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

too often a wild sea of raging fire. No ocean of water in the world can vie with its gorgeous sunsets; nosolitude can equal the loneliness of a night-shadowed prairie: one feels the stillness and hears the silence, the wail of the prowling wolf makes the voice of solitude audible, the stars look down through infinite silence upon a silence almost as intense. This ocean has no past – time has been nought to it; and men have come and gone, leaving behind them no track, no vestige, of their presence.”
    Butler went back to England eventually, returned to write a second book, this one called The Wild North Land , and pursued, for the remainder of his years, a distinguished military career. Wealthy or not, his calibre was such that they had to make him a general and, when the great British river flotilla went up the Nile in its vain attempt to save Gordon from the Mahdi, Butler was in charge of it. He gathered many trophies and not a few decorations but his book was his monument and his closing words rang down the corridor of the decade like a trumpet call:
    “Midst the smoke and hum of cities, midst the prayer of churches, in street or salon , it needs but little cause to recall again to the wanderer the image of the immense meadows where, far away at the portals of the setting sun, lies the Great Lone Land.”
    Butler’s book was published in 1872. The following year another work on the North West made its appearance. It was so popular that it went into several editions and was serialized in the newspapers. Its title, Ocean to Ocean , also became part of the phraseology of the day. It was the saga of two bearded Scots, who, in one continuous passage by almost every conveyance available travelled entirely through British territory to the Pacific Coast – a feat which captured the public’s imagination.
    The author of Ocean to Ocean was a remarkable Presbyterian minister named George Monro Grant, who was to become one of the most distinguished educators and literary figures of his time. He was already an outstanding preacher whose sermons, at St. Matthew’s, Halifax, were so eloquent and forceful that sinners of the deepest dye were seen to emerge from their pews actually beaming after suffering the scourge of his tongue.
    Grant was Sandford Fleming’s choice for the post of secretary to the transcontinental expedition that the Engineer-in-Chief organized in 1872 to follow the proposed route of the new railway. The surveyor had determined to see the country for himself and discuss theprogress of the field work at every point with the men on the ground. He could scarcely have chosen a better companion, for Grant had the same breadth of vision as his own. Many of his parishioners agreed with the elderly lady who said that Grant was “far too much taken up with the affairs of the world ever to have been a minister.” In 1867 he had been a strong advocate of Confederation, a cause not popular with all of his congregation; one of them told him bluntly to “stick to your damn preaching and leave the politics to us.” But Grant was already a Canadian first and a Nova Scotian second; he did not believe that the future of his province lay in petty sectionalism; the prosperity of the part, he was certain, depended on the development of the whole. His odyssey with Fleming resolved in his mind “the uneasy doubt … as to whether or not Canada had a future.”
    In Grant, Fleming had a trail-mate who was leather-tough and untroubled by adversity, a good man in the best sense, from whose bald brow there always seemed to shine the light of Christian good humour, in spite of an invalid wife and one retarded son. He himself had come through the fire, having been thrice at death’s door in the very first decade of life: scalded half to death, almost drowned and given up for dead and mangled by a haycutter, which cost him his right hand. This accident-proneness – it sprang out of bubbling high spirits and an incurably restless