Canadian Transport Sourcebook

10

Piercing Mountain Barriers

As one who had to travel Canadian roads frequently himself, John A. Macdonald realised that Canada could not develop without improved transportation. In his address to the electors of Kingston when he sought their votes in 1844 for the Parliament elected to meet in Montreal, he declared, "No exertion will be spared by me in forwarding the settlement of the rear townships, by the formation of public roads." In the following year he addressed a meeting called by the Mayor of Kingston in support of a proposed railroad from Kingston to Toronto, and in 1851 in Gananoque he moved a resolution "that the construction of railroads tends very much to promote the prosperity and happiness of the country," declaring that the farmers would be largely benefited by the construction of a railroad leading to the seaboards.

Between 1834 and 1850 thirty-four Canadian railway charters had been granted with a total capital of twelve million eight hundred thousand pounds, but the capital was, in most cases, as visionary as the railway lines. The Guarantee Act of 1849 helped actual construction by enabling any railway over seventy-five miles long to borrow money with a guarantee of six per cent up to half the bonded interest. With this assistance supplemented by subscriptions from interested municipalities, Canada had an actual trackage in 1853 of two hundred and five miles with another six hundred and eighteen miles under construction. In 1851 the Great Western Railway, which was planned to run from Hamilton to London, Ontario, with branches to the inland ports of Windsor, Sarnia and Goderich, was constructed with American money and American contractors. The profits talked of varied from fifteen to twenty per cent.

John A. Macdonald in 1842

The fatherly interest taken by American promoters in Canadian railway construction was no doubt influenced by the desire to draw traffic from Canada to their own lines and ports, and this was frankly admitted at a celebration held at Boston in 1851, to signalise the com­pletion of rail connection between Boston and Montreal. Among the Canadian delegates to this celebra­tion were Sir Allan MacNab and John A. Macdonald.

Allan Napier MacNab won his knighthood For his services in sup­pressing William Lyon Mackenzie's Rebellion of 1837, where his most notable feat was to send Mackenzie's supply boat, the Caroline, over Niagara Falls. Entering political life, he became the leader of the high and dry Tories, with a strong predilection for railway expansion. In 1845 he went to London, in the hope of raising capital for the Great Western Railway, and two years later en­deavoured to get the British Government to lend money for.the construction of this enterprise, which in return was to relieve dis­tress in Ireland and Scotland by transporting emigrants for rail­way work. For lack of English support he turned to the United States, which supplied both money and engineers for the con­struction. John A. Macdonald by this time (1851) had risen to be solicitor-general and sympathised with MacNab's idea that Canada needed railways. Where he differed from MacNab was in the advisability of going to the United States for assistance. Canadian railways benefited by the traffic carried in bond through Canada to and from American points, and this domestic transit trade was a useful source of income to the Great Western Railway, which provided a link between American railroads serving New York and Chicago.

Three other associates of John A. Macdonald were financially interested in the Grand Trunk Railway, a rival of the Great West­ern, namely, E. P. Taché, A. T. Galt and Georges Etienne Cartier.

The Grand Trunk Railway was incorporated in 1852, and accord­ing to the prospects issued in England the following year, the di­rectors were to include six members of the Canadian Government and the contractors to be the English firm of Peto, Brassey, Betts and Jackson. Estimated profits for stockholders were to be eleven and one-half per cent and the railway was planned to link Sarnia on Lake Huron with Toronto, Montreal, Quebec and Portland.

Before long the two rivals agreed to eliminate costly duplication and to co-operate where feasible. But wages went up and credit went down, so that further assistance had to be secured from any government or municipality that was willing to give it. The severe depression of 1857 was followed by the temporary cessa­tion of railway construction in 1860. In the meanwhile the first passenger train on the Grand Trunk was run from Montreal trough to Toronto in 1856, and by 1859 the system extended from Rivière du Loup, east of Quebec City, and from Portland, Maine, to Detroit and Port Huron. By 1860 the total railway trackage in Canada amounted to 1,895 miles.

John A. Macdonald himself refrained from taking any personal interest in railway promotion or dividends, perhaps fortunately, for his thoughts were left free to concentrate on larger problems. In 1857 he was responsible for the engagement of Chief Justice Draper to press the claims of Canada at the Hudson's Bay Com­pany Enquiry in London. These claims were recognised by the Select Committee of the House of Commons, which included in its report that:

"It is essential to meet the just and reasonable wishes of Canada to be enabled to annex to her territory such portion of the land in her neighbourhood as may be available to her for the purposes of settlement—with which lands she is willing to open and main­tain communications, and for which she will provide the means of local administration. Your Committee apprehend that the districts on the Red River and the Saskatchewan are among those likely to be desired for early occupation. Your Committee trust that there will be no difficulty in affecting arrangements as between Her Majesty's Government and the Hudson's Bay Company, by which these districts may be ceded to Canada on equitable principles."

Sir Allan MacNab

In a single year four passes over the Canadian Rockies were crossed, of which one (the Kicking Horse Pass) was afterward actually used by be Canadian Pacific Railway, while a second, the Vermillion Pass, forms part of the route of the present Banff-Windermere Highway. This received its name from the ochre beds which provided the Indians with a source of supply for their much desired red paint. Kananaskis Pass is probably the pass used by the emigrant train referred to in Sir George Simpson's narrative of 1841, and may have given him the sugges­tion of a more direct route for the fur brigades than the established trail over Howse Pass further north. The selection of a geol­ogist as member of the Palliser Expedition was probably inspired by the report made to Governor Douglas by Angus McDonald in 1856 that gold had been discovered on the Upper Columbia Henry Labouchere when asked for military assistance in enforcing a tax on the miners, had replied that as the government did not expect to raise revenue from so remote a part of the British pos­sessions, neither did it propose to incur any expense on account of it.

Vermillion Paint Pot.

Vermillion Pass.

Photo by Associated Screen News. Night-Gipsy (Blood Indian).

Photo by Associated Screen News. Far-Away-Cough (Blackfoot Indian).

Courtesy of Harper's New Monthly Magazine.

Buffalo Trails.

Vermillion Pass and Kicking Horse were traversed not by Captain Palliser himself but by Doctor Hector, following a trail from the Bow Valley opposite Castle Mountain to the Kootenay Valley and then turning north over a low pass to the Beaverfoot River, a tributary which joins the Kicking Horse River at Leanchoil. This, according to Hector, was "an old neglected pass, that used to be used by Cree war parties." Describing the western side of the Vermillion Pass, he says:

"The Valley is tolerably open and the descent is uniform. The dense woods often compelled us to cross and recross the stream, it being so much easier to travel on the shingle than chop our way through the forest."

Sir A. T. Galt

Even at that time there was evidence of forest fires:

"The fallen trees had been burnt which allowed us to pass along freely. ... Very little grading would be required to make a good passable road."

A little above the Falls near Lean­choil, Hector had the painful expe­rience which gave the Kicking Horse River its name:

"One of our packhorses, to escape the fallen timber, plunged into the stream, luckily where it formed an eddy, but the banks were so steep that we had great difficulty in getting him out. In attempting to recatch my own horse, which had strayed off while we were engaged with the one in the water, he kicked me in the chest, but I had luckily got close to him before he struck out, so that I did not get the full force of the blow. However, it knocked me down and rendered me sense­less for some time. ... After travelling a mile along the left bank of the river which, because of the accident the men had named Kicking Horse River, we crossed to the opposite side."

Such is the story of the Kicking Horse incident as told by Hector himself. Peter, the Indian guide, has added some further details. According to him, the Indians with the party were in fear of attack by a hostile tribe and were anxious to push on. They thought that Hector had been killed, so they hastily dug a shallow grave into which they lowered the body. They were about to shovel in the earth when they noticed a flicker in the eyelids of the corpse, so they lifted Hector out again and found to every­body's joy that he was still alive.

The report of Captain Palliser in regard to a road to the Red River Settlement, was definitely adverse:

Captain John Palliser

"As a line of communication with the Red River and the Sas­katchewan prairies, the canoe route from Lake Superior to Lake Winnipeg, even if made first and greatly improved by a large outlay of capital would, I consider, be always too arduous and expensive a route of transport for emigrants, I therefore cannot recommend the Imperial Government to counte­nance or lend support to any scheme for constructing, or, it may be said, forcing a thoroughfare by this line of route either by land or water, as there would be no immediate ad­vantage commensurate with the re­quired sacrifice of capital; nor can I advise such heavy expenditure as would necessarily attend the con­struction of any exclusively British line road between Canada and the Red River Settlement."

Sir James Hector

Captain Palliser's expedition was sent by the British Gov­ernment, but fortunately the Government of Canada organ­ised its own separate expedition to investigate routes to the west and to study the possibilities of the Canadian prairies for settlement. This was in two divisions, one under the direction of S. J. Dawson, a Scot from Glengarry, who came to Canada as a boy and took up the study of civil engineering. Dawson's exploration covered the country between the head of Lake Superior and the Red River Settlement, and resulted in the con­clusion that the easiest route between those points was along the later Nor'­wester and Hudson's Bay Company route from Fort William, rather than the earlier route of the French fur traders from Grand Portage (now in American territory). Dawson esti­mated that a combination of waterway and wagon road could shorten the journey between Lake Superior and Red River to three days at a cost of not more than fifty thousand pounds, and that if the wagon road were replaced by a railroad, the time could shortened to two days instead of the usual four weeks. This, he said,

"would be the first step to a route through Canada and British Columbia. Once at Red River there is navigable water with but little interruption to the base of the Rocky Mountains; and through these it appears that Captain Palliser has recently discovered easy passes within British territory. From thence westward to Frazer's River the distance is, comparatively, not great. It is therefore, reasonable to believe that if the route were opened to Red River, it would soon be continued all the way to Frazer's River and the Pacific, and as it is the shortest that can be adopted, it would, no doubt, become the highway of an emigration to the gold regions, the extent of which no one can foresee.

"Another, and by far the most important consideration is, that by opening this route, a vast extent of fertile land would be thrown open to colonization, and this is of peculiar interest to Canada at present. It is a well known fact that an emigration (of French Canadians) is constantly going on from Lower Canada (Quebec) to the prairies of the Western States. Now the Rivière Rouge and the Nord Ouest, from the time that the Canadian voyageurs occupied the country, have been familiar words in Lower Canada, and if the route were once opened there can be no doubt but that (French) Canadian emigrants would prefer a land with which they are so much connected by old as­sociations, where a kindred people are ready to receive them, and where they would have the inestimable advantage of living under British laws, to a country where they would not understand the language, and where most of those of them who do emigrate be­come mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, to a people who have sharpness enough to turn their simplicity to account."

The second division of this Canadian expedition explored the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan watersheds west of the Red River settlement under the direction of Henry Youle Hind, Professor of Chemistry and Geology in the University of Trinity College, Toronto, an Englishman who came to Canada in 1847. Hind made the somewhat startling proposal to divert the waters of the South Branch of the Saskatchewan River into the Qu'Appelle River, a tributary of the Red River, so as to eliminate the round­about water route through Lake Winnipeg and the north branch of the Saskatchewan and to provide a continuous waterway di­rectly westward and navigable by steamers to the Bow River and its continuing pass over the Canadian Rockies. Hind emphasises the attraction which recent discoveries of gold in British Columbia was causing to emigrants, and claimed that the Canadian route to the Pacific coast was easier than any American route yet dis­covered. He wrote:

"During the past Summer, when returning from the South Branch, I met several parties of American emigrants, who were proceeding to Frazer's River via Carlton House and the North Branch of the Saskatchewan. One party was well furnished and equipped by an influential company at St. Paul, whose objects and proceedings have been published in pamphlet form. Some of the emigrants are wintering at Red River Settlement, purposing early in the Spring to follow in the track of the party I met. Others are now organizing in the North Western States, to journey to the 'Mines' by the same route. It is apparent that a strong effort will be made to establish a North-Western Emigrant Land Route to the Pacific, by the people of the North-Western States of the Union. The Missouri route is too difficult and hazardous at present. ...

"The projectors of the navigation of Red River below Brecken­ridge, in the State of Minnesota, look also to the North Branch as offering the most favourable means of reaching the foot of the Rocky Mountains. They are constructing a steamer on Red River, and propose to connect, by a line of stages, with Crow Wing and St. Paul. ...

"One of the results of this Exploring Expedition to the South Branch of the Saskatchewan last year has been to ascertain the practicability of constructing, at a very small cost when compared with a railroad, a communication for steamers of considerable size to near the foot of the Rocky Mountains ... to Bow River. In order to convert this route into a steamboat communication without any serious interruption, the diversion of the waters of the South Branch down the Qu'Appelle Valley is involved. ...

"The occurrence of gold in unexpected abundance in British Columbia, not only in Frazer's River but also on Thompson's River and elsewhere, over wide areas, coupled with the emigra­tion and commercial activity to which it will give rise, is suf­ficient to warrant me in drawing your attention to the subject. ... In the eyes of our American neighbours of the Western States, it is of paramount importance; and I think we may look upon the banks of the South Branch of the Saskatchewan as the great emi­grant route to British Columbia which will be eventually adopted."

The Last of England.

S.S. Sarmatian.

Hind's proposal to divert the waters of the south branch of the Saskatchewan met with opposition from S. J. Dawson, his col­league of the first division, who predicted that if this were at­tempted

"the plains of Red River would be converted into a Sea, and the Settlement swept into Lake Winnipeg."

The Dawson-Hind reports were published in Canada, and were also sent by Lord Monck, the Governor-General, to England, where they were republished by the British Government. Hind's story of his explorations was also published as an independent book in two volumes, with coloured illustrations.

The Red River settlement had no intention of being swept into Lake Winnipeg. It was making steady if slow progress towards prosperity, the chief handicap being lack of communication with the outer world.