In this week’s Hub book review, Lydia Perovic examines Dominion: The Railway and the Rise of Canada, by Stephen R. Bown (Anchor Canada, 2024), which details how the engineering triumph of the Canadian Pacific Railway was essential to establishing Canada as a viable nation.
We tend to forget it now, as we stitch this country together by plane and automobile, but rail was how Canada came to be. Putting in place the then-fastest method of transport of people and goods in order to cross east to west coast without having to travel through the U.S. was a matter of survival for the emerging dominion.
No one saw this more clearly than the country’s first PM, John Alexander Macdonald, who doggedly pursued the project against all odds. Today, in our identitarian, centrifugal age, nation-building across vast differences looks like an impossible project. How did Macdonald and company come to see Canada as one jurisdiction? It was a giant feat of imagination.
London certainly did not help, the northernmost reaches of the empire not holding great appeal to them by then. No, the desire to craft a country out of its incongruous parts was all local. As Stephen R. Bown shows in Dominion, his book about the making of the Canadian Pacific Railway (now available in paperback), things could have gone the other direction at many a turn.
Victoria and B.C. could have further grown their ties with northern California and the American Northwest. The Prairies could have affirmed their oneness with the U.S. prairie states, and the Metis gradually built some sort of self-governing, predominantly Catholic entity. Upper and Lower Canada could have stayed a country on their own called The Canadas, with or without the Maritimes. Newfoundland would have had no reason to join anything by the end of the Second World War.
And yet, the thing came together. Zooming in closer from a variety of angles, as Bown does in the book, the project looks an omnishambles. Pursued against expert advice, marred by the Pacific Scandal and assorted other kinds of cronyism from both the Tories and the Liberals, facing two Louis Riel-led rebellions, pieced together in the working conditions that would today most certainly be illegal—the making of the CPR, once we zoom out and see it completed, brought a country into being, created something bigger than the sum of its parts. (Or so we thought, until recently.) It didn’t have the snappiness of the Boston Tea Party, but it was certainly an epic. This is Canada: all our Iliads and Paradise Losts are transit-related.
Bown is very good on the life of the working men—migrants and local population both—that made the CPR: how much they earned, where they came from, what were they able to feed themselves, what were their hopes. The very first surveyors to roughly map the potential railway, crossing the country by horse, oxcart, canoe, steamer, and by foot, were the engineer Sir Sandford Fleming and George Munro Grant, a minister and public intellectual who left a detailed record of their journey in Ocean to Ocean (1873).
The gritty work of the detailed survey, however, was done by the army of workers known as the Canadian Pacific Survey—the hundreds of men who were spread out between Ontario and the Pacific in nomadic camps. At least 38 workers died on the job, Bown writes.
And then there was the business of laying down the tracks, done by a mix of European settlers and Indigenous and Chinese labourers. Half of them did not speak any English. There are few women in this story, outside the odd wife or a visiting royal. The first jobs for which women could qualify—telegraph operators—appear much later in the story after the telegraph lines get joined to the railway.
The CPR was lucky to end up with William Cornelius Van Horne as its manager, whom Bown credits as the paragon of competence and ethical conduct. There are dozens of characters in the book who were key for the CPR, financiers, politicians, and on-the-ground guides, but few match Van Horne as being all-round good news.
Technology has its own chapter too, with the primary focus on the invention that made railway construction possible: dynamite. Alfred Nobel’s “blasting oil” and its later variants made path-making through all kinds of terrain possible, and once lime and gypsum could be easily blasted, concrete and cement became available as construction materials.
Bown is even-handed on the topic of the Red River uprising and North-West Rebellions, spotting strategic errors and unsound judgment on both sides where warranted. Riel was wrong to approve the execution of the Orangeman Thomas Scott; Macdonald was wrong not to pardon Riel in the later conflict.I’ll admit that most of my Riel info comes from the Chester Brown graphic novel, and the Harry Somers-Mavor Moore opera about the man (a masterpiece of the late 1960s modernism which premiered the same year as Moshde Safdie’s Habitat 67, both marking Canada’s centenary) so I always welcome reading sedate and de-romanticized version of the events, and Bown’s is certainly that.
On the signing of the numbered treaties with Indigenous Peoples across what once was the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) land, Bown is also sober and even-handed. American whiskey traders and the U.S. Cavalry had to be driven out, inter-tribal warfare reduced, and a new social contract crafted, one based on mutual agreement and not straight-up colonial conquest. On the final Plains Treaty with the Niisitapi (Blackfoot), Bown writes:
To not sign would have soon meant starvation and continuous warfare with the encroaching Cree and Metis, who are also pursuing the dwindling bison herds for their own livelihood…At the time no one could have envisioned many millions of people living on the land that had never before seen more than a hundred thousand, nor imagined mighty cities and endless farms smothering the formerly wild grasslands.
On the great Canadian buffalo famine, he is adamant: it is Canada’s version of the Irish great potato famine, a “combination of natural disaster and political indifference, incompetence, and general hostility.” With the near-extinction of buffalo, tens of thousands of Indigenous people found themselves without any of the usual food sources.
Canada should have taken ownership of the problem and found channels of food supply, he writes: “They could have done more to alleviate the suffering, provided more competent and effective education and equipment for a transition to an agricultural economy, weeded out the corrupt Indian agents and curbed the excesses of the churches.” This was a betrayal, Bown writes, and a “stain upon the nation’s honour.”
Case well made. Where I find it harder to follow him is in the wistful looking back on the hunter-gathering, free-roaming, fur-trading period of what was to become Canada, a largely intact space dotted with HBC outposts where fur traders and their Indigenous wives raised their families. Industrialization, waves of migration, large-scale agriculture, the cities, and the whole nation-state shebang put paid to this peaceful, nomadic existence, in Bown’s telling.
He is aware that this prelapsarian world was in demise even before the railway brought the concomitant troubles. He writes of the fur trade fashion being fickle and the disappearance of buffalo and the spread of smallpox and other infectious diseases. But he can’t help writing an elegy for the ways of life lost to the march of history.
It is like writing a history of France as Gaulish resistance to Roman civilization, or lamenting Saxon England just after the Norman invasion—or even much later, as Tommaso di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, an elegy for the Kingdom of Sicily about to be gobbled up by the emerging pan-Italian state. It makes for beautiful copy, but slightly irrational historiography.
So where do we stand now as a country regarding train traffic? Well, the building of the Eglinton Crosstown Rail is taking much longer than the CPR did is a fact of note. And what of the promise of the Quebec City-Windsor high-speed train, which every few years gets resurrected as an idea, and then promptly shelved? The Windsor-Quebec line will have to wait for a different era and its own Macdonald—an age, and politicians, much more friendly to ambitious nation-building projects.
