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

air like the booming of a distant ocean.” This was a domain which few men ever saw; it could not exist for men. The railway would mark its finish.
    For the few who had come, nature might be idyllic but life was harsh. They huddled in drafty cabins, ill-lit by candles made of grease or buffalo chips and heated by a single box stove. They slept on mattresses stuffed with prairie grasses, spread out on bunks fashioned from green lumber whipsawed by hand. The price of groceries was so astronomical that they were, often enough, obliged to do without. In the words of Mrs. David McDougall, who bore the first white child along the Saskatchewan in 1872, it was “meat, morning, noon and night until I could have cried for joy to have seen some fresh fruit.”
    The savage blizzards of winter could fell the hardiest, as they did the respected prairie missionary George McDougall in 1876; in summer the clouds of mosquitoes could drive oxen mad. Then there were the great fires that could leave the land a blackened ruin and the grasshoppers that, in plague years, could eat everything, including the curtains on the windows, leaving no green or living sprout behind.
    In the East such phenomena were not understood. By 1872, the trickle of settlers westward was reaching the thousands. The soldiers who had struggled over the portages at the time of the Métis uprising, returned with tales of the rich humus in the Red River Valley. Their colonel, Garnet Wolseley, had himself written in Blackwoods magazine that “as far as the eye can see, there is stretched out before you an ocean of grass, whose vast immensity grows upon you more and more the longer you gaze upon it.” It brought, he said “a feeling of indescribably buoyant freedom [that] seems to tingle through every nerve, making the old feel young again.… Upon the boundless prairies, with no traces of man in sight, nature looks so fresh and smiling that youth alone is in consonance with it.”
    These were heady words but there were headier by far to come. Another dashing and romantic Irishman was back from the North West and very shortly the country would be agog with his descriptions of the region which he called “The Great Lone Land.”

6
Ocean to Ocean
    William Francis Butler has been called hot-blooded and impulsive. He does not look it in his photographs; but then one must remember that the photographers of that era had to support their subjects on metal posing stands and hold their heads steady with neck clamps (later removed from the print by a retoucher) so that they could endure the time exposures necessitated by wet plate photography. The glazed eye and the frozen expression became the accepted portrait style. Long after a faster process was invented, people thought they had to maintain a corpse-like aspect, devoid of levity. Butler, circa 1870, is a solemn, dome-headed young subaltern, the long oval of his face exaggerated by his close-cropped Souvaroff-style side whiskers and moustache. Only the eyes are alive.
    But he was impulsive. He was stationed in England when helearned that the Canadian government was mounting an expedition against Riel. The news could not have come at a more propitious moment. A remarkably intelligent officer, who had seen twelve years’ service in India, Burma and Canada (he had been there during the Fenian troubles of 1867), he ought to have been promoted long before. But in those days commissions were purchased, not earned, and Butler did not have the fifteen hundred pounds it would cost him to accept the proffered command of a company.
    He was faced with a terrible dilemma: he could serve on as a junior officer, watching “the dull routine of barrack life grow duller,” or he could quit the service and face an equally cheerless existence as the governor of a penitentiary or the secretary of a London club – and worse still, “admit that the twelve best years of life had been a useless dream.” He was positively thirsting for adventure