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

The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881
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required to unite in one chain the whole English race” appealed to the imperialism of London editors and their readers. The Daily Mail called it “a noble plan,” the Morning Herald endorsed the idea and so did the Economist , although the latter said that the actual job of building should be left to the colonists and not the mother country. Since Carmichael Smyth had reckoned the cost at seven hundred million dollars and since the colonists at that point had built only a few miles of railway, the suggestion was not immediately practical.
    Nevertheless he lived to see his prophecies come true. In his pamphlet he asked: “Who will be the first locomotive engineer to inscribe upon the Rocky Mountains: ‘Engineer A.B. piloted the first locomotive engine across the Rocky Mountains’?” Carmichael Smyth was still alive, thirty-five years later, when on a warm July day,Robert Mee stepped from his CPR cab and, with a can of red paint, answered the query.
    Although Carmichael Smyth overestimated the cost of the line, he was uncannily accurate about its route. It took more than ten years of surveys and untold squabbling to arrive at roughly the same location he scrawled across his map. His pencil even crossed the Rockies in the approximate vicinity of the Kicking Horse and Rogers passes, which at that time had not been discovered. And he also saw, quite clearly, that the road could be made to pay for itself through the traffic of the colonists it transported to the new land.
    Almost simultaneously, an Irish subaltern in the Royal Engineers, Lieut. Millington Henry Synge, proposed a vast rail and water highway across the continent. Synge, who rose to be a major-general, was a member of the many-branched Millington Synge family, whose genealogical tree is studded with bishops and baronets and not a few imaginative writers of whom John Millington Synge, the Irish playwright, is the best known. His plan, though treated with respect at the time, bordered on the fanciful. Synge was stationed at Bytown near the famous flight locks of the Rideau and this proximity may have been the source of his mind-boggling suggestion for a canal through the Rockies – “steps of still water,” as he airily described it.
    Synge suggested importing the surplus unemployed of England to build the railway while Carmichael Smyth had advanced the idea of using convict labour. Both schemes were united, with scrupulous detail, in 1850, in a tome entitled Britain Redeemed and Canada Preserved . The authors were F. A. Wilson, an old Hudson’s Bay Company man, and A. B. Richards of Lincoln’s Inn, London. In 556 weighty pages, the authors contemplated the employment of twenty thousand convicts to break ground and rough-hew the line. In addition, a body of sixty thousand volunteers from “among the suffering poor of our most distressed counties” would be signed on for three years, at soldier’s pay. An accompanying fold-out map showed the line running straight as a ruler from Halifax to the Pacific, oblivious of rock, muskeg, lake or mountain. The authors were so enamoured of the idea of a convict work force that they tended to dismiss geographical location.
    Wilson and Richards were taking no chances on escapees. To protect the Canadian public there would be a network of forts and garrisoned barracks, constructed of “the gigantic logs of the country,” vigilantly guarded and encircled by moats and palisades. Indiantribes would be encouraged to scour the country for missing malefactors. Canadian woodsmen would be formed into mounted patrols to assist the guards along the line of route. And, in case any of the fugitives tried to disguise their close-cropped heads with false hair, the promoters of the plan proposed to crop their eyebrows as well.
    Once the railway was finished, the miscreants were to be shipped off to the bleak Labrador peninsula because of the “very remarkable and salutary influence which the contiguous climate of Nova Scotia seems

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