National Dreams

Myth, Memory, and Canadian History

Daniel Francis

• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9781551520438
• eBook ISBN: 9781551523309
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

As Canadians, we remember the stories told to us in high-school history class as condensed images of the past--the glorious Mountie, the fearsome Native, the Last Spike. National Dreams is an incisive study of the most persistent icons and stories in Canadian history, and how they inform our sense of national identity: the fundamental beliefs that we Canadians hold about ourselves. National Dreams is the story of our stories; the myths and truths of our collective past that we first learned in school, and which we carry throughout our adult lives as tangible evidence of what separates us from other nationalities. Francis examines various aspects of this national mythology, in which history is as much storytelling as fact. Textbooks were an important resource for Francis. "For me, these books are interesting not because they explain what actually happened to us, but because they explain what we think happened to us."

For example, Francis documents how the legend of the CPR as a country-sustaining, national affirming monolity was created by the company itself--a group of capitalists celebrating the privately-owned railway, albeit one which was generously supported with public land and cash--and reiterated by most historians ever since.

Similarly, we learn how the Mounties were transformed from historical police force to mythic heroes by a vast army of autobiographers, historians, novelists, and Hollywood filmmakers, with little attention paid to the true role of the force in such incidents as the Bolshevik rebellion, in which a secret conspiracy by the Government against its people was conducted through the RNWMP.

Also revealed in National Dreams are the stories surrounding the formation and celebration of Canadian heroes such as Louis Riel and Billy Bishop.

CHAPTER ONE
Making Tracks THE MYTH OF THE CPR

On the morning of November 18, 1993, as I sat over my morning cereal reading the Globe and Mail, I was startled to encounter columnist Michael Valpy’s outrage at the desecration of a Canadian symbol. Canadian Pacific had just announced that it was introducing a new corporate logo which would include the American Stars and Stripes along with the familiar maple leaf. “I have a message for those soul-shrivelled, dreary, thick, witless people at Canadian Pacific Railway,” Valpy wrote. “You are pathetic.”

According to Valpy, CPR was “flushing away” a great Canadian tradition for the sake of making a few more dollars. The railway was, said Valpy, a “wonderful romantic notion,” a magnificent technical achievement and one of the enduring symbols of Canadian identity. It had been built in order to preserve the country from the Americans. It was one of the truly great things Canadians had done together as a nation. Yet the “grey faceless bean-counters” in the corporate head offices now planned to betray that legacy by painting the dreaded Stars and Bars on the sides of their rail cars.

In his outrage, Michael Valpy was expressing a common view of the CPR and its relationship to the country. This view holds that without the railway there would be no Canada, certainly not as it exists today. The railway was built chiefly on the backs of Chinese coolie labour, using land obtained for almost nothing from the Indians and capital raised for the most part in Britain. Nevertheless, for many people, it has become over the years a great “Canadian” achievement and a symbol of the bonds which unite us as a people. In 1990, when the Mulroney government introduced drastic cutbacks to national rail service, including an end to the historic route north of Superior known as widespread. “It’s one of the most famous trains in the world,” wrote one mourner about The Canadian, “right in there with the Orient Express, the Trans-Siberian, the Indian-Pacific. They can’t be serious. The history of The Canadian is our history.”¹ It seemed as if the government was giving up on a noble dream, the National Dream, that once gave meaning to the country. In Canada, a train is, or at least was, much more than a train. It is seen as a visible expression of the determination to exist as a country, against the logic of the geographers and the accountants, Michael Valpy’s “grey faceless bean-counters.”

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1. Pierre Berton became something of a national icon himself following publication of his popular two-volume history of the CPR in 1970-71. Already well known as a controversial newspaper columnist and television quiz-show host, Berton’s railway books made him the pre-eminent popular historian in the country, our number one National Dreamer. It is impossible to dig too deeply into any aspect of Canada’s past without encountering the Berton Version. Here he is instructing Canadians on the history of their national railway in the television miniseries based on the railway books.

“Study the railways and you learn about our people,” Silver Donald Cameron once wrote.² Where does this idea come from? Most recently it comes from Pierre Berton, who mythologized the history of the railway during the 1970s in three books and a popular television series. Berton’s narrative presents the CPR as an heroic endeavour which united the disparate regions of the country in a single, bold dream of nationhood, making Canada “a rare example of a nation created through the construction of a railway.”³ In this narrative, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald is presented as a visionary politician who recognized that Canada was a nation in name only until its two ends were united by the iron road. W. Kaye Lamb, another historian of the railway, agrees. “If he [Macdonald] had not found ways and means of constructing it when he did, Canada would almost certainly not extend today from sea to sea.”⁴ In the pantheon of nation builders, Macdonald holds front rank, and the railway was his chosen instrument.

The myth of the CPR was in the air long before Berton and Lamb began writing it. Almost every book written about the railway has made the argument that, as R.G. MacBeth put it in 1924, “the country and the railway must stand or fall together.”⁵ When the Newfoundland poet Ned Pratt was casting about for a suitable epic theme to cap his distinguished career, he saw that the story of the CPR had the necessary ingredients.

The east-west cousinship, a nation’s rise,
Hail of identity, a world expanding,
If not the universe: the feel of it
Was in the air
—“Union required the line.”

His Governor-General’s Award-winning epic, Towards the Last Spike, presents the railway as a symbol for the completion of the nation.

The myth of the CPR as creator of the country is, in fact, as old as the railway itself, which is not surprising given that it was the railway itself which created the myth. Once the CPR had built the line, it set about promoting its achievement in countless books, pamphlets, stories, and movies. “The construction of the Canadian Pacific consummated Confederation,” the company crowed in one of its early publications. The mundane act of constructing a railway was transformed into an heroic narrative of nation building. After a while it was almost impossible to imagine one without applaudinff the other.

I

Canada is a country without an independence day. Our history reveals no single moment at which the country gained its autonomy.⁶ “We cannot find our beginning,” Robert Kroetsch writes. “There is no Declaration of Independence, no Magna Carta, no Bastille Day.”⁷ Canada began as a collection of separate colonies belonging to Great Britain, then evolved by stages into an independent nation. During the 1840s, responsible government brought a modicum of independence to the local legislatures. In 1867, Confederation united these legislatures into a single colony, but one which remained under the protective wing of the Mother Country. The Balfour Report (1926) declared that Canada was an “autonomous community within the British Empire,” and we began establishing our own embassies in foreign countries, but the British Privy Council was still our court of last resort, and the constitution was still amendable only in London. Perhaps we were not truly independent until 1982, when Canadians attained the power to amend their own constitution.

Canada accepted its autonomy as a country gradually, almost tentatively, as opposed to many other countries which seized it enthusiastically and proclaimed it defiantly. As a result, we have no myth of creation, no narrative which celebrates the birth of the nation, not even a central image like Uncle Sam or John Bull to personify the community and sum up what it stands for. We have no Founders, at least none whom we celebrate. In the absence of a defining moment, various symbolic ones have been proposed. For the sake of convenience we celebrate our national birthday on July 1, implying that Confederation Day, 1867, is Canada’s true independence day, even though it is not. (To make matters more complicated, Quebec celebrates its “national” day on June 24, St. Jean Baptiste Day.) One familiar narrative suggests that Canada “came of age” during World War I, that the country attained a new maturity and the right to speak for itself in the world because of the carnage suffered by our young soldiers. On the other hand, I remember getting the impression when I was at school that Canada became independent with the Statute of Westminster in 1931, even though that legislation continued to leave important powers in British hands.

One of the most popular candidates for Canadian Independence Day has been November 7, 1885, the day on which a party of CPR navvies and notables watched company president Donald Smith drive the last spike at Craigellachie deep in the mountains of British Columbia. Histories of this event declare that the two photographs taken at Craigellachie are the most famous in Canadian history. In his 1924 book about the railway, R.G. MacBeth suggests that a Last Spike photograph belongs on the wall of every schoolroom in the country because it captures “the birth of a nation.”⁸ A much more recent book about the company calls the Last Spike “the most important single event in Canadian history.”⁹ Other countries have produced romantic images of citizens storming the barricades clutching the flag of freedom. Canada’s version is apparently these photographs, showing a man in a top hat and a wool suit banging at a nail.

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2. There are two Last Spike photographs taken by Alexander J. Ross to record the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885. In this one, Donald Smith stands ready to hammer the spike home. Van Home is on his right with chief engineer Sandford Fleming visible between them. The second photograph shows Smith striking the historic blow. These photographs have been called the most famous in Canadian history.

If the photographs of the Last Spike are going to be taken as symbolic representations of the moment of our independence as a nation, it is worth inquiring how they came to be taken. Textbooks tell us that CPR general manager William Van Home wanted a modest ceremony, mainly because it was all the railway could afford. Chief engineer Sandford Fleming was there, as was Van Home, Major A.B. Rogers, discoverer of Rogers Pass, and a few other company officials. So were the men who had been busy completing the last stretch of track through Eagle Pass. Otherwise, Van Home supposedly said, “anyone who wants to see it driven will have to pay full fare.”¹⁰ Donald Smith’s first blow with the hammer glanced away and merely bent the spike. Another was quickly substituted and, this time more carefully, Smith drove it home. The original, bent spike was taken by Smith and cut up into brooches for the wives of company officials. The second last spike was pulled out following the ceremony to prevent its removal by over-zealous souvenir hunters; it eventually ended up in the possession of Edward Beatty, a later president of the CPR.

The man who took the famous photographs was Alexander J. Ross, a photographer from Calgary. Berton describes him as a hunchback. Beyond that nothing is known about why he was chosen to capture this historic moment on film. Ross remained in the photography business for a few years, then turned to ranching before he died in 1894.¹¹

No public officials were present at the Last Spike ceremony, no representative of the country which, myth has it, the railway made possible. (The Governor-General, Lord Lansdowne, had planned to be there, but was called back to Ottawa on more pressing business.) The Last Spike was an event staged by a group of capitalists to celebrate the completion of a privately-owned railway, albeit one which was generously supported with public land and cash. For them the “trail of iron” was a money-making proposition, not a national dream. “The Canadian Pacific was built for the purpose of making money for the share-holders and for no other purpose under the sun,” stated Van Home.¹² Yet within a few years myth had transformed the railway from a triumph of private capitalism into a triumph of patriotic nation-building. The backers of the CPR were “Empire-builders,” not “money-makers,” wrote MacBeth.¹³ The implication to be drawn is that the real Fathers of Confederation were William Van Home, Donald Smith, and George Stephen, the men who built the railway.

The narrative of nation-building was reinforced by the fascination which railways exerted over the public imagination during the last half of the nineteenth century. Railways were the emblem of an age which believed fervently in progress and technological achievement. Their promoters presented them as miracle workers. This “apparently impossible project,” MacBeth called the CPR; “this modern wonderwork.”¹⁴ Railways seemed capable of transforming the world like magic, spreading wealth, settlement, and industry in their wake. George Ham, an early CPR publicist, marvelled at how the road “magically transformed a widely scattered Dominion into a prosperous and progressive nation.”¹⁵ The railway, proclaimed another enthusiast, is “the magical wand which is destined to people the Great North West.”¹⁶

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3. Labourers had their own story to tell about the construction of the transcontinental railway. They staged their Last Spike ceremony after the bigwigs had gone. This photograph reminds us that there are different ways of narrating history, depending on who is telling the story.

Despite all this rhetoric, in the spring of 1885 the yet-to-be-completed CPR was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, in desperate need of another injection of capital. But the patience of the government was wearing thin, and most observers expected the half-finished project to collapse. Then a group of disaffected Metis led by Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont in the Saskatchewan River country decided to take up arms in support of their land grievances. They declared a provisional government and routed a party of Mounted Police, raising the spectre of an all-out frontier war. The CPR offered its partially-completed line to move a force of almost 3,000 soldiers quickly westward from Ontario to quell the insurrection. After the Metis and their Indian allies were defeated, the CPR could claim a share in saving the country, and in return a grateful government saved the CPR by approving the money necessary to finish the road.

This co-dependency between the railway and the politicians whose survival depended on its completion goes some way toward explaining the origins of the CPR myth. The railway needed Prime Minister Macdonald and his party to ensure the provision of public funds. Macdonald needed the railway to prolong his political survival and to complete his vision of a transcontinental nation. CPR contributions to the Conservative Party during the 1880s totalled somewhere between $15 and $25 million in today’s money.¹⁷ This was taxpayers’ money, of course, paid over to the CPR by the government, and then given back to the Conservatives to use to fight their political battles. Locked in such a mutually rewarding embrace, it was not hard for the railway and the Party to convince themselves that the country depended on their success. No wonder the destiny of one became so thoroughly confused with the destiny of the other.

II

The railway preceded settlement, it did not follow it, which meant that once it was completed, there was no one to ride on it. In 1885, the great boom in prairie settlement was still a decade in the future, and almost nobody had any reason to take a train ride across the country. Faced with the challenge of paying for itself, the CPR did two things. First of all, it developed an immigration program for the Prairie West, and secondly it began a campaign to convince travellers that western Canada, and particularly the Rocky Mountains, were attractive tourist destinations. Both objectives could only be achieved by creating a favourable image of western Canada and marketing it around the world. So the CPR embarked on a mammoth selling job, which succeeded beyond its wildest dreams.

In return for building the railway, the CPR had obtained from the government about ten million hectares of land between Ontario and the Rocky Mountains (along with $25 million and a variety of other concessions). The company was expected to finance the railroad by selling the land to new settlers. To do so, it created an immigration department which produced a flood of posters, pamphlets, maps, and books in a variety of languages for distribution across Europe and in the United States. This material extolled the Canadian West as a paradise where newcomers would find every opportunity to achieve the good life. Lecturers toured Europe with slide shows designed to impress viewers with the wealth and fertility of the region. In England the railway created a Travelling Exhibition Van which toured the back-country roads like an itinerant circus, carrying the message of the Canadian Eden to all the tiny hamlets where fut...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• INTRODUCTION The Story of Canada
• CHAPTER ONE Making Tracks: The Myth of the CPR
• CHAPTER TWO The Mild West: The Myth of the RCMP
• CHAPTER THREE Your Majesty’s Realm: The Myth of the Master Race
• CHAPTER FOUR The Infantilization of Quebec: The Myth of Unity
• CHAPTER FIVE Divided We Stand: The Myth of Heroism
• CHAPTER SIX The Ideology of the Canoe: The Myth of Wilderness
• CHAPTER SEVEN Great White Hope: The Myth of North
• CONCLUSION History in an Age of Anxiety
• Endnotes
• Photo Sources
• Sources Consulte
• Index