Читать книгу The Romance of the Canadian Pacific Railway - R. G. MacBeth - Страница 7

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Whether a protective tariff brings real or fictitious prosperity, and whether it enriches the few or the many, are questions which are fortunately outside the scope of this book. But, anyway, the fact, historically, is that with the advent of Sir John Macdonald and his National Policy of protection in 1878, there came quite a pronounced outburst of new faith in the future possibilities of Canada. There were, no doubt, other subsidiary causes, and some even hold that lean and fat years come in cycles. But, in any case, there was a decided restoration of public confidence in all legitimate business enterprises, and, what was still more important, there came a distinctive national sentiment and pride which made the vast project of the Canadian Pacific Railway from ocean to ocean a distinct possibility.

Portions of the railway had already been under construction by the Mackenzie Government, as we have seen. These portions were mainly east of the Red River, but surveys had been carried on with far-reaching results in the mountain region of British Columbia. These surveys were under the general direction of Mr. Marcus Smith, an engineer of remarkable experience and ability. He had done work in the British Isles and Spain before coming to this side of the ocean, where he was on service in South America, as well as on the Grand Trunk and the Intercolonial in the older parts of what is now Eastern Canada. The other day here, through the kindness of Mr. Newton Ker, now head of the Coast Department of Lands for the Canadian Pacific, I had the privilege of reading a scrap book kept by Mr. Marcus Smith over many years, and willed by him to Mr. Ker. This book indicates that Mr. Smith had a very wide interest in social, civil and political life, as well as in his own special vocation of engineering. The man who gathered that collection of articles together had a big outlook on things, and would regard his work in the mountains as of national significance.

The remarkable explorations of Mr. Walter Moberly, who later discovered the Eagle’s Pass by watching the flight of eagles evidently following a fish-stream, had produced good results and his experience in connection with the building of the famous Yale-Cariboo wagon road made his later services specially valuable. Mr. Henry J. Cambie, and Mr. Thomas H. White, his personal assistant and associate in solving the engineering problems through the Fraser River canyons, are still, happily, living in Vancouver, highly regarded as citizens who did their share of nation building. Other noted engineers of that period in British Columbia were H. T. Jennings, H. P. Bell, Henry MacLeod, C. E. Perry, G. A. Keefer, Joseph Hunter, L. B. Hamlin, W. F. Gouin, C. F. Harrington, E. W. Jarvis, John Trutch, C. Horetzky, C. H. Gamsby and, later on, Major Rogers, after whom Rogers’ Pass was named, although Moberly always contended that the pass had been discovered by Albert Perry, one of his assistants in a survey in 1866. Of course there were many others, but these are representative of the famous body of men who made their way along the dangerous rivers, through the tangled forests, by precipitous cliffs and across terrific canyons, until they finally found safe location for the steel trail through a region that many had pronounced to be impenetrable—a sort of supernatural barrier interposed between the prairies and the Western sea. Most of these men have, as already intimated, passed over the Great Divide into the Unseen; but, at great cost to themselves in hardship and suffering and privation, they made it possible for the people of to-day to travel in rolling palaces where once they themselves trod with aching and weary feet. Let us highly honour the memory of the engineers and surveyors and their men, who were the forerunners of the mighty engines which now thunder through the echoing mountain passes, along which these heroes of the transit and the chain, long years ago, pursued their painful and precarious way.

The Macdonald Government came back into power in 1878, as we have seen, on the wave of the National Policy movement. But, for two years, they worked on the lines of their predecessors and linked up some of the disconnected portions of the road which Mr. Mackenzie had constructed in various localities, mainly between the Lakes and the Red River. Then Sir Charles Tupper, that militant and aggressive Minister of Railways, took the bold plunge and let to Andrew Onderdonk, a young American railroader of San Francisco, contracts to build portions of the Canadian Pacific through “the sea of mountains” in British Columbia. Canada was young at the railway business, as indicated by the fact that it was an American who got the contract to build the first parts of the mountain road. Later on, as the construction of the road from ocean to ocean began to get under way, Canadians developed by the score into great practical railway builders. Young men who had begun by chopping in the bush grew into contractors for getting out ties for the track-layers, and finally themselves took contracts for actual building of the railway over rock and boulders, through mountain vastnesses and quaking bogs until the steel reached tide water. It was in itself an act of splendid audacity for a people of less than four millions in number to start on the task of throwing a railway across an immense and almost uninhabited continent to the shores of the Western sea. And this daring on the part of the young Dominion was backed gallantly and effectively by scores of native-born Canadians who, with genuine Canadian initiative, learned a new trade and followed it with tremendous energy and skill.

It has been my good fortune and privilege to meet many of these men. Some of them made money and some of them did not. The task of calculating the cost of a piece of work over a given stretch of country, where unexpected obstacles emerged, was not easy. There were stretches on the North Shore of Lake Superior where the old Laurentian rocks had to be blasted to pieces at a cost of half-a-million a mile. There is a well-known muskeg east of Winnipeg where seven tracks went under, till a solid foundation was secured in what looked for a while like a bottomless pit. And there were tunnels and bridges and cuttings in the mountains which challenged the resources of a race of Titans. So, we say, these contractors did not, by any means, always make money. But my knowledge of them leads me to say that very few of the contractors or engineers cared for the money end of it in any case. They felt that they were engaged in a work of significance, not only to Canada and the Empire, but to the world, and that was an inspiration worth while. I recall being told by the secretary to one of the most famous of these railway builders that, so intent was this railway man on his work, that he very often forgot to have money enough in his pocket for personal necessities. In one sense he handled millions; but, only for the precaution of his secretary who knew his ways, this railway magnate would often have been personally stranded. “He thought so little of money,” said the secretary, “that he hardly ever carried any with him. But he was generous withal. The real fact was he was so engrossed in the great enterprise of helping to build a road across Canada that he forgot his own personal needs.”

Going back to Mr. Andrew Onderdonk, it is interesting to recall his influence on the social life of British Columbia by his importation of a few thousand Chinese coolies to work on railway construction. Mr. Onderdonk claimed that he was unable to get enough white men who were willing to do that particular kind of work. Be that as it may, the present fact is that we have a very large Chinese population in this Province which faces the Orient. It is equally sure that the presence of so many Orientals causes many serious problems. It is fashionable for some people who do not know the history, to lay the responsibility for the presence of Chinese here on the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. But the fact is that it was Mr. Onderdonk who imported these Oriental coolies while the road was still under Government supervision, two or more years before the Canadian Pacific Railway Company was formed. It is only fair always to apportion praise or blame justly, so that every one shall bear his own burden of responsibility without having to carry more than his share. Hence, the company, be it known, was not the originator of the importation of Chinese coolies for the construction of the road. On this subject we are not now moralizing either way, but are simply making a statement of historical fact.

In any case, Mr. Onderdonk knew the business of railway construction and kept steadily on, taking over some portions from other contractors, till he had the steel laid from Port Moody to Kamloops, and made a creditable record for railway building across an exceedingly difficult section of Canada. In fact, Sir Charles Tupper, the militant Minister of Railways, said quite openly that, though the construction of a piece of the road on the Pacific Coast would not mean much till it was linked up with the Eastern part of Canada, he wanted to get the mountain section under construction without delay for certain reasons. One was that the construction of that exceedingly difficult section, if successfully accomplished, would show the possibility of the whole task of the transcontinental being completed in due time. The other, of course, was that the people of British Columbia, fortunately for them, had several ably-insistent and politely-vociferous leaders who would give no rest to any Government till the work of railway construction had actually begun on the Coast. There were some prominent men elsewhere who did not look at things in the same light. An Opposition in Parliament opposes the party in power as a sort of a constitutional principle, nominally at least, for the safety of the country, which otherwise might have unwise legislation imposed on it. But even apart from that, we need not now look with undue criticism on the record of men like the Hon. Edward Blake, a statesman of great ability and integrity who, when Onderdonk was going ahead with his contracts in the mountains, moved in the House of Commons in 1880 that “the public interests require that the work of constructing the Pacific Railway in British Columbia be postponed.” Others of his party took the same stand, and it must be admitted that, apart from the prerogative of an Opposition above indicated, the whole project seemed vast enough to appal men who did not personally know the West well enough to visualize its illimitable future. The gigantic undertaking, as already mentioned, looked well nigh quixotic for less than four millions of people, and the fact that there were, in the years following, times when the whole effort seemed on the verge of disaster, ought to restrain our wholesale condemnation of early sceptics. Incidentally, it ought to bring us to the salute when we think of the railway builders who fought their amazing difficulties and, by fighting, gathered strength to win out in the end.

Andrew Onderdonk in the mountains and other contractors between Lake Superior and the Red River, were doing good work, but their detached pieces of road ended in the air. And Sir John A. Macdonald was quick to see that something more had to be done. Accordingly, at a Cabinet meeting at the close of the first session after his return to power, Sir John brought up the question of building railways in the North-West in order to attract immigrants. Sir Charles Tupper, who, being at the head of the Department of Railways, had made special study of the situation, agreed with Sir John that something should be done at once and neither one of them was in love with the idea of Government ownership and operation of railways. Sir Charles thought the policy of a transcontinental should be again emphasized, and that a responsible company should be secured to build it. Sir John said that was always his idea; but it was a “large order” and they had better take a week to think it over. On the appointed day Sir Charles submitted a carefully prepared report in favour of a through line, built, owned and operated by a chartered company. Putting it in brief form, the suggestion was that the Government should complete and hand over to such a company the parts of the railway then built or under construction, estimated at about seven hundred miles, which, when finished, would have cost about thirty-two millions of dollars. The portions of the road then built, or being built, were the lines from Port Arthur to Winnipeg, from Kamloops to Port Moody and the Emerson Branch on the east side of the Red River, from the boundary-line to St. Boniface and Winnipeg. In addition to getting possession of these portions, the company would receive a cash grant of twenty-five millions of dollars, and fifty (later reduced to twenty-five) million acres of land along the railway.

The suggestion was heartily agreed to by Sir John, and the Cabinet was unanimously in favour of the plan proposed. The Cabinet adjourned immediately after the decision was made. The members thereof had good reason to call it a day. The Rubicon had been crossed and the country was on the march to a new destiny. There were to be many obstacles encountered before the objective would be reached. It was a mighty venture of faith, but men of thought and men of action would clear the way.

Meanwhile the contractors on the portions under construction carried on, but the Government was looking eagerly to the financial magnates of the Old Land to form a company to carry out its policy. Yet, despite a visit of Sir John, Sir Charles and the Hon. John Henry Pope to London, there was no rush on the part of British financiers to build a railway across a vast, thinly populated continent. And when it looked as if there was going to be a disappointing set-back, there arose a small group of men on our own continent who were destined to lead in making the projected transcontinental what Lord Shaughnessy, a few hours before his death, called so finely, in a conversation with President Beatty, “a great Canadian property and a great Canadian enterprise.” We shall, in the next chapter, meet the men who came to the rescue.