The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 by Pierre Berton Page B
Authors: Pierre Berton
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seats … and one longed to cry out and beg to be stopped if only for a moment.…”
Finally the road was abandoned, and the locks at Fort Frances, on which the government had squandered three years and $289,000, were abandoned, too. The days of canals and corduroy roads were over. The railway was on its way.
1
Poor Waddington
The debate on the terms of admission of British Columbia was not yet over when the first of the entrepreneurs arrived in Ottawa. This was Alfred Waddington of Victoria, seventy-five years old and a fanatic on the subject of a Pacific railway. His scheme was premature and ill-considered and he himself was suspect in the eyes of the Canadian decision-makers; nonetheless his place as a minor catalyst in Canadian history is secure: his meeting in July, 1871, with Sir Francis Hincks and Sir John A. Macdonald touched off the complicated chain of events that led to the nation’s first great political crisis.
“Old Waddy,” as he was called, was a bland-looking man whose moon face was framed in ear-length locks and a little fringe of chin whiskers. Only the hard, resolute line of his mouth hinted at an inner stubbornness. He was obsessed, almost to the point of irrationality, by the idea of building the railway through the Yellow Head Pass to Bute Inlet, a precipitous indentation in the British Columbia coastline on whose beaches he had already been granted a townsite.
Waddington had been a trial to the Victoria political establishment ever since he had arrived in British Columbia from San Francisco, with the first wave of adventurers, after gold was discovered on the Fraser in 1858. The well-educated son of an English squire, originally lured across the Atlantic by the California gold rush, he came to the colony a wealthy man, free to plunge with zest into politics and pamphleteering. As a member of the colonial legislature he became a constant and pugnacious critic of the administration. He was more than a politician: he was also a railway engineer of sorts, an amateur fireman, a school inspector, the publisher of the first book printed on Vancouver Island, the founder of the colony’s first gasworks and a pillar of the first old-people’s home in Victoria.
He was, in short, a mover and a shaker, a tilter at windmills who attacked with equal pugnacity the Hudson’s Bay Company, the medical profession, the pomp and circumstance of British colonial society and the restricted franchise – everything that Victoria held dear. For years old Waddy battered away at the unyielding ramparts of the tight little in-group that controlled the colony until, one autumn day in 1860, he suddenly abandoned it all and turned his attention to the promotion of what eventually became a transcontinental railway scheme.
The railway – he intended it first as a wagon road to the gold-fields of the Cariboo – took over his life. Its terminus was to be at Waddington Harbour, a paper community he had created at the head of Bute Inlet, the narrow fiord that springs out of the mouth of the Homathco River, some 150 air miles north of Vancouver. The inlet and the river seduced Waddington as they were to seduce later surveyors. At an age when most men seek retirement, he spent five years struggling through the Homathco’s gloomy canyons, beggaring himself on trail-making and surveys.
The venture was marred by the Chilcoten Massacre of 1864. Nineteen of Waddington’s men were slaughtered by Indians whose women had been molested and whose fears had been aroused by pranksters who had pretended to bottle enough smallpox to destroy the entire tribe.
But nothing seemed to deter Waddington, neither Indian ferocity nor the seventy-nine hairpin turns on the sheer cliffs of the mountain named after him. He was an incurable optimist, “one of the most sanguine imaginative men I have ever met; prompt to delude himself on any matter of which he makes a hobby,” in the words of the colonial government’s police inspector, Chartres
Finally the road was abandoned, and the locks at Fort Frances, on which the government had squandered three years and $289,000, were abandoned, too. The days of canals and corduroy roads were over. The railway was on its way.
1
Poor Waddington
The debate on the terms of admission of British Columbia was not yet over when the first of the entrepreneurs arrived in Ottawa. This was Alfred Waddington of Victoria, seventy-five years old and a fanatic on the subject of a Pacific railway. His scheme was premature and ill-considered and he himself was suspect in the eyes of the Canadian decision-makers; nonetheless his place as a minor catalyst in Canadian history is secure: his meeting in July, 1871, with Sir Francis Hincks and Sir John A. Macdonald touched off the complicated chain of events that led to the nation’s first great political crisis.
“Old Waddy,” as he was called, was a bland-looking man whose moon face was framed in ear-length locks and a little fringe of chin whiskers. Only the hard, resolute line of his mouth hinted at an inner stubbornness. He was obsessed, almost to the point of irrationality, by the idea of building the railway through the Yellow Head Pass to Bute Inlet, a precipitous indentation in the British Columbia coastline on whose beaches he had already been granted a townsite.
Waddington had been a trial to the Victoria political establishment ever since he had arrived in British Columbia from San Francisco, with the first wave of adventurers, after gold was discovered on the Fraser in 1858. The well-educated son of an English squire, originally lured across the Atlantic by the California gold rush, he came to the colony a wealthy man, free to plunge with zest into politics and pamphleteering. As a member of the colonial legislature he became a constant and pugnacious critic of the administration. He was more than a politician: he was also a railway engineer of sorts, an amateur fireman, a school inspector, the publisher of the first book printed on Vancouver Island, the founder of the colony’s first gasworks and a pillar of the first old-people’s home in Victoria.
He was, in short, a mover and a shaker, a tilter at windmills who attacked with equal pugnacity the Hudson’s Bay Company, the medical profession, the pomp and circumstance of British colonial society and the restricted franchise – everything that Victoria held dear. For years old Waddy battered away at the unyielding ramparts of the tight little in-group that controlled the colony until, one autumn day in 1860, he suddenly abandoned it all and turned his attention to the promotion of what eventually became a transcontinental railway scheme.
The railway – he intended it first as a wagon road to the gold-fields of the Cariboo – took over his life. Its terminus was to be at Waddington Harbour, a paper community he had created at the head of Bute Inlet, the narrow fiord that springs out of the mouth of the Homathco River, some 150 air miles north of Vancouver. The inlet and the river seduced Waddington as they were to seduce later surveyors. At an age when most men seek retirement, he spent five years struggling through the Homathco’s gloomy canyons, beggaring himself on trail-making and surveys.
The venture was marred by the Chilcoten Massacre of 1864. Nineteen of Waddington’s men were slaughtered by Indians whose women had been molested and whose fears had been aroused by pranksters who had pretended to bottle enough smallpox to destroy the entire tribe.
But nothing seemed to deter Waddington, neither Indian ferocity nor the seventy-nine hairpin turns on the sheer cliffs of the mountain named after him. He was an incurable optimist, “one of the most sanguine imaginative men I have ever met; prompt to delude himself on any matter of which he makes a hobby,” in the words of the colonial government’s police inspector, Chartres
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