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

Author:Pierre Berton
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780385673549
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2010-12-22T08:00:00+00:00

2

The displaced people

The whole country marvelled, that spring and summer of 1883, over the feat of building the railway across the prairies in just fifteen months – everybody, that is, except the people it was displacing. To the Indians, the railway symbolized the end of a golden age – an age in which the native peoples, liberated by the white man’s horses and the white man’s weapons, had galloped at will across their untrammelled domain, where the game seemed unlimited and the zest of the hunt gave life a tang and a purpose. This truly idyllic existence came to an end with the suddenness of a thunderclap just as the railway, like a glittering spear, was thrust through the ancient hunting grounds of the Blackfoot and the Cree. Within six years, the image of the Plains Indian underwent a total transformation. From a proud and fearless nomad, rich in culture and tradition, he became a pathetic, half starved creature, confined to the semi-prisons of the new reserves and totally dependent on government relief for his existence.

The buffalo, on which the entire Indian economy and culture depended, were actually gone before the coming of the railway; but the order of their passing is immaterial. They could not have existed in a land bisected by steel and criss-crossed by barbed wire. The passing of the great herds was disastrous, for without the buffalo, which had supplied them with food, shelter, clothing, tools, and ornaments, the Indians were helpless. By 1880, after the three most terrible years they had ever known, the emaciated natives were forced to eat their dogs and their horses, to scrabble for gophers and mice, and even to consume the carcasses of animals found rotting on the prairie.

On top of this the Indians were faced with the sudden onslaught of a totally foreign agrarian culture. Because of the railway, the impact was almost instantaneous. In eastern Canada, the influence of the white strangers had been felt gradually over a period of generations. In the North West it happened in the space of a few years. It did not matter that the various treaties guaranteed that the old, free life would continue and that the natives would not be forced to adopt white ways. With the buffalo gone and the grasslands tilled and fenced, such promises were hollow.

The government’s policy, born of expediency, was a two-stage one. The starving Indians would be fed at public expense for a period which, it was hoped, would be temporary. Over a longer period, the Indian Department would attempt to bring about a sociological change that normally occupied centuries. It would try to turn a race of hunters into a community of peasants. It would settle the Indians on reserves, provide them with tools and seed, and attempt to persuade them to give up the old life and become self-sufficient as farmers and husbandmen. The reserves would be situated on land considered best suited for agriculture, all of it north of the line of the railway, far from the hunting grounds.

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