This relief gave the Company a new lease of life and the work, which had never slackened, even though men had to wait for their pay, was forced ahead by the aggressive Van Horne, while Shaughnessy handled every dollar with such consummate skill that it seemed to do the work of two. But the terrific expenditure in construction on the North Shore and through the mountains, caused the twenty odd millions to melt like snow before the sun. Smashing the rocks and levelling up the chasms on the North Shore and finding a sure foundation in shaking and almost bottomless morasses which sucked down material like an insatiable undertow, all meant enormous unforeseen expenditure. The Company would not allow any careless work and, if necessary, the contractors would stay at one spot for months till the road-bed was absolutely secure. Van Horne was rushing to complete the railway, but he was too thorough a railroader to sacrifice security to speed in construction. Expense was of no consequence. He was going to “get the work done right and send in the bills to Stephen and Shaughnessy.”
Just at the juncture when the railway seemed in imminent danger of coming to a sudden halt because its coffers were again bare, and the Government was afraid that the country would not stand for any more assistance to be given to what some thought was a wild commercial venture, an event occurred which threw the Canadian Pacific into the limelight as an undertaking of immense Imperial value. That event was the Riel Rebellion, which Van Horne had foreseen as a possibility and concerning which he had warned the powers at Ottawa when he told them that if it did occur, he would carry troops from the East to the prairies in the space of a few days. Sir John Macdonald and the Government, with a strange pertinacity, born of the mysterious red tapeism of Regina officialdom, refused to think such an event possible. However, it came with sudden and deadly emphasis when at Duck Lake, in March, 1885, on the North Saskatchewan, a small force of civilians and police suffered heavily in a sort of rebel ambuscade. Fifteen years before, this same Riel had, at Fort Garry, run amuck, and then it had taken six months for the soldiers under Col. Wolseley, coming by land and water, to reach the scene. Now, in 1885, with the Lakes frozen and no chance of going through the United States with armed men, the whole middle West might be swept by the carnage of semi-savage rebels on the war path. The time had come for Van Horne to play a winning card, and he played it. The Government made frantic appeal to him because months before he had intimated his willingness to help in such an event. But before their appeal was actually known to the general public, Van Horne had trains ready with steam up at the centres in the East where troops would make their points of departure. He knew that there were gaps on the North Shore and that there would be hardships, but to reduce these to a minimum he stipulated that he and Shaughnessy and the Railway Company officials should have complete control of both transportation and commissariat. He always believed, for he had proven it by many a test, that when men were well fed with nourishing food and stimulated for special effort with strong black coffee, they could do and endure greatly. And so he would not leave the soldiers to the tender mercies of inexperienced quarter masters with meagre supplies on the bleak North Shore of Lake Superior.
In one or two places the soldiers had to march along the shore-ice on the lake. In other places they were taken by teams and sleighs, or else on flat cars over some hastily laid track. They had what might well be called a hard time over part of the way, but soldiers do not expect luxury on active service, and they got through in fewer days to Winnipeg than it had taken of months to accomplish in Wolseley’s expedition, years before. From Winnipeg the troops, with their Western comrades, were distributed by rail and trail over the plains as far as the mountains, and the rebellion was soon quelled. From that day the most fiery opponents of the North Shore section of the Railway, the chief point of critical attack, found their calling gone and had to subside. Some of them would still oppose the whole system through force of habit, but the extraordinary and unexpected service rendered by the Railway in a crisis time would make it comparatively easy for even a cautious Government to give temporary help to the Company, with the consent and approval of the grateful Canadian people. Not only so, but the Canadian Pacific Railway had thus suddenly become of such significance and value as an all-British route across the North American continent, that men in the Old Land who believed in the continuance of the Empire, realized as never before that a new factor in Imperialism had come into history. This railway was seen to be, not only a commercial transportation company which traversed a portion of an overseas Dominion, but a great link in the chain of an Empire that girdled the earth. It would no longer be ignored in the financial circles of London, where the centre of Empire stood.
Meanwhile, right on through the rebellion, the work was being pushed ahead in the mountains, although it was not generally known then that the Company at first had boldly thrust its spear-head against the embattled hills without very definite knowledge of how it was to get through beyond the Rockies. The Kicking-Horse Pass showed the way, along its flashing, frothing river, through the Rockies, but for some time there was doubt about how the Selkirk Range was to be pierced. So anxious was the Company about this problem that Mr. Sandford Fleming, the famous engineer, was summoned by cable from the Old Country to look into the situation. He journeyed by train to Calgary and went by trail through the Kicking Horse, but just then Major Rogers, a hard-bitten, adventurous man, acting on some information given by Walter Moberly years before, discovered the famous pass called Rogers’ Pass to this day. Rogers was an American engineer who, with his son Albert (after whom Albert Canyon was called by Principal Grant of Queen’s University, Secretary to Sandford Fleming on his journeys), had explored amid much hardships to find a pass through the Selkirks. When he did find it, the Company was so pleased that a bonus cheque for $5,000 was sent to Rogers. A few months afterwards Van Horne met Rogers and reminded him that he had never cashed the cheque. Rogers, who was well educated, but rough at times in temper and language, evidently had abundant sentiment withal. For he replied, “Do you think I would cash that cheque? I was not out there for money, but to have a hand in a big project. No, sir, I have that cheque framed in my brother’s house in Waterville, Minnesota, where my nephews and nieces can see it as a token of some work their old uncle did in his time.”
Contractors who became famous later on in various ways were at work on the mountain section. The work on the prairies had been child’s play compared to it. A good old Scotch elder who came in to see me at the Coast twenty years ago was amazed at the enormous task that had been accomplished. In political life in Manitoba he had attacked what people called “the ruinous expenditure” on the road. But he said to me then, in 1903, in Vancouver: “Now that I have seen it I wonder that men ever undertook the work at any price, and so far as I am concerned I am through with criticism of the expenditure on construction.” And then the good man added, “The fact is that if the good Lord had not bored through the mountains with rivers, there is not enough money in the Empire to build to the Coast.” There was much in what this honest man said that day.
The expenditure was almost incredible. Where the rivers ran, there was, for miles on end, the necessity for cutting into the solid rock to get room for the road-bed and trains. There were miles of snowsheds to be built, and tunnels through solid rock almost without number. Up the mountain sides there were built various devices to protect the road and make it safe from slides and avalanches. Rivers were deflected from their channels and retaining walls were built. When I first passed over the road, not many years after it was opened, there seemed to be leagues of trestles, now filled in or replaced by steel or tunnels. Everywhere there was need for the ceaseless flow of millions of money. But Van Horne, who knew all about the business, saw that nothing was left undone to make the road beyond criticism. And so well was the work done that once, shortly after the road was completed, Van Horne, who was taking some arbitrators over the mountains to value the government construction section, had the engineer run over fifty miles an hour to show these gentlemen “that the Company section was a real railroad even if the government sections were not.”
It was no wonder that with the vast expenditure indicated by the above paragraphs the Directors saw that they must raise some more millions or perish.
Accordingly, in 1885, when the Riel Rebellion, by reason of the service rendered by the Canadian Pacific Railway in transportation of troops, had been quelled, Stephen approached the Dominion Government again for assistance. The rebellion services of the railway had solidified the Government support in the House, which was then in session, and had pretty well silenced the Opposition. The assets of the Railway were already subject to a lien for the former loan, but the Government, besides a few minor concessions, finally allowed the Directors to issue $35,000,000 stock, of which it was to guarantee $20,000,000, the rest to be issued by the Railway Directors. Stephen went to London, not very hopefully, to sell this bond issue. The Directors in Canada waited anxiously to hear the result, for the bankruptcy of the road and of the Directors (though they cared less for that) was only hours away if Stephen’s mission failed. Sir Charles Tupper, then High Commissioner for Canada in London, that steadfast friend of the road, had done some most effective preparatory work with the famous banking house of the Barings, of which Lord Revelstoke was the head. Stephen had scarcely begun his explanation of the situation when Lord Revelstoke broke in and said, “We have been looking into the whole matter already. We are satisfied with the outlook in Canada and the future of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and will take over the whole issue of your stock at ninety-one.” Stephen was overjoyed, because the question of the solvency of the great railway was settled for all time. He sent an exultant cable at once to Canada. Mr. Angus and Mr. Van Horne were in the Board Room in Montreal when it was delivered. They read it with a sort of glad surprise too deep for words. They were matter-of-fact men, but they shook hands with some emotion. Then they threw some of the chairs about and danced around the room. The relief to the tension had come and they had to relax somehow. They were human.
They knew in that hour that the road would be completed. And out along the line in the great mountains there would be a station called Revelstoke. And where the steel met from the East and the West, there would be another station named “Craigellachie,” after the Gælic cablegram meaning “stand fast,” which Stephen, as we have already recorded, had sent to his cousin, Donald A. Smith (Strathcona), in the dark days some years before. The name would remind succeeding generations of the men whose steadfastness was like unto that of Craigellachie, the unshaken rock in the old glen of Strathspey.