The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (30 page)

The dancing grew wilder as the full moon shed its eerie light over the scene. Whenever the whistler gave out the dancers themselves supplied the music, shouting the tunes aloud. The entire crew, “panting like pressure engines,” seemed to have forgotten where they were and saw themselves in some vast, chandeliered ballroom, far from the dripping forests, the mires and the deadfalls.

“They were now in the last dance, and appeared to have gone mad, and when at last the orchestra stopped, and Dick White doffed his cap with the indispensable flourish, and the moon shone on his bald scalp as he offered his arm to the fair one at his side, preparatory to leading her to a seat on a log, I fairly screamed with laughter, and then to see that modest young lady suddenly throw out one of her number eleven
boots, and sledge hammer arm, and place Dick in an instant on his back and to observe the lady dancing a jig around him, yelling at the same time that made the distant hills echo, was glorious fun.”

Thus did Party “S” by temporary madness save itself from a larger insanity.

The following day, Rylatt received three letters from his wife, the last written by a neighbour, she being too ill to hold a pen. It ended with an earnest appeal: “Oh, Bob, come home, I can’t bear it!”

He could not go home; Moberly had already refused to release him from his two-year contract. As the fall rains began, pouring down in such sheets that it was impossible to cook a meal, the party, reduced in numbers, moved north again, spurred on by Moberly who had returned from his interview with Fleming at the Yellow Head to find them settling in for the winter.

“The whole valley is like a lake,” Rylatt noted. “Thus, under the present state of affairs, I exist. My drenched clothing is taken off at night, wrung out, and I turn in to my equally wet blankets. When resuming my clothing in the morning, I shiver all over, my teeth chatter, as I dolefully reflect how difficult it will be to prepare a meal.”

There were no more warm breakfasts for the wet, shivering crew, only flapjacks larded over with bacon grease and a muddy coffee made from beans placed in a piece of canvas and bruised between two rocks.

With winter setting in and their goods far behind them, they found themselves in the heart of the Rockies, sixty-five hundred feet above sea level, fifty miles still from their wintering place, “where no trail exists nor ever has existed … wholly unexplored … every mile to be contended with, swamps to be crossed, heavy timber to be hacked through, dense undergrowth to be levelled for our animals.”

For weeks no scrap of news seeped through. Two thousand miles away a series of events not unconnected with their own toil was taking shape. Macdonald was in the midst of his futile negotiations with Macpherson. Allan was moving gingerly to dump his American associates. Rumours were beginning to reach Liberal ears of a damaging agreement signed by Cartier. But the men in the Athabasca Pass were cut off from the world. At last, on October 19, a pack train arrived and Rylatt was handed a slip of paper on which was scribbled the message he had been dreading:

“Dear Rylatt — The papers state your wife has passed beyond the stream of time. Don’t be too cut up, dear old fellow.”

There were no particulars. Three days later, while brooding in his tent, he was startled by a strange cry. His dog Nip, a faithful companion during all his hardships, who shared his blankets and his food, had broken through the shore ice and was struggling vainly in the river. Rylatt did his best to save him but failed. “ ‘Oh, God,’ I cried in my distress, ‘must everything be taken from me?’ ”

By the following April, near the Fiddle River, Rylatt was nearly dead himself of scurvy:

“My mouth is in a dreadful state, the gums being black, the teeth loose, and when pressed against any substance they prick at the roots like needles. At times the gums swell, almost covering the teeth. To chew food is out of the question and so have to bolt it without mastication. My legs also becoming black below the knee.… My breath is somewhat offensive and I am troubled with a dry cough. In fact I feel like an old man.…”

At length, Rylatt persuaded the reluctant Moberly to allow him to quit the service and go home. He said his good-byes on the evening of May 13, 1873, and this leave-taking was warm and fervent. Suddenly he “felt a pang of regret at having to turn my back on such comrades.” They crowded around him with warm hand-shakes and clumsy words of Godspeed. The cook appeared with some doughnuts, especially made for the occasion. In the two years together these men had come to know one another as men can only under conditions of hardship and stress. Rylatt and a burly Scots companion, Henry Baird, took three horses and set off south towards Kamloops through unknown country, trudging through soaking moss “so deep that an animal could be buried overhead and suffocate,” swimming and re-swimming the ice-cold rivers – packs, horses and all – crawling on their hands and knees over the fallen timber, stamping out a trail through the crust of the melting snow-fields, foundering in the rapids of the treacherous watercourses, slashing away at the impeding underbrush, flogging their animals unmercifully as they struggled on in search of feed.

A month later they were still on the trail, provisions lost, matches almost gone, sugar used up, a single sack of flour between them and starvation. About one hundred and fifty miles out of Kamloops, they happened upon a meadow where the horses could graze. They made a fire, dried their clothing and cooked some flapjacks in a pan. Then, stretched before the blaze, in the closest thing to comfort they had known for many weeks, the two exhausted and weather-beaten men
fell to “cogitating on the possibilities and probabilities of the Canadian Pacific Railroad.”

“In the mind’s eye we pictured a train of cars sweeping along over this flat, over the fierce streams we had passed, puffing and snorting up the mountains in gentle curves and windings, shrieking wildly as some denizen of the forest, scared at the strange monster … is hurrying off.…”

They talked about “the weary looks in the eyes of the passengers, longing for the end of the route.” They could almost see them settle back in their corners, yawn, complain of fatigue and “doze away the terrible hours of idleness.” Then their thoughts turned to the dining car and, with watering mouths, the two men began to enumerate the kind of dinner that might be served on such a train in the future: “…  hot joints, mealy potatoes, pies, cheese, etc., and wine to be had for the paying for.”

The fantasy grew more graphic. The two began to conjecture that the imaginary passengers on the imaginary train were gazing out on
them
and remarking: “Those two fellows yonder seem to have it pretty much to themselves, as they toast their skins … and are doubtless happier and more at freedom than we.…”

At length, the train of imagination rolled on beyond the forested horizon. Rylatt and Baird roused themselves and counted their matches: there would not be many more hot meals. They still had a long way to go but the end of that long sentence on the Canadian Pacific Survey was at last in sight. They cooked some more flapjacks on what was left of the fire to eat cold on the morrow. They saved what little tea and tobacco was left for an emergency. Then, wearily, they shouldered their loads, gathered up their grazing horses and, with that strange vision of the future still fresh in their minds, set off once again into reality.

4
“That old devil” Marcus Smith

Marcus Smith, the man who took over all surveys in British Columbia in the spring of 1873, was without doubt the most controversial figure that the Canadian Pacific Survey produced. No two men in the service seemed to agree about him. Moberly liked him. C. F.
Hanington wrote that “he was a wonderful man to my mind.” Thomas Henry White, another colleague, talked rather ambiguously about “the fire and sparkle of Marcus Smith’s genius.” Harry Armstrong, who worked first in Smith’s drafting room in Ottawa and became his friend, described him as “a very crabbed and impatient man, though withal very kind of heart.” Later, Armstrong, a full-fledged engineer, ran into him on Lake Superior and recalled that he was “still the same, brusque, irritable man.” Some of the men who worked under Smith used harsher terms. Rylatt, when he was at a low point on the Columbia, wrote in a fury that Smith was “a hard, unjust and arbitrary wretch.” In the summer of 1872, a young rodman named Edgar Fawcett, toiling in the Homathco country, called him “an old devil” and wrote in his diary that “I did not come here to be blackguarded by Mr. Smith for $45 a month.” And when Smith announced he was leaving the party and moving on, another member wrote in
his
diary that it was “the best news we have heard since we left Victoria.”

Smith was a pretty good hater himself. He referred to one of Roderick McLennan’s travelling companions, a man named Wright, as “a Yankee sneak.” Henry J. Cambie was also a sneak and, in addition, “a little toady,” as was James Rowan, Fleming’s assistant, and, by inference, Fleming himself. Fleming’s successor, Collingwood Schreiber, was “mean and inferior” and a conniver, to boot, Major A. B. Rogers was “a thorough fraud” and Charles Horetzky was “a crazy, conceited fellow.” Smith was suspicious of all politicians: Alexander Mackenzie was dishonest, in his view; the Governor General, of all people, he suspected of railway land speculation; and John A. Macdonald would “sacrifice anything or anybody to smooth down difficulties.”

Smith reserved his choicest epithets and his most withering contempt for those who dared to oppose the route to the Pacific in which he had come, by 1877, to believe. This route led from the Pine Pass southwest through Fort George, across the Chilcoten Plains to the headwaters of the Homathco and thence down that turbulent river to its mouth at Bute Inlet. Smith quarrelled bitterly with anyone who favoured any other line for the railway. He fought with Fleming because Fleming continued a strong advocate of the Yellow Head Pass–Fraser River–Burrard Inlet route. He fought with Cambie because Cambie sent back favourable reports on both the Fraser River route and the northern alternative from the Yellow Head to Port Simpson. He was angered by Horetzky, who also wanted the
railway to keep to the north and come out to the mouth of the Kitlope. He became such a monomaniac on the subject of “his” route that, when he took Sandford Fleming’s place during the latter’s leave of absence, Mackenzie, who was both Prime Minister and Minister of Public Works, refused to talk to him.

Smith employed every device he knew to force the government to accept the Pine Pass–Bute Inlet route. He wrote to Members of Parliament, dispatched secret surveys into the north, arranged for letters and articles in the newspapers and bombarded everybody, including two prime ministers, with his views. He was darkly suspicious of conspiracies, which he believed were being mounted against him, and he accused Fleming of suppressing his reports (as did Horetzky) out of jealousy. Fleming bore it all with remarkable equanimity, at least in public, but he did his best to get rid of Smith. At one point he thought he
had
fired him. Smith stuck around. Fleming acted as if he didn’t exist. Smith may have been erratic but he was a good engineer and he was a born survivor; long after Fleming himself had been eased out of the service, he was still part of the Canadian Pacific Survey, though his position was less exalted.

In 1872, when Smith first entered the long fiord of Bute Inlet, and then made his way up the Homathco – “a scene of gloomy grandeur, probably not met with in any other part of the world” – it was love at first sight, as it had been with Moberly and Horetzky and all the other enthusiasts who championed a line of route, including, indeed, the chief engineer himself. Surveyor’s diaries are seldom gems of literary art. A tired man, squatting on the edge of a river bank, scribbling with a pencil stub in a greasy notebook, is anything but poetic; but Smith, who had a habit of noting the curious trivia around him – the character of Indian communities, for instance, or the sight of a young native girl throwing off her shift coquettishly and bathing in the river – waxed positively lyrical about the region:

“Scene awfully grand – the river rushing and foaming in a narrow chain between walls of rock, a frowning cliff overhanging all and the snow capped mountains piercing the clouds and hidden by curtains of glaciers glittering blue and cold in the sunlight.”

Later, he wrote for an official government report an equally eloquent description of the Chilcoten meadows – “the silence of the plains only broken by the silent tread of the Indian or the sad wail of the solitary loon” – and of the Homathco canyon, “where the
awful grandeur of the mountains, the roar of the waters, and the constant sense of danger kept the nerves strong and the mind active.”

His description of the “charming” mile-wide valleys of the Chilcoten and Chilanko rivers had the ring of a hopelessly infatuated suitor composing a paean to his intended. He wrote of the bottom lands, ripe and mellow with bunch growth, with the clear streams meandering through them in graceful curves, of the pale, greyish green of the grasses “in agreeable harmony with the dark foliage of the spruce,” and of the “picturesque irregularity of the evergreens,” the whole “forming a scene of pristine beauty rarely to be met with.” Compared with the spare, routine prose of some of his colleagues, Smith’s, on occasion, seemed almost sensual.

Smith had just turned fifty-six – a stubby man with a barrel chest, tough as shaganappi and bristly as a warthog – when he first clambered up the dripping cliffs of the Homathco. His hooded eyes, drooping moustache and grizzled beard gave him a querulous, almost dour look. Topley, the Ottawa photographer who managed to make most of his subjects look as if they had been stuffed and mounted, did not quite succeed with Marcus Smith. There remains upon that sturdy but weather-ravaged face a fleeting expression of slight distaste. One can almost see the subject shifting impatiently in the prop studio chair and blurting out: “Look ye [a favourite expression] does it have to take so damned
long!”