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 [a]The Task of the Canadian Pacific] 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, [a]North West Passage by Land] 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 [a]The Pacific Terminus] 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.
CHAPTER X
Our Fathers and Mothers Come In
THE PEOPLE who now streamed in through the open door, who were they? Mostly Eastern Canadians. But who were these Eastern Canadians? We must look back a hundred years to find out.
When most of the English colonists to the south broke away from the Empire, many thousands of them considered this violent action wrong; and, without any doubt, if the object to be achieved was self-government, it could and would have been won later on without secession, as other colonists won it.