The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 by Pierre Berton Page A

becoming an enthusiastic champion of an all-Canadian route. When the contract was signed in 1880, he and, indeed, all the CPR directors had been cool to Macdonald’s plan to build it across the Shield. But in late August, 1881, Stephen confessed to the Prime Minister that “all misgivings I had last year … have disappeared with a better knowledge of the position of the whole country. I am now satisfied that the C.P.R . without the control of a line to the Atlantic seaboard would be a mistake . If for instance, it terminated like the Northern Pacific, at Lake Superior it never could become the property it is certain to be having its own rails running from sea to sea. I am sure you will be glad to hear this from me because I do not think but for your own tenacity on that point, would the line North of the Lake ever have been built, events have shown you were right and all the rest wrong.”
    Some of this was flattery and some of it was close to being blackmail. Stephen had been aware, from the outset, of Macdonald’s obsession with an all-Canadian railway. He used his knowledge to good advantage – to bargain toughly for the insertion of the Monopoly Clause in the contract. The Prime Minister was made to understand that he could not have one thing without the other. If the CPR was to pay through the nose for an unprofitable line through an uninhabitable wilderness, it must receive compensation. Stephen might argue that this was merely an extension of the Conservative Party’s National Policy of protection, but that protection was paying big dividends for the proprietors of the CPR and of the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway whose directorates interlocked. The contract gave them a monopoly of all traffic out of Winnipeg into the United States and they made the most of it.
    At the time he wrote that letter, Stephen had an additional reason for his enthusiasm. He had just returned from Winnipeg, where he discovered that the white elephant might not be as unprofitable as he and his colleagues had believed. Lumber from Ottawa could be laid down in the Manitoba capital at ten dollars a thousand less than the city was paying elsewhere. He confided to the Governor General that the company would not give up the controversial portion of the line “even if the Government wished us.”
    The safety of the railway and of the country – the two were often identical in Stephen’s mind – could, he now felt, be guaranteed only by keeping the traffic of the North West on the Canadian side of LakeSuperior. (He did not, apparently, count the branch out of Sault Ste Marie, which circumvented the lake by connecting with Jim Hill’s road.) For that reason, the line from Lake Nipissing west must be “in all respects a first class road, capable of easy operation at high speed.” Stephen was eager to complete it in the shortest possible time: indeed, he was talking about driving steel from Portage la Prairie all the way to the foot of the Rockies by the late fall of 1882 – a forthright policy that would bring additional financial pressures to bear on the new company. Stephen was aware of the danger, but determined to press ahead: “This new and urgent necessity … is going to tax us to the full extent of our capacity, but I mean we shall do it.…”
    Again, as in the case of the prairie and mountain sections, Stephen and his colleagues had rejected Sandford Fleming’s surveys. The Fleming line took the easiest route, well to the north of Lake Nipigon, but Stephen wanted to adopt a new location that would hug the granite-ribbed shores of Superior. “The line north of Nipigon would be easy of construction and operation too, but it never can support settlers, there is absolutely no land , nothing but bare rocks and pools of water.” Moreover, by building close to the lake the contractors could be supplied by water transport. Stephen argued that because of this, construction time would be cut, perhaps in half. “Do not