Building the Canadian Pacific Railroad: Part 1 - "Insane Recklessness"

The logo for the CPR. The
beaver is such a nobel animal; a
beautiful furry rodent-thing.

People say Canadian history isn't interesting, and quite frankly, a fair few times they're correct. I place most of the blame on the manner in which it's taught in schools and how that breeds total disregard for the mixed bag of interesting and mind numbingly boring Canadian facts as if they're all the latter and none of the former. There's plenty of absolutely insane stuff that happens in our past, much of which is covered by Canada's own Pierre Berton, a leading historical author that has been praised for making the subject matter almost as if it's a story, making it readable and lively. He's also been criticized for making the subject matter almost as if it's a story, playing a touch fast and loose with the facts. Regardless of opinions, I read what turned out to be a fairly arduous journey through The National Dream, Berton's book on the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway and all the politics leading up to it. It wasn't a a bad read, but it did have the tendency of many passionate historians to overwhelm you with facts that are only relevant if you're reading so in depth on the topic as to base your life around it. What I'm trying to say is I found little interest in the colour of the wagon that crossed the street on July 14th, 1869 - it was likely just brown, anyways.

Regardless of being perhaps a touch too well researched, falling much the way of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, the subject matter in and of itself is actually fascinating. Canada decided it was going to build the greatest railroad of all time when the country is only four - a mere toddler learning to walk and crawl, we should have practised building a few models first. In addition to that, it's not like it was linking a massive amount of people - Canada was only holding three and a half million at the time, and for comparisons sake, the U.S. was sitting with well over ten times that amount. They had just finished their largest railroad undertaking, one that was a thousand miles shorter than the would-be CPR. Nevertheless, the railway was to be built as it was a political promise to some of the provinces to join Confederation, thus linking the country together. Fortunately, never once has a politician been known to break their word.

A CPR train with a few of the workers. Those darn kids,
always using their filters on their photographs...

Unfortunately for Canada, building the rail wasn't exactly just a little bit of elbow grease and olde-timey work ethic. It required several pantloads of money - one hundred million to be exact, which is certainly a great number of pantloads. To put that in perspective, a dollar a day was a decent wage at the time. So where was Canada going to snatch up all this money? John A. Macdonald, the man largely behind the idea in the first place, decided that it was a great idea to go against every Canadian ideal ever and get in bed with the Yankees. He took a great deal of money from an American backer for funding his political campaigns and in turn he was meant to give the man the contract for the railway. Naturally this is comically corrupt, and was later named the Pacific Scandal. I will be detailing this in the exciting part two of this blog.

What you need to know is he was kicked out of office pretty quick, and replaced by Alexander Mackenzie and the Liberal party. During this great political mess, surveyors were sent out to find the right trail for the railway. It's difficult to express just how tough these poor guys had it. They would be traversing land never before seen by white dudes, plowing through ridiculously cold winters, moving through clouds of mosquitoes so thick they would look simply like a black mass of intense frustration and all the while they don't really have all that great an idea of where they are or where they're going. One of the most famous crews was out on the trail for one hundred and sixteen days and travelled 1,887 miles. Of those, 932 were on show-shoes and 332 of them with all their goods on their backs. Their dogs had died sometime back, presumedly from consciously deciding that death was a much more enjoyable alternative. Honestly, I would have sided with the dogs.

Some of the engineers that worked on the
railway. The mutton chops on the guy
at the top left represent the majesty
of the grand, Canadian rail.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of the surveyors, they had somewhat of a plan as to where they wanted the railway to move. However, the issue of how they'd pay for the darn thing was yet unsolved. They began selling contracts to builders, but even that was rife with political corruption, a problem that apparently was a cornerstone of early Canada. Keep in mind secret ballots weren't introduced until 1874, and the previous way of voting was to publicly call out who you wanted in. Voter intimidation and bribery was about as prominent as you'd believe, as you can clearly see if the dude you bought a sandwich for actually voted the way you wanted him to. What I don't get is how secret ballots weren't introduced earlier, as folding a sheet of paper and putting it in a box was not groundbreaking technology... but anyway, I digress. The corruption with the contracts was related to the Liberals giving the contracts to, well, Liberals. $5,257,336 worth of contracts were sold, and $4,986,659 went to prominent Liberals, a number of which would later have spots in government.

Running on a hilariously hypocritical platform of accusing the Liberals of corruption, John A. returns to office with 133 seats to 73. How a man who had so clearly screwed the voters got voted back in so quickly is almost as baffling as Rob Ford still being allowed to be in office. You have to hand it to Macdonald - he had a way with speeches. This time, to his credit, he changed his ways and brought in a much more effective way of moving the railway forward. Instead of paying the lowest bidder on the contract to build the section, (in and of itself creating a number of problems with shoddy worksmanship) he changed it to promising the builders land according to how much they've built. This lowered the cost to the government substantially and promoted building the western provinces that would build up shortly after. Way to go, John.

So the building of the railway begins. In addition to the obvious problems (massive expense, vast territory, tons of work, Irish workers, etc.) they had to deal with a whole pantload (a different unit of measurement than the previous usage of pantload) of muskegs and sinkholes. The terrain was absolutely brutal. That, and they'd have to blow up large chunks of mountains in order to build the railway through them using nitroglycerin. Unfortunately, they didn't have the same safety precautions as we would nowadays. There were small spills, meaning there would be little black spots you'd have to keep your eye out for while walking the trail or you very well might lose a leg in a small explosion. They also put the nitroglycerin in their backpacks, meaning it would shake around and occasionally, well... explode. It was pretty brutal work.

What ended up being the saving grace for the railway was a group of Montreal men that decided to purchase a vast amount of the railway, much of the expense coming through subsidies of the government. It was a massive risk for the men that would soon be called the Syndicate, as they were actually boring money form a bank they owned in order to finance the expedition. If it fell through, it would essentially ruin them all. However, it worked out just fine and the people of Canada sure were happy for it because of one main fact - these guys weren't American. True north strong and free!

Famous Historical Figures Say the Darndest Things!

1. "If ever our bones will be discovered, when and by whom. If our friends will mourn long for us or do as is often done, forget us as soon as possible. In short, I have been looking death in the face..." A quote from one of the surveyors, written down in his journal. Seriously, things got bleak.
2. "Until this great work is completed, our Dominion is nothing more than a 'geographical expression'. We have as much interest in British Columbia as in Australia, and no more. The railway, once finished, we become one great united country with a large interprovincial trade and a common interest." Governor of the HBC, Sir Stafford Northcote