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

eclipse. (Some, indeed, were never more than names on early railway maps.) It affected aspects of Canadian life as varied as the tourist trade and the wheat economy. In addition, it gave the railway company something very close to absolute control over the destinies of scores of embryo communities along the right of way.
    This was not what the government had intended when the railway was conceived in 1871, or even in 1881, when the administration turned the task over to a private company. It had been conceded, since the days of the first explorers and surveyors, that any transcontinental line would have to cross the North West by way of the fertile, wooded valley of the North Saskatchewan, following more or less the route of the Carlton Trail, along whose rutted right of way the Red River carts had squeaked for the best part of a century. This route led north and west from Winnipeg, by way of Battleford, to Fort Edmonton and on to the Yellow Head Pass in the Rockies. From there the line was to continue in the fur traders’ footsteps down the valleys of the Thompson and the Fraser to Burrard Inlet on the Pacific. It had taken a decade of bitter argument, vicious recrimination, political manæuvre, back-breaking exploration, and meticulous foot-by-foot location survey to settle upon that route. It had also cost many millions of dollars, the reputations of several public figures, and the lives of forty surveyors. The powerful little group of men in St. Paul threw it all away after about an hour’s discussion.
    There were three of them, all members of the four-man executive committee of the CPR – a remarkable trio: passionate, sometimes temperamental, strong-willed, and single-minded. Each had begun life in poverty with few prospects; each had known an astonishing personal success.
    Of the three, George Stephen, the president of the new railway company, was the most sophisticated. The one-time draper’s assistant, now impeccably turned out by his personal valet, moved easily in the financial capitals of two continents. As president of the Bank of Montreal – a post he was about to resign – he had acquired a reputation as a financial wizard, respected for his integrity, admired for his audacity. Had he not transformed an expiring railroad, the St. Paul and Pacific, into the most profitable enterprise on the continent? He and his colleagues, Jim Hill and Donald Smith, had become multimillionaires as a result.
    The second man, Richard Bladworth Angus, was Stephen’s protégé – another dark, cool-eyed Scot, heavily moustached and side-whiskered, and just two years Stephen’s junior. In an astonishing twelve-year period he had soared from an obscure post as a $600-a-year bank clerk to succeed E. H. King, “the Napoleon of Canadian Finance,” as general manager of the Bank of Montreal, the most powerful financial institution in Canada. Known for his tact, his foresight, his amiability, and his modesty (he would eventually refuse a knighthood), he was called in business circles the Man of Peace. Stephen in 1879, while still the bank’s president, had, in effect, stolen this shrewd, strict financier to manage the St. Paul railway. A year later, he seduced him into the great adventure of the Pacific road.
    The third man was James Jerome Hill, a tougher and rougher specimen than his colleagues. With his single, burning eye, his short, lion’s beard and long mane, he looked like a bit of a pirate, which, in truth, he was. Five years before, Hill, the ex-Canadian, had talked Stephen into the financial gamble of the St. Paul railway. It was said that he could talk the hardest-headed man into practically anything. In an age when most capitalists were prudently close-mouthed he was unexpectedly garrulous, enveloping adversaries and colleagues alike in a smoke-screen of words. In his business dealings he was often devious, in his ambitions, Napoleonic. A dangerous man to have as an enemy, he had, in his forty-three years, made a