Читать книгу The Romance of the Canadian Pacific Railway - R. G. MacBeth - Страница 3

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The fascination for studying the genesis of things that exist seems to be universal. Men have an instinctive and urgent desire to find out how objects that are seen actually originated. Scientists and savages alike, for instance, are still hammering out theories as to the process by which the world was made, though to most of us the most ancient account is adequate. Once I knew an Indian boy on the prairie who was so curious to discover how the figure of a dog appeared at the centre of a large glass “marble” we were playing with, that when I had turned away for a moment, he broke it open with the back of a tomahawk. Similarly, we have known exploring scientists who spent laborious lives in the endeavour to find the sources of a great river.

To be indifferent to the beginnings of things which have become part of our lives, betokens either the calamitous absence of a thinking mind or that horrible satisfaction with present possession which ignores the toil and the tears and the sacrifices of past generations. To persons of such vacant or selfish natures all the explorers and the pioneers—the men whose souls yearned beyond the sky-line of their immediate surroundings—are of no particular account. The untrodden ways which daring pathfinders opened up with adventurous feet are of no consequence to the unthinking who settle comfortably on lands pre-empted by the blood-marked footsteps of the trailmakers.

It is because we are not of the number who are sodden with crass materialism and seared by the branding iron of greed, that we desire to learn the history of the things which minister to our continued existence and comfort in this great new day, the far-off vision of which made glad the brave seers and workers of earlier times.

These thoughts come to me now just as I am riding westward on the public observation car of a Canadian Pacific Railway train, through the great mountains that are piled up on the sunset verge of the Dominion of Canada. The traditional weariness of travel is practically banished by these wheeled palaces, which that living, breathing, throbbing locomotive, under the skilful direction of her driver, draws through passes and tunnels and glorious river canyons down to the Western sea. And I thought of how, in times gone by, that Western Sea had been in the dreams of gallant men who hoped to reach its shores some day. I recalled how noble sea-rovers, like Henry Hudson and Sir John Franklin, had thrown away their lives in the attempt to find a North-west Passage by water across the North American continent, from the Atlantic. And I remembered, too, how Alexander MacKenzie, the fur-trader, starting by trail from near the old Peace River Crossing, had gone over the mountains on foot, and how he wrote on a rock by the Pacific the amazing inscription, “Alexander MacKenzie, from Canada, by land, July 22nd, 1793.” We call that inscription amazing because behind it and flashing through it is the story of an invincible will in heroic action and the record of physical daring unsurpassed in the palmiest days of the athletes and gladiators in Greece and Rome.

Thus did Alexander MacKenzie blaze the trail across the mountains. If the North-west Passage by water had proved a myth, MacKenzie demonstrated the reality of a passage by land which, in the years afterwards, others would follow. Strange, too, it was that in the same year, 1793, Captain George Vancouver, an English sea-rover, dropped the anchor of his wooden, white-winged vessel in the great harbour where there is now a queenly city bearing his name, on the West Coast of Canada.

Little did these adventurous pathfinders who discovered mountain passes and ocean lanes think that, before a century had passed, a group of men with vision and courage would follow the inspiring example of the explorers by land and sea, and achieve not only the crossing of a continent, but the girdling of the earth in a magnificent transportation system. Yet despite the gloomy prophecies of failure uttered by sceptics who declared that the thing could not be done, the Canadian Pacific Railway has driven its iron horses through the mountains to stand by the Western Sea. And from the land terminals, East and West, this unique organization has set its vessels on the tides of all the oceans of the world, as well as upon the gentler waters of our inland seas.

There were many weighty reasons for the building of this railway and the launching of its great ships, as well as highly important considerations which demand its continued efficiency in our times. Let us study them together in this book, which, as an eye witness of the genesis and development of the railway, though never at any time connected with it, I have written and published independently, as a humble contribution to our history as a British Dominion. Like my preceding books, it is sent out because generations arise which ought to know with what hazard and struggle on the part of the pioneers the foundations of Canada were laid.

The name of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company fixes in our minds the original objects of the road. The Railway was particularly the outcome of a new national consciousness in Canada, arising out of Confederation, and it was designed with the special idea of knitting the older parts of Canada in the East with the newer provinces and territories which were growing up in the wide West, and which would some day form an integral part of a Dominion whose Western border would rest on the Pacific tide. “Westward the star of empire takes its way” is a saying which has found historical support in the descent of the centuries from the immemorial East, which is now a graveyard of ancient kingdoms. And once the prows of exploring vessels struck the Eastern shores of this new continent of America, there were unresting souls that pressed onward throughout the years till they reached the pillars of the sunset beside the alluring Western sea.

In those earlier years Spain was a great sea-going nation and the West Coast map of the United States is dotted all over with Spanish nomenclature. This is found also to some degree on the long coastline of what is now British Columbia, though in this latter region the British element was always more pronounced owing to the British blood of the early explorers, both by sea and land, and to the passionate patriotism of British-born men who were in the employ of the great fur-trading organizations. In this connection it is interesting to recall the origin of the name British Columbia. The territory now covered by the province consisted originally of Vancouver Island and other islands and the mountain mainland, at one time known as New Caledonia. It was good Queen Victoria who gave the name of British Columbia to the great mainland area, and this name was later extended to include Vancouver Island when both were united in one colony in 1866. The Queen wrote in 1858 to Sir E. Bulwer Lytton, statesman and novelist too, that the only name she found on the map of the mainland common to the whole area was Columbia, but as there was a Columbia in South America and as the United States people called their country Columbia, at least in poetry, the Queen thought that British Columbia would be the most suitable name. And British Columbia it remains to this day, proud to have been named by our noble Queen and to have sprung from so illustrious an ancestry. Later on, British Columbia, as we shall see, proved magnetic enough to draw the steel of the great railway across the continent to the Western Ocean.

On the general subject, it may be well to remind our readers that a railway with its locomotive steam engine is a comparatively modern arrangement for travel, although trucks of various kinds were wheeled on tracks in the coal mining regions of England two centuries ago. But George Stephenson, rugged old Scot, with his primitive engine, the “Rocket,” began as late as 1829, a revolution in modes of travel. There lived in Manitoba, some years ago, an old railroader, Charles Whitehead, Senior, who was said to have taken a hand in making the “Rocket” go. Stephenson’s invention was not a flash in the pan, or, to change the figure, it did not “go up like a rocket and come down like a stick.” It stayed, and not only won the prize of £500 for a steam engine that would actually run and draw, but it became the fruitful progenitor of the moguls and other colossal “fire-wagons” which rush to and fro on a gridironed earth in our time. Of course, Stephenson, like all other originators of new means of transport since the days of Noah, had to bear the sneers and jocularities of the idle crowd. Some one asked him what would happen if a cow got on the track, just as Nehemiah’s enemies suggested disaster to his wall if a fox ran upon it. But the grim old Scot only replied that it “would be bad for the coo,” and went on to perfect his engine. Hence came the graceful iron horses which, with steaming breath, race along the steel trails in all countries in our time.

Canada had not begun as a Confederation when the first prophecy—an astonishing foretelling—of the Canadian Pacific Railway was made by Joseph Howe, in Halifax, in 1851. Canada was then simply the old Central Provinces of Ontario and Quebec. Down by the Atlantic, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were, in a sense, isolated British possessions, which in many ways were in closer touch with the United States on the Atlantic than with the Canada of that day. Joseph Howe had been to London and received assurances that the Intercolonial Railway would be built to link up the Atlantic Maritime areas with Quebec and Ontario. But Joseph Howe, orator, poet and statesman, saw beyond that limited plan, and in his address in Halifax in 1851 outlined in his own masterly way the future of British North America and its immensely important possibilities. We quote a passage of this remarkable address as follows:

“With such a territory as this to overrun, organize and improve, think you that we shall stop at the Western bounds of Canada? Or even at the shores of the Pacific? Vancouver Island, with its vast coal measures, lies beyond. The beautiful islands of the Pacific and the growing commerce of the ocean are beyond. Populous China and the rich East are beyond; and the sails of our children’s children will reflect as familiarly the sunbeams of the South as they now brave the angry tempests of the North. The Maritime Provinces which I now address are but the Atlantic frontage of this boundless and prolific region. God has planted Nova Scotia in the front of this boundless region—see that you discharge, with energy and elevation of soul, the duties which devolve upon you in virtue of your position. Hitherto, my countrymen, you have dealt with this subject in a becoming spirit, and, whatever others may think or apprehend, I know that you will persevere in that spirit until our objects are attained. I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I believe that many in this room will live to hear the whistle of the steam engine in the passes of the Rocky Mountains and to make the journey from Halifax to the Pacific in five or six days.”

To some who heard this remarkable appeal and forecast it may have sounded like the effort of a rhetorician. In reality it was the deliberate and well-grounded hope of a man who was a life-long student of public affairs, who had all the passion of a patriot and the fervor of a seer, and who desired to see a great British North America in unified devotion to the ideals of the British people. The fact that Joseph Howe, in later years, differed from others as to whether this Federation should be brought about without a plebiscite of the people of Nova Scotia, does not in any way detract from the extraordinary fact that in 1851 he prophesied a transcontinental railway, which even in 1871 some prominent public men denounced as a mad and impossible undertaking. One has to confess that, even twenty years after Howe’s prophecy, the thing did look impossible; but not only has the apparently impossible project of a railroad from ocean to ocean been accomplished, but that trans-continental has become part of a world-encircling transportation system which is a marvel of efficiency. The Canadian Pacific Railway not only welded together the scattered areas under the flag on the North American Continent, but it has taken its place as an organization of Imperial significance and value in peace and war, as many events have proven. How and by whom this modern wonder-work has been done it is our hope and purpose to make known in some imperfect, but earnest, way in the chapters that follow.

Though planned in the East, where statesmen and financiers were facing the problems of the New Dominion, it was in the wide West-land that the need of this transcontinental railway was most manifest, and it was in the West that the road first appeared. Hence we must study enough of the history of the West to see the stage set for the entry of the steel trail. Or, to put this in another way, we should find how the West had developed so as to successfully challenge the attention of Eastern statesmen and effectively call for a large Federal expenditure, in order that it might become linked up with the already developed East for the welfare of the whole Dominion. With this in view we shall, in the next chapter, meet those who, before the coming of the railway, began to make for the West a place on the map of history.