Читать книгу End of the Line - Don McIver - Страница 9

The Day Dawned Clear

Mercifully, overnight the temperature crept up toward the freezing mark for the first time that entire month. By 9:00 a.m. the thermometer had nudged just past 0° Celsius (33° Fahrenheit) and as on the previous day the sky was clear — the sun having eroded most of the remaining snow on surrounding hillsides.

In the morning, school children played hooky to visit the grim site. Many years later, Thomas Kilvington remembered being strictly forbidden from visiting the gruesome wreck. Along with other curious classmates, he disobeyed the admonition and hiked the long trip from his home only to immediately encounter his father among the assembled throng!

The view that greeted them was quite different from what it had been the previous night. The near-vertical second car had been dragged down, broken up, and moved aside. Although many “photographic” records of the site taken in daylight show that car still in place, closer examination reveals that the artists had taken licence in trying to illustrate the scene by adding back in the missing detail. Winches had been set up on the two abutments, but attempts to raise the first, practically submerged car were stymied by a section of the bridge that had collapsed on top of it. At daybreak they were finally successful in budging the debris and gaining full access to the car. Some fifteen to twenty bodies were then recovered. Although, at that point, most of the victims had, in fact, been accounted for, it was believed at the time that perhaps another twenty had slipped beneath the ice. What remained of the first car was demolished and efforts to locate the casualties continued. Among the last to be brought to the surface was George Knight the eighteen-year-old fireman from Windsor, Ontario.

In 1857 photography was usually limited to controlled indoor lighting and lengthy exposures, but this salt-paper print by an unknown photographer was captured for perpetuity the morning after the disaster, looking towards Burlington Bay.

Library and Archives Canada, MIKAN 3203866.

After the last wave of victims from the leading car had been accommodated, the pressure on those engaged in the temporary mortuaries began to slacken. Toward the end of the day after the disaster, most of the bodies had been identified and some had been removed to local residences or dispatched to their hometowns. The firebrand rebel William Lyon Mackenzie claimed that even in this process, the Great Western had been so insensitive as to levy a charge of four dollars for the crude box provided to transport each victims’ remains. Mackenzie, no lover of either the political establishment or railways in general, may well have been guilty of broadcasting unfounded gossip — the more likely, since this accusation does not appear to have been levelled elsewhere. Still, it was this sort of writing that generated readership for Mackenzie’s Weekly Record, the radical press of its time.

This 1850s photograph of William Lyon Mackenzie oozes irascibility. The one-time rebel and lifelong reformer was also a dedicated adversary of Sir Alan MacNab, of the Great Western, and of just about anything to do with capitalism.

Niagara Falls Public Library, D422259.

With community hysteria starting to subside and the immediate strain on authorities beginning to slacken, the machine of law and process was put in motion. The coroners retired to the nearby boardroom of the Great Western and empanelled a jury to examine the circumstances surrounding the unnatural deaths of the victims. They then immediately adjourned the inquest to the following day, Saturday.

Even before the jury was struck, the morning after the accident Hamilton City Council was convened to express “heartfelt sympathy to the suffers and friends of the deceased.” They then went on to resolve:

That in humble submission to the Providence of Him, without whom not a sparrow falleth to the ground, but whose inscrutable wisdom permitted this City to be visited by a fearful calamity on the Great Western Railroad, by which some of our most respected friends and citizens have been hurried into eternity, be it therefore resolved that the inhabitants of this City be respectfully required to set apart Monday 16th March as a day of humiliation: they are requested to cease from the ordinary occupations of the week and meet in their respective congregations on that day, and that the proclamation of his Worship be issued to that effect.

While order was being slowly restored, the salvage effort continued. For the second night, workers carried on removing the debris and dragging the canal under the glow of the locomotive headlights and the flicker of myriad bonfires. That night one new resident of Dundas, Britton Osler, who lived three or more miles away at the head of the valley, breathlessly wrote to his brother Featherstone detailing the events and adding: “We can see out of the window now the lights of the bridge where they are yet fishing out the dead.” Perhaps a reflection of his upbringing (his father was the newly appointed Anglican rector to Dundas and Ancaster) he provided the rather unusual headcount of the dead: “4 clergymen, 1 Church of England.” Somewhat luridly, and inaccurately, he wrote: “Mr. Zimmerman of Niagara Falls was among the first to be taken out with his head completely off.” Young Osler, then only eighteen years old, may be forgiven his youthful insensitivity. The letter penned by his mother, Ellen, in Toronto, to his brother earlier in the day had a vastly different timbre. That letter practically screams of a mother’s anxiety and distress.

The family was in the midst of relocating from Bond Head, north of Toronto, to Dundas where the Reverend Featherstone Osler Senior was hoping to provide a better education for his family. The move involving a large family was complex. Two sons, including Britton, travelled ahead, as did their father. One son at least, the younger Featherstone, was to stay in Bond Head for the time being. Their mother, accompanied by younger members of the family, was making the journey that fateful week. That trip was interrupted when eight-year-old William came down with the croup. That necessitated a stay in a Toronto hotel. Two family members then proceeded alone, taking the train immediately preceding the wreck. Britton, undoubtedly on the way to meet that train, wrote to his brother of seeing it cross the Desjardins Canal Bridge from the carriage bridge, above.

Even a century and a half later, Ellen’s letter to Featherstone, hastily scrawled across three pages, still betrays a mother’s distress that her son would be worried about their welfare, as well as her own trepidation when it had seemed possible that the advance party might have been on board: “Martha and John went up yesterday and for some time I thought they must have been passengers on the cars that were lost but they fortunately left by the mid-day train.” She only received assurance of their safety when her husband telegraphed her the same day she wrote the letter, the day after the disaster. Having gasped-out the happy tidings of their safety she reverts with mild incongruity to her role as mother. The very next sentence reads: “Poor Martha had the fits again and what to do with her I know not.”

This 1867 image shows Britton Bath Osler as a dignified legal expert and future prosecutor of Louis Riel. A decade earlier, the scribbled letter to his father, written when the tragic details at Desjardins were beginning to circulate, reveals a more callow youth, preoccupied the grisly details and body counts.

McCord Museum, I-27210.1.

The story of the Osler’s brush with death illustrates the vagaries of fate. Although none were on board, the family’s itinerary seems to have been woven around the tragedy. As with any who just miss or just manage to board a ship, plane, or train destined for disaster, personal lives and history might have had to be rewritten had fate been different.

Young William might well have been aboard and killed. If so, one of the most celebrated Canadian doctors of the time might have never enjoyed his career. William Osler went on to become chief of medicine at Johns Hopkins and a professor of medicine at both Oxford and McGill universities. The youthfully insensitive Britton served as one of the crown prosecutors at the trial of Louis Reil and, curiously, became one of the most prominent railway lawyers of his time. His knowledge of engineering detail became so advanced that he was made an associate of the Canadian Society of Civil Engineers. The younger Featherstone later became a respected judge in the Ontario Court of Appeal. The family somehow skirted the disaster to contribute separate chapters to the country’s story.

In Hamilton that Saturday morning, a day and a half after the calamity, arrangements for funeral services and burials were being made. Although funeral homes were just starting to provide embalming and dressing services, the norm was still for the funeral procession to start from the residence of the deceased or from a relative or friend’s home. After the funeral service, held in a place of worship, the departed were taken to the cemetery.

The more severe winters experienced in the nineteenth century, combined with the rudimentary tools then available to gravediggers, constituted something of a problem. Given that the ice in the canal was reported to be two-feet thick, it is clear that the ground would have been hard frozen. Interment in family vaults was straightforward: the capstone had only to be lifted and the casket carried down to be sealed in its niche. Some gravesites were prepared ahead of time, in milder weather, doubtless discomforting should the intended occupant become aware of the preparations. For the most part, however, winter burials were simply accommodated in communal vaults until the ground was sufficiently thawed. In the Hamilton cemetery such a storage vault, now abandoned, is built deep into the side of the escarpment. The mind easily conjures macabre images of the frenetic haste that must have occurred each spring as cemetery workers wallowed in the wet, malodorous earth to dig graves of sufficient depth. Every increased degree of warmth that made their job easier only increased the urgency of completing their task before the warmth penetrated the stacked coffins deep in the hillside.

The weather register for Hamilton in March 1857 shows the conditions that prevailed around the date of the wreck. On the day of the disaster the thermometer hovered well below 0°Celsius. In contrast to conditions a day or two earlier, the notation on the day of the accident read “sleighing gone.”

Hamilton Spectator, April 7, 1857.

The prominence of many of the victims resulted in some truly impressive displays of sombre respect. Among the first funerals to be held was that of the Reverend Theodore Heise, whose disfigured remains were escorted by an ecumenical bevy of clergy and a procession of native Germans along with their wives and children, who formed his congregation. Another interment that Saturday was John Sharpe, the partially crippled, half-blind keeper of a bookstall at the Hamilton station.

Sunday morning the churches were packed to capacity. Congregations eschewed finery and the pulpits altars and galleries were draped in black. The music selected and the sermons reflected the despondence of the flock, and the services were interrupted by occasional stifled cries.

In the afternoon the funerals recommenced. Alexander Burnfield, the twenty-nine-year-old locomotive engineer, was carried into the Hamilton Cemetery (then frequently referred to as the Burlington Cemetery). At the head of the procession was the Great Western’s Locomotive superintendent, accompanied by the foremen from the Toronto and Hamilton shops and several hundred of Burnfield’s fellow employees. His grave, apparently, was ready to receive him. The reporter from the Hamilton Spectator described the gravediggers, begrimed with the evidence of their trade, as barely having completed their work before the funeral party arrived. An eloquent graveside service was reportedly listened to attentively before the Scottish-born Burnfield was committed to the ground to be grieved by his widow and young family.

The cortèges of John Henderson and Mrs. P.S. Stevenson (wife of the sherriff) were formed in a single procession for the journey to the cemetery. Following the single hearse were more than a hundred carriages and a great many mourners on foot. Henderson was the brother-in-law of C.J. Brydges, managing director of the Great Western, a respected astronomer, a telegraphic engineer, and a former employee of the railway. The Great Western was represented by a number of officials, several directors, and a great number of workers who had met the oncoming procession after departing from Burnfield’s interment. Also present were the mayor and a number of councilors.

The ceremonies for former-city counselor Donald Stuart were held at St. Mary’s Church. So packed was it that thousands were unable to gain access. Scarcely had Stuart’s coffin been dispatched to the Catholic cemetery than its place was taken by two: those of the sisters Ellen and Mary Devine. A short ceremony was conducted and they too were on the way to the cemetery.

After a funeral service in the Park Street Baptist Church the remains of the Reverend Alfred Booker were taken to the cemetery in a procession sixty carriages long followed by a crowd on foot. Heading the procession was his son Major Booker — the same who several years earlier marched at the head of the triumphal parade inaugurating Great Western service to Hamilton and had also marshalled his force at the disaster scene to impose order. Now leading a double column of his Artillery Company, dressed in plainclothes with crepe armbands, he paid his last tributes to his stern father. The militia formed-up at the entrance, providing a lane down which passed the hearse and nearly every clergyman in the city.

All that Sunday the city was preoccupied with grieving. The church bells rang first for the Sabbath services then with the mournful tolling for the succession of funerals.

If it were possible, Monday was an even more sombre day. That was the day the council had declared as a “day of public humiliation.” Normal business activities were suspended, flags flew at half-mast, and divine services were held in all the churches both morning and afternoon. Two funeral cortèges met at the corner of York and MacNab streets — a short distance from the cemetery gates. They were those of popular marine captain James Sutherland, and the young barrister and son of Hamilton’s first mayor, Adam Ferrie Junior. Combined, the two funerals exceeded the seemingly endless length of the previous day’s processions. No less than 140 carriages joined in the journey to the cemetery. Leading the procession were the mayor and the Corporation of Hamilton along with the police force. Sutherland’s casket was draped in the Union Jack and carried on an open cart. Immense numbers attended the ceremonies at the burial ground. Among the monuments marking the graves of other members of his prominent family a broken stone column surmounted by a carved wreath still stands over Adam Ferrie’s resting place. The break in the column is deliberate — intended to recognize a life cut short. Adam Ferrie was just twenty-four years old.

While Hamilton was going about the ceremonial business of burying its dead, Clifton (now part of Niagara Falls, Ontario) was organizing a funeral extravaganza for its most flamboyant citizen, Samuel Zimmerman. If the newspaper reports are even half correct the Zimmerman funeral was the most spectacular witnessed in this country and may not have been eclipsed yet. As well as being an exceptionally prominent and well-connected financier and a generous philanthropist, Zimmerman was an active Freemason and his funeral was to be conducted with the full rites of that organization.

The following report in the Spectator was widely reprinted throughout southern Ontario:

On Monday morning, March 16th a numerous band proceeded to the cars on their way to Niagara Falls, his late residence. A crowd of brethren swelled the throng at every station along the road. At the bridge, those from the United States joined the sad array. Their cars were festooned with curtains of lustrous white and sombre black sustained and fixed by large rosettes between the alternate windows. Their locomotive was also similarly covered, and black crepe muffled its sounding bell. The Erie and Ontario road was opened especially for the occasion, and a long train of cars passed more than once between the stations, at the bridge and at the Falls, freighted with a host of masons.

At the Clifton House, the large assembly met, and filled the great hall close by. There were the powerful contractor and the poor day labourer, the merchant prince and the humble clerk, the man of boundless acres and the backwoodsman, eminent members of the legislature, the press, the bar, and all other professions. There was the centarian, gray with years, the youth just budding into manhood, and the “Lewis” the scion of a Masonic race. There was the venerable High Priest in his long white robe, with the golden mitre upon his head and the golden breast plate upon his bosom.

The assembly climbed the hill to the Zimmerman residence on the escarpment, where the body lay, and there formed a funeral procession of extraordinary dimensions. Every rank of the Masonic Order was represented. The cortège contained two bands, one from Rochester, New York, and the other from Buffalo. Among the mourners were two of Zimmerman’s brothers, his children, his first father-in-law, and the receiver general of the country, J. Morrison. Among the friends were several members of the legislature and the mayors of St. Catharines, Niagara, and Buffalo. Among the Masonic lodges represented were those from New York City, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Syracuse, and Rochester, and from the states of Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. Canadian representatives came from Montreal, London, Toronto, Hamilton, and other cities.

In all, some ten thousand persons marched in the procession or witnessed the ceremonies from nearby hillsides and buildings. After the reading of the Church of England burial service the Masonic rituals were observed. Finally, the body was laid to rest in a temporary vault set in the hillside surrounded by the ornamental gardens and commanding a panoramic and uninterrupted view of the American and Horseshoe Falls.