Two years before this, a former brakeman and superintendent of the Credit Valley Railway had been sent to Winnipeg as superintendent of the western lines of the C.P.R.—he became Sir William Whyte. In the morning, on discovery of the doings at Headingly, and on instructions from Van Horne, Mr. Whyte took a gang of men to tear up the diamond. The attorney-general had sworn in twenty special constables who were guarding the “jewel”, as the diamond was called.
The defenders were in charge of ex-poundkeeper Cox. Whyte told him he would remove the diamond at any cost, though he was unwilling to use violence. Cox prepared to resist, but a punch in the eye from a warmly loyal C.P.R. navvy changed his mind.
The diamond was removed and hauled in triumph to the C.P.R. yards, and the battle of Fort Whyte was on, with General Whyte commanding his forces from his private car. An engine was ditched at the crossing, and Whyte stayed by, with two hundred and fifty men from the C.P.R. shops to see that the supporters of the Manitoba Government didn’t move it. In his car were about twenty special constables.
Joe Martin and several high provincial officers were on the ground. He caused the provincial chief of police to inform Whyte that the appointments of his special police had been canceled. A handy magistrate swore them in again. More men were brought up by the provincial powers, and it seemed as if they would attempt to make the crossing afresh. Whyte attached a hose to his locomotive, which stood close to the ditched engine, and said he would turn live steam on any gang which tried to work against him. It was impossible for the provincialists to get up steam against such steam; and so closed a perfectly Martinesque day.
The double dare continued for five days of venomous but harmless hostility. Then Martin swore in a hundred and twenty constables and called out the military, under Colonel Villiers, who pitched their tents on the battlefield. A threat was made to lay the diamond further down the line, and Whyte built a fence, and kept his watchful forces waiting behind it.
A battalion of farmers appeared carrying sundry woodware. They talked of lynching “Smooth William”, but retired, discerning that valour may be compounded with discretion. Whyte vowed that he would stay there as long as the crossing was unauthorized even if he had to tie up the C.P.R. from East to West to preserve its rights.
For a fortnight the armies faced each other, and then the C.P.R. tired of waiting on Ottawa, sought an injunction restraining the provincial road from trespass. The courts refused the injunction, Superintendent Whyte called off his engines, his cars and his men, and Fort Whyte went into the history of bloodless campaigns.
In the Van Horne biography the episode is called “as merry a game of bluff as he had ever known.” That there wasn’t a serious casualty list was due to the inherent good temper of men on both sides—perhaps most of all to the imperturbability of Mr. Whyte, who was on the whole, the West’s most outstanding citizen for more than a quarter of a century, and who wasn’t called “Smooth William” for nothing.
One could not count the ambitious railway schemes that were conceived or cradled in Winnipeg during the eighties and nineties; some born to blush unseen, some to waste their prospects on the prairie air, and some to suffer a dolorous existence till they were gathered to the boundless bosom of the C.P.R. Often enough, the poorer the outlook of an enterprise, the more grandiose was its name.