21 October 2010

Macdonald's Wife Liked to Ride the Rails Across Canada

When the national dream of a transcontinental rail line became a reality in November 1885 with the driving of the last spike, Lady Agnes Macdonald, wife of Prime Minister Sir John A Macdonald, could hardly wait to travel by Canadian Pacific Railway to the outposts of Western Canada.
 
The railroading adventures of Lady Macdonald began early in 1885. Sir John had gone to England to rest after the ruckus of the North-West Rebellion and Riel's execution, leaving his wife behind in Ottawa to contemplate a New Year's trip to the Canadian west, maybe as far as the Rockies.
 
"Only to Regina," cautioned the prime minister, who was sure the wild country beyond that frontier town, inhabited by a handful of settlers and prone to blizzards and freezing temperatures, was no place for his wife to be gallivanting off to in mid-winter. (At the time only 23 homesteads had been claimed along the rail line between Moose Jaw and Calgary.)
 
But the poised and gracious Lady Macdonald, 20 years younger than her husband, loved adventure and had the boundless energy to match. She also had a mind of her own, so it probably came as no surprise to her husband when he heard that she planned to travel as far as Stephen in British Columbia at the very summit of the Rockies.
 
The CPR's vice-president and general manager, William Van Horne, was only too eager to place the facilities of the railroad at her disposal. The CPR needed all the publicity it could get, and to have the wife of the prime minister travelling over the line to see the mountains in their winter splendour was publicity indeed.
 
On 4 Jan 1886, Lady Macdonald and her party steamed through Moose Jaw in the prime minister's private railway coach "Jamaica" (Lady Macdonald was born in Jamaica where her father was the attorney general). The coach was described as "very long, roomy, and exquisitely fitted up, and no more elegant rooms than its drawing room could be found."
 
The trip, considered by some to be "a dreadful rashness," was a complete success. The sun shone all the way and there were no delays, frozen locomotive, or snowslides.
 
On the return journey, Lady Macdonald stopped at Regina where she held a New year's levee at Government House for her friends as well as Territorial dignitaries.
 
Government House in 1886 was not the stately mansion we know today. The earlier vice-regal home of the lieutenant governors of the North-West Territories was described as a ramshackle, one-storey structure, assembled from two or three prefabricated buildings shipped from eastern Canada and poorly equipped to handle climate extremes. It was painted red and "not a single tree or cow blocked its view to the horizon on every side."
 
(Several years later, when the prime minister was called upon in the House of Commons to defend the expenditure for a proposed new Government House at Regina, he replied:  "The old house is a wretched place and I do not see how the Governor's family lived there during the winter... There are 17 stoves going continually and the inmates can not keep themselves warm. My wife was there during a winter, and although there was a stove in the room, the water froze."
 
In spite of primitive surroundings, the New Year's levee was a crowded, happy affair. Lt.-Governor Edgar Dewdney was there in his Windsor uniform covered in gold braid, along with Mounted Police officers in their red tunics. Lady Macdonald, lively, and sociable as usual, welcomed the hundreds who called during the afternoon, and made sure everyone did justice to the platters of roast beef, ham, chicken, and turkey.
 
On her return to Ottawa, Agnes Macdonald wrote to her sister-in-law Louisa Macdonald:  "I have been to the summit of the Canadian Rocky Mountains by CPR... It was by far the most interesting and delightful trip I ever made in my life. What astonished me was the comfort and ease of the railway, its strict punctuality, its quiet and prompt management, and its little motion. We read, played games, wrote letters, all generally with great ease and this on a line far away in an almost uninhabited country and in the depth of a Canadian winter. Ottawa seems so dull and tame and stupid and old after that wonderful new western world with its breadth and length and clear air and wonderfully exhilarating atmosphere that always seems to lure me on."
 
Six months later, Lady Macdonald returned to the mountains, this time with the prime minister in tow and the determination to ride from Laggan (now Lake Louise) to the CPR's Pacific terminus on the cowcatcher of an engine!
 
Leith Knight.