They put the horses back in the shafts and made haste to Fort Garry, arriving in the late afternoon, filthy, flybitten and exultant. At the mansion of Governor Archibald, the staff drew them hot baths and gave them their first mail from Halifax. Grant wrote back to his wife, “This is going to be a great country and I am glad that I will hereafter be in a position to know and understand it.”
Fort Garry was the bustling administrative centre of Manitoba province, with a straggling village called Winnipeg growing up around it. On the muddy streets, Grant reported, saloons were more numerous than churches. The saloons were full of land speculators, government surveyors divvying up the land into sections and plots, Metis guides and drovers, American railway prospectors, new immigrant farmers and the occasional Cree or Ojibwa.
The new province of Manitoba, brought into the Dominion two years earlier, in 1870, was a tinderbox of resentments. In 1869, Louis Riel, a twenty-eight-year-old former seminarian, had assembled a crowd at St. Boniface Cathedral to protest the presence of federal land surveyors who were, he cried, stealing land from underneath the feet of the Metis. Riel’s first rebellion soon took fire, drawing support from English and French settlers alike, and he formed a provisional government and issued a list of demands addressed to the federal government in Ottawa. These included provincial status for the territory, French as an official language of the province, land grants to be controlled by the province, treaties to be concluded with the Indians and education to be controlled by Catholic and Protestant churches. For a time, Riel carried all before him, but when the provisional government hanged Thomas Scott, an English farmer, for resisting, Orange Protestants in Ontario were so outraged that the federal government dispatched a military expedition to put down the insurrection. Riel fled into the Dakota territory.
Grant never met Riel, and for obvious reasons Ocean to Ocean avoids any mention of the rebellion. It was essentially a railway promotion brochure, after all, and the less said about rebellions the better. Grant wanted the West to be peopled by white, English-speaking farmers. Riel wanted the West to be French and Metis and Aboriginal. Ocean to Ocean’s national dream prevailed. To this day, Riel awaits acknowledgment as the true founder of the province of Manitoba. He remains the apostate visionary of a Canada that never stood a chance.
In Fort Garry, while they were purchasing what they needed for their westward journey, Grant met the leader of the francophone community in Manitoba, the Archbishop of St. Boniface, Alexandre-Antonin Taché, and he sounded out the veteran missionary, probably in French, about whether the land to the west was suitable for agricultural settlement. Taché, sensing that Grant was there to attract droves of English-speaking settlers, avoided giving a clear answer, though the old fox knew the West like the back of his hand.
Grant also met Donald Alexander Smith, Chief Commissioner of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the North West, a fellow Scot and Presbyterian, former fur-trade dealer turned railway speculator. Smith, better known later on as Lord Strathcona, became the driving financial force behind the completion of the CPR.
Around midday on August 2, the expedition set off again, a line of Red River carts and buckboards, loaded high with tents, baggage, pemmican, salt pork, pots and pans, guns and ammunition. Occasionally, as they wended their way through the single-track trails of the grasslands, they would pass a new homestead. The last one, somewhere near Portage la Prairie, was inhabited, it so happened, by a family called Grant. They had supper with the family in their rough log cabin, one wall decorated with a cheap poster of the Liberal leader of the day, Alexander Mackenzie. Needless to say, these Scottish pioneers, patriotic, Liberal in politics and undaunted by life on the edge of nowhere, enchanted Grant.
George Monro Grant left them thinking noble thoughts, but there was no disguising the fact that beyond that homestead at Portage, there was nothing: not a house or settlement, not a beckoning plume of smoke from a chimney. For the next three weeks, the Prairie sky swallowed them up.
Their imaginations had been prepared by the popular watercolours of Paul Kane depicting romantic Indian warriors spearing buffalo, but there were no warriors and no buffalo to be seen anywhere. The animals had been pushed to the brink of extinction, and the Plains Cree, through contact with settlers and whiskey traders, were being devastated by smallpox and alcohol. Now the railway was coming. Without realizing what they were doing, the Fleming-Grant survey party was sounding the death knell of a Plains civilization that had endured for millennia.
The survey party was in the hands of a Metis guide and a group of Metis horsemen, wranglers and carters, some French, some English, all given to swearing like troopers but all skilled in the ways of the trails that wended their way through the grass, the clumps of alders and the salt ponds day after day for three weeks. The expedition lived on pemmican—dried meat mixed with tallow—and on the fowl that Fleming’s son brought down with a shot gun. They made thirty to forty miles a day on the Yellowhead trail, a meandering cart track that connected Hudson’s Bay fort to Hudson’s Bay fort and led eventually to the Yellowhead Pass in the Rockies.
Apart from summer storms that came upon them in tempests of wind and hail, nothing broke the silence of their days, Grant sometimes lying in the bottom of a wagon gazing skyward, sometimes riding a horse, gripping the pommel of his saddle with the stump of his right hand. In Fort Garry, they had jettisoned their eastern woollens and flannels and now wore riding chaps, boots and buckskin jackets. It’s fair to say that those long days on the trail, sometimes breaking into a gallop to run after birds, sometimes chasing each other, other times letting the reins free so that they could daydream, were the happiest moments of my great-grandfather’s life.
Once, they stopped in fear as a party of horsemen suddenly appeared on the horizon and rode fast toward them, drawing up in a huge plume of dust. They were Sioux warriors, about eighty of them, chased north into Canadian territory by the railway men, ranchers, settlers and cavalry of the United States. The warriors sidled up beside Grant and Fleming’s wagons and, through the Metis guides, told them that they were from the Missouri territory, heading to Fort Garry to swear allegiance to the Great White Mother. Their fear, they told Grant, was that the local Cree and Ojibwa might drive them back into the United States. They were magnificent men, Grant wrote, dressed in blankets and leggings and wearing their eagle headdresses. One of them had a painted tin horse a foot long hanging on his naked chest, skunk fur on his ankles, hawk feathers in his hair and a great bunch of sweet-smelling lilac bergamot flowers under one arm. The chief wore a necklace of bear claws, and moccasins belted with broad stripes of porcupine quills dyed bright gold. They parlayed with Grant and Fleming’s party, Grant recorded, “with a dignity of manner that whites in the new world must ever despair of attaining,” and then took their leave.
Somewhere in the Saskatchewan territory, they overtook a missionary, George McDougal, and Souzie, his Cree guide, and for a number of days, McDougal and Souzie travelled with them. McDougal was returning to his mission at Victoria Settlement. He had ministered to the Crees there, in a rough-hewn church, dispensary and school, and two years before had lost his wife and his daughters to a smallpox epidemic that had cut down the settlement. To this day, you can see the pitiable marble headstones of the McDougal family, including their adopted Cree daughter, all swept away in what to devout believers must have been the most unfathomable of God’s mysteries. Only now was the widower missionary returning to his post. By the campfire at night, the Presbyterian and the Methodist had time to ponder the ways of God.
When Grant asked McDougal to name “any positive improvement in morality that had resulted from the Missionaries’ labours,” McDougal tersely replied—one can imagine him staring darkly into the campfire—“Yes, Christianized Crees would not steal your horses … when you were passing through their country.”
Come now, Grant insisted, there must be some more positive impact to the Christian message. McDougal would concede only that they “di
d keep the Lord’s Day after a fashion, treated their women rather better, were more comfortable, a little cleaner, sent their children to school for a while.” Then he added, bitterly, that they still remained “dirty, vicious, miserable” and not much better than the Indians who stayed pagan. McDougal’s despair did not manage to unsettle Grant’s optimism. When they did reach Victoria Settlement, Grant was moved to tears by the sight of Cree children singing Christian hymns in their own language.
Grant concluded there were only three alternatives for dealing with the Indians. The Americans had tried the first alternative—extermination—and it had only provoked bloody wars. The second alternative was pauperization, forcing Indians onto reservations as permanent wards of the federal government. This would have the same effect, he thought, as welfare dependency among the white working poor. He remained opposed, throughout his life, to the reserve system. His preferred third way, very vague and high-minded though it was, was to treat the Indian “as if he had in him the makings of a man.” When civilized, he added, he will not be like the average Ontarian. “Neither is the French habitant nor the Hindo … yet both are very good people in their way. But he will be a man.” Civilization meant allowing Indians to own property, to become industrious farmers and mechanics like white people did. They could keep treaty lands as communal property, but they should be afforded the incentives of private ownership and hold title to their individual farms and homesteads.
Civilization in his view also meant industrial schools of the type used to educate the working class. The first residential schools for Aboriginal children were established in the 1870s. Canada has lived with the consequences—the legacy of physical brutality, sexual abuse and forced acculturation—ever since.
From Fort Ellice to Fort Carlton, from Fort Carlton to Fort Pitt, the convoy travelled northwest across the plains through the hot days of August 1872. Fleming took careful note of every topographical feature that would have to be overcome when the railway came through. Every Sunday, they rested, repaired the wagons, turned the horses loose, lay in the grass and slept, served themselves extra rations and concluded the day with prayer service. The day of rest, Grant thought, brought the men together, eased the quarrels and ill feeling that grew up during the week, and raised the moral tone, though he confessed he still couldn’t get the Metis horsemen to stop swearing.
At Fort Edmonton, a rough plank square that they reached in late August, they all had their photographs taken in their Plains gear, young Frank with a porkpie hat on his head and a carbine under his arm, Fleming with grey beard billowing out from his cheeks and a French kepi on his head, a bearded Grant, in wide riding chaps and a buckskin coat, covering the stump of his right hand with a broad-brimmed leather cowboy hat, and Moren, the doctor, dressed Metis style with a broad, coloured sash holding up his riding breeches. They look about as happy as men can be.
At Fort Edmonton, they switched the gear from Red River carts to pack horses for the mountains ahead. Forty miles out of Edmonton, on the trail to Jasper, they took on new Metis guides and packers. Their destination, the Yellowhead Pass, was named after a legendary French fur trader whom the Indians called Tête Jaune, the blond one. Fleming’s plan was to meet up with a survey party led by Walter Moberly, who had started out from the Pacific in June and was surveying the approaches from the other side of the Rockies.
The next month, two weeks up to Jasper and two weeks from Jasper down to the Fraser, was the toughest of the trip. The trails zigzagged upward through miles of bog and tightly packed pine forest. The way was blocked by deadfall or rushing water. The footing was poor; horses went lame, kicked over the traces and dumped their packs. The inclines grew steeper every hour. It rained, and the nights grew colder. Ice formed on their water buckets. On the Prairies, Fleming reckoned, they had made forty miles a day. Now they were down to ten if they were lucky, sometimes fewer than that, and if they didn’t keep up speed, they might be caught in the mountains by the winter snow. At Jasper, they failed to rendezvous with Moberly, which put Fleming in a foul mood. Still, they stripped a spruce overhanging the river and drove a railway spike into the base. It is still there.
Finally, they made it to the Yellowhead Pass, a meadow at thirty-seven hundred feet of elevation, framed by peaks on all sides. As soon as they saw it, Fleming knew the railway should go through this pass and no other. The elevation was low and the valley was wide enough that no blasting would be necessary. In celebration they rested and Grant preached a sermon of thanksgiving.
Next day, they reached the Continental Divide, the rivers behind them flowing north to the Arctic, the rivers ahead of them flowing toward the Pacific. More days of miserable slogging ensued, as they struggled down the slopes of the Rockies, along treacherous, slippery trails that had a way of disappearing or running them in circles, all in increasing cold and teeming rain. By this time, they were battling exhaustion and some measure of homesickness. But their spirits lifted when they finally reached the Fraser. At the junction where the Clearwater River meets the Thompson, they bade farewell to their guides and packers and boarded scows and set off down the Thompson toward Kamloops. They camped that night short of the settlement in one of the meadows in a bend of the river, their sixtieth encampment since Lake Superior, and their last.
As the scows were rowed down the river, Grant observed the Indian camps on the shores. Smallpox had swept through the valleys, decimating the people who made their life along the river. The survivors Grant observed in sweat lodges—steam rising from tents where, around a circle of heated stones, the people would sit breathing in the steam, purifying their bodies and their souls. He also noticed how elaborate the Indian graves were: structures made of poles containing the valuables of the deceased, guns, blankets, food, shawls and flags, canoes and painted images of the dead.
Arriving at the Hudson’s Bay post in Kamloops, the travellers were treated to their first feather bed in a month. At the Sunday service, where Grant gave a sermon, he had a glimpse of the complex racial and ethnic hierarchy of British Columbia. The British colonial elite were a decided minority. The congregation consisted of American prospectors, farmers (who left their Indian wives outside) and the Chinese. The Chinese had come north after the end of construction of the Union Pacific. Already there was strong prejudice against the Asians in Kamloops, a prejudice, Grant tartly observed, that seemed to ignore that they were “cleanly, orderly, patient, industrious and above all cheap.” All his life he was to be a vigorous opponent of anti-Chinese legislation, especially the anti-Chinese immigration quotas. While any state had the right to “keep out bad people,” he wrote, “no nation has the right to keep out the good of one nation while admitting both the bad and good from other lands.”
They journeyed onward to the sea, taking a steamer from Yale to New Westminster, sharing the trip with the legendary chief justice of British Columbia, Matthew Begbie, who had imposed rough justice on the gold fields, Indian settlements and backwood camps, armed only with a couple of constables and the criminal law of England.
Arriving in New Westminster, Grant and Fleming were greeted as celebrities by the governor, who put at their disposal a steam vessel that they used to explore the coast for the next two weeks. The key question was what place to choose as the eventual terminus of the railway. Was it to be Bute or Burrard Inlet? The local politicians, the governor and the assemblymen all wanted to know— but Fleming kept his counsel as the little steamer methodically plied its way through Howe Sound, down into English Bay and along the Spanish Banks. Apart from a sawmill here and there, there was nothing but primeval forest and silence in the vast inlet surrounded by mountains. The silent, green-flanked harbour Grant sailed through was to become the terminus, and around the terminus would grow the mighty city of Vancouver. When he first saw it, there was nothing there but giant fir trees down to the shoreline, wheeling seabirds overhead and peaks already crested with snow.
They cruised like lords through the Gulf Islands, and when they arr
ived in Victoria, the province’s capital, a banquet was held in their honour and interviews were accorded the Times Colonist. The Victoria of 1872 was an unruly polyglot port town of five thousand people. As Grant toured the downtown, he was amazed to see Greek fishermen, Kanaka sailors from Hawaii, Jewish and Scottish storekeepers, Chinese washerwomen, French, German and Yankee restaurateurs, black waiters and sweeps, and Australian farmers all jostling each other in the streets.
On October 14, 1872, the party said their farewells and boarded a steamer bound for San Francisco, and, five days later, climbed on board the Union Pacific, heading for Chicago and home. At the dusty little railway stations in Nevada and Utah, Grant noticed that the sheriffs had posted Wanted posters with rewards for the capture of local desperadoes. This confirmed in him the contrast between the lawless American West and the peace, order and good government that generally prevailed back home. From Chicago to Toronto, then to Ottawa and finally to Halifax, Grant reached home on November 1, 1872. His long-suffering wife, Jessie, was nine months pregnant, and within days their first child, my grandfather William Lawson Grant, was born.
Three weeks after his return, Grant gave his first lecture to a Halifax audience on the West and its future. Ocean to Ocean: Sandford Fleming’s Expedition Through Canada in 1872 was published the next year, and a further edition followed in 1877, with a frontispiece depicting Grant in a clergyman’s homburg and Fleming in a kepi, seated in the middle of a canoe, while the Metis and Iroquois steersmen shot the rapids. The book remained in print throughout Grant’s life. He had found his calling: the promotion of a national dream.
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