Читать книгу The John A. Macdonald Retrospective 2-Book Bundle - Ged Martin - Страница 11

1878–1886

The Realization of All My Dreams

When Canada’s first prime minister died in 1891, a sorrowing colleague claimed that the history of Canada for the previous fifty years was “the life of Sir John Macdonald.” That was an exaggeration, but during his final term as prime minister, Macdonald’s life and Canada’s history were closely entwined — perhaps too closely. The completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885 should have crowned his career, but the triumph was marred by Louis Riel’s Western uprising that same year. Far from departing the scene in triumph, he would spend the last five years of his life fire-fighting a series of threats, most of them knock-on problems from the crisis of 1885.

Macdonald’s National Policy introduced a firm political dividing line, making it harder for “loose fish” to switch parties — although one Quebec senator jumped to the Liberals, complaining at Macdonald’s inability to speak French. However, Western demands for inclusion in the system, coupled with the overwhelming financial needs of the railway, forced representatives of the older provinces into defensive blocks: at crucial moments, Macdonald was held to ransom by his own supporters. In many respects, he remained the Ontario leader, dealing with other provinces through allies rather than subordinates. As late as 1878, Macdonald had never visited New Brunswick, and he did not travel west of Lake Huron until 1886. Negotiations to recruit the Halifax lawyer John Thompson to Cabinet in 1885 were conducted through his Nova Scotian colleagues. The prime minister’s first direct approach began: “I am of course aware that you have been asked to join our ministry.” Careful negotiations were required to secure the “cordial assent” of existing ministers to the appointment of Thomas White in 1885 — necessary, Macdonald assured him, because the fifty-four-year-old White would “be a Minister long after I am off the stage.” Sadly, White died of overwork three years later. Above all, Macdonald had no control over Quebec, where his lieutenant, Hector Langevin, was constantly undermined by party rivals.

The “Old Man” preferred to work with associates he had known for years: it took seven years for any MP from the 1878 intake to make it into Cabinet. Initially, he based his team on two stalwarts, Tilley as finance minister to launch the National Policy, Tupper to drive the Pacific Railway project. But Tilley was exhausted by 1885, while from 1883 Tupper preferred the post of High Commissioner in London, although he remained semi-involved in domestic politics. David Macpherson had helped rear Macdonald’s son during Isabella’s illness in 1856: Macdonald put him in charge of the West in 1883. The prime minister was deeply attached to John Henry Pope, the loyal, gruff Anglo-Quebecker who once dismissed three Cabinet colleagues as “smaller than the little end of nothing.” Macdonald first met him in 1849; they had been parliamentary colleagues since 1857. When “John Henry” (who was not related to the prime minister’s secretary, “Joe” Pope) worked himself to death in 1889, Macdonald broke down making the announcement to the Commons.

Macdonald liked to disguise his age by wearing light-coloured suits.

Ministerial talent was thin among MPs. Thompson was imported because there was an “equality of unfitness” among Nova Scotian Conservative backbenchers. In 1880, Macdonald decided to placate New Brunswick politician John Costigan, by promoting his son, a post office clerk in Winnipeg. “We can’t make him a Cabinet minister (which he wants) & must help the son.” In fact, Costigan gained his objective in 1882, although an alcohol problem limited his usefulness. Both Costigan and another Irish Catholic, Frank Smith, threatened resignation over patronage issues, and Macdonald dared not call their bluff. He had blocked one of Tupper’s appointments in 1879, and for two years his Nova Scotian colleague refused to speak to him. Appointed a minister in 1882, Joseph-Adolphe Chapleau proved greedy for patronage. Macdonald felt that he was “comparatively harmless” inside Cabinet, a theory shattered during the 1887 election when Chapleau threatened to bolt the campaign unless given exclusive control over government appointments in the Montreal area. The prime minister surrendered. When Pope’s death vacated the Railways portfolio, with its massive patronage, Chapleau was “crazy to get it.” Macdonald dared not offend the Quebecker by appointing a rival, so he took the job himself — an absurd addition to the workload of a seventy-four-year-old prime minister. Macdonald tried to persuade one of his ablest Ontario supporters to join the Cabinet: D’Alton McCarthy was a fine debater and effective campaigner. But McCarthy refused to leave his lucrative law practice for what Macdonald admitted was “the thankless & inglorious position of a Canadian Minister.” The appointment, in 1888, of the thirty-two-year-old Charles Hibbert Tupper was a gesture to his father, whose faults he energetically magnified. The prime minister returned one of his importunate letters with the scribbled advice: “skin your own skunks.” Even Sir John A. Macdonald had difficulty managing this disparate team. As the years passed, it became steadily harder to imagine anybody replacing him.

Macdonald offered simple advice to these who feared that the 1879 tariff would make imported foodstuffs more expensive: “use no American flour … but eat Canadian flour, on which there was no tax.” He invariably linked the tariff to the construction of the transcontinental railway: when Western settlers complained that Canadian goods were more expensive, he sarcastically offered them “the glorious privilege” of importing American manufactures duty-free — so long as they could be transported by toboggan. Linking tariff and railway made political sense in Canada, but it caused problems in Britain. The Pacific Railway needed British investment capital, but British manufacturers objected to Canadian import duties — after all, their taxes paid for the navy that defended Canada. Hence Macdonald visited Britain in 1879 and 1880, defending the National Policy to politicians and angry businessmen.

Crossing the Atlantic in 1879 enabled Macdonald to accept membership of Britain’s Privy Council, a political Hall of Fame dating from the sixteenth century. The distinction had been offered after the Treaty of Washington, but with a hint not to collect it until the Pacific Scandal died down. Sworn in by Queen Victoria, Macdonald became the first “Right Honourable” colonist in the overseas Empire. Britain’s veteran prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, invited “the Canadian chief” to an overnight stopover at his country house. Disraeli found his visitor “gentlemanlike, agreeable, and very intelligent, a considerable man,” noting with approval “no Yankeeisms” in his speech, “except a little sing-song occasionally at the end of a sentence.” Soon after, Macdonald assured Disraeli of Canada’s “pleasurable excitement” at actually being mentioned in one of his speeches.

This cloying sentiment disguised a nationalist agenda. Macdonald dismissed people who argued for Canadian independence as “fools”: standing alone, the Dominion would be overwhelmed by the Americans. But he wanted to move towards partnership with Britain. He talked freely with a British royal commission on defence issues in 1880, predicting that Canada would raise its own small army to share imperial responsibilities, although his insistence upon strict confidentiality kept his evidence secret for seventy years. Macdonald also persuaded the reluctant British government to accept an official Canadian representative in London: he urged the title “Resident Minister” but the imperial authorities preferred the vaguer term “High Commissioner” — an office held first by Galt and then by Tupper. But Macdonald made no commitment to shed Canadian blood in imperial wars: when Britain entangled itself in Sudan in 1885, he flatly refused to help.

As in 1872, the government wished the Pacific Railway to be built by a heavily-subsidized private company. In 1880, Macdonald chose a syndicate headed by Montreal banker George Stephen. At first, this seemed an odd choice, for Stephen was running a north-south railway linking Winnipeg to the United States — while Macdonald’s aim was an all-Canadian, east-west route. However, Stephen had profited from his Minnesota project through selling railroad land grants to settlers, and he saw the potential of similarly developing the Canadian West. Stephen came to depend upon Macdonald’s personal support, further obligating the prime minister to stay in office. Relations with Stephen’s business partner, Donald Smith, were less easy: Smith had deserted the government in 1873 and, five years later, Macdonald had denounced him as “the biggest liar I ever met!” But Macdonald believed that politicians “cannot afford to be governed by any feeling of irritation and annoyance,” and eventually the two men buried their hatchet. The Canadian Pacific Railway company (CPR) was launched in 1880, with a promised subsidy of $25 million and twenty-five million acres (10.11 million hectares) of land.

By 1880, Canada was likely to build some form of railway to the Pacific. Even the unenthusiastic Liberal government, with its pessimistic, piecemeal policy, had constructed one section from Lake Superior towards Manitoba, and another in mainland British Columbia. As Macdonald commented, since Mackenzie had built “two ends of a railway, we must finish the middle.” But he was determined that the line must also run north of Lake Superior, giving central Canada a direct link to the prairies. If the transcontinental railway began at Thunder Bay, it would be accessible by Great Lakes shipping only in summer. “But for you,” Stephen wrote Macdonald in 1884, the railway would have been “simply an extension” of the American railroads in winter, “in short, not a Canadian Pacific Railway at all.” But Stephen’s price for tackling the unpromising Canadian Shield was CPR control over all prairie branch lines southward from the main line. Unless the Americans could be prevented from siphoning off its traffic, nobody “would give one dollar for the whole line east of Winnipeg.” This CPR monopoly was unpopular in Manitoba.

Macdonald was sixty-five in 1880, and running the government was a tough job. His overseas trip the previous summer had been delayed by severe sickness, with “cramps and spasms” that reminded him of the 1870 gallstones crisis. Macdonald was ill again in March 1880, and horrified his colleagues by talking about retirement. In April 1881, he asked Campbell to prepare documentation about British Columbia: “I intended to have done it myself but I am not up to the work.” Soon after, he collapsed: “strength gone and troubled with continued pain in the stomach and bowels,” he reported to Tupper. His Ottawa doctor suspected cancer and advised “that I had better put my affairs in order.” His sister Louisa was shocked by her brother’s appearance. “I never saw John looking what I would call old until this time.” For the third time in two years, he crossed the Atlantic, this time to seek medical advice. A London specialist pronounced him “free from organic disease” but insisted upon “a very rigid diet & complete rest.” (Macdonald was now seen as such an asset to the Empire that the doctor refused to charge a fee.) “I am slowly getting better but my strength does not return as I could wish,” he told Campbell in June 1881.

Nonetheless, he yearned to be back at his desk: “I have no pleasure nowadays but in work, & so it will be to the end of the chapter.” The chapter was never-ending, especially because the Pacific Railway and the development of Canadian industries were both long-term projects. It was vital to win another term in government and Macdonald’s “remaining ambition is to see that our policy is not reversed.” But to ensure that that the National Policy would be “safe from 1883 to 1888,” voters had to be persuaded that it was working. “You cannot plant the seed to-day and get the crop to-morrow,” he warned. Fortunately, times were good and, in 1882, he called an early election.

Although the Mowat Liberal government remained firmly entrenched in Ontario, Macdonald had a temporary advantage on his chief battleground by the early 1880s. After a quarter century of arrogant dominance, the Globe was under pressure. Although the Toronto Mail had struggled, Macdonald “actually wept” when he lost control over it to its creditors in 1877. However, his luck rebounded: run on business lines, the Mail soon rivalled the Globe in circulation and, until 1885, preached Conservative policies. Financially, too, the Globe was under challenge from an evening paper founded in 1876, the Toronto Telegram, which aggressively marketed want-ads and cut into the Globe’s advertising revenue. George Brown responded in 1880 with an expensive re-launch — at just the moment when a disgruntled ex-employee shot him. Brown died six weeks later. “I do not often read the Globe,” Macdonald remarked in 1882. It remained as hostile to him as ever, but it was a greatly reduced threat.

The 1881 census showed that Ontario was entitled to four additional parliamentary seats. Next year, in an episode nicknamed “Hiving the Grits,” Macdonald proposed extensive boundary changes right across the province. The original plan was to confine a small number of opposition MPs within overwhelmingly Liberal ridings, while a larger number of Conservatives would be elected by smaller majorities. However, the redistribution was modified when Macdonald’s backbenchers panicked at this high-risk strategy, and its overall effect is hard to assess. Essentially, the Liberals lost in Ontario in 1882 for the classic reason that they failed to win enough votes. The Conservatives outpolled them by 3,700 votes, just 1.4 percent, enough to net them a fifty-five to thirty-seven seat plurality. As Macdonald later joked, his boundary changes were a “gerrymander,” but Mowat’s redrawing of the provincial electoral map was a “readjustment”: in 1879, the provincial Liberals had won the Ontario election by less than 2,000 votes — 0.8 percent — which translated into a fifty-seven to thirty-one seat victory. “We meant to make you howl,” Macdonald allegedly told one of the Liberals who lost his seat, but his motive was strategic not sadistic: by protesting, his opponents likely talked themselves into losing. As usual, the Ontario Liberals forgot the rest of Canada, which cumulatively re-elected the Conservatives by 139 seats to seventy-one. Macdonald’s election for Lennox, his childhood home, was overturned for irregularities, and he represented Carleton, in the Ottawa hinterland. He felt “used up” by the “hard fight” across the province. But in Berlin (later Kitchener), seven-year-old Willy King watched the prime minister receiving a bouquet from a pretty girl and concluded that “politics had its rewards.” As William Lyon Mackenzie King, he would become the only Canadian leader to serve for longer than Macdonald himself.

Unwisely, Sir John A. Macdonald assured Parliament in 1883 that “not one single farthing of the cost of building the railway should fall on the older Provinces.” This was a reckless boast, since Stephen had already warned him that the railway was “going to cost a great deal more money than we calculated on.” Raising cash proved increasingly difficult. Far from reassuring investors, the government’s decision, in October 1883, to guarantee the CPR’s annual dividend only highlighted the project’s financial problems. On December 15, a desperate Stephen told Macdonald that there was “no way on God’s earth” that the Canadian Pacific could escape bankruptcy without a massive loan from the government. Legend claims that Macdonald told a late-night CPR delegation that they might as well ask him for the planet Jupiter: Cabinet and Parliament would never agree. He was roused at 2:00 a.m. by John Henry Pope with a blunt warning: if the Canadian Pacific collapsed, the Conservative party would follow within twenty-four hours. The story, told years later, is probably a conflation of different episodes, since Stephen thanked Macdonald “for the readiness which you have shown throughout to help us in every possible way.” The prime minister now had to persuade his own followers that the Canadian Pacific was going to cost another $22.5 million — roughly Ottawa’s annual revenue. Officially, it was a loan, but the security was the Railway itself. Parliament approved in March 1884, but Quebec Conservatives ostentatiously absented themselves during the debates. The price of their support was funding for the North Shore Railway, connecting Montreal and Quebec City but through thinly populated country north of the St. Lawrence. Maritimers demanded construction of the Short Line, a direct link to Montreal through northern Maine. The Canadian Pacific had run out of cash and Sir John A. Macdonald was exhausting his political capital.

“I bore the strain wonderfully well,” Macdonald told Gowan at the close of the “tedious & disagreeable session,” but he conceded that “it was a strain greater than I should like to encounter again.” To Campbell, he was more open. “My daily exhaustion is very great, although not so perceptible to others as to myself.” “I would leave the Government tomorrow,” he told Tupper, but for the fear that “Stephen would throw up the sponge if I did.” A summer break down the St. Lawrence was followed by a voyage to England, where his London specialist found “no flaw” in his basic health, attributing his indigestion to “work & worry.” The British elite welcomed Macdonald like a friendly potentate. He spoke for an hour at a banquet in his honour, a speech that one diner thought “would have been a very good one if it had been a little more condensed.” Queen Victoria invited him to stay overnight at Windsor Castle, and thought him “an interesting, agreeable old man.” He returned home to a massive demonstration in Toronto to mark his forty years in politics, followed — in January 1885 — by a celebration of his seventieth birthday in Montreal. Of course, the adulation could not continue.

It was not that the government had no warning of trouble in the West, but rather that too much alarming noise came from that troubled region. Although treaties had been signed with native people to extinguish Aboriginal title across the prairies by 1877, the “Indians” (as Native people were generally called) remained a source of concern. Macdonald uttered worthy sentiments. “The Indians are the aborigines — the original occupants of the country, and their rights must be respected.” But he distrusted “any philanthropic idea of protecting the Indian” especially by preserving “semi-savage customs.” “The whole thing is a question of management,” he pronounced, and “management” meant keeping Aboriginal communities quiet while settlers took over the West.

“Seedy looking old beggar, isn’t he?” commented a supporter in 1886.

The influx of settlers into Manitoba had pushed many Métis to follow the dwindling buffalo herds to the North Saskatchewan valley. Under the 1870 deal, male heads of Métis families had been granted “scrip,” vouchers for free land grants. Some claimed they had never received their entitlement, others demanded a fresh handout. Unsympathetic, Macdonald claimed many Métis had sold out to speculators. In any case, they could obtain free land grants of 160 acres (about sixty-five hectares) under Canada’s homestead policy to encourage settlers. Throughout 1884, Ottawa was more concerned with hotheads in the Manitoba Farmers’ Protective Union: Macdonald’s son Hugh, now a lawyer in Winnipeg, warned they might seize unguarded militia stores if an insurrection broke out. It seemed implausible that the Métis would take action on their own, but they might get caught up in some wider movement. In September 1884, there were reports of possible trouble around Battleford. “I don’t attach much importance to these rumours,” Macdonald wrote, “but there is no harm in taking precautions.”

Louis Riel had returned from the United States in July 1884. Macdonald intended “to deal liberally” with Riel and use him to “keep the Métis in order.” The governor general, Lord Lansdowne, agreed that Riel’s reappearance was “anything but a misfortune.” Unfortunately, continuing anger in Ontario at the killing of Thomas Scott made direct negotiations with Riel politically impossible and, as in 1869–70, he proved difficult to pin down through intermediaries: terms submitted in September were described as “what we request for the present.” Riel also conflated Métis grievances with personal compensation claims, imaginatively estimated at $100,000, making the mistake of seemingly presenting them as a blackmailer’s price to quit Canada. Paying Riel to disappear, Macdonald insisted, would be an admission of government weakness. Riel’s mental state was a further complication. During 1884–85, he renamed the days of the week and the stars in the sky, declared himself to be a prophet as well as a member of the French royal family, and appointed the archbishop of Montreal as pope of the New World. The government’s subsequent claim that Riel’s delusions were compatible with rational political action was controversial at the time and unconvincing now.

In December 1884, the Métis dispatched a petition of grievances to Ottawa and, on January 28, 1885, Cabinet authorized an investigation. Macdonald’s defenders argue that this rapid response removed any pretext for rebellion: he had acted, he later admitted, “with the greatest reluctance” but on the principle, “let us have peace” — the voice of the traumatized veteran of 1837. But critics claim that the angry Métis interpreted the move as a delaying tactic. Government public relations proved poor: Riel was offended to hear the news casually some days later, a discourtesy that probably pushed him towards rebellion. However, Riel’s mystical belief in his own destiny fatally handicapped the uprising. In 1869, trouble had begun in November, while the Red River was inaccessibly wrapped in winter; in 1885, Riel defied the government in March, when spring was in sight and militia forces could be deployed against him. Believing his Métis to be divinely chosen, he made little attempt to build alliances with Native people or discontented settlers. He refused to allow his supporters to exploit their knowledge of the terrain and fight a prolonged guerrilla campaign. He did not even sabotage the Canadian Pacific Railway, which quickly brought government forces from eastern Canada.

Maybe Ottawa could have moved faster in response to Métis grievances, but in the early months of 1885, the government faced what seemed a far greater crisis over the transcontinental railway. Although nearing completion, the CPR had yet again run out of cash. With its assets mortgaged to the government, no private investment was likely but, as Macdonald wrote on January 24, “however docile our majority, we dare not ask for another loan.” In fact, his backbenchers were far from docile. On March 17, as the company faced catastrophic financial crisis, Macdonald reported “blackmailing all round,” with Quebec and Maritime MPs raising their demands. “I wish I were well out of it.” After fruitless talks in Ottawa on March 26, George Stephen regretfully accepted that he must declare bankruptcy. But earlier that day, at Duck Lake in the far-off Saskatchewan country, Louis Riel had led his Métis into a clash with the Northwest Mounted Police, killing twelve of them. On March 27, the news reached Ottawa. It looks like the greatest coincidence in Canadian history, making possible the trade-off that confirmed Macdonald’s political genius. He would use the CPR to save the West, and the uprising as the opportunity to rescue the company.

Canada’s destiny had a close shave during those two crucial days, but the connection between Riel and the railway is less dramatic than it seems. Central Canada was already aware of trouble in the West; the Montreal Gazette headlined “The Riel Rebellion” on March 25. The shootout at Duck Lake was not immediately linked to the CPR, for it was assumed that the Mounted Police and the Winnipeg militia could contain the outbreak. In any case, had the company crashed, the transcontinental railway itself would have become the property of the government, as the CPR’s chief creditor. Campbell urged that Cabinet should “face the evils which the fall of the company (if it must fall) would undoubtedly entail” rather than lend any more money. If Macdonald performed a political about-face, posing as “guardian of the country rather than the company,” Parliament would surely vote the necessary money to finish the project and the Conservative party would sidestep political disaster. Although this seemed unduly optimistic, once MPs grasped that they would have to pay for its construction anyway, they might accept another CPR bailout. Far from the bad news of March 27 producing a miraculous turnaround in attitudes to the CPR, the company was kept on life support through short-term bank loans for several months. Parliament was debating Macdonald’s Franchise Bill — denounced by the Liberals as a device to ensure that only Conservatives were added to the voters’ lists — and not until mid-June were proposals for financial aid introduced. In vain, Stephen urged “extreme urgency.” Macdonald, he concluded had “the best possible intentions” but it seemed “impossible for him to act until the last moment arrives.” “Putting off, his old sin,” Campbell called it, adding “Macdonald has lost his grasp.” But “Old Tomorrow” judged the timing right, and the necessary funding was secured in July 1885. On November 7, the two ends of the transcontinental railway were joined in the mountains of British Columbia.

Nine days after the famous “Last Spike” completed the CPR, a metal bolt was shot back to open the trapdoor under the Regina gallows, and convicted traitor Louis Riel fell to his death. Riel’s execution still divides Canadians, and the prime minister bears chief responsibility for the political decision to confirm the death sentence passed upon the rebel leader. “If Riel is convicted he will certainly be executed,” Macdonald wrote in June. From a modern perspective, that sounds like the judicial murder of a political opponent. In the contemporary context, we should emphasize that Riel was the only person to die for his role in the uprising — although eight Aboriginal men were also hanged for a specific crime, the killing of settlers at Frog Lake, with dozens of Native people rounded up to witness the grisly mass execution. Memories of the “martyrs” of 1837 lingered in Quebec, and Macdonald knew that widespread repression would create victims and long-term wounds. He even tried to dismiss the uprising as a “mere domestic trouble” which should not “be elevated to the rank of a rebellion,” but he ruefully agreed when Lord Lansdowne objected that the episode was more than “a common riot.” “We certainly made it assume large proportions in the public eye … for our own purposes,” Macdonald admitted. Punishing Riel made it possible to exercise clemency to his followers without making the government look weak. Most rebels served only short prison sentences.

The jury that convicted Riel also recommended mercy, an implied criticism of the government’s failure to tackle Métis grievances. Therefore, in confirming Riel’s death sentence, Macdonald was sitting in judgment on himself. There was the further complication of Riel’s mental state: if he was mad, could he be held responsible for his actions? At the last minute, the government commissioned three medical reports on Riel’s sanity — although Campbell asked how anybody could determine in November whether he had been sane the previous March. Chosen as lead investigator was Michael Lavell, warden of Kingston’s penitentiary — an appointment he owed to Macdonald. Lavell was experienced in dealing with mentally disturbed prisoners, but his medical qualifications were in obstetrics. Macdonald gave him precise but narrow instructions, and Lavell duly reported although Riel was an oddball, he had known right from wrong. Yet Riel’s continued insistence on accepting responsibility for his actions as he faced the noose surely cast doubt on his sanity. However, only one of the three doctors, the francophone F.-X. Valade, expressed doubts. Valade’s report was not only ignored but misleadingly rewritten for subsequent publication.

Macdonald was bombarded with advice. Send Riel to an asylum and Quebec would demand his release. Fail to hang him, and Ontario would punish the Conservatives at the polls. Basically, Ontario demanded Riel’s neck for a crime for which he was never tried, the shooting of Thomas Scott. Macdonald assumed that Riel’s religious delusions would neutralize sympathy in Catholic Quebec — but any government campaign to publicize them would have strengthened the case for reprieving him as a madman. Quebec ministers believed Riel’s execution would soon be forgotten in their province. “The Riel fever will I think die out,” Macdonald wrote a month after the hanging. In fact, the “Riel fever” divided Canadians deeply and enduringly.

It was presumably the triumph of the transcontinental railway and not the tragedy of Riel that motivated a Guelph teenager to write to Macdonald on November 18, 1885: “Take the advice of a thirteen year old Tory & resign.” Aged seventy and with his greatest work completed, surely he should have heeded Robina Stewart’s counsel? “I have done my work and can now sing my Nunc Dimittis,” he wrote, alluding to the Anglican prayer: “Lord, now lettest thy servant depart in peace.” But Macdonald had earned a lap of honour, his first and only journey through western Canada. On July 10, 1886, he quietly left Ottawa by special train for a seven-week tour, accompanied by Agnes, his secretary Joseph Pope, a tame journalist, two servants, and a police bodyguard. His wheelchair-bound daughter, Mary, came too: she was left for treatment at Banff’s hot springs while her parents travelled on to the Pacific.

At short notice, Conservative activists gathered to hail their chief, and trackside communities organized civic welcomes. A young Tory at Winnipeg’s train station broke off cheering to comment to a friend, “Seedy-looking old beggar, isn’t he?” After a side trip through the wheatlands of southern Manitoba, “Canada’s grand old man” was greeted with “deafening cheers” at Brandon. Looking “fresh and vigorous,” Macdonald delivered “a short impromptu speech well seasoned with his native wit.” Carberry presented him with a huge sheaf of wheat. Gleichen hosted a meeting with the Blackfoot nation, in recognition of the loyalty shown by Isapo-Muxica (Crowfoot) during the rebellion: the event was staged more to showcase Macdonald as a benign ruler than to engage with Native grievances. At brief stopovers, Agnes enthusiastically worked the crowds, chatting to women and children. At Calgary, which Macdonald predicted would become “a large metropolitan city,” she spent several hours at a social event, meeting “all the ladies who desired to have a chat with the cleverest and most popular lady in Canada today.” As their train headed through the mountains, Agnes insisted on riding on the cowcatcher. To the alarm of officials and the terror of Joe Pope, Canada’s prime minister joined her for a 200-kilometre stretch. Macdonald “said but little at the time,” but in 1891 he wrote of his pride at “looking back from the steps of my car upon the Rocky Mountains fringing the eastern sky.”

On July 24, the waters of the Pacific Ocean lapped at his feet as he left the train at Port Moody. Then it was on by steamboat to Victoria, where Macdonald was greeted by a band playing “See the Conquering Hero Comes.” A torchlight procession escorted him to a long-vanished hotel, which ruthlessly overcharged for his three-week visit. Tired from travelling, he initially discouraged formal events but quickly became a familiar figure sauntering the downtown streets. But Victoria had elected him to Parliament in 1878, and a delayed welcome ceremony in a packed theatre enabled him to express his thanks. He called his journey “the realization of all my dreams.” On August 13, Macdonald formally inaugurated Island’s railway to Nanaimo, which he also predicted would become a “great city.” That evening, they sailed for the mainland, mesmerized by Mount Baker, “radiant in the southern sky, catching and reflecting the light … after the sun had disappeared below the horizon.” New Westminster was disappointed at receiving only an overnight visit, while the mayor of the recently founded city of Vancouver arrived to express his regret that it had burned down six weeks earlier.

Then followed the long journey home, more speeches, even an appearance at a Conservative convention in Winnipeg. As his train headed across northern Ontario on August 31, 1886, somebody realized that his return to Ottawa would coincide with a massive Liberal rally in the capital addressed by provincial premier Oliver Mowat and federal opposition leader Edward Blake. Local Tories were hastily summoned to a welcoming reception, but the Globe crowed that it was a poorly attended “side show.” Sir John A. Macdonald had returned to the trench warfare of Canadian politics.