The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 Read Online Free

not rule out another rebellion or even a border dispute with the Americans. The Fenian brotherhood had, since 1866, mounted a series of skirmishes across the boundary and would try again on the Manitoba border in the fall of 1871.
    The Prime Minister, as he was to say so vehemently on more than one occasion, was born a British subject and meant to die one. His nationalism had two sides. On the positive side he was pro-Canadian which, in those days, was much the same as being pro-British. On the negative side he was almost paranoic in his anti-Americanism. The Americans, to Macdonald, were “Yankees” and he put into that term all the disdain that was then implied by its use: the Yankees were upstarts, money grasping, uncouth, anti-British; and they wanted to grab Canada for themselves, throw off the monarchy and turn solid Canadians into shrill, greedy, tinsel copies of themselves.
    Macdonald’s opponents might feel that the price of holding the newly acquired North West was too high to pay, but he himself was well aware that some Americans, especially those in Minnesota, saw it as a ripe plum ready to fall into their hands. He believed, in fact, that the United States government “are resolved to do all they can, short of war, to get possession of the western territory.” That being so, he wrote in January, 1870, “we must take immediate and vigoroussteps to counteract them. One of the first things to be done is to show unmistakeably our resolve to build the Pacific Railway.”
    There was reason for Macdonald’s suspicions. In the very year of Confederation, W. H. Seward, the United States Secretary of State, fresh from his successful purchase of Alaska, had told a Boston audience that the whole continent “shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American union.” His successor, Hamilton Fish, was an expansionist, as was the President himself; though they were not prepared to fight for a piece of Canada, they were delighted to countenance, if not to encourage, a powerful group of Minnesota businessmen and politicians who saw their burgeoning territory extending north of the 49th parallel as a concomitant of the Red River uprising of 1869. In J. W. Taylor, Washington’s undercover agent in Winnipeg, they had an ardent sympathizer.
    As Macdonald well knew, there were powerful influences working in the United States to frustrate the building of any all-Canadian railroad. In 1869, a United States Senate committee report declared that “the opening by us first of a Northern Pacific railroad seals the destiny of the British possessions west of the ninety-first meridian. They will become so Americanised in interests and feelings that they will be in effect severed from the new Dominion, and the question of their annexation will be but a question of time.” A similar kind of peaceful penetration had led eventually to the annexation of Oregon.
    It was the railwaymen who coveted the North West. “I have an awful swallow for land,” the Northern Pacific’s General Cass told the Grand Trunk’s Edward Watkin (Watkin later reproduced the despised Yankee vernacular as “swaller”). In 1869 – during the Red River uprising – the Governor of Vermont, John Gregory Smith, who also happened to be president of the Northern Pacific, determined to build that line so close to the Canadian border that it would forestall any plans for an all-Canadian railway. In a conversation with Charles Brydges, a leading Canadian railway man, he made no secret of Washington’s willingness to take advantage of the uprising and subsidize the line in order to get possession of the North West for the United States.
    By the following year, Jay Cooke, the banker who was the real power behind the Northern Pacific, was so sure of capturing the same territory as a monopoly for his railroad that he was using the idea to peddle the company’s bonds. A Northern Pacific pamphlet decriedthe whole idea of a railway north of Lake Superior: