Canadian Transport Sourcebook

Chapter 5: The Story of the Canadian Pacific Railway by Keith Morris

The Highway To Asia.

The establishment of a transcontinental railway, supplemented by a telegraph line over the whole route, and a steamship service on the Great Lakes, resulted in the linking up of Canada from ocean to ocean and in the building of the far-spread communities of the Dominion into one indissoluble national family.

But they were Empire Builders in the biggest sense of the term, these men of the Canadian Pacific Railway. They had made a pathway across a continent. They now planned to bridge the oceans.

True to their traditions, they carried their plans into effect. Two years after the completion of the railway the mighty Pacific was spanned. A steamship service was inaugurated between Vancouver and Japan, China, and Hong-Kong, and the new world Dominion was linked with the ancient and mystic Orient, with its teeming millions of human beings.

Sixteen years later the Company acquired the Elder Dempster (Beaver) Line, and the Atlantic was spanned. The Canadian Pacific Railway then came into existence as a bridge connecting Europe with Asia, and the greatest of all Highways of Empire.

Forty years before the Canadian Pacific was finally established as the long-dreamed of bridge between Great Britain and Asia—a bridge spanning the Atlantic Ocean, the continent of North America, and the Pacific Ocean and under British control—an eminent English publicist, Sir Edward Watkins, made an eloquent plea for 'A British Railway from the Atlantic to the Pacific' in words which, in the light of later events, were of a nature prophetic.

He commenced his plea by quoting from the Queen's Speech to Parliament, in 1858: 'I hope that the new colony on the Pacific (British Columbia) may be but one step in the career of steady progress, by which my dominions in North America may be ultimately peopled in an unbroken chain, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, by a loyal and industrious population.'

'This aspiration, so strikingly expressed,' Watkins said, 'found a fervent echo in the national heart, and it continues to engage the earnest attention of England, for it speaks of a great outspread of solid prosperity, and rational liberty, of the diffusion of our civilization, and of the extension of our moral empire. Since the Royal Speech, Governments have done something and events have done more to ripen public opinion into action. The Government at home and in Canada have organised and explored. The more recent discoveries of our new gold fields on the Pacific, the Indian Mutiny, the completion of great works in Canada, the treaties with Japan and with China, the visit of the Prince of Wales to the American continent, and, at the moment, the sad dissension in the United States, combine to interest us in the question, and to make us ask, "How is this hope to be realized; not a century hence, but in our time?"

'Our augmenting interests in the East demand, for reasons both of Empire and of trade, access to Asia less dangerous than by Cape Horn, less circuitous even than by Panama, less dependent than by Suez and the Red Sea. Our emigration, imperilled by the dissensions in the United States, must fall back upon colonization. And, commercially, the countries of the East must supply the raw materials and provide the markets which probable contests between the free man and the slave may diminish, or may close, else­where. Again, a great nation like ours cannot stand still. It must either march on triumphantly in the van, or fall hopelessly in the rear. The measure of its accomplishment must, century by century, rise higher and higher in the competition of nations. Its great works in this generation can alone perpetuate its greatness in the next.

'Let us look at the map. There we see, coloured as British America, a tract washed by the great Atlantic on the east, and by the Pacific Ocean on the west, and containing four million square miles, or one-ninth of the whole terrestrial surface of the globe. Part of this vast domain, upon the east, is Upper and Lower Canada; part, upon the west, is the new colony of British Columbia, with Vancouver's Island (the Madeira of the Pacific); while the largest portion is held, as one great preserve, by the fur-trading Hudson's Bay Company, which, in right of a charter given by Charles II. in 1670, kills vermin for skins, and monopolises the trade with the native Indians over a surface many times as big again as Great Britain! and Ireland. Still, all this land is ours, for it owes allegiance to the sceptre of Victoria.

'Between the magnificent harbour of Halifax on the Atlantic, open throughout the year for ships of the largest class, to the Straits of Fuca, opposite Vancouver's Island, with its noble Esquimault inlet, intervene some 3,200 miles of road line. For fourteen hundred or fifteen hundred miles of this distance the Nova Scotian, the Habitant and the Upper Canadian have spread, more or less in lines and patches over the ground, until the population of 60,000 in 1759 amounts to 2,500,000 in 1860. The remainder is peopled only by the Indian and the hunter, save that at the southern end of Lake Winnipeg there still exists the hardy and struggling Red River Settlement, now called Fort Garry; and dotted all over the con­tinent, as lights of progress, are trading posts of the Hudson's Bay Company.

'The combination of recent discoveries places it at least beyond all doubt that the best, though perhaps not the only, thoroughly efficient route for a great highway for peoples and for commerce, between the Atlantic and the Pacific, is to be found through this British territory. Beyond that, it is alleged that while few, if any, practicable passages for a wagon road, still less for a railway, can be found through the Rocky Mountains across the United States terri­tory (north-west of the Missouri), there have been discovered already no less than three eligible openings in the British ranges of these mountains, once con­sidered as inaccessible to man. While Captain Palliser prefers the "Kananaskakis," Captain Blackiston and Governor Douglas the "Kootanie," and Dr. Hector the "Vermilion" Pass, all agree that each is perfectly practicable, if not easy, and that even better openings may probably yet be found as exploration progresses. . .

'Although the lakes and the St. Lawrence give an unbroken navigation of two thousand miles, right to the sea, for ships of three hundred tons burden, yet if there is to be a continuous line along which, and all the year round, the travel and traffic of the western and eastern worlds can pass without interruption, railway communication with Halifax must be perfected, and a new line of iron road, passing through Ottawa, the Red River Settlement, and this continuous belt, must be constructed. This new line is a work of above 2,300 miles and would cost probably £20,000,000, if not £25,000,000 sterling. The sum, though so large, is still little more than we voluntarily paid to extin­guish slavery in our West Indian dominions; it does not much exceed the amount which a Royal Com­mission, some little tine ago, proposed to expend in erecting fortifications and sea-works to defend our shores. It is but six per cent. of the amount we have laid out in completing our own railway system in this little country at home. It is equal to but two and half per cent. of our National Debt, and the annual interest upon it is much less than the British Pension List.

'We say, then, "Establish an unbroken line of road and railway from the Atlantic to the Pacific."

'Such a great highway would give shorter distances by both sea and land, with an immense saving of time. As regards the first bugbear of the general traveller—sea distance, it would (to and from Liverpool) save, as compared with the Panama route, a tossing, wearying navigation of six thousand miles to Japan, of five thousand miles to Canton, and of three thousand miles to Sydney. For Japan, for China, for the whole Asiatic Archipelago, and for Australia, such a route must become the great highway to and from Europe; and whatever nation possesses that highway must wield of necessity the commercial sceptre of the world.'

The Canadian Pacific Railway Company made what was a vision to Sir Edward Watkins a reality to the Mother of Nations. And the reality was greater than the vision. From the western shore of Britain to the eastern shore of Asia, by way of Canada, the Imperial route of Empire is traversed by the ships and trains, not of several separate corporations, but of one individual corporation.

In that lies the Canadian Pacific Company's greatest strength.

Copyright/Licence: The author or authors of this work died in 1964 or earlier, and this work was first published no later than 1964. Therefore, this work is in the public domain in Canada per sections 6 and 7 of the Copyright Act. See disclaimers.