Read The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 Online
Authors: Pierre Berton
The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (11 page)
During the summer the Hudson’s Bay Company’s steamboat
International
plied the Red River at uncertain intervals. Butler described it with his usual sharp eye: “Her engines were a perfect marvel of patchwork – pieces of rope seemed twisted around the crank and shaft – mud was laid thickly on boiler and pipes, little spurts of steam had a disagreeable way of coming out from places not supposed to be capable of such outpourings.” The creaky vessel, 130 feet long,
had difficulty negotiating the hairpin turns. In winter, of course, she could not operate; and when the water in the Red fell below two feet, she ran aground and the passengers had to take the Burbank stagecoach out across the bumpy, uninhabited prairie, laying over during the night at the atrocious stopping places where, in a single undivided attic, men, women and children all slept together in beds jammed together side by side.
This ordeal was idyllic compared to that suffered by the luckless ones who chose the all-Canadian route (generally because it was cheaper). The steamer trip as far as Prince Arthur’s Landing was pleasant enough, though a little nerve-racking at meal times: there were as many as four sittings and those who had not yet eaten were in the habit of hovering impatiently behind the seats of the diners. But after Prince Arthur’s Landing, on the Dawson Route to Winnipeg, the real test of nerves began.
The route consisted of a corduroy road, interspersed with water stretches, and then a wagon road cut directly from the prairie turf. It was named for another Scot, the same Simon J. Dawson who, with Henry Youle Hind, had been sent out by the government in the late fifties to explore the North West. Dawson, who was later to become a Member of Parliament, was known as “Smooth Bore Dawson” because of his even temper and his quiet way of speaking. He needed to husband his reserves. The calumnies subsequently heaped upon him might have driven a more excitable man to dangerous excesses.
As the result of the report he made following his explorations of the Lake Superior country, Dawson was commissioned in 1868 to supervise the building of a series of corduroy links from Prince Arthur’s Landing to connect the long chain of ragged lakes which lie between Superior and the Lake of the Woods. From that point the Fort Garry Road would lead on to the prairie and thence to Winnipeg.
When Wolseley and his soldiers set out on their 96-day overland journey to quell the Riel uprising, the Dawson road was still unfinished. The soldiers helped put part of it together, splitting rocks by lighting fires under them and sousing them with water, packing the corduroy under the roadbed, building bridges, and cutting cords of poplar poles on which they rolled their boats across the exhausting portages, each man masked like a hangman by a heavy veil to ward off the hordes of blackflies and mosquitoes.
From Wolseley’s point of view, the odyssey was a success. Dawson had ordered one hundred and fifty boats specially built for the expedition on the Isle of Orleans and shipped to Sarnia, from where a crew of eight hundred skilled voyageurs brought them to Lake Superior and thence over the portages the soldiers had prepared (the same technique and some of the same voyageurs were later used to navigate the cataracts of the Nile during the attempt to rescue Gordon in 1884-85). But in the process Wolseley’s troops destroyed as much of the road as they built and held up construction for the three months it took to move the sixteen hundred men through the wilderness. By the time the last soldier had moved on, the road was in such a state that it was useless.
Eventually, however, it was completed. Tugs and steamboats were placed on a dozen lakes. Dams were built on the Maligne River to raise the water levels around the falls and rapids as much as a dozen feet. Tents, houses and shanties were erected for the convenience of passengers. And two great locks, eight hundred and two hundred feet high, were planned at Fort Frances so that steamboats might eventually circumvent the rapids of the Rainy River. Between 1872 and 1873, a thousand settlers paid their ten dollars to use the Dawson Route between the lakehead and Winnipeg.
It was a formidable route. A tug or steamboat was required on every lake and a different team of horses, together with harnesses and wagons, at each of the ten portages. Throughout its brief existence, there was never a time when some section of the Dawson road was not in need of repair. Indeed, the route was scarcely open when the completion of a railway from Duluth to Moorhead on the Red River, in the spring of 1873, made it obsolete. Travellers could now take the lake boat to Duluth, proceed by rail to the river and there pick
up a steamboat to Winnipeg. This, too, was a rough trip. As one traveller recalled, “half the time we didn’t know whether we were on the rails or on the ties”; but it was nothing compared to the Dawson Route in 1874.
In that season the government determined to contract out the freight and passenger service to a private company. The contractors agreed to move passengers from the lakehead to Winnipeg in ten or twelve days and freight in fifteen or twenty. But because they were subsidized by the government to carry passengers at low fares, it was in their interests to carry as few as possible and put most of the $75,000 subsidy in their pockets.
The story is told of one luckless settler arriving in a pitiable state of exhaustion and dilapidation at the office of Donald A. Smith,
M.P.
, in Winnipeg, and proclaiming: “Well, 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 of nights, and the boat was so leaky that every bit of baggage I’ve got is water-logged and ruined. But that ain’t all. 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 in one of the boats, an Ottawa Irishman told me to go to h—1 and said that if I gave him any more of my d—d chat he’d let me get off and walk to Winnipeg.”
In June and July of 1874, the pioneer newspaper of Manitoba, the
Nor’wester
, began to carry the immigrants’ complaints. They considered the station-master at Fifteen Mile shanty “a brute,” and the men at the Height of Land “mean and surly.” At Baril Lake, the baggage was flung helter-skelter into the hold of a barge where it rested in eight inches of water. On one passage across Rainy Lake where, true to nomenclature, a cloudburst descended, male passengers compassionately took the tarpaulin off a woodpile and placed it over the heads of the women and children. This so enraged the engineer that he seized an axe and threatened to chop away at the customers unless the covering were instantly replaced. It wasn’t, whereupon the engineer “out of sheer spite” held up the boat for five hours.
So eager were the contractors – W. H. Carpenter and Company – to “make the most of the $75,000 bonus” (to quote the
Nor’wester)
that they were criminally careless of human life. One boat was so
overloaded with freight, horses and forty passengers that its gunwales were within three inches of the water, which could be seen pouring in at several places. Even then the pilot wanted to proceed and could only be persuaded to turn around after a heated quarrel.
James Trow, an Ontario Member of Parliament who took a lively interest in the North West, reported that paid American agents of the Northern Pacific were on hand at Prince Arthur’s Landing to try to seduce immigrants away from the Dawson Route, saying that “if we persisted we might possibly get through before Christmas or New Year’s but in all probability our bones would be left to bleach on some portage or sunk beneath the waves.”
The Americans urged the travellers to give up any fancy of settling on the Canadian prairie and choose instead the more hospitable soil of Minnesota or Dakota. “These smooth-tongued interlopers succeeded in poisoning the minds of several,” Trow reported. The burly
M.P
. patriotically chose the all-Canadian route and on its corduroyed right of way encountered an Englishman who exclaimed that “he would sooner be hanged in England than die a natural death on the Dawson Route.”
Trow himself was forced to admit that the men stationed along the way seemed remarkably indifferent to the interests of the travelling community. Nevertheless, he retained his patriotism and wrote that “notwithstanding all its drawbacks, the Dawson Route affords one of the most enjoyable excursions on the continent of America.” The scenery, all agreed, was beautiful and the region was to become, decades later, a major tourist resort.
Still, many a passenger was on the edge of revolt as a result of conditions on the trail. Scores arrived in Winnipeg in a state of semi-starvation, obliged to subsist on fish they caught themselves, their effects destroyed by leaky boats. They were forced to work their own passage, sleep in dirty, neglected shanties and walk when no wagons were available – all the time subjected to a volley of insults and threats by the employees of the contractors.
Complaints began to pour into Ottawa. In July, 1874, an alarmed government sent Simon Dawson himself out to investigate. When the surveyor arrived at the North West Angle of the Lake of the Woods, he was nearly mobbed by a crowd of infuriated and starving passengers who were vainly awaiting transportation to Winnipeg. Dawson scrambled about and found some half-breeds with Red River carts who arranged to handle the job, but his smooth-bore temperament
must have been sorely tried. That year he quit in disgust and disappointment as superintendent of the route and advised the government that no further work should be done on it.
The road continued to operate in a desultory kind of way. The Marchioness of Dufferin, the Governor General’s lady, went over it in 1877 and was knocked about so much on the corduroy that she preferred to get out and walk. Another traveller, Mary Fitzgibbon, wrote that she would never forget her own trip. The road by this time consisted of “round logs, loosely bound together, and thrown down upon a marsh, no two consecutive logs being of the same size.” Originally there had been some foundation, and there were still deep drains on each side but “the logs had given way at different ends in some parts and altogether in others. It was bump, bump, bang and squash and squash, bang and bump; now up now down, now all on one side, now all on the other. Cushions, rugs, everything that could slide, slid off the seats … and one longed to cry out and beg to be stopped if only for a moment.…”
Finally the road was abandoned, and the locks at Fort Frances, on which the government had squandered three years and $289,000, were abandoned, too. The days of canals and corduroy roads were over. The railway was on its way.
Chapter Two
2
Sir Hugh Allan’s shopping spree
1
Poor Waddington
The debate on the terms of admission of British Columbia was not yet over when the first of the entrepreneurs arrived in Ottawa. This was Alfred Waddington of Victoria, seventy-five years old and a fanatic on the subject of a Pacific railway. His scheme was premature and ill-considered and he himself was suspect in the eyes of the Canadian decision-makers; nonetheless his place as a minor catalyst in Canadian history is secure: his meeting in July, 1871, with Sir Francis Hincks and Sir John A. Macdonald touched off the complicated chain of events that led to the nation’s first great political crisis.
“Old Waddy,” as he was called, was a bland-looking man whose moon face was framed in ear-length locks and a little fringe of chin whiskers. Only the hard, resolute line of his mouth hinted at an inner stubbornness. He was obsessed, almost to the point of irrationality, by the idea of building the railway through the Yellow Head Pass to Bute Inlet, a precipitous indentation in the British Columbia coastline on whose beaches he had already been granted a townsite.
Waddington had been a trial to the Victoria political establishment ever since he had arrived in British Columbia from San Francisco, with the first wave of adventurers, after gold was discovered on the Fraser in 1858. The well-educated son of an English squire, originally lured across the Atlantic by the California gold rush, he came to the colony a wealthy man, free to plunge with zest into politics and pamphleteering. As a member of the colonial legislature he became a constant and pugnacious critic of the administration. He was more than a politician: he was also a railway engineer of sorts, an amateur fireman, a school inspector, the publisher of the first book printed on Vancouver Island, the founder of the colony’s first gasworks and a pillar of the first old-people’s home in Victoria.