Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 729
The story of the Canadian Pacific Railway has been too well told to need detailed repetition here. The Company was organized under a Canadian Act of Parliament of February 15, 1881, on terms of what appears at first sight princely generosity. It was to receive a cash subsidy of $25,000,000, payable as construction proceeded, and a land grant of 25,000,000 acres. The land was to be selected out of what was called the Fertile Belt of the North-West, meaning roughly the valley of the North Saskatchewan, as opposed to the country farther south and west through which the main line of the railway was to pass and which was at that time still regarded as largely desert. The company was to receive a large measure of tax exemption, free import of construction materials and a protection, for twenty years, against competition in a north and south direction. It received the ramshackle assets left over from previous failure, including 710 miles of road constructed or under construction. The sum total sounds colossal. As beside the work to be done it was hopelessly inadequate.
The making of the road is indeed a fascinating story, or rather it is three fascinating stories. There is first of all the gathering of the capital that initiated the company. It was put together by an adventurous and indomitable group of men, Donald Smith, George Stephen, Richard Angus and their associates, who found it, so to speak, lying across the map of Minnesota. It consisted of a half-made railroad which had fallen back into the possession of a group of Dutch bondholders, to whom it owed over $20,000,000, and into the occupation of vast annual flocks of grasshoppers which were eating everything in the country except the iron rails. The Canadian group bought out the Dutch, it is often said, for a song, yet it was a song that touched the highest note the Bank of Montreal could sing ($6,780,000). Then the grasshoppers went away, and in their place came immigrants, settlers, goods and chattels and more and more settlers — till the Canadian syndicate hardly knew what to do with their money. A shrewd associate said to Sir John A., “Take their money while they still have it.” And that was how the Canadian Pacific Railway, as finance, came into being.
As construction, as road building, the story sounds even better. Under the driving power of William Van Horne they drove the railway over the plains, carrying its own sleepers, rails, plates over the ones just laid — at the rate of two, three and even three O. Skelton, ‘Railway Builders’ “Chronicles of Canada,” 1916 and a half miles a day — once as much as twenty miles in three days. They hoisted it on trestle bridges and filled it in before it could fall. At the other end they bought up Mr. Donald McIntyre’s Canada Central Railway that took them west from 1883 Montreal to Callander on Lake Nipissing, and from there they drilled, filled, blasted and bridged their way through the Lake Superior wilderness. Even to-day the winter traveller through J. M. Gibbon, “Steel of Empire” 1935 that still region of rock and gorge and forest may marvel at their enterprise. Riel’s rebellion gave a transport business that helped out the half-made Superior section. The same year saw it completed. At the same time they laid out a terminal town on the Pacific and called it Vancouver. Then came the final day 1885 when Donald Smith drove a gold spike, as already said, right into the heart of the Rockies, and ended them.
Best of all, though less realized, is the national aspect of the enterprise and the credit due above all to Sir John A. Macdonald. His was the firm insistence, in spite of all technical opinion, that the railway must be all Canadian, must at any cost pierce the wilderness. That it must also, and that it did later, go west via the United States (Chicago-Minnesota) was another matter. It had to be Canadian first. To the same credit belongs the unending help given by the Government over and above the contract, the final generous assistance that meant salvation on the verge of disaster. The story is one to give us confidence that all the later difficulties that threaten our present transportation with disaster, may be met and overcome with the same spirit.
The definite initiation of the Canadian Pacific Railway enterprise naturally stimulated the movement into the West and brought the striking episode of the ‘Winnipeg Boom’ of the opening eighties. The policy of what is called Homestead Settlement had been adopted some years before in a statute of 1872. It was S. Leacock, “My Discovery of the West,” 1937 copied from the American Homestead Law of 1862, which was rapidly filling the Mississippi Valley.
The system gave to each settler 160 acres, a so-called quarter-section, of land. He must live and work on it for at least three months a year. It became his very own after three years. His sons living at home could each have an adjacent 160 acres. He could, under the original pre-emption law, reserve for his purchase as much more. In his mind’s eye the settler’s farm already reached farther than his mind’s eye could. But in the earlier years of the system the North-West still seemed far away, and even dangerous. Settlers in the seventies went from Ontario not to go west but to get out of Ontario. The mortgages turned out the sons of the farms as cruelly as they ever did a Highland clearance. But with better knowledge passed from farm to farm and with rail communication after 1880 from Minnesota into Winnipeg, the prospect changed. It was discovered that Manitoba — still pronounced properly with a bah at the end of it — meant ‘God’s country,’ and with that the prairie turned into the promised land, and the exodus began.
The homestead system developed a great appeal. In other systems of colonization — a lord-of the manor, a privileged company, or the Wakefield endless chain of hired man and proprietor that was tried out in New Zealand — the settlers began in service 1837 or in debt. The homestead man came as his own boss, living perhaps in a house made of sods, surviving as best he could on R. Garnett, “Life of Edward Gibbon Wakefield,” 1898 paid winter work. Each crop lifted him forward as the waves lift a swimmer through the surf. He saw himself already lord of a bonanza farm, reaching beyond the horizon, bending with golden grain that fell with a sigh beneath the knife of the binder. He saw himself in winter affluence on the portico of a California hotel. It was a picture that called forth while it lasted all the best impulse of individual effort. It is all gone now. There is no land left and no insatiable market for its unified crop. We must turn back to the forgotten pages of history and pick up again manorial and company migration where we left it. But the independent homestead in early prairie days appeared in the sunrise. It drew colonists from all over the Empire, Scottish farmers from Midlothian, appalled at Manitoba methods, Cockneys who didn’t know ‘Haw!’ from ‘Gee!’ remittance men, and Oxford graduates with a little Latin still for use in barrooms.
Since Winnipeg is the gateway of the West, the channel of supply, the emporium of import and the market for land sites, W. J. Healy, “Winnipeg’s Early Days,” 1927 the Winnipeg Boom followed as an inevitable consequence. The town became a babel of tongues, a clatter of hammers. The real-estate man rode on the wind, the genius of the hour. Prices were high but didn’t matter. There was work at high pay for everybody. G. Ham, “Reminiscences of a Raconteur” Life on Main and Portage was a round of drinks, a roar of good fellowship, a merry-go-round of sudden fortune.
On the uplift of such a boom, a new town anywhere, a San Francisco, a Carson City, turns into a magic Bagdad — especially a place as small and as new as Winnipeg. Life in a boom town takes on an intensity, a focus not known elsewhere. It has no past. It has no elsewhere. It is all here and now, like the world into which each infant is born. In the light of such a rebirth, people see one another better. Everybody becomes a ‘remarkable man’ — as he is — a ‘hell of a good fellow.’ And why not? It is a half-caught vision of what life might be all the time.
The boom broke. The fortunes vanished. The good fellows turned back into ordinary people, many of them turning slowly to down-at-heel survivals, glad of a treat across the bar. The Oxford men got jobs in a livery stable. The Cockneys went away, looking for a war, and the boom was over. When it was done bankers and economists explained it all away as an over-expansion of credit. The opinion may be hazarded that this is nonsense. The boom is the reality, the collapse the accident. The town of Winnipeg, with only 8,000 people in 1881 and all the North-West behind it, need not have broken. The proof is that it has now well over 200,000 and the Prairie Provinces two million and a half. Nothing was wrong except our inability to handle so much that was right. Some day, when peace comes, real peace, there will be another boom beside which the Manitoba Boom was only a whisper.
This expansion into the North-West brought with it, as an unforeseen and unnecessary consequence, the North-West Rebellion G. Stanley, “The Birth of Western Canada,” 1936 of 1885. Expansion of settlement meant, of course, a certain further restriction of Indian nomad life. In Canada, as in the States, railways and buffalo could not share a bed. Nor could they both have ‘corridors.’ The open plain must be exchanged for the closed reservation. For the half-breeds, also, the new settlement must break the pattern of their old-time life, their side-by-side holdings on the river and the isolation of their language and speech. But there could have been many compensations and more civility. A cigar goes a long way, even with an Indian. But the government, as before, acted with culpable indifference. Surveys were run along the Saskatchewan, newcomers appeared, dispossession seemed imminent, with little if any attempt to explain it. All through the summer of 1884 the Saskatchewan country murmured with discontent. The murmurs grew to loud protest. Meetings were held. The settlers sent over to the States for Louis Riel, living in exile in Montana. Riel had spent the last few years alternately between school-teaching and going partly crazy, a thing quite intelligible to the profession. But to choose him as a leader was the worst choice that could G. Denison, “Struggle for Imperial Unity,” 1909 have been made. His very name unfuriated Ontario. This time they must fight. For Ontario that one name, Riel, blocked all consideration of real grievances.
W. J. PHILLIPS, R.C.A., WINNIPEG, MAN., 1941
“At the same time they laid out a terminal town on the Pacific and called it Vancouver” — page 184
The prairie country had been since 1873 under the surveillance of the North-West Mounted Police, whose name now fills and thrills the movie world. But at this time the world knew little of their arduous life, the patrol of the plains, the control of the desperado, the winter life in the wooden-shack barracks at 20 below zero. The exploits of these Riders of the Plains remained untold. A poet could write: —
They need no sculptured monument, no panoply of stone,
To blazon to a curious world the deeds that they have done.
But the prairie flower blows softly and the scented rose-bud trains
Its wealth of summer beauty o’er the Riders of the Plains.
The police well knew what rebellion in the North-West could mean. The danger was not of the half-breeds; they were too few. The danger was of an all-Indian rising, a last wild attempt to exterminate the Whites. The Indians of the West of fifty years ago were not like the humble quarter-breeds of the Ontario reservations, gratified with a red shirt and drunk on one drink S. Steele, “Forty Years in Canada,” 1915 of whisky. These latter had long since sold out savagery at ten dollars a year. But look in any illustrated book at the pictured faces of such full-blooded braves as Imasees, son of Big Bear, and you may reconstruct again the terror of bygone centuries and understand the vain warnings of the police.
All through the winter in the West the half-breeds organized and collected arms, unheeded. The Indians gathered near to the isolated posts on the North Saskatchewan, as wolves approach their prey. With the spring there came the clash of an armed column, made up of police and settler volunteers, met and heavily outnumbered by a gathering of several hundred half-breeds. Duck Lake, March 26, 1885 There was a fierce fight, brave enough on both sides, with Louis Riel standing by, praying before a crucifix. The police left nine dead and hauled their wounded to Fort Carleton. Thus came the Rebellion, as sudden to Canada as the onrush of a March blizzard.
There followed the hurried call to arms of the militia — there were no ‘regulars’ now — the trainloads of volunteers made up in Toronto, each man to carry with him three days’ food of his own, the shouting crowds at the Union Station, with K. Company from ‘Varsity’ as a part of the Queen’s Own. The boys of Upper Canada College had a worthier half holiday this time than when they went to see Lount and Matthews hanged in 1838.
There followed the railroad journey westward — broken by the unfinished gap of railroad north of Lake Superior; the gathering H. A. Kennedy, “The Book of the West,” 1925 in Winnipeg and the campaign on the plains of the Saskatchewan. There was the fierce fight at Fish Creek, the attack on Poundmaker’s Reservation at Cut Knife and in May the final three-days’ V. LaChance, ‘Diary of Francis Dickens,’ “Queen’s University Bulletin,” 1930 assault on the rifle pits at Batoche that broke the back of the Rebellion. There followed rapidly the recapture of the outposts, where Indian massacre had degraded the Indian’s cause, and then the round up of Big Bear, far to the north, and the execution of his guilty followers. It remained to deal with Louis Riel. The advance of the soldiers had struck apprehension to his heart. He had no spirit for the fight at Batoche, and was captured miles away, near Prince Albert. A surviving artillery A. Guy Ross, Jan. 31, 1941 man of the Winnipeg Field Battery told the writer of this book the other day of seeing Riel brought in by two mounted police, “a little insignificant, bearded man, shabby in rough homespun.” His execution at Regina on November 7, 1885, seemed to Ontario the justly deserved fate of a murderer.
The close of the Rebellion marked the end of the old North-West. It seemed to change with strange rapidity. If not in the twinkling of an eye, at least in the twinkling of a decade it all seemed gone. The buffalo grounds had become the grain farms. Long lines of steel kept crawling across the prairies. The Indian tepee gave place to the frame house of the homestead, and the stockaded fort to the grain elevator. The Indian brave and the buffalo rider before long were known only in the Calgary Stampede and in the films of the moving pictures. This rapid change in the panorama of the West was due to the impetus of settlement given by the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the rapid extension of its branches, and the influx of homestead settlers taking up land.
But as the 1880’s drew to a close, public interest in Canada turned away from the West to revert to the everlasting question of the tariff and our relations with the States. The Conservatives had won the two elections of 1882 and 1887 with no great difficulty. The issue turned on endorsing their forward policy. The Liberals had little to offer but the cold negations of free trade and their bill-board appeal, equally negative, “Has the National Policy made you rich?” All through this period Canadian militant politics were illustrated and enlivened by the genius of J. W. Bengough whose cartoons in his weekly Grip became a national feature, never attempted before, never achieved since. This tendency to turn our politics into fun we share with the Americans. Its influence for good has been incalculable. This is a digression, but the memory of Bengough is worth it.
As the decade closed, the Liberals embarked on the ‘whole hog’ policy of Unrestricted Reciprocity, with two years of agitation as a new election approached. Its appeal was to lie in its uncompromising Goldwin Smith, “Canada and the Canadian Question,” 1891 thoroughness. It was to remove all tariffs as against the States. This was a declaration of war on manufacturers, except such as could survive in the continental market. But for the farmers, and for the Maritime fish and lumber men, it was meant to restore the sunshine of the lost paradise of the Reciprocity of the sixties. The new movement had behind it the powerful support of the illustrious Goldwin Smith, then living in Toronto, an Oxford scholar of such eminence that he could A. Haultain, “Goldwin Smith, His Life and Opinions,” 1913 agree with no one but himself, who found England too English and the United States too American. His participation in the foundation of Cornell University (after the Civil War) he had abandoned, still in the heat of the day. He now lived in retirement in his Toronto Grange, the patronizing patron of Canadian culture. His independent fortune heightened the independence of his mind, but narrowed its outlook. His biographer tells us how Goldwin Smith stood one day at his drawing-room window, overlooking the grounds of the Grange, musing on the reported strikes and violence at Cripple Creek. “Why can’t people be content,” he murmured, “with what they have?” Why not? He himself, in property and investments, had close to a million. To enlighten the Ontario farmers Goldwin Smith established his Farmers Weekly Sun. But it is hard to convert farmers from a Victorian drawing-room. The sunlight of the Weekly Sun was feeble beside the coal-oil and naphtha of the Conservative hustings. Price’s Corners repudiated Oxford.
In any case unrestricted reciprocity was doomed from the start. It meant too much or too little. If complete, it meant that either the United States must give up protection, an impossible supposition, or there must be only one tariff for both countries, tight as marriage, and made at Washington. Intellectuals like Mr. Blake and Mr. Edgar might juggle with schemes for entry of British imports without exit. It was too complicated for plain people to whom “unrestricted” meant all or nothing. Then came Sir Joseph Pope “The Day of Sir John Macdonald,” 1915 the disclosure that a section, only a section, of the advocates of Reciprocity meant it just that way, full tariff union and annexation. The cause was lost. Macdonald knew then that he had only to wave the flag at it — at “the veiled treason” that opposed him. Here belong the words of his last election address, already Feb. 7, 1891 quoted, “A British subject I was born, a British subject I will die.” He spoke only too truly. The election was carried (March 5) and Macdonald died June 6, 1891.
