Copyright, Canada, 1924, by

THE RYERSON PRESS

ILLUSTRATIONS

The fascination for studying the genesis of things that exist seems to be universal. Men have an instinctive and urgent desire to find out how objects that are seen actually originated. Scientists and savages alike, for instance, are still hammering out theories as to the process by which the world was made, though to most of us the most ancient account is adequate. Once I knew an Indian boy on the prairie who was so curious to discover how the figure of a dog appeared at the centre of a large glass “marble” we were playing with, that when I had turned away for a moment, he broke it open with the back of a tomahawk. Similarly, we have known exploring scientists who spent laborious lives in the endeavour to find the sources of a great river.

To be indifferent to the beginnings of things which have become part of our lives, betokens either the calamitous absence of a thinking mind or that horrible satisfaction with present possession which ignores the toil and the tears and the sacrifices of past generations. To persons of such vacant or selfish natures all the explorers and the pioneers—the men whose souls yearned beyond the sky-line of their immediate surroundings—are of no particular account. The untrodden ways which daring pathfinders opened up with adventurous feet are of no consequence to the unthinking who settle comfortably on lands pre-empted by the blood-marked footsteps of the trailmakers.

It is because we are not of the number who are sodden with crass materialism and seared by the branding iron of greed, that we desire to learn the history of the things which minister to our continued existence and comfort in this great new day, the far-off vision of which made glad the brave seers and workers of earlier times.

These thoughts come to me now just as I am riding westward on the public observation car of a Canadian Pacific Railway train, through the great mountains that are piled up on the sunset verge of the Dominion of Canada. The traditional weariness of travel is practically banished by these wheeled palaces, which that living, breathing, throbbing locomotive, under the skilful direction of her driver, draws through passes and tunnels and glorious river canyons down to the Western sea. And I thought of how, in times gone by, that Western Sea had been in the dreams of gallant men who hoped to reach its shores some day. I recalled how noble sea-rovers, like Henry Hudson and Sir John Franklin, had thrown away their lives in the attempt to find a North-west Passage by water across the North American continent, from the Atlantic. And I remembered, too, how Alexander MacKenzie, the fur-trader, starting by trail from near the old Peace River Crossing, had gone over the mountains on foot, and how he wrote on a rock by the Pacific the amazing inscription, “Alexander MacKenzie, from Canada, by land, July 22nd, 1793.” We call that inscription amazing because behind it and flashing through it is the story of an invincible will in heroic action and the record of physical daring unsurpassed in the palmiest days of the athletes and gladiators in Greece and Rome.

Thus did Alexander MacKenzie blaze the trail across the mountains. If the North-west Passage by water had proved a myth, MacKenzie demonstrated the reality of a passage by land which, in the years afterwards, others would follow. Strange, too, it was that in the same year, 1793, Captain George Vancouver, an English sea-rover, dropped the anchor of his wooden, white-winged vessel in the great harbour where there is now a queenly city bearing his name, on the West Coast of Canada.

Little did these adventurous pathfinders who discovered mountain passes and ocean lanes think that, before a century had passed, a group of men with vision and courage would follow the inspiring example of the explorers by land and sea, and achieve not only the crossing of a continent, but the girdling of the earth in a magnificent transportation system. Yet despite the gloomy prophecies of failure uttered by sceptics who declared that the thing could not be done, the Canadian Pacific Railway has driven its iron horses through the mountains to stand by the Western Sea. And from the land terminals, East and West, this unique organization has set its vessels on the tides of all the oceans of the world, as well as upon the gentler waters of our inland seas.

There were many weighty reasons for the building of this railway and the launching of its great ships, as well as highly important considerations which demand its continued efficiency in our times. Let us study them together in this book, which, as an eye witness of the genesis and development of the railway, though never at any time connected with it, I have written and published independently, as a humble contribution to our history as a British Dominion. Like my preceding books, it is sent out because generations arise which ought to know with what hazard and struggle on the part of the pioneers the foundations of Canada were laid.

The name of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company fixes in our minds the original objects of the road. The Railway was particularly the outcome of a new national consciousness in Canada, arising out of Confederation, and it was designed with the special idea of knitting the older parts of Canada in the East with the newer provinces and territories which were growing up in the wide West, and which would some day form an integral part of a Dominion whose Western border would rest on the Pacific tide. “Westward the star of empire takes its way” is a saying which has found historical support in the descent of the centuries from the immemorial East, which is now a graveyard of ancient kingdoms. And once the prows of exploring vessels struck the Eastern shores of this new continent of America, there were unresting souls that pressed onward throughout the years till they reached the pillars of the sunset beside the alluring Western sea.

In those earlier years Spain was a great sea-going nation and the West Coast map of the United States is dotted all over with Spanish nomenclature. This is found also to some degree on the long coastline of what is now British Columbia, though in this latter region the British element was always more pronounced owing to the British blood of the early explorers, both by sea and land, and to the passionate patriotism of British-born men who were in the employ of the great fur-trading organizations. In this connection it is interesting to recall the origin of the name British Columbia. The territory now covered by the province consisted originally of Vancouver Island and other islands and the mountain mainland, at one time known as New Caledonia. It was good Queen Victoria who gave the name of British Columbia to the great mainland area, and this name was later extended to include Vancouver Island when both were united in one colony in 1866. The Queen wrote in 1858 to Sir E. Bulwer Lytton, statesman and novelist too, that the only name she found on the map of the mainland common to the whole area was Columbia, but as there was a Columbia in South America and as the United States people called their country Columbia, at least in poetry, the Queen thought that British Columbia would be the most suitable name. And British Columbia it remains to this day, proud to have been named by our noble Queen and to have sprung from so illustrious an ancestry. Later on, British Columbia, as we shall see, proved magnetic enough to draw the steel of the great railway across the continent to the Western Ocean.

On the general subject, it may be well to remind our readers that a railway with its locomotive steam engine is a comparatively modern arrangement for travel, although trucks of various kinds were wheeled on tracks in the coal mining regions of England two centuries ago. But George Stephenson, rugged old Scot, with his primitive engine, the “Rocket,” began as late as 1829, a revolution in modes of travel. There lived in Manitoba, some years ago, an old railroader, Charles Whitehead, Senior, who was said to have taken a hand in making the “Rocket” go. Stephenson’s invention was not a flash in the pan, or, to change the figure, it did not “go up like a rocket and come down like a stick.” It stayed, and not only won the prize of £500 for a steam engine that would actually run and draw, but it became the fruitful progenitor of the moguls and other colossal “fire-wagons” which rush to and fro on a gridironed earth in our time. Of course, Stephenson, like all other originators of new means of transport since the days of Noah, had to bear the sneers and jocularities of the idle crowd. Some one asked him what would happen if a cow got on the track, just as Nehemiah’s enemies suggested disaster to his wall if a fox ran upon it. But the grim old Scot only replied that it “would be bad for the coo,” and went on to perfect his engine. Hence came the graceful iron horses which, with steaming breath, race along the steel trails in all countries in our time.

Canada had not begun as a Confederation when the first prophecy—an astonishing foretelling—of the Canadian Pacific Railway was made by Joseph Howe, in Halifax, in 1851. Canada was then simply the old Central Provinces of Ontario and Quebec. Down by the Atlantic, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were, in a sense, isolated British possessions, which in many ways were in closer touch with the United States on the Atlantic than with the Canada of that day. Joseph Howe had been to London and received assurances that the Intercolonial Railway would be built to link up the Atlantic Maritime areas with Quebec and Ontario. But Joseph Howe, orator, poet and statesman, saw beyond that limited plan, and in his address in Halifax in 1851 outlined in his own masterly way the future of British North America and its immensely important possibilities. We quote a passage of this remarkable address as follows:

To some who heard this remarkable appeal and forecast it may have sounded like the effort of a rhetorician. In reality it was the deliberate and well-grounded hope of a man who was a life-long student of public affairs, who had all the passion of a patriot and the fervor of a seer, and who desired to see a great British North America in unified devotion to the ideals of the British people. The fact that Joseph Howe, in later years, differed from others as to whether this Federation should be brought about without a plebiscite of the people of Nova Scotia, does not in any way detract from the extraordinary fact that in 1851 he prophesied a transcontinental railway, which even in 1871 some prominent public men denounced as a mad and impossible undertaking. One has to confess that, even twenty years after Howe’s prophecy, the thing did look impossible; but not only has the apparently impossible project of a railroad from ocean to ocean been accomplished, but that trans-continental has become part of a world-encircling transportation system which is a marvel of efficiency. The Canadian Pacific Railway not only welded together the scattered areas under the flag on the North American Continent, but it has taken its place as an organization of Imperial significance and value in peace and war, as many events have proven. How and by whom this modern wonder-work has been done it is our hope and purpose to make known in some imperfect, but earnest, way in the chapters that follow.

Though planned in the East, where statesmen and financiers were facing the problems of the New Dominion, it was in the wide West-land that the need of this transcontinental railway was most manifest, and it was in the West that the road first appeared. Hence we must study enough of the history of the West to see the stage set for the entry of the steel trail. Or, to put this in another way, we should find how the West had developed so as to successfully challenge the attention of Eastern statesmen and effectively call for a large Federal expenditure, in order that it might become linked up with the already developed East for the welfare of the whole Dominion. With this in view we shall, in the next chapter, meet those who, before the coming of the railway, began to make for the West a place on the map of history.

Salvaged from a “Highland Clearance” in the North of Scotland, and brought out to the Red River country in 1812, a colony of Scottish crofters settling midway across British America became the corner-stone of the stately edifice now known as Western Canada. These people were brought out after a harsh landlordism had displaced them from their tenant farms and replaced them by sheep, as more remunerative occupants of the strath. The plight of these evicted tenants, whose humble homes were burned to bar their return, excited the compassionate attention of that gentle, but heroic, nobleman, the Earl of Selkirk, and he, obtaining a controlling interest in the Hudson’s Bay Company, brought them to the Red River and placed them on land there. Lord Selkirk’s name liveth for evermore, not only because his friend, Sir Walter Scott, wrote that he never knew a man more fitted for high-souled undertakings, but because the colony he then planted was destined to prove to the world that the West was a land worth possessing as an illimitable area which would some day be the granary of the Empire. Moreover, those early settlers laid foundations for the future in religion and education. They builded churches and they erected schools. They were of that strong creed which believed that without moral sanctions and intelligence no country’s business future could be secure. With these elements in a community, prosperity will be fostered and of such a country great hopes will be entertained.—

The steady progress of that old colony on the Red River and the somewhat hectic development of British Columbia, the latter not through colonization so much as by gold rushes and trade exploitations, were the leading factors in drawing the attention of Eastern statesmen to the enormous possibilities of the West. In consequence the Canada that was formed by the four old provinces in the East felt that the wide West-land must also be brought into the Dominion that was to stretch from sea to sea.

As one born in that old Selkirk Colony, where my father was one of the original settlers, I confess to finding some amusement in the theories of later arrivals as to the opening up of the West. Some, for instance, allege that the Hudson’s Bay Company had kept the West closed against colonization and gave out the impression that the country was not fit for agriculture. In refutation of that charge we have the fact that it was the Hudson’s Bay Company that founded the first colony and protected it through all the difficult years till it demonstrated that the country was worth while. And it was the Hudson’s Bay men at posts all over the vast North-west who cultivated plots around their posts and sent to scientific schools evidences of the country’s fertility. It matters not that Sir George Simpson, or some other individual man of the old company, said that the prairie country was exposed to dangers as to grain crops. In our own day people in Eastern Canada said the same thing and commiserated their friends who left Ontario to settle in what they called “hyper-borean regions.” The real fact is that settlers would not come into the country until some railway communication was assured, and no lesser force than that of Confederation in Canada could undertake to build a railway into the West. Until that was done the country was closed by an isolation which could not be remedied except as indicated above. Few people would care to face the hardships and sufferings of the Selkirk colonists, who were nearly ten years in the country before they got enough from the soil to furnish subsistence. But they, as stated already, endured till they demonstrated the value of the country. And when the statesmen who saw and understood, conceived the plan of the Canadian Pacific Railway to traverse and develop the West I feel that a new glory was shed on the work of the old pioneers. I am glad to remember that my father, one of the last survivors of that early colony, lived long enough to see the iron horses pass the Red River on the steel trail to the Pacific across the plains where he had seen the buffalo roaming, and on over the mountains where some of his intimate friends, like Robert Campbell, of the Yukon, had gone on their great explorations. These early settlers had done their part, and rejoiced to know that others were making real the things of which they, in the pioneer days, had so daringly dreamed.

A quite extraordinary linking up of events makes it possible for us to say that, historically, the old Red River colony was not only by its demonstration of the value of the West a procuring cause of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, but that the old colony was the means of bringing into special prominence, and enthusiasm for the West, the famous engineer, Sandford Fleming, who directed all the preliminary surveys for this pioneer trans-continental road.

It happened on this wise. Fleming’s interest in the problem of transportation was known to Mr. James Ross and Mr. William Coldwell, both of whom I remember as publishers of the Nor’Wester, the first paper in the Red River colony. These newspapermen had large influence locally, and got the colonists interested in making an application to the Imperial and Colonial Governments for a roadway from the Eastern Provinces to the Red River and on to the Rocky Mountains. The idea was to have a through route on British soil, and the plan was to begin with a wagon-road as the forerunner of a transcontinental railway. Mr. Sandford Fleming, though at that time he had not visited the Red River colony, had advocated the undertaking as far back as 1858, in a lecture which he published. So it came that when, in 1863, Mr. Fleming severed his connection with railway building in Ontario, he was asked, on behalf of the Red River colonists, to present and support a memorial to the Canadian and Imperial Governments praying them for the establishment of communication between East and West. The memorial was prepared by James Ross and William Coldwell, and bears the mark of their literary skill as well as their strong devotion to British interests. After outlining the plan which the memorial desired to see adopted, it goes on to indicate that such a road with its commerce and traffic would fill “Central British America with an industrious, loyal people. Thus both politically and commercially the opening up of this country, and the making of a national highway through it, would immensely subserve Imperial interests, and contribute to the stability and the glorious prestige of the British Empire.” This memorial was adopted by the Red River colonists at a mass meeting—a fact which suggests that despite their isolation of half a century there were men amongst them who had the vision of “a grand confederation of loyal and flourishing provinces skirting the United States’ frontier and commanding at once the Atlantic and the Pacific.” Verily, the colonization plan of the high-souled Lord Selkirk, which some men of his time called visionary and Utopian, was justifying itself in these Red River settlers, who not only laid a foundation of solid moral worth in a new land and demonstrated its great resources, but were also doing their part in welding together the links of a far-flung Empire under the British flag. This gives the noble founder of the colony, as well as the colony itself, an assured niche in the temple of our country’s fame.

Mr. Fleming was very enthusiastic over this memorial, and presented it to the Hon. John Sandfield Macdonald, then Premier of the Canadian Government. He accompanied it by a strong appeal in writing to Mr. Macdonald, in which he visioned the great importance of the road across the continent. Immediately thereafter, Mr. Fleming, at the request of the Red River people, proceeded to the Old Country, where he presented the memorial to the Duke of Newcastle, then Colonial Secretary. From his visit to Canada three years before, with the Prince of Wales, the Duke was familiar with the situation and discussed it with Mr. Fleming with great interest and freedom.

This visit to the Duke of Newcastle in 1863, while not productive of immediate results, was, according to the opinion of Mr. Lawrence J. Burpee, who writes an excellent biography of Mr. Fleming, the turning-point in Fleming’s career. It made him an Empire figure and intensified his worthy ambition to aid in building and consolidating into one vast commonwealth the scattered colonies under the red cross flag. Mr. Fleming’s later achievements in this regard are known to history. They brought him the esteem of his generation, the appreciation of his sovereign and the well-won and worthily-borne honour of knighthood. Mr. Fleming had barely returned to Toronto from his visit to the Colonial Secretary in the interests of a transcontinental roadway, when he was summoned by the Premier, John Sandfield Macdonald, to come to Quebec, then the Canadian capital. The result of that visit was that Mr. Fleming, with the cordial support of all the governments concerned, including the Imperial Government, represented by the Duke of Newcastle, was placed in charge of the surveys for the projected Intercolonial Railways in 1864. With his work on that important undertaking, till its completion, we cannot deal in this story. But we have traced the connection from the old Red River colony in the West to Mr. Fleming’s visit abroad on its behalf—a visit that led in large measure to his work on the Intercolonial, which, in turn, led to his being appointed in 1871 to the gigantic position of engineer-in-chief of the proposed transcontinental, the Canadian Pacific Railway. All this was preliminary and was part of Canada’s approach to a colossal task. In the next chapter we shall look more closely into the inception of an enterprise which now belts the globe.

In an early chapter of the most famous of all Books, reference is made to the inhabitants of the earth at a certain period, in the descriptive statement, “There were giants in those days.” This is generally accepted as indicating the physical stature and strength of those ancient men. But there have been periods since that time concerning which we could repeat the statement in the light of their distinctive achievements, not necessarily because of the physical prowess, but because of the mental and moral energy of the men who wrought great deeds.

Such days, it seems to me, have been found in Canadian history in the period of the heroic men and women who pioneered in all the provinces, in the period when strong men grappled with the problems of confederating the scattered colonies of British North America into one Dominion, and in that period when the young Dominion, with only a few millions of people, undertook and accomplished, with incredible speed, the gigantic task of binding the provinces together by a band of steel. It is, briefly, with the confederation achievement, but, much more extendedly, with the building of the first transcontinental that our present writing deals. The battle of the pioneers was principally against poverty and climatic conditions. The battle for Confederation was intensified by political, racial and even religious issues, though ultimately none of these was much affected, as provision was made for the autonomy of the Provinces in their own affairs. The battle for the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway was first of all between political gladiators who differed as to the practicability and value of it. But when construction actually began, the struggle was against rival interests, and difficult financial conditions, as well as against such terrific natural obstacles that the undertaking was looked on by some as the very climax of engineering impossibility. Now that the smoke of battle has cleared away and that both Confederation and the Railway are running smoothly, we can look back and see the giants who fought victoriously to create the conditions we now enjoy. Some of these great men did not live to see the realization of their dreams, but they died in the faith that their dreams were so good that they would come true some time. Like the gallant soldiers of all time, they fell, still gripping the sword-hilt and cheering their comrades on to victory. Let us be grateful enough to halt for a moment with bowed heads and lay a wreath of memory on their honoured graves. Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war, and Canada must not forget her heroes in either.

There were several causes operating, midway in the last century, to lead the older Canada of Ontario and Quebec, and also the Maritime areas of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, to consider the advisability of federating together for the good of the whole. The commercial power of the United States had such a magnetic pull upon some of the provinces that the tie which held these Provinces to Britain was being subjected to some strain. Moreover, the Imperial Government noticed with some anxiety that political prejudices and feeling between the various parts of the British possessions made any concerted plan for military action difficult to accomplish. Accordingly, as it is now known and can now be told, Lord Monck, who was the Governor-General in the “sixties,” quietly used some pressure to keep Confederation before the minds of public men in the various parts of the country. Besides all that, there was very considerable difficulty in carrying on government in the Canada of Ontario and Quebec, owing to racial differences and double leadership, which meant an almost constant danger of legislative deadlock.

Moreover, the British possessions from the St. Lawrence to the Pacific were like a dumbbell, big at the ends and weak in the middle, as a Westerner once said. There were the immense areas of older Canada and the still more immense areas west of Lake Superior—but the North Shore of that inland sea was a wilderness of unproductive rock where no link of settlement would seem possible. Hence, as the aforesaid Westerner expressed it, “Canada would break off in the middle unless we linked it up with the steel trail.” There was much truth in that statement in those early days and highly important truth it was. Many, in our day, cannot realize how swiftly inter-travel and inter-trade over the pioneer railway across Canada brought the East and the West together.

All these considerations, realized out of actually existing or foreseen conditions, impelled the statesman of Canada in the 60’s to take definite steps towards confederating the old provinces and then annexing the vast territories all the way to the Pacific Coast. And here entered the giants. Thus, for instance, in 1864 that great tribune of the people, Mr. George Brown, of the Toronto Globe, reported in favour of Confederation from a committee of the Canadian Legislature. About the same time the Legislatures in Nova Scotia, mainly through the efforts of Dr. (later Sir Charles) Tupper; in New Brunswick, through the influence of Mr. Samuel L. Tilley; in Prince Edward Island, by the exertions of the Hon. W. H. Pope, passed resolutions appointing delegates to a Conference in Charlottetown for the purpose of discussing a uniting of the Maritime Provinces. When that Conference met in Charlottetown a deputation from Ontario and Quebec was received consisting of unusually strong men, namely, John A. Macdonald, George Brown, George E. Cartier, A. T. Galt, T. D’Arcy McGee, Alexander Campbell and Hector L. Langevin. As a result of the Charlottetown meeting larger horizons loomed upon the vision of that remarkable gathering. The souls of the men who then assembled yearned beyond the sky-line of their own immediate surroundings and, thinking of the extent of British Possessions in North America, they were inspired and attracted by the greater task of confederating them all into one great Dominion from sea to sea. It was a tremendous task for that early day, but the men who faced it were giants who could not rest satisfied with being cabinned and cribbed in a narrow circumference, but who said:

After some discussion, the Charlottetown Conference adjourned to meet as a larger gathering in Quebec City on October 10th, 1864—a red-letter day not only in the history of Canada, but of the British Empire and the world. The object of the Quebec Conference was as stated above; and therefore there were men there from all the then organized British Provinces. These were men who could have filled places in the “Mother of Parliaments” at the world’s metropolis, but who at the Quebec meeting were engaged in the, perhaps, more difficult undertaking of bringing into being, out of diverse elements, a new nation within the Empire. These men were “The Fathers of Confederation,” and the famous picture of that conference should be in every Canadian home. Etienne P. Tache, who once said that the last gun fired in North America for British connection would be fired by a French-Canadian, was chairman. From Ontario and Quebec came John A. Macdonald, George Brown, George E. Cartier, A. T. Galt, William McDougall, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Oliver Mowat, Alexander Campbell, James Cockburn, Hector L. Langevin, and Jean C. Chapais. From Nova Scotia there were Charles Tupper, W. A. Henry, Jonathan McCully and R. B. Dickey. From New Brunswick came Samuel L. Tilley, John M. Johnston, Charles Fisher, Peter Mitchell, E. B. Chandler, W. H. Steeves and John H. Gray; Prince Edward Island was represented by Colonel Gray, Edward Palmer, W. H. Pope, George Coles, Edward Whalen, T. H. Haviland and A. A. Macdonald. Newfoundland sent F. B. T. Carter and Ambrose Shea, though it was not yet to come into Confederation.

It is not our purpose, in the present writing, to dwell on this great meeting beyond saying that it led to the Confederation of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in 1867. Prince Edward Island entered in 1873 and the Western prairie country and British Columbia in 1870 and 1871. The two latter entered with somewhat reluctant feet; Manitoba, retarded by Louis Riel’s stand against the incoming of Canada lest the rights of the natives should be ignored; and British Columbia, unready to come in unless the railway across the continent to the Pacific Coast was guaranteed within a given time. These difficulties were finally overcome, but the details do not belong to this story. Suffice it to say that Confederation being accomplished, the new sense of national unity led to combination in the immense undertaking of a railway from sea to sea. The courageous facing of such an enormous task had no precedent in the business history of the modern world. The big Republic to the South of us has done some amazing things, such as the Panama Canal in recent years, but even that commercially daring country only attempted a transcontinental railway when it had nearly forty millions of people. Canada undertook the task when her population was less than four millions. To the onlooking world the attempt must have appeared like “a forlorn hope”—a sort of a “Charge of the Light Brigade” against batteries bristling with obstacles of a wholly unprecedented kind. But there are always some men who are unafraid, and the dream of seers was to be realized. Once Confederation had been accomplished, a transcontinental railway became a national necessity. This was true not only from the standpoint of politics and trade, but from the standpoint also of law and order in the far-flung country. It will be remembered that Louis Riel started a revolt against the incoming of Canadian authority in 1869, and that he held high carnival in the West till Colonel Garnet Wolseley and his soldiers reached Fort Garry from the East, nearly a year after the Riel outbreak started. All this period was not consumed in travel; but it had taken three months’ steady travel overland, after mobilization in the East, before Wolseley reached the scene of Riel’s revolt. The whole Western country might have been swept by the rebel chief’s revolt in that time, and the necessity of swifter communication between the different parts of Canada became painfully apparent. And so, when British Columbia came into Confederation in 1871, there was an understanding that the railway from the East to the Pacific should begin in two years and be finished in ten. This daring pledge was given by Sir John A. Macdonald and his Government at Ottawa, despite the fact that a distinguished explorer and engineer, Capt. Palliser, sent out by the Imperial Government, had reported after four years on the ground, that on account of the mountains being impassable, a transcontinental railway could not be built from sea to sea on British territory. But Sir John Macdonald went ahead and sought to interest some big business men who might form a company to build the Canadian Pacific to the Western sea.

At that time Sir Hugh Allan, head of the Allan line of steamships, was probably the most able and prominent business man in Canada. He was not only interested in steamships on the Atlantic, but had acquired railway interests as well. There is no doubt that Sir Hugh Allan had been pressing upon men in public life the project of a transcontinental railway, which he might lead in building, with the further idea, no doubt, of having another line of steamers on the Pacific. This was a worthy enough ambition for a great Canadian. There is no reason to think that Sir Hugh Allan was mercenary or avaricious, for he had no need of more wealth than he possessed. In any case he, being of the same political party as Sir John Macdonald, as well as a man of great ability and financial power, was one of those in line as a possibility for such a big task.

Accordingly Allan formed a company to build the railway. So also did Mr. D. L. Macpherson and a group of Toronto capitalists, who alleged that Allan was in league with American interests in a degree that would militate against the success of the Canadian Pacific as a Canadian road. Sir John Macdonald tried in vain to get these two projected companies to amalgamate. Finally it seemed to be settled that a new company should be formed of Canadians and that Allan would have control. He was spending money with a lavish hand and when the Dominion election was held in 1872 he furnished the large sum of $160,000 for campaign funds to Macdonald, Cartier and Langevin. It is known that Allan had always contributed to the campaign funds of the party, as others did, but the fact that these campaign funds in 1872 were contributed at a time when a huge contract was pending, made the whole transaction look dangerous. All campaign funds are legally and morally wrong, and the fact that they were customary and that everybody knows they are customary, does not make them right.

In this particular case, Cartier, who was then mentally as well as physically broken down, and who, contrary to Macdonald’s advice, ran for an impossible constituency, where he was defeated, seems to have made the largest demands on Allan. It seems clear also that Cartier held out to Allan, hopes of the contract. But it is also clear that the other leaders got certain sums which they used in the campaign. The Macdonald government was elected. After the election a new company, called the Canadian Pacific, was formed, with representative men from all the Provinces as directors. That new board chose Allan as President, it is said, without any pressure from the Government. This is not unlikely, as Allan was, as we have said, the biggest business man in Canada at the time. To this company the Government granted a charter to build the Canadian Pacific, but American interests were to be excluded as the Government insisted. Allan agreed to this and repaid the money the Americans had advanced. The New York men, of course, were annoyed at this and gave the opponents of the Macdonald Government some hints as to those campaign funds from Allan. Then Allan’s personal correspondence with American interests during the election year was stolen by a clerk in the office of Allan’s solicitor, Mr. J. J. C. Abbott, and, being made public, raised a tremendous political storm.

When the House of Commons met the atmosphere was tense and electric. Only a few days elapsed before Mr. L. S. Huntingdon, for the Opposition, moved for the investigation of the charges that were floating around in regard to these campaign funds, the suggestion being that Sir Hugh Allan got the railway contract in return for his monetary contributions. On an immediate vote the Government was sustained, but there was an uneasy feeling abroad and men of independent mould were breaking away from party ties. Sir John Macdonald, who saw the situation with his usual political sagacity, himself moved for the appointment of an investigating commission, and the House adjourned till that commission would be ready to report. When the House met in October, 1873, the Hon. Alexander Mackenzie, leader of the Opposition, moved a vote of non-confidence and supported it by quoting from the report of the commission. The debate in the House was hot. Charles Tupper, the “war horse of Cumberland”—a masterful debater, who later was the tremendous drive wheel of the railway project—supported the Government, but Huntingdon replied that the Government had kept itself in power by the lavish use of money from men who were desiring contracts. Sir John A. Macdonald spoke for nearly five hours in defence of his action, dealing with the whole history of the Canadian Pacific Railway. He made a special appeal for support in order that East and West might be connected by rail and the whole of Canada developed. Sir John, though at no stage of his career a great orator, was possessed of a magnetic manner and could coin phrases that had indescribable force. Such, for instance, was the expression he used once at a great mass meeting in Toronto, when he said dramatically, “A British subject I was born—a British subject I will die.” On this occasion, in 1873, in the House, when he made explanation of his policy in regard to the railway contract, he closed his five hours’ address in the words: “But, Sir, I commit myself, the Government commits itself, to the hands of this House; and far beyond this House, it commits itself to the country at large. We have faithfully done our duty. We have fought the battle of Confederation. We have fought the battle of unity. We have had party strife, setting Province against Province. And more than all, we have had, in the greatest Province, every prejudice and sectional feeling that could be arrayed against us. I throw myself on this House; I throw myself on this country; I throw myself on posterity, and I believe that, notwithstanding the many failings of my life, I shall have the voice of this country rallying around me. And, Sir, if I am mistaken in that, I can confidently appeal to a higher court—to the court of my own conscience, and to the court of posterity. I leave it to this House with the utmost confidence. I am equal to either fortune. I can see past the decision of this House, either for or against me, but, whether it be for or against me, I know, and it is no vain boast of me to say so, for even my enemies will admit that I am no boaster—that there does not exist in Canada a man who has given more of his time, more of his heart, more of his wealth, or more of his intellect and power, such as they may be, for the good of this Dominion of Canada.”

This speech was listened to by a full house and crowded galleries, amongst those present being Lord Roseberry, then on a visit to Canada. Sir John closed his speech about two o’clock in the morning, and the Hon. Edward Blake rose to reply. Blake was probably the ablest and most massively intellectual man that Canada has produced. He lacked the magnetism of Sir John, but had the power, almost to a fault, of dealing with a subject in such detail that when he was through with it there was little left to be said. Mr. Blake was at that time quite sceptical as to the practicability of a transcontinental railway, anyway; but that night in the House of Commons he concentrated his tremendous argumentative oratory against the Government for having, as he alleged, won the election with campaign funds from interested parties.

There was doubt as to the result in the House till some of the independent members who might ordinarily have supported the Government began to indicate otherwise. Curiously enough, Mr. Donald A. Smith (afterwards Lord Strathcona), the man who, later on, drove the last spike in the Canadian Pacific Railway, under the Premiership of this same Sir John Macdonald, in 1885, was the member who really dealt the Government its knockout blow in 1873 in the House of Commons. No one knew what the course of Mr. Smith, who was never a party man, would be, and when he rose to speak every one listened with strained attention. His opening words seemed to favour the Government, but he was simply absolving Sir John Macdonald from personal blame. Here is the report of what Mr. Smith said: “With respect to the transaction between the Government and Sir Hugh Allan, I do not consider that the First Minister took the money with any corrupt motive. I feel that the leader of the Government is incapable of taking money from Sir Hugh Allen for corrupt purposes. I would be most willing to vote confidence in the Government (loud cheers from the Government side), if I could do so conscientiously (loud cheers from the Opposition). It is with very great regret that I cannot do so. For the honour of the country, no Government should exist that has a shadow of suspicion resting on them, and for that reason I could not support them.” (Renewed Opposition cheers.) In the afternoon of that day, November 5th, 1873, Sir John A. Macdonald informed the House that he had placed his resignation in the hands of the Governor-General and that the Hon. Alexander Mackenzie was called upon to form a new administration.

Sir John Macdonald had resigned without waiting for a vote of the House and no one to this day knows just how it would have divided. But the feeling in the country was hot and, like a wise man, he bowed to the inevitable. He said that someday the people would understand and call him back to power. The fact that they did call him back five years later astounded his political foes, one of whom had said in the House, during the debate, that Sir John “had fallen like Lucifer, never to rise again.” But he did rise, to the surprise of many. The fact that he came back later on was due, in some degree, to his personal magnetism. But it was also due to the fact that people knew that Sir John had not profited in any personal way and that he and Sir Hugh Allan had become almost obsessed with the idea that the continuance of Sir John in office at that time was absolutely necessary to the opening up and development of Canada. They acted accordingly, as if the end they had in view justified the methods they adopted. Moreover, it was shown that Sir John had definitely told Allan that he would not give the railway contract to him, but to an amalgamation of the two companies. Allan said in connection with the whole matter: “The plans I propose are the best for the interests of the Dominion and in urging them I am doing a patriotic action.”

In the meantime, when Sir John resigned, Mackenzie took office and, in a general election shortly afterwards, swept the country. Sir Hugh Allan, unable to raise capital in the presence of the political earthquake and the business depression, threw up the charter for building the Canadian Pacific Railway, and a new programme had to be adopted. For the time being the curtain had to be rung down on the gigantic project.