The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (7 page)

Riel was born a westerner and a Métis, which means he was a French-speaking Roman Catholic of mixed race. In his case his veins were tinctured with the merest dash of Cree blood. His father, who was to have been a priest, became an eloquent tribune of his people, and Louis, the eldest of eleven, inherited the mantle of political agitator. His schooling in Montreal, his brief period in the law office of a leading radical, and his own prairie heritage had shaped this clever, intense and apparently humourless youth into a racial patriot ready to champion the half-breed cause at Red River.

The Métis were in a state of turmoil when Riel arrived back at St. Boniface in 1868 because their status quo was threatened by the yeasty combination of events arising out of Confederation and the imminent sale of the Hudson’s Bay lands to Canada. The settlement of the West, they knew, meant an end to their own unique society, the loss of the lands on which many of them had squatted, usually without title, and the eventual break-up of their race.

Métis society was built on the law of the buffalo hunt, a twice-yearly event, which was run with a military precision that produced generalship of a high order and led to the first stirrings of political organization among an essentially nomadic people. The statistics of such hunts are remarkable. The greatest employed four hundred mounted hunters, twelve hundred carts and sixteen hundred souls, including women and children. This vast, itinerant city crawled across the plains, stretching for miles, on its way to a border rendezvous with the Métis of Dakota; there, near Pembina, it formed itself into a gigantic circle, one thousand feet in diameter, ringed with oxcarts placed hub to hub and a triple row of teepees. Then, after four days of painstaking organization, which saw the election of captains, soldiers and guides, it rolled off once more – every cart in its exact place – towards the final encounter with the great herd. The climactic scene was awesome: the ground shaking as if from an earthquake, the sky blacked out by the immense clouds of dust, the phalanx of mounted hunters, muskets raised, galloping towards the stampeding beasts, the prairie running red with the blood of the animals. Such a spectacle would be unthinkable in a land of roads and railways, fences and furrows. By 1869, with the Hudson’s Bay Company about to yield up its lands to Canada, surveyors from the East, without a by-your-leave, were already setting up their transits on Métis river lots.

The Métis were not Canadians and did not think of themselves as such. Neither did the white Selkirk settlers of the Red River or the Protestant half-breed farmers. Within the community there was a small “Canadian Party” whose orientation was white, Protestant, Orange and Upper Canadian. Its leader was a towering journalist and surgeon named John Christian Schultz. He and his colleagues had strong links with the Toronto expansionists and Canada Firsters (who were, really, Upper Canada Firsters) with whom they were working for annexation. Schultz and his shrill followers helped precipitate the Métis uprising which Riel did not begin but which he did organize and shape with consummate skill.

The details are familiar to most Canadian high school students. By the end of 1869, without a single act of violence, Riel and the Métis had raised their own flag over the Red River settlement and were preparing to treat on equal diplomatic terms with Donald A. Smith, the Hudson’s Bay man from Montreal and Labrador, whom the Government had hastily dispatched. Since the great fur company had formally relinquished its territory and Canada had yet to take it over (the Métis prevented the erstwhile lieutenant-governor from crossing the border) Riel was in an interesting bargaining position. Soon he had the entire community behind him save for the incendiary members of the Canadian Party whom he had imprisoned. Had matters rested there, Louis Riel would undoubtedly have brought the community peacefully into Confederation on Métis terms and taken his place with men like Joseph Howe and D’Arcy McGee as a great Canadian statesman, his name enshrined on countless hospitals, ball parks, schools and expressways.

This was not to be. Schultz and some of his cronies escaped from Riel’s prison and mounted a counter-movement. The Métis quickly put it down but one of the Canadians, a sinewy Orangeman named Thomas Scott, could not be put down. When he tried to murder Riel, he was summarily court-martialled and sentenced to be shot. In this single act of violence was laid the basis for a century of bitterness and controversy.

Of all the pivotal figures in Canadian history, Thomas Scott is one
of the least engaging. His breed was not uncommon in Ontario – a bigoted Protestant Irishman, totally unyielding, always inflammatory, who was nourished by his own hatreds. Scott would have driven a less mercurial man than Riel into a fury: he attacked his guards, urged his companions to follow suit, taunted the Métis and vowed to escape and kill their leader. Riel made his death a deliberate act of policy: Canada must learn to respect his people. One can pity Scott, as he is dragged before the firing squad, faced for the first time with the realization that the Popish half-breeds actually mean what they say (his shocked cry, “This is cold-blooded murder!” was to echo for decades through the back roads of Ontario); but one can never like him. He makes his brief, incandescent appearance on the stage of history and is gone, writhing on the ground, not quite dead from the firing squad’s volley, waiting for the
coup de grâce
. But his memory remains and his tragedy, mythologized out of recognition (as Riel’s was to be), will kindle an unquenchable conflagration in Orange Ontario.

The massive demand for revenge, washing over Parliament Hill like a tidal wave, forced the Government to mount, in 1870, a largely unnecessary military expedition across the portages of the Shield to relieve a fort which Riel was preparing to hand over peacefully. The expedition did have one other purpose: Macdonald, now thoroughly alive to the perils of further indifference, was not unhappy about a show of military strength in the valley of the Red River which the Minnesota expansionists clearly coveted.

By January, 1870, Macdonald had determined that speedy construction of a railway across the new territory to the Pacific was a necessity. Charles Brydges of the Grand Trunk had warned him that Washington would try to use the Riel troubles to frustrate Canada’s acquisition of the North West. Macdonald, whose own intelligence from the United States confirmed Brydges’s fears, wrote that “no time should be lost in this.”

Riel’s own story almost exactly parallels that of the railway. Unwittingly, he helped to launch it; unwittingly again, fifteen years later, he helped to save it; he was hanged within a few days of the driving of the last spike. Forced into hiding and finally into exile in the United States, Riel was twice elected to Parliament from the riding of Provencher in the new province of Manitoba, of which he was the undisputed founder. He could not take his seat – the Ontario government had put a price of five thousand dollars on his head – but before he vanished over the border, he indulged in one last, dramatic piece of stagecraft. The scene is Ottawa in 1874 – a snowy afternoon in January. Two muffled figures appear at a side door of the Parliament Buildings. One tells the clerk on duty that a new member has come to sign the roll. The bored clerk hands the stranger a pen: he scratches his name and slips away. Idly, the clerk glances at it and utters a startled cry. There are the words “Louis Riel” burning themselves into the paper. The clerk looks up; but the outlaw waves sardonically and vanishes. He will not return until 1885 to play his unknowing role at the most critical moment of all in the history of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

5
The land beyond the lakes

By 1871, with the events from Manitoba still making headlines week after week, Canadians began to look upon their new North West with the same mixture of wonder, guilt and apprehension that they would bring to the country north of 55 in John Diefenbaker’s day:
It must be wonderful to see it! Oh, if only one
COULD
see it, but it was so remote, so hard to reach! Something ought to be done about developing it; they said parts of it were very rich. But would you want to
LIVE
there — so far away from everything, in that dreadful climate? One day, of course, millions would live there — that was certain. One day …

If the attitudes to the North West were vague, confused and uncertain, part of the reason lay in the conflicting reports about it. Some said it was little more than a desert; others saw it as a verdant paradise. Even the two official government explorations of the territory launched in 1857 – one by the British, one by the Canadians – differed in their assessments.

The best-remembered of these expeditions was that of the British, mounted by a dashing Irish bachelor named John Palliser, who left his name on a triangle of supposed desert in what is now southern Alberta. The expedition was Palliser’s own idea and it came at the height of the restless mid-Victorian era – a period that saw the sons of the landed gentry striking out on voyages of exploration and adventure to the far corners of the globe, plunging through African jungles and veldt, attacking the Arctic ice pack, staggering across
the plains of Australia and North America, always with magnificent aplomb. The Palliser brothers were all seduced by this wanderlust. Two went off to shoot big game in Ceylon, another headed for the China seas where he rescued a French lady from pirates. A brother-in-law vanished into the Australian wilderness, a second was lost on Franklin’s last polar expedition. John Palliser, fired by a relative’s tales of the Missouri country, had already trekked across the western plains, living with the Indians, running the gantlet of war parties and bagging buffalo, three of which he brought back to Ireland alive in the company of a black bear, an antelope, two Virginia deer and an Indian dog.

What, then, was more natural than that this darkly handsome and muscular bachelor with the aquiline face and the romantic sideburns, seeing another intriguing blank space on the map, should view the Canadian North West as a new land to conquer? There was so much to learn out there, beyond the inland seas: where did the British territory end and the United States territory begin? Were there workable passes in the Rockies? Was a railway feasible across those plains and mountains?

There was only one problem: Palliser’s family had fallen upon lean days; his father was being forced to sell the family estates to make ends meet. The expedition would cost at least five thousand pounds, and Palliser could no longer afford that amount. He approached the Royal Geographical Society for support. His credentials as a typical Victorian adventurer were impeccable. He was fluent in five languages, was a crack shot, could camp out and take care of himself in the wilds and had travelled the world. The Society, which was interested in both the climate and the geology of this unknown region of the continent, decided to back Palliser; and so did the Imperial government.

Palliser’s commission was broad. He was to explore an empire from Lake Superior to the Rockies and he was to report on
everything –
agriculture, minerals, settlement possibilities, and, of course, possible transportation routes. He was to keep every conceivable kind of record, botanical, zoological, meteorological, magnetic. As companions he was given three ill-assorted but dedicated scientists. There was Eugène Bourgeau, a plump and unfailingly cheerful little naturalist known as “the Prince of Botanical Collectors.” There was Dr. James Hector, a slender Scots geologist of twenty-three whose inner resolve belied his scholarly features; with Spartan discipline
Hector had trained himself to endure discomfort. Finally, there was a frosty-looking magnetical observer from the Royal Artillery, Thomas Blakiston, an able and ambitious Crimea veteran but such a terrible stickler for form and place that he finally parted company with the expedition and went off on his own.

Palliser and his companions were two years in the field and their accomplishments, though obscured at the time (the expedition’s report was delayed in its publication until 1862 and Palliser’s map until 1865), were monumental. They explored, by a variety of routes, all of the country between Lake Superior and the Pacific coast. Bourgeau collected 460 species and sixty thousand specimens, some of which are still to be seen in the museum and herbarium of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. Hector discovered the Kicking Horse Pass and was almost buried alive as a result. His horse, stumbling in the frothing waters, dealt him a blow with its hoof which rendered him insensible. The Indians, believing him dead, popped him into a freshly dug grave and were about to shovel in the earth when the supposed corpse, conscious but unable to utter a word, managed, by a single prodigious wink of one eye, to shock the would-be burial party into less precipitate action. With Hector in great pain and his companions close to starvation, the party plunged on through the newly named pass, following the turbulent river along the line of the future
CPR
.

But the idea of a railway in the shadows of those rumpled peaks was far from Palliser’s mind. He had been asked to judge whether or not, in the carefully non-committal prose of the Colonial Office, “the country presents such facilities for the construction of a railway as would at some period, though possibly a remote one, encourage her Majesty’s government in the belief that such an undertaking between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans will ever be accomplished.”

His answer was bluntly negative. His knowledge of the country would never lead him to advocate a railway “exclusively through British territory.” Across the prairies, certainly; but that armoured barrier north of Lake Superior “is
the
obstacle of the country and one, I fear, almost beyond the remedies of art.” The sensible method was to go through American territory south of the lake and cut up to Manitoba through Pembina on the border, if and when the Americans built their own lines to that point.