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

the Americans, it said, would send any branches needed into British territory to service their neighbours.
    On one side of the mountains, the railway would siphon off the products of the rich farmlands; on the other side it would drain the British Columbia mining settlements. “Drain” was the operative verb; it was the one the Senate committee used. As for the Minnesotans, they saw their state devouring the entire Red River Valley. Their destiny lay north of the 49th parallel, so the St. Paul Pioneer Press editorialized. That was “the irresistible doctrine of nature.”
    But it was Macdonald’s intention to defy nature and fashion a nation in the process. His tool, to this end, would be the Canadian Pacific. It would be a rare example of a nation created through the construction of a railway.
    In the Canada of 1871, “nationalism” was a strange, new word. Patriotism was derivative, racial cleavage was deep, culture was regional, provincial animosities savage and the idea of unity ephemeral. Thousands of Canadians had already been lured south by the availability of land and the greater diversity of enterprise, which contrasted with the lack of opportunity at home. The country looked like a giant on the map, second only in size to China. For most practical purposes, it stopped at the Great Lakes.
    The six scattered provinces had yet to unite in a great national endeavour or to glimpse anything remotely resembling a Canadian dream; but both were taking shape. The endeavour would be the building of the Pacific railway; the dream would be the filling up of the empty spaces and the dawn of a new Canada.

2
The dreamers
    For almost forty years before Macdonald made his bargain with British Columbia, there had been talk about a railway to the Pacific. Most of it was nothing more than rhetoric. It cost Joseph Howe little, in 1851, to utter his remark about some of his listeners living to hear a steam whistle in the passes of the Rockies. A century later, public figures were prophesying with equal recklessness and incidental accuracy that their children would live to see a man land on the moon. The comparison is a reasonable one: for most colonial Canadiansat mid-century the prospect of a line of steel stretching off two thousand miles into the Pacific mists was similarly unreal.
    Thomas Dalton, the editor of the Toronto Patriot , has been credited with the first vision. He talked vaguely, in 1834, of an all-steam route by river, rail and canal from Toronto to the Pacific and thence to the Orient. His friends dismissed him as a mere enthusiast, by which they probably meant he was slightly demented. Every far-sighted scheme has its quota of eccentrics and the railway dream was not immune. In 1845, a prodigious pamphleteer who called himself Sir John Smyth, Baronet, popped up in Toronto with a long printed tract urging a line of steam communication around the globe, including a rail and water route through British North America. Smyth was not taken seriously, possibly because of the string of titles he arranged to follow his by-line. These included “moral philosopher” and the initials “ P.L. ,” which, Smyth insisted, stood for “poet loret.” In those days just about anybody could afford to publish a pamphlet.
    Between 1848 and 1850, however, a series of works was published by three sets of authors, and these were taken seriously. The first of these, and the most prescient, was by another Smyth – Major Robert Carmichael Smyth, a 49-year-old British engineer. A career soldier since the age of sixteen, Carmichael Smyth had just returned to England from service in Canada with the 93rd Highland Regiment. He first posed his idea of an “Atlantic and Pacific Railway” in 1848, in a series of letters to his shipboard acquaintance, the humorist Thomas Chandler Haliburton, creator of Sam Slick. Carmichael Smyth gathered the letters into a pamphlet early the following year and his enthusiastic advocacy of this “great link