CHAPTER IX
Opening the Door of the West
DO YOU see that rough man with a key in his hand? It looks like a spade, you say—and so it is; but it is doing the work of a key. He strikes it into the soil; he digs up a sod. That is all you observe, till your imagination awakes—and then you see that he is opening the door of the West. He has turned the first sod of a railway line from the East.
The saving of the West from destruction, the swift suppression of revolt when delay might have rallied all the Indians to the rebel flag, was only made possible by the railway. But when the railway was planned there was no idea that it would be needed for such a purpose. It was not built for its military value.
True, the safeguarding of our country and our Empire in case of war had always been one aim of those far-sighted men who looked forward to a transcontinental railway on British soil. Such a line, enabling troops and munitions to be carried from Atlantic to Pacific in a few days, would clearly be a priceless advantage, and might even be the deciding factor in a life and death struggle; we know the immense help it gave in the life and death struggle we were plunged into a few years ago.
Yet the reasons which decided Canada to carry out this tremendous railway scheme were wholly peaceful—to open up a land of homes for loyal people on the plains, and to join the East and Centre with the farthest West; to unite our scattered little communities in one great Dominion.
There was only one thing uniting these three regions—a sentiment. They all knew and felt that they were members of one great brotherhood, the royal republic known as the British Empire. The British Columbians could have “paddled their own canoe” and remained separate from the Canadians if they had wanted; but they did not want. Their legislature unanimously and wisely voted in favor of federating with the newly formed Dominion of Canada in 1871—on condition that within ten years a railway should be built connecting that far western province with the railway system of Eastern Canada.
The colony on the Pacific, with a small population, hemmed in both north and south, would have found it hard to maintain an independent existence if she had not joined forces with her fellow-countrymen in the East.
British Columbia, too, was the only possible gateway of Canada to the West. Without a transcontinental railway, the rest of our country would have been cut off from its natural and necessary outlet to the trade of the Pacific, a trade already large and destined to become enormous.
Just as urgent was the need of this railway to open up the land between the Rockies and the Lakes for the millions of British folk and others who desired new homes under the British flag, which stood then, as it stands to-day, for the union of steadfast liberty with steadfast law.
The United States, face to face with the same problem, had just solved it by completing in 1869 a transcontinental railway system which linked California with New York and at the same time opened up the western plains of that country to the home-maker. That was not only an example but a warning.
The United States, of course, had plenty of land, enormous territories of its own to fill up; but the evil habit of coveting a neighbor’s possessions is found among those who have plenty as well as among those who have little. South of the line were many who looked with covetous eyes on the fertile land in the north. Their plan to “jump the claim” to this land might have become a serious danger if no one had been living here except fur traders and Indians.
What staved off the danger, to begin with, was the settlement of the Red River district, by the energy and self-sacrifice of Lord Selkirk. The settlers were only a handful; but they “held the fort” and set an example, and after a while others began to dribble in, as you have heard already. The situation would again have become serious, however, when the Union Pacific Railway brought settlers and adventurers crowding into the Western States, if an easy way had not been provided for our own people to settle our own western territory from Eastern Canada and from overseas.
If the prairie had passed into the control of an alien power, the Canadian people, and the people coming from overseas to join them, would for ever have been prevented from expanding westward, just as the American colonists themselves a hundred years before had found their westward expansion blocked by the French occupation of the Mississippi valley—only on that occasion, as we have seen, the Americans were able to break down the obstacle by the British mother-country coming to their rescue.
The very existence of Canada, then, as a complete Dominion worthy of the two great enterprising races which had laid its foundations, and worthy of the civilizing British brotherhood in which it had achieved self-governing membership, depended on the prompt connection of all its parts by a national railway line.
The puzzle was, how to do it? The line would have to be built through an almost uninhabited wilderness, and the cost of construction was bound to be enormous.
The Canadian people, though rich in faith, in courage, and resources, were not rich in money. With the strong right arm and heroic heart they had tamed the wild East, but was their arm strong enough and long enough to reach out and tame the wild West? At first it seemed not. The building of the railway, by the agreement with British Columbia, should have commenced by 1873. It was 1875 before construction began, on a line from the head of Lake Superior towards the West; and even then the Federal authorities could only make up their minds to an instalment plan, giving contracts for the building of sections here and there, and trusting to navigation on the Great Lakes and Lake of the Woods to complete a chain of mixed land and water communication between East and West. No provision was made for the necessary land line north of the Lakes.
In 1880, when nine of the ten years had gone by and less than 700 miles of track had been laid, the scheme of a Government railway was given up as hopeless. A little group of men was found to guarantee the building of a line by private enterprise and finish it within ten years. Most of these men were Canadians of Scottish birth, of the same class that had already done so much for the exploration of the West and the carrying on of its ancient fur trade. In fact, the moving spirits in the enterprise were Donald Smith, the head of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who had spent most of his life in the northern and western wilds, and his cousin George Stephen. Though it was not to be officially a Government line, it was built to provide the great national highway which the country required, and Parliament decreed that a majority of the directors must always be British citizens.
It was a great adventure and a costly one, the building of that line; so costly, indeed, that again and again the Company was nearly ruined before its task was done, even with a large grant of money and western land from the Government. The prophecy that it would never pay for its axle grease sounds absurd now that the railway has proved itself perhaps the most conspicuously successful enterprise ever undertaken in Canada, and one of the most famous in the world. In its early years, however, the capitalists, outside the group of resolute men who had launched the scheme, could hardly be persuaded to put any money in it, they thought its chances of success so small.
Blasting, cutting and levelling, building a track to carry heavy trains through mountain passes and along the sides of precipices where even a mountain goat never ventured before, demanded the highest degree of skill, endurance, and dogged defiance of danger. Towering heights and raging torrents, hard rock and dense forest, crumbling gravel and avalanching snow, all were encountered and all were overcome.
Besides the mountains and chasms of the Far West, there was the long mountainous stretch north of Lake Superior, where the thrilling grandeur of the scenery may suggest to the admiring passenger some feeble idea of the tremendous toil which alone made possible his enjoyment or indeed his very sight of it. Here 200 miles of railway track cost $12,000,000, of which $2,100,000 was used for dynamite alone. A dynamite factory had to be established on the spot. The bridges, tunnels and galleries along the face of the cliff for three miles at Jackfish Bay cost $1,500,000. A single mile cost $700,000.
There was only one town of any size in the whole length of the line, from eastern Ontario to the British Columbian shore; and Winnipeg itself had not 8,000 inhabitants when the work began in 1881. Practically every company and battalion of the great army of railway builders was hundreds of miles from its base of supplies. The fighting line, far longer than all the battle lines on the French, Italian and Russian war fronts put together, stretched for over 2,500 miles through an almost uninhabited and untilled wilderness.
With such tremendous energy and enthusiasm was the work pushed on, that in less than half the promised time it was finished. The discovery of a useless North West Passage had taken centuries; the creation of an infinitely useful North West Passage overland had taken only five years. The first sod had been turned on May 2, 1881; the prairie section reached Calgary on August 18, 1883; the last gap north of Lake Superior was closed on May 17, 1885, giving a continuous line of steel from Montreal to the Rocky Mountains; and on the 7th of November in the same year the last spike was driven at Craigellachie, 85 miles west of the Selkirk summit in British Columbia. The first through passenger train, from the head of Atlantic navigation on the St. Lawrence to the head of Pacific navigation on Burrard Inlet, left Montreal on the evening of June 28, 1886, and finished its memorable journey at Port Moody on the morning of July 4. The great city of Vancouver, twelve miles down the Inlet, was then but a clearing in the forest scarcely three months old. It took Port Moody’s place as the Pacific terminus in June, 1887.