I know, I know...I've been laser-focused on the Champions Let's Read for a while, but I just remembered that this blog is about other things, too. A long time ago, I read a book by Canadian historian and author Pierre Berton on Vimy, the great Canadian triumph of World War One. It was a fantastic book, and I couldn't put it down. Berton was a great writer, and wrote a lot of books on Canadian history. I've collected quite a few, and I'm slowly making my way through them in the order that they were published. I'm not a fan of his social attitudes, but there's no denying his acumen for writing about Canada's past. This was not the first book on Canadian history he wrote, but it was the first time he set out to write a popular, narrative history.
The National Dream covers the period from 1871 to 1881 when the Trans-Canada Railroad was just that: A dream. It was the grand ambition of Sir John A. MacDonald, Canada's first Prime Minister. He had a vision of uniting British Columbia to Eastern Canada through a transcontinental railroad. He saw this as an absolute necessity to prevent America from expanding into the uncharted northwest, where Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and the Yukon are today. It was no secret that America had a policy of Manifest Destiny and considered the entire continent to be their birthright. MacDonald believed that without a railroad and a string of settlements across the prairies and all the way to BC, Canada would not long survive as an independent nation, but would eventually be absorbed into the United States.
The problem was that Canada was still a very young country; Confederation was only four years old, and the country consisted of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, a tiny part of Manitoba (which was made a province in 1870), and the Pacific colony of British Columbia, which was admitted as a province in 1871. One of the conditions for BC's addition to Confederation was the building of a railroad connecting the new province to the East. And there simply wasn't enough money available to make the railroad happen. The Americans had completed their transcontinental railroad in 1869, linking the prosperous East with the Wild West and California at an estimated cost of $60 million dollars, equal to about $1.2 billion today., with a track that was just under 1,800 miles long. Canada wasn't anywhere close to being able to afford a track that would be even longer, stretching from Toronto to Vancouver, just over 2,000 miles.
The issue of the railway was the dominant one in Canadian politics throughout the decade of the 1870s. The Pacific Scandal brought down MacDonald's government in 1873, leading to the first Liberal government in Canadian history under Alexander MacKenzie. The first actual work on the railroad was begun in 1875, but very little was accomplished, and MacDonald was swept back into power in 1878. Determined to make the railroad a reality, he sought financing in London and even in America. Finally, by early 1881, all the pieces seemed to be in place, and construction began in earnest in BC, in Winnipeg, and in Ontario.
The biggest challenges for the railroad were finding the best and quickest route through the Rocky Mountains, and figuring out how to build a railroad through the forbidding terrain of the Canadian Shield in Northern Ontario. Many surveyors traversed the Rockies seeking navigable passes through which a railway could be safely built. Chief among them was Walter Moberly, who was the first white man to see vast reaches of the Canadian Rockies. Moberly's surveying suggested that the best route through the Rockies would be through a northern route and Eagle Pass. This would have brought the railroad through what is now Edmonton, and land speculators had a field day staking claims and selling them to would-be settlers.
Sandford Fleming, the government's chosen Chief Engineer on the project, preferred a different pass through the Selkirk Mountains, the Yellowhead Pass. However, politics got in the way (don't they always?), and Fleming was dismissed in 1880 by Sir Charles Tupper, a member of MacDonald's cabinet and a future Prime Minister himself.
By the time the 1880s rolled around, the railway was still a pipe dream; an entire decade had been wasted with bureaucracy, financing difficulties, and personality conflicts among the surveyors, all of whom insisted that they had the best route mapped out. In the end, though, the railway would take a different route from all of them, and Canada would be forever changed. By 1881, the government finally had the people they needed lined up and ready to make the Canadian Pacific Railway a reality. But that, my friends, is a tale told in the next book.
Obviously, my brief summary isn't going to do justice to Berton's work. His meticulous research and narrative style made this book and its sequel (The Last Spike, 1971) Canadian best-sellers and inspired an eight-part TV miniseries in 1974 that was the highest-rated dramatic programming in CBC history. The entire series is available on YouTube for free, so it's worth checking out if you don't feel like sitting down and reading (but the book is better).
Anyway, that's my digression into one of my favorite topics, history. I'll be adding a review of The Last Spike soon, which tells the dramatic tale of how the CPR actually got built in record time. Until then, may all your dreams come true.
No comments:
Post a Comment