Read Online The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 by Pierre Berton - Free Book Online
Authors: Pierre Berton
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Palliser and his companions were two years in the field and their accomplishments, though obscured at the time (the expedition’s report was delayed in its publication until 1862 and Palliser’s map until 1865), were monumental. They explored, by a variety of routes, all of the country between Lake Superior and the Pacific coast. Bourgeau collected 460 species and sixty thousand specimens, some of which are still to be seen in the museum and herbarium of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. Hector discovered the Kicking Horse Pass and was almost buried alive as a result. His horse, stumbling in the frothing waters, dealt him a blow with its hoof which rendered him insensible. The Indians, believing him dead, popped him into a freshly dug grave and were about to shovel in the earth when the supposed corpse, conscious but unable to utter a word, managed, by a single prodigious wink of one eye, to shock the would-be burial party into less precipitate action. With Hector in great pain and his companions close to starvation, the party plunged on through the newly named pass, following the turbulent river along the line of the future CPR .
But the idea of a railway in the shadows of those rumpled peaks was far from Palliser’s mind. He had been asked to judge whether or not, in the carefully non-committal prose of the Colonial Office, “the country presents such facilities for the construction of a railway as would at some period, though possibly a remote one, encourage her Majesty’s government in the belief that such an undertaking between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans will ever be accomplished.”
His answer was bluntly negative. His knowledge of the country would never lead him to advocate a railway “exclusively through British territory.” Across the prairies, certainly; but that armoured barrier north of Lake Superior “is the obstacle of the country and one, I fear, almost beyond the remedies of art.” The sensible method was to go through American territory south of the lake and cut up to Manitoba through Pembina on the border, if and when the Americans built their own lines to that point.
Meanwhile the government of the united Canadas, prodded by George Brown and the Toronto expansionists, had mounted, in 1857,a similar expedition under George Gladman, a retired Hudson’s Bay chief trader. Though he was the nominal head, the key men were Henry Youle Hind, a self-assured young professor of geology and chemistry from the University of Toronto, and Simon James Dawson, a sharp-featured civil engineer from Trois Rivières. The following year these two men, without Gladman, co-directed a second expedition made up of several parties which explored the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan river country.
In their separate reports, the Canadian explorers were, significantly, far more optimistic about an all-Canadian railway than the members of the British expedition. Gladman did not feel the difficulties to be “insuperable to Canadian energy and enterprise.” Hind thought Palliser too sweeping in his condemnation of the route across the Shield, which was “of vast importance to Canada.” Hind agreed with Palliser that the Great American Desert had its apex in the Far West but along the wooded valley of the North Saskatchewan and some of its tributaries there was “a broad strip of fertile country.” Hind wrote in his report that “it is a physical reality of the highest importance to the interest of British North America that this continuous belt can be settled and cultivated from a few miles west of the Lake of the Woods to the passes of the Rocky Mountains.” He was impressed enough by that statement to render it in capitals. In Hind’s view this was the route that any railway must take to span the great central plain. He borrowed the magic name of “Fertile Belt,” which Palliser had first used, and the name stuck. To the south was an “Arid Belt” – Palliser’s Triangle, in truth – which
Palliser and his companions were two years in the field and their accomplishments, though obscured at the time (the expedition’s report was delayed in its publication until 1862 and Palliser’s map until 1865), were monumental. They explored, by a variety of routes, all of the country between Lake Superior and the Pacific coast. Bourgeau collected 460 species and sixty thousand specimens, some of which are still to be seen in the museum and herbarium of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. Hector discovered the Kicking Horse Pass and was almost buried alive as a result. His horse, stumbling in the frothing waters, dealt him a blow with its hoof which rendered him insensible. The Indians, believing him dead, popped him into a freshly dug grave and were about to shovel in the earth when the supposed corpse, conscious but unable to utter a word, managed, by a single prodigious wink of one eye, to shock the would-be burial party into less precipitate action. With Hector in great pain and his companions close to starvation, the party plunged on through the newly named pass, following the turbulent river along the line of the future CPR .
But the idea of a railway in the shadows of those rumpled peaks was far from Palliser’s mind. He had been asked to judge whether or not, in the carefully non-committal prose of the Colonial Office, “the country presents such facilities for the construction of a railway as would at some period, though possibly a remote one, encourage her Majesty’s government in the belief that such an undertaking between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans will ever be accomplished.”
His answer was bluntly negative. His knowledge of the country would never lead him to advocate a railway “exclusively through British territory.” Across the prairies, certainly; but that armoured barrier north of Lake Superior “is the obstacle of the country and one, I fear, almost beyond the remedies of art.” The sensible method was to go through American territory south of the lake and cut up to Manitoba through Pembina on the border, if and when the Americans built their own lines to that point.
Meanwhile the government of the united Canadas, prodded by George Brown and the Toronto expansionists, had mounted, in 1857,a similar expedition under George Gladman, a retired Hudson’s Bay chief trader. Though he was the nominal head, the key men were Henry Youle Hind, a self-assured young professor of geology and chemistry from the University of Toronto, and Simon James Dawson, a sharp-featured civil engineer from Trois Rivières. The following year these two men, without Gladman, co-directed a second expedition made up of several parties which explored the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan river country.
In their separate reports, the Canadian explorers were, significantly, far more optimistic about an all-Canadian railway than the members of the British expedition. Gladman did not feel the difficulties to be “insuperable to Canadian energy and enterprise.” Hind thought Palliser too sweeping in his condemnation of the route across the Shield, which was “of vast importance to Canada.” Hind agreed with Palliser that the Great American Desert had its apex in the Far West but along the wooded valley of the North Saskatchewan and some of its tributaries there was “a broad strip of fertile country.” Hind wrote in his report that “it is a physical reality of the highest importance to the interest of British North America that this continuous belt can be settled and cultivated from a few miles west of the Lake of the Woods to the passes of the Rocky Mountains.” He was impressed enough by that statement to render it in capitals. In Hind’s view this was the route that any railway must take to span the great central plain. He borrowed the magic name of “Fertile Belt,” which Palliser had first used, and the name stuck. To the south was an “Arid Belt” – Palliser’s Triangle, in truth – which
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