Free The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 by Pierre Berton Page B

up by the yeasty society of nineteenth-century America. A Bavarian immigrant, he had arrived in New York at the age of eighteen and eked out a living working as a reporter for German-American newspapers. He had shot up swiftly in both the journalistic and the financial fields. As a reporter for leading United States dailies, he had covered the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the Pike’s Peak gold rush, and the Civil War. Beginning as an agent for German bondholders, he moved into railway finance and helped reorganize an Oregon railroad and steamship line. By 1881, at the age of forty-six, he owned the Nation and the New York Evening Post and controlled the Northern Pacific, whose construction he was pushing westward with a reckless enthusiasm that took little account of rising costs.
    In Manitoba two private railways were being built towards the United States border. The Northern Pacific had bought control of one and was ready to buy control of the other, believing, in Stephen’s words, that “they can force a connection at the boundary and so strangle the Canadian Pacific; which they are determined to do if they can.” With both Macdonald and Tupper absent from Ottawa, Stephen feared the government might yield to pressure from the prairie province and allow the two lines to connect at the border with a spur from the Northern Pacific’s through line. Stephen urged Macdonald to instruct Ottawa at once to hold matters over until he returned; he cabled him that a decision in favour of the Manitoba lines “must effectually destroy Pacific as National through line, rendering Eastern section useless …”
    All that fall of 1881, Stephen kept up continual pressure on the Prime Minister to disallow by federal decree any provincially chartered lines that came within fifteen miles of the border. Again and again he made the point that a “Yankee line” into Manitoba would make it impossible to operate or even to build the Lake Superior section of the CPR . With such American competition no one could prevent the products of the North West being drawn through the United States to Chicago, whose attractionas a market for wheat was almost irresistible. Stephen used every argument in his power to convince Macdonald to disallow the Manitoba charters: it would, he told him, mean the disgrace not only of the railway but also of the Conservative government itself, since the country would not stand for the enormous expense of the Lake Superior line if it turned out to be worthless. “It would be a miserable affair to find that the benefit of all our efforts to develop the North West had by our own acts, fallen into Yankee hands.”
    Many of Macdonald’s followers, especially those in Manitoba, were eager to subvert the spirit of the contract which protected the railway through its Monopoly Clause. Because of the British North America Act the clause did not prevent the provinces from chartering lines to the border in competition with the transcontinental railway. This was Stephen’s fear. The Liberal press was already crying “Monopoly!” Stephen wanted the Prime Minister to counter this opposition by exerting pressure on friendly newspapers: “Don’t you think it would be well for you to take some steps to prevent the friendly portion of the Press being led astray by the cry of Monopoly? … I think it would be well for you to instruct the Mail and Gazette on these points, and expose the ‘Monopoly humbug.’ ” Stephen also hoped to bring pressure on the Liberal Free Press in Winnipeg through the company’s land commissioner, John McTavish, who did considerable advertising, and through Donald A. Smith, who held a mortgage on the Free Press property and was believed to own shares in the paper as well.
    Stephen even felt it necessary to bolster Macdonald with some of his own arguments, pointing out that disallowance was simply another aspect of the protectionist platform that had won the Conservative Party its smashing victory in