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

grammar text, Macoun left his job, walked forty-three miles in the dead of winter to the home of the county school inspector and was given to understand that he was practically qualified. He received his certificate in just three weeks and began his new career teaching, of all subjects, astronomy.
    In his spare moments, this enormously energetic and dedicated Irishman read his way through the standard scientific tomes, collected specimens by the hundreds, hobnobbed with every botanist he could find, talked botany with anyone who would listen, built himself a herbarium and, partly by trial and error, partly by osmosis, and partly by sheer, hard slogging, slowly made himself a botanist of standing in both Europe and America.
    In 1869, just ten years after he had left the farm and set himself on his chosen path, John Macoun was offered the chair of Natural History at Albert College. That summer he began the series of Great Lakes vacation-studies that brought him, three years later, into the ken of Sandford Fleming.
    This accidental meeting between Fleming and Macoun was immensely significant. Macoun, the perennial enthusiast, became enamoured of the North West. It was he, perhaps more than anyone else, who eventually convinced the Government, the public at large, and, finally, the men who built the Canadian Pacific Railway, that Hind and Palliser were wrong – that the land to the south of the Saskatchewan River was not an arid belt but a fertile plain. In doing so he helped change the course of the railway and thus, for better or for worse, the very shape of Canada. It is possible that the south Saskatchewan farmers, eking out an existence along the drought-stricken right of way during the 1930’s, might have cursed his memory, had they been aware of it.
    By the time they left the steamer and headed out across the rock and muskeg towards the prairie, Macoun, Grant and Fleming had become a close triumvirate. It makes a fascinating picture, this spectacle of the three bearded savants, all in their prime, each at the top of his field, setting off together to breast a continent: the comradeship was warm, the prayers earnest, the talk stimulating and the way challenging.
    Of the three, Fleming was easily the most remarkable as well asthe most impressive physically. He was forty-five years old at the time and he still had half of his life ahead of him in which to complete the Intercolonial and plan the Canadian Pacific, devise a workable system of standard time, plan and promote the Pacific cable, act as an ambassador to Hawaii, publish a book of “short daily prayers for busy households,” become Chancellor of Queen’s University, girdle the globe, and cross Canada by foot, snowshoe, dog team, horseback, raft, dugout canoe and finally by rail.
    Fleming was a dedicated amateur whose interests ran the gamut from early steamboats to colour-blindness. (He himself was colour blind and once courted his future wife unknowingly wearing a pink suit.) He had a fling at a wide variety of pastimes and pursuits. A competent artist, he was rarely without his sketchbook. He dabbled in town planning and was a better than average chess player. He once acted as an amateur lawyer in a civil litigation. Indeed, if this insatiably curious yet singularly cautious man had a fault, it was that he had too many interests. He always seemed willing to take on something more, at a cost to his health and his abilities in his chosen profession of engineering. He loved his work and apparently saw himself as a strong, silent scientist – a doer and not a talker. “Engineers,” he once said, “…  are not as a rule gifted with many words. Men so gifted generally aim at achieving renown in some other sphere – the pulpit, the press, the bar … politics.… Silent men, such as we are, can have no such ambition.… Engineers must plod on in a distinct sphere of their own, dealing less with words than with deeds, less with men than with matter.…”
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