The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 Read Free Page B

which promises little for the future.”
    Remarkably, all three of them recovered. Tupper’s doctor told him that he had been “strained but not sprung.” His condition was diagnosed in August as “catarrh of the liver” and Macdonald’s not as cancer but as “catarrh of the stomach,” phrases that doctors used when they could not explain an illness. “Sir John still suffers from languor and a sense of prostration,” the Ottawa Free Press reported from London that summer. Obviously, the problem was exhaustion from overwork.
    In contrast to the lassitude of the capital, Winnipeg, a thousand miles to the northwest, was all bustle and turmoil. The eyes of the country were focused on the new Canada beyond the Precambrian wilderness of the Shield. Tupper was preparing for an autumn visit to the country throughwhich the railroad would run. So was the Governor General, Lord Lorne, with a covey of foreign newspapermen. The great North West boom was about to begin.
    Within a fortnight of its formation, the CPR company was established in Winnipeg in temporary headquarters pending the completion of the new Bank of Montreal building. A freight shed was under construction and fourteen new locomotives were on their way – all samples from various makers in the United States, sent up on trial for the company’s inspection. “One of these machines is a regular giant, with driving wheels six feet in diameter and capable of making tremendous speeds,” the Manitoba Free Press reported on March 10. Contracts had already been let for half a million railroad ties, six thousand telegraph poles, and fifty thousand feet of pilings. Mountains of timber were heaped in the yards waiting to be moved to the end of track. The great triple-decker construction cars were rolling westward. Workmen were pouring into town: three hundred from Montreal, another three hundred from Minneapolis. Five hundred teams of horses had been hired to move construction supplies. New settlers were beginning to trickle in, and Charles Drinkwater, who had once been John A. Macdonald’s secretary and was now secretary to the CPR board, publicly predicted that the influx of immigrants that summer would be enormous.
    There were other signs of the swiftly changing character of the old North West. The Ogilvie Milling Company had abandoned millstones and introduced steel rollers to cope with the hard northern wheat. The Manitoba Electric and Gas Light Company was planning to light the entire city by gas. (“It is now inevitable that gas is to be the light of the future – at least for some time to come.”) There was talk of a street railway to run the whole length of Main. The Red River cart, held together by buffalo thongs, was all but obsolete; ingenious Winnipeg wheelwrights were working on new wagons with iron axles and iron tires to compete with the railway. And the herds of murmuring buffalo which, just ten years before, had blackened the plains, were no more. They seemed to have vanished the previous winter as suddenly as if the earth had opened and swallowed them – a phenomenon the Indians believed had actually occurred.
    The railway builders estimated that they had close to two thousand miles of trunk-line to construct. * It could be divided into three sections:
    In the East , some six hundred and fifty miles, between Callander on Lake Nipissing and Fort William at the head of Lake Superior, all heavy construction across the ridges of the Precambrian Shield.
    On the prairies , some nine hundred miles from Winnipeg across the rolling grasslands to the Rocky Mountains.
    In the West , some four hundred and fifty miles of heavy mountain construction.
    In addition, the railway company was to be given, as a gift, some seven hundred miles of line built as a public work. There were three of these publicly built lines:
    First, there was the sixty-five-mile branch line from Winnipeg to the Minnesota border known as the Pembina Branch, already completed. It connected