The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (6 page)

There were other reasons given, after the fact, for the change of route. Perhaps these also helped convince the decision-makers in St. Paul, but no one knows for certain. There were, for instance, the coal-fields of southern Alberta, which the railroad could tap; Hill, one of the ranking coal experts on the continent, would certainly have been aware of them. And there was the undeniable fact that the new route would require far fewer bridges on the prairies than the original one, which crossed several deep valleys and innumerable coulees.

There were also problems, most of them unforeseen or unremarked. When General Rosser, the practical surveyor, bluntly asked Macoun where he thought they would get railway ties in that treeless waste, the professor airily replied that that was Rosser’s problem. Apparently it did not unduly concern Hill and his colleagues.

Thus, for better or for worse, the die was cast, though an act of Parliament was required before the change could become official. Few single decisions by a private corporation have had such widespread public repercussions. As a result, and quite by accident, the most spectacular mountain scenery in North America was opened up in the early eighties; Canada gained a new image as a tourist attraction: Banff, Lake Louise, Glacier, and Yoho parks were all by-products of Jim Hill’s table-pounding. So was a whole series of prairie communities strung out like beads on a string between Brandon and Calgary. So were the mines and farm lands of southern British Columbia, opened up by the trunk-line and its branches. So were the costly locomotives that had to be harnessed – as many as five at a time – to haul the trains over the Great Divide. So were the miles of snowsheds in the Selkirks and – after many deaths from avalanches and snowslides – the costly diversions of the spiral and Connaught tunnels. In later years it became railroad cant that the Canadian Pacific had the scenery but the Canadian National had the grades; from the company’s point of view, it remains to this day a toss-up as to whether or not the change of route was really an economically sensible decision. There are too many imponderables to render a judgement. Who can say how important the mountain scenery was to a once-profitable passenger trade? Who can estimate whether or not the profits on townsites and the advantages of a shorter line cancelled out the increased construction costs and additional carrying charges over the mountain peaks?

From the point of view of the nation, a better guess can be hazarded. It is probable that the switch to the southern route was one factor in delaying the settlement of the North West for twenty years and thus partially frustrating John A. Macdonald’s dream of filling up the empty plains. The
settlers tended to take up land as close as possible to the railway; often enough they were driven off it by drought conditions.

Significantly, it was the
CPR
itself that implicitly debunked Macoun’s enthusiastic reports of almost unlimited arable land by refusing to accept a great deal of the acreage that had been set aside for it in the forty-eight-mile belt along the route of the railway. The land subsidy in the
CPR
contract was unique. In effect, it allowed the railway to pick and choose the best available acreage anywhere on the prairies. The key phrase was the stipulation that the company could reject land that was “not fairly fit for settlement.” Since the mountain and the Shield country was provincially owned (and could not be farmed anyway), the contract also provided that the land must lie between the Red River and the Rockies, ostensibly in alternate sections along the line of the railway in a belt forty-eight miles thick. The
CPR
held the government to the letter of that agreement. In 1882, the company’s most generous estimate of “fit” land within the belt stood at six million acres; later that estimate was reduced to five million acres. Clearly, the
CPR
was saying that the land could
not
be settled. To keep its bargain with the railway, the government was forced to give it land elsewhere; much of this substitute acreage was found in the Fertile Belt, along the original line of route.

If the railway had followed the valley of the North Saskatchewan, it is probable that much more land would have been taken up because of the attractive combination of good soil and easy access by rail. The pattern of settlement would have been changed, larger cities would have sprung up in the north, and the far western plains might have filled up at an earlier date. Sooner or later, of course, branch lines or new transcontinental railways would also have brought settlers to the southern plains, but by then the pattern of the North West would have been set and that pattern would almost certainly have been a different one.

The
CPR
rejected tens of thousands of acres in the dry country west of Moose Jaw; and, in spite of the heavy immigration to the plains in the early 1880’s, very few settlers were prepared to occupy land in that portion of Palliser’s Triangle. By 1885, the year the railway was finished, only twenty-three homesteads had been taken up along more than four hundred miles of railway between Moose Jaw and Calgary.

The settlers, used to eastern Canadian conditions, were not prepared to cope with the special problems of prairie agriculture, especially in dry country. Indeed, it is doubtful if they were aware that the circumstances were radically different, since the government, in its settlement policy, neglected to make any distinction between the dry southwestern plains and
the more humid Red River valley. Regulations for taking up land were identical throughout the North West. The new arrivals were left to decide for themselves whether the soil was suitable for farming and to work out by a long process of trial and error the means of grappling with unfamiliar conditions.

The hard-baked sod required a heavier plough. The dry land demanded new methods of cultivation and cheap windpumps. Fuel, timber, and fencing had to be imported into the vast, treeless areas. There was also the necessary shift from fall to spring planting in a land where the winters were long and harsh and the growing season alarmingly brief. Some of these conditions would have existed no matter which route the railway followed. The choice of the southern route accentuated them.

The wet cycle, which had such an effect on Macoun in 1879 and 1880, continued through 1881 and 1882. These were years of very high water in the North West. The country north and south of the Qu’Appelle Valley, on both sides of the
CPR
line, was badly flooded, the ponds overflowing to the point where settlers were forced to make long detours. Then, in 1883 – the peak year for immigration – the dry cycle returned. Evaporation was so rapid that the ponds and marshes were swiftly drained. Reservoirs had to be built in the ravines or dug out of the prairie soil to hold back the run-off. By 1886 the land was so dry in many places that cracks a foot wide opened up in the parched soil. One trail, near Balgonie, just east of Regina, was so badly riven by fissures that it became too dangerous for wagon traffic. Immigration figures in the North West, which reached a record 133,624 in 1883, began to decline with three successive years of crop failures. It was twenty years before they again climbed above the hundred thousand mark. There was an equally spectacular drop in homestead entries: in 1884 they were halved. Thousands abandoned the embryo farms they had so eagerly taken up. By 1896, half of all contracts entered into with the railway by the various colonization companies had been cancelled; a total of 1,284,652 acres reverted to the
CPR
.

With the acceptance of the disc plough and more adaptable farming methods, the prairie country became, after the turn of the century, the granary of the world; Regina, which might not have existed had the northerly route been chosen, was found to be in the very heart of the richest grain-growing soil on the continent. In those portions of Palliser’s Triangle where cereals would not grow, a healthy ranching economy developed. But the cycle of drought continued. The undue optimism of the seventies and early eighties was replaced in the decade from 1884 to 1894 by an extreme pessimism. So many farms were abandoned that the Canadian
government began to entertain doubts about the future of the West. Once again, John Macoun was dispatched to the southern prairies to report on the seriousness of conditions and once again, just as he arrived on the scene, the rains came and Macoun was able to predict the end of the drought. The vast wave of immigration that filled up the prairies in the following years appeared to vindicate him. When he died in 1922, his friends triumphantly published his autobiography with a flattering foreword by Ernest Thompson Seton. It was not until the desperate years of the 1930’s, when the rains ceased once more and the grasshoppers and the cutworms and the hot, dry winds returned, that there took place a rueful reassessment of his strange role in the shaping of the nation.

3
The first of the
CPR
towns

General Rosser’s newly surveyed route led out of Portage la Prairie towards Grand Valley on the Assiniboine, and then through the Brandon Hills to Flat Creek (later known as Oak Lake). It was near the crossing of the Assiniboine that Brandon, the first of the
CPR
towns, sprang up. The method of its selection by the General provided an object lesson for the company in the value of establishing its own communities instead of building on existing ones.

Rosser was a Virginian gentleman of the old school – tall, handsome, swarthy, and popular. A West Point chum of General Custer, he had fought opposite him as a guerilla officer during the Civil War. After the war he had risen to become chief engineer of the Northern Pacific – his workmen, ironically, protected by Custer’s troops – laying out the route along the Yellowstone River in Montana. Later, as a railway contractor, he had helped build part of Jim Hill’s St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba line. He was, according to the Winnipeg
Times
, “known as one of the most pushing men on the American continent.” Hill, who hired all the key
CPR
personnel that year, was as partial to pushers as he was to Americans. (The
Globe
was already reporting “indignation against the Syndicate about employment of American instead of Canadian engineers and surveyors.”)

Rosser was a man of precipitate action, as events were shortly to prove. During the Civil War he had risen from lieutenant to major general. He had refused to surrender with Lee at Appomattox, preferring instead to charge the Federal lines with two divisions of cavalry. When he was finally
captured, some time later, he was trying to reorganize the shattered remnants of the army of Northern Virginia for a final, dramatic stand. His subsequent civilian record was equally dashing. He had begun as an axeman and again worked his way up through the ranks from rodman to scout to chief surveyor. He was surrounded by an aura of legend – a record of hairbreadth escapes in war and peace. On one occasion, when surprised by Yankee cavalry and wounded above the knee by a bone-shattering bullet, he had ridden all night to safety with the broken limb swinging back and forth and the enemy hard on his tail. A decade later, near Bismarck, North Dakota, a party of Sioux had cut him off. One crept up behind a tree, used it as a shield, and began taking pot-shots at him. Rosser coolly waited until the Indian poked his head around the trunk to take aim, shot him squarely between the eyes, heaved his corpse onto a pony and again galloped safely away. In 1881, as chief engineer of the
CPR
, he brought the same dash and impulsiveness to the establishment of townsites.

A fortnight before the first sod was turned, rumours of a great new city west of Winnipeg began to fly. Survey parties started to move out of Portage la Prairie in the last week of April, locating the new route. Everyone knew that the railway would require a divisional point about one hundred and thirty miles west of Winnipeg. That fitted almost to a mile the location of the little settlement of Grand Valley, clustered on the banks of the Assiniboine at the exact spot where the railway was to cross the river. Tents and shacks began to spring up in the vicinity as the surveyors drove in their stakes. There was a smell of big money in the air, and, as a correspondent reported to the
Free Press
, “many land grabbers and speculators.” The excitement increased day by day. Two men from Perth, Ontario, arrived with fifteen tons of dry goods and groceries to set up a general store. Two more began to erect a sawmill. Another opened a “hotel” of canvas spread over wooden frames, the expanse of the sides
being used as an advertising medium. Ehigald McVicar, the pioneer resident in the community, whose wife was the local postmistress, began making improvements to his home, doubling the size of his warehouse, and planning a new ferryboat to replace the one that he had been operating at the crossing. His brother John announced that he would also extend the size of his house so it would be equal to “the accommodation of the present influx of strangers.”

“The boom in Grand Valley grows,” the
Free Press
reported on April 30. “People are steering for that point from all directions.…” The real estate men steered themselves right to the McVicar homestead, for it was on this property that the new city would presumably be situated. The McVicar brothers were the first settlers in Grand Valley – humble, illiterate men who had come west in 1879 from Grenville, Quebec, to build the first sod dwelling in the region. The community might have borne their name had it not been for their innate modesty. They refused the offer of the chief dominion postal officer in Winnipeg to call it McVicar; since he had referred to the Assiniboine Valley as “grand,” they suggested the alternate title. The little town grew around the site of their original homestead, and the McVicars expected to get rich from the Grand Valley boom.