the
morning of July 4. The great city of Vancouver, twelve miles down the
Inlet, was then but a clearing in the forest scarcely three months old.
It took Port Moody’s place as the Pacific terminus in June, 1887.