British Columbia was quite a different story. Bordered by the 49th parallel on one side and the American purchase of Alaska (in March 1867) on the other, British Columbia faced a difficult decision. The great Fraser River gold rush of 1858 had moved northward to the Cariboo country, to Barkerville, with its board sidewalks, board houses, and board cemetery, now a board monument to gold fever. As early as 1865 Barkerville’s gold was starting to run out too; miners were leaving, colonial delrt was accumulating, and the British government decided it did not need two west-coast colonies, Vancouver Island and British Columbia, each with its own stamps, officials, and capital. The two were joined together forcibly in November 1866, under the name of the mainland colony, but with the capital left in Victoria. This union did not end British Columbia’s tribulations, and the American acquisition of Alaska made British Columbians distinctly uneasy.
Above: Basilica, Quebec City, in a snowstorm, 1882.
Right: Richmond Street, London, Ontario. 1882.
They were cut off from everything. If they wanted to send a letter from Victoria to Ottawa, they had to put an American stamp on it beside the British Columbian one; the American post office at San Francisco, some 800 kilometres (500
Barkerville, B. C., is named for William Barker, a Cornish sailor who struck gold there in 1862. By 1865, when Charles Gentile took this picture, the gold rush was at its height; within ten years, though, the bonanza was over. Note the hillside of stumps; the trees had been used for buildings and boardwalks.
Miles) to the south, would not accept it otherwise. It was humiliating and unfair. All things considered, why not be Americans? There were some British loyalties in Victoria, but in British Columbia annexation to the United States did not have the fierce, treasonous mien that history had given the idea in the East. It was coolly thought of as a legitimate possibility. However, representations from the Fraser valley were much more pro-Confederation than those from the Island; the mainland was at least contiguous with the Dominion of Canada, even if the distances were enormous and the territory hardly explored. The Sir John Palliser expedition of 1857-60 had explored southern Saskatchewan and Alberta, and had found a new pass, the Kicking Horse. Exploration does not make colonization; still, Canadian acquisition of the Hudson’s Bay territory in 1869 did give the Canadianists in the British Columbia mainland a legitimate argument.
But what could the new Dominion of Canada offer to this vast, untamed world of mountains and sea coast? As it turned out, Canada offered quite a bit—and more than good sense might have suggested. British Columbia delegates went east to Ottawa in the summer of 1870. It was a long trip, from Victoria by steamer to San Francisco, then via a long, hot train journey on the very new Central Pacific-Union Pacific transcontinental railway, completed just the year before, to Omaha, Chicago, and Toronto. Macdonald himself was out of action; he had been struck down with a severe attack of gallstones early in May and was only now beginning to recover from what had seemed a mortal illness. For the time being the captain of the ship was George-Etienne Cartier. The British Columbians wanted a guarantee of at least a wagon road from Winnipeg to Burrard Inlet. Cartier was bolder than that. He knew something about railways, even about their use as machines for expansion. What
Americans could do, Canadians could do. In effect, Cartier said to the British Columbians, “What on earth do you want with a wagon road? It’s no good at all in winter, and monumentally slow even in summer. Why don’t you ask for a railway?” The British Columbians couldn’t believe it. To have their own terms improved on by the very people they were negotiating with! The Canadian terms were enthusiastically accepted: a railway survey to be begun within two years of the date of union—July 20,1871—and the railway itself to be completed within ten years. Thus Cartier committed the Canadian government to building and completing a railway to the west coast by July 20, 1881. The Conservative caucus in Ottawa blanched a bit at this but the British Columbia bill went through caucus, and later Parliament, on assurance from the British Columbians that they would not insist on the dates. After all, there wasn’t even a railway survey in existence, and the nearest railway point to Burrard Inlet was probably Barrie, Ontario.
The Canadian union was taking on a more recognizable shape. Prince Edward Island being added on July 1, 1873. The Islanders were triumphant: after some fascinating manipulations they got their railway paid for, a guaranteed ferry service to the mainland, and a debt allowance double anyone else’s. No wonder the Governor General reported, on his official visit to Gharlottetown to celebrate July 1, 1873, that the Islanders were under the distinct impression that it was the Dominion of Canada that had been annexed to Prince Edward Island!
It was an audacious enterprise, that union put together between 1864 and 1873. But it had to be fastened down. The Intercolonial Railway from Halifax to Quebec, required by the British North America Act, was partly finished; the first through train was run in July 1876. Sandford Eleming, the engineer-in-chief, got his way and the railway ran over iron bridges, not wooden ones. At the other end of the country the railway was still at the survey stage. Sandford Eleming was put in charge there too, and a mighty work it was. The scale was enormous, and even now, a hundred years later, sufficiently daunting. The Americans had had a transcontinental railway by 1869; but there were formidable differences. The U. S. population in 1870 was 39 million, with the transcontinental railway serving a population of half a million in California alone; Canada in 1871 had a population of 3.7 million, and the future Pacific railway would serve 11,000 whites—given that the Native peoples were paid scant attention by British Columbia. Pulling Canada together with a railway system that would, by 1885, go from Halifax to Vancouver, was a considerable achievement for a young country that had, even in 1881, only 4.3 million souls.
Cartier’s Pacific railway decision may have been unwise; lots of Ontario taxpayers had begun to think so. Still, the Macdonald government was struggling, not ineffectually, to master the enormous problems the Northwest Territories and British Columbia represented. One thing was abundantly visible: there could be no transcontinental nation without the physical means to administer it. A mart usque ad mare was our major problem of empire and communications.
World History
