The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 by Pierre Berton

energy, which saw him engaged in a score of boyhood scrapes – had a maturing effect on him. His mother firmly believed that God had a purpose in sparing him; Grant himself said that without the loss of his hand he would not have achieved the success that was later to be his. Confined by his accident, the handicapped boy brought to the world of books the same zestful curiosity with which he had examined the haycutter. At college he was known as an outstanding and intensely competitive student, debater, orator and, in spite of his missing hand, a good football player.
    Grant was, in a London journalist’s phrase, “the realized ideal of Kingsley’s muscular Christian.” When he joined Fleming’s expedition, he was in the prime of life – a lithe thirty-seven, with a high, savant’s dome, flat straight nose, intense Scottish eyes and the inevitable beard. He stood, at that moment, at the threshold of a great career which would lead him to the principal’s chair at Queen’s. The notes for Ocean to Ocean were transcribed late at night, at the end of a hard day’s travel, by the light of a flickering campfire, but thebook itself, a polished and readable polemic for the new Canada, bore no sign of haste or hardship. In the words of Grant’s son, “it revealed to Canada the glories of her northern and western territories, and did not a little to steel the hearts of many through the dark days that were to come.”
    The expedition set out across the Great Lakes by steamer into the stony wasteland of the Shield where Fleming’s surveyors were already inching their way – and sometimes meeting their deaths – in a land untouched by white men’s moccasins. The party included Fleming’s son and a Halifax doctor friend of Grant’s, Arthur Moren. Soon another remarkable figure was to be enlisted.
    Not long after embarkation, Fleming’s attention was attracted by the enthusiasms of an agile and energetic man with a brown beard and twinkling eyes. This creature invariably leaped from the steamer the instant it touched the shoreline and began scrambling over rocks and diving into thickets, stuffing all manner of mosses, ferns, lichens, sedges, grasses and flowers into a covered case, which he carried with him.
    It was only because the steamer whistled obligingly for him that he did not miss the boat. Sometimes, indeed, he was forced to scramble up the side after the ship had cast loose from the pier. The sailors called him “the Haypicker” and treated him with an amused tolerance, but his enthusiasm was so infectious that he soon had a gaggle of passengers in his wake, scraping their shins on the Precambrian granite, as he plucked new specimens from between the rocks.
    This was John Macoun, a botanist on the staff of Albert College in Belleville, enjoying a busman’s holiday in the wilds. Fleming asked him casually if he would care to come along to the Pacific and Macoun, just as casually, accepted. Timetables in the seventies were elastic and, though the prospect of a twenty-five-hundred-mile journey across uncharted prairie, forest, mountain peak and canyon might have deterred a lesser man, it only stimulated Macoun, in the garden of whose lively mind the images of hundreds of unknown species were already blooming.
    Macoun was a natural botanist, almost entirely self-taught. As a child he had been credited with the sharpest eyes among his fellows, able to find more strawberries and birds’ nests than any other boy in the school. At thirteen he had quit school and shortly after that departed his native Ireland (then in the throes of the ghastly potato famine) to seek his future in Upper Canada. He began his new life as a farmhand but he could not resist the lure of plants. He determined to become a teacher in order that he might devote his spare hours to a study of botany. It tells something of the educational system of those days that he had little trouble in achieving his ambition. After a three-day study of a plain