Canadian Transport Sourcebook

Craigellachie.

In the story of nations there are episodes which shine, resplendent, pre-eminent, as planets in the starry heavens. Of such is the ceremony of the driving of the last spike in the Canadian Pacific Railway. By that simple yet momentous act the confederation of the Dominion of Canada became a living reality. A new world's highway had been opened, and the dream of statesmen and pathfinders had become a concrete fact.

The setting was worthy of the drama. Craigellachie, where the rails from the Atlantic first met those from the Pacific, lies in the Eagle Pass, over which towers in majesty the snow-covered crags of the Gold Range. The Pass itself is but a narrow gorge, in which the Spirit of the Mountains holds undisputed sway.

On the seventh day of November, in the year 1885, the shrill whistle of a locomotive reverberated through the stillness of the ages. It was the heralding of a new era in the life of a nation. From a private passenger car, "Saskatchewan," there stepped, among others, three men, representatives of the human force and pow that had made the completion of a mighty undertaking possible. They were Donald Alexander Smith, William Van Horne, and Sandford Fleming.

To Donald Smith was given the task of honour. And right well did the future Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal wield the hammer which drove the spike into position.

Sandford Fleming describes the historic scene. 'The work was carried on in silence. Nothing was heard but the reverberations of the blows struck by him. It was no ordinary occasion; the scene was in every respect noteworthy, from the groups which composed it, and the circumstances which had brought together so many human beings in this spot in the heart of the mountains, until recently an untracked solitude. Most of the engineers, with hundreds of workmen of all nationalities who had been engaged in the mountains, were present.

'Everyone appeared to be deeply impressed by what was taking place. The central figure in the group was something more than the representative of the Railway Company which had achieved the triumph he was consummating. His presence recalled memories of the Mackenzies and McTavishes, the Stuarts and McGillivrays, the Frasers, Finlaysons, McLeods and McLaughlins, and their contemporaries, who first penetrated the surrounding territory. From his youth he had been connected with the Company (Hudson's Bay Company), which had for so long carried on their operations successfully from Labrador to the Pacific, and California to Alaska. To-day he was the chief representative of that vast organization which before the close of the last century had sent out pioneers to map out and occupy the unknown wilderness, and which as a trading association is in its third century of its existence.

'All present were or less affected by a formality which was the crowning effort of years of labour, intermingled with doubts and fears, and of oft-renewed energy to overcome what at times appeared unsurmountable obstacles. Moreover, was it not the triumphal termination of numberless failures—the successful solution of the frequently repeated attempts of the British people, ever since America has been discovered, to find a new route to Asia?

'To what extent the thoughts of those present were turned to the past must, with that undemonstrative group, remain a secret with each individual person. This much may be said: to all, the scene was deeply impressive, and especially to the many hundreds of workmen, who, from an early hour up to the last moment, had struggled to do their part, and who were now mute lookers-on at the single individual actively engaged—at one who in his own person united the past with the present, the most prominent member of the ancient company of "Adventurers of England," as he was the representative of the great Canadian Pacific Railway Company.

'The blows on the spike were repeated until it was driven home. The silence, however, continued unbroken, and it must be said that a more solemn ceremony has been witnessed with less solemnity. It seemed as if the act now performed had worked a spell on all present. Each one appeared absorbed in his own reflections. The abstraction of mind, or silent emotion, or whatever it might be, was, however, of short duration. Suddenly a cheer spontaneously burst forth, and it was no ordinary cheer. The subdued enthusiasm, the pent-up feelings of men familiar with hard work, now found vent. Cheer after cheer followed, as if it was difficult to satisfy the spirit which had been aroused. Such a scene is conceivable on the field of hard-fought battle at the moment when victory is assured.'

Several hours later a message was flashed across the Atlantic. It was from Queen Victoria, and conveyed the royal congratulations to the people of Canada on the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, a work which Her Majesty regarded as 'of great importance to the whole British Empire.'

It was more. It was a work pregnant with results of importance to a whole world.

Fleming does not record his own thoughts on this memorable occasion. But in his retrospective reflections it may be that an address he gave to an Ontario audience nigh thirty years before recurred to his mind. In an address delivered in Toronto, in 1904, he took his hearers back in fancy to this earlier lecture, and pictured the country lying west of Lake Superior—the Great Lone Land—as it was before the advent of the life-spreading steel, and the dreams and aspirations which even then were cherished by a few far-seeing visionaries of Empire. He recalled that in 1858 there was not throughout the whole extent of North or South America a single transcontinental railway; that there was scarcely a mile of railway in the United States west of the Mississippi, and a very small mileage west of Chicago; that the greater and by far the most valuable portion of what is now known as the Dominion of Canada was held as a vast hunting-ground by the Hudson's Bay Company, 'and it was indeed fortunate that it was so held, as the present and future generations of Canadians will testify.' At that date the provinces and territories west of the longitude of Lake Superior were not thought of. British Columbia itself was not even a Crown Colony. The city of Ottawa as the capital of the Dominion was unknown. Winnipeg did not then exist. Ten years later, there were only a few people around Fort Garry and along the banks of the river, known as the Red River settlers. Exclusive of pure Indians there were probably not more than eight thousand people in the whole North-West. The settlers were shut off from the outer world, except by such means of communication as that furnished by dog-trains in winter and canoes in summer, together with Red River carts.

But even at that period of Canada's history there were a few public-spirited sanguine men who had the hardihood to peer through the pine forests and the wooded wilderness of a thousand miles to Canada's richest heritage, the prairie region. Their mental vision carried them across the rolling prairies another thousand miles to gaze on the mountains with the setting sun and the ocean beyond them. These daring, yea, visionary spirits did not think Canada was destined to stop short at the Georgian Bay and the tier of counties lying eastward of Lake Simcoe. There were dense forests to subdue. The Ottonabee, the Trent, the Ottawa, and other rivers had abundance of water power to prepare for exportation the timber then growing in the tributary forests. It required no seer to see that these forests would become exhausted, and that new fields and other sources of industry would have to be sought out. Precisely as there are to-day, there were men then who inscribed on their banner, the words, 'Build up Canada,' and visionary and impracticable as it seemed to many, they formed the resolution to carry their standard across the home of the buffalo and the distant Rocky Mountains.

This was the inception of the Canadian Pacific Railway. By a large number of people it was regarded as an idle fancy, the dream of chimerical men, never to be realised. The enormously large works involved were not common at that stage in the history of engineering undertakings. The proposal to build a railway through uninhabited British North America, over one of the great mountain rangers of the globe, across a roadless continent, respecting much of which nothing was known, when looked at soberly by the practical man presented to him a project which passed at a single leap from the plane of ordinary undertakings to the lofty sphere of enterprises of the grandest description. It surpassed in every element of magnitude and cost, and probably also in physical difficulties, any work ever previously undertaken by man.

'But what were the purposes to be achieved? Were they not inestimably important? Wonderful commercial results could be counted on, and it was felt that the national, the imperial, advantages and possibilities were far beyond the conception of the most sanguine of far-seeing men. The undertaking would have an immediate effect in expanding Canada, then limited to two provinces in the valley of the St. Lawrence; it would be of a greatest advantage to the Mother Country in opening up new channels for the enterprise of British merchants. The railway from the Atlantic to the Pacific when completed would bring nearer to England her Eastern Empire; it would unite with a new bond the interests and affections of Britons in Europe, Asia, Australasia, and America; it would secure in perpetuity British dominion upon the continent of America; it would promote the occupation and civilization of half a continent, and go a long way to lay the foundation of what might be regarded as a Canadian Empire.'

In his biography of Sandford Fleming, Lawrence Burpee records that during the engineer's visit to London, in 1876, he called at 24, Cheyne Row, with a letter of introduction to Thomas Carlyle. 'It had long been his desire to meet face to face the great prophet of the nineteenth century,' says Burpee.

'The conversation drifted to Canada, with many shrewd questions and comments as to the conditions of life in the new land. The recent death there of Carlyle's brother Alexander lent a personal note to the subject. The vast possibilities and human significance of the Canadian Pacific Railway appealed to him, and the political and social experiments that were being worked out in this younger Britain beyond the seas. A reminiscence of the interview is found in the "Descriptive Catalogue of the Carlyle's House Memorial Trust." Among the books listed in the Bank Dining Room is: "Fleming, S., Report on the Canadian Pacific Railway, 1877. Presentation copy."'

The history of the creation of the Canadian Pacific Railway is the history of a small band of men. Political, financial, and physical obstacles had to be fought and overcome in a manner which called forth efforts, as has been narrated, almost superhuman in their intensity. But these men continued in their chosen way. The path was steep, and at times they stumbled over the jagged rocks which lay as barriers in the course, but their indomitable spirit remained unbroken and they reached the summit of their aspirations on that eventful November day.

It is a story of Romance in Action.

The greatest achievement in the career of Lord Mount Stephen is his part in the building of Canada's first transcontinental highway. It was he who carried the biggest burden. As first President of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, and the official head of the syndicate to which the Dominion Government transferred the Great National Enterprise in the stormy days of 1880, he took the leading part in the negotiations with the Government and with British capitalists, and his executive force, restless energy, and conquering perseverance, constituted him the dominating factor in the affairs of the Company.

Despite the great strain resulting from his occupancy of the Presidency during the Company's early financial struggles, he maintained his active association with the Canadian Pacific for nigh three years after the completion of the line, and did not leave 'the bridge' until the corporation had reached the smooth waters of prosperity. 'From the time I became a party to the contract with the Dominion Government for the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and consented to accept the position of President of the Company,' he said in his farewell letter, dated 7th August, 1888, to the Shareholders, 'it has always been my intention to relinquish the active chief control of the affairs of the Company as soon as the task which I then undertook should be completed. This task was partially finished when the line was open for traffic through to the Pacific Ocean, over two years ago; but at that time so much remained to be done towards the firm establishment of the enterprise, and its future development and success, that in deference to the wishes of my colleagues, I consented to continue for a time in office. Warned now by the state of my health, finding that the severe and constant strain which I have had to bear for the past eight years has unfitted me for the continuous and arduous duties of an office in which vigour and activity are essential; feeling the increasing necessity for practical railway experience; and believing that the present satisfactory and assured position of the Company offers a favourable opportunity for taking the step I have had so long in contemplation, I have this day resigned the Presidency of the Company which I have had the honour to hold since its organization.

'In taking this step, it may not be out of place to say that my pecuniary interest in the company remains undiminished, and that the welfare of the Company is, and always must be to me, a matter of the deepest possible interest; and that as a member of the Board of Directors, I will always be ready to aid and co-operate with my colleagues in everything calculated to protect and promote the interests of the shareholders. In resigning the position of the President of the Company, it is to me a matter of the greatest possible satisfaction to be able to say that in my successor, Mr. Van Horne, the Company has a man of proved fitness for the office, in the prime of life, possessed of great energy and rare ability, having a long and thoroughly practical railway experience, and, above all, an entire devotion to the interests of the Company.'

In the Canadian Pacific Railway station at Montreal there stands a statue of Lord Mount Stephen. It is the Company's tribute to one of their greatest men.

All honour, too, to Donald Smith, who loyally supported George Stephen in the days of struggle. He took the same risks as his cousin took, and with him fought and overcame the obstacles in the path which led to Craigellachie.

In the history of Lord Strathcona—the big Scotsman with the massive head and keen grey-blue eyes under the shaggy eyebrows, 'that somehow suggested snow-laden eaves,' who drove the last spike in Eagle Pass, and who lived to become one of the most honoured sons of Canada and of the British Empire, ending his activities in a blaze of glory, and leaving behind him a name which has been indelibly written in the Book of Immortality—his association with the Canadian Pacific Railway Company is a prominent phase, of which he was ever and rightly proud.

Conceived in the dreams of statesmen, formed in the realms of finance, the travail of the birth of the Canadian Pacific Railway as a concrete reality was endured by William Van Horne.

His was the constructive genius the fruits of which was the spanning of a continent by lines of steel at a rate of speed never previously attempted anywhere and never surpassed since. 'No problem that ever arose—even that of conquering the Rockies and Selkirks—had any terrors for him.'

He was a human dynamo. From him there radiated currents of activity, the galvanic effects of which were felt along the route from end to end. His capacity for work was prodigious. 'Sleep,' he said, 'is just a habit; a habit to be indulged in only when absolutely imperative.' 'He thought nothing of staying up all night, and making up the deficiency by snatching a few winks here and there during the day. He had the knack of commanding sleep whenever and wherever he willed it. He could doze off whenever he liked for five minutes, and wake up at the end of that time thoroughly refreshed. He had such an intense interest in life that he felt he could not afford to sleep, except by way of indulging in brief intermezzos.'

A story is still related in Canada that a stalwart Western miner, hearing the many tales of Van Horne's almost superhuman habitual labours, undertook to do in one day and hour by hour exactly what the famous 'railway man' was doing. At the end of the day the miner was carried to his bed, where he remained for several weeks afterwards in a state of collapse.

William Van Horne was in truth the Master Builder. An American of Dutch blood, he possessed the qualities peculiar to his race in a supreme degree. There was that in the old Dutch stock of the Van Hornes, it has been said, which caused him to hammer away at the problem until he finally succeeded. His hammering was as rapid as it was forceful, and the result was an achievement unparalleled in the history of railways.