southern or northern route. Then the Civil War
broke the deadlock: the need of binding the West to the side of the
North created a strong public demand for a Pacific road, and Congress,
so stimulated, and further lubricated by the payment, as is proven, of
at least $476,000 in bribes, gave lavish loans {116} and grants of
land. The Central Pacific, working from Sacramento, and the Union
Pacific, starting from Omaha, met near Ogden in Utah in 1869--or rather
here the rails met, for the rival companies, eager to earn the high
subsidy given for mountain construction, had actually graded two
hundred superfluous miles in parallel lines. In 1871 the Southern
Pacific and the Texas Pacific were fighting for subsidies, and Jay
Cooke was promoting the Northern Pacific. The young Dominion was
stirred by ambition to emulate its powerful neighbour.

These factors, then, brought the question of a railway to the Pacific
on Canadian soil within the range of practical politics. Important
questions remained to be settled. During the parliamentary session of
1871 the government of Sir John Macdonald decided that the road should
be built by a company, not by the state, that it should be aided by
liberal subsidies in cash and in land, and, to meet British Columbia's
insistent terms, that it should be begun within two, and completed
within ten, years. The Opposition protested that this latter provision
was uncalled for and would bankrupt the Dominion, but the government
carried its point, though it was forced to hedge {117} later by a
stipulation--not included in the formal resolutions--that the annual
expenditure should be such as not to press unduly upon the Dominion's
resources.

The first task was to survey the vast wilderness between the Ottawa
valley and the Pacific, and to find, if possible, a feasible route. So
able an explorer and engineer as Captain Palliser, appointed by the
British government to report upon the country west of the Lakes, had
declared in 1863, after four years of careful labour in the field,
that, thanks to the choice of the 49th parallel as Canada's boundary,
there was no possibility of ever building a transcontinental railway
exclusively through British territory. The man chosen for the task of
achieving this impossibility was Sandford Fleming. Appointed
engineer-in-chief in 1871, he was for nine years in charge of the
surveys, though for half that time his duties on the Intercolonial
absorbed much o