that unless a well organized steam service be inaugurated throughout the Country, the transport business of the Company cannot be carried on any longer.” McTavish reckoned that events “must render it plain. Reflecting upon the hardships of the 1870 season, J. An unstable European fur market, dwindling and undependable manpower, and rising costs compelled the Hudson’s Bay Company to replace the York boat brigades and cart trains with less labour-intensive transportation means. Traders were confronted with longer, more expensive voyages the Indians and mixed bloods who freighted and trapped for them toiled harder to reap a diminishing harvest. Union with Canada meant the westward march of settlement which drove the already-overtrapped fur-bearing animals before it. The Dominion forestalled American annexationist aspirations by enticing Manitoba and British Columbia into Confederation, and reorganizing the vast expanses between into the Northwest Territories. Soon the river steamer Anson Northup began to call in at Fort Garry to forge a commercial link between the adjacent Canadian and American Wests.
So might it have continued had not the white man introduced the Industrial Revolution into the “great lone land.” While the squealing carts of the Honourable Company jolted across the prairie and the parkland fringe, to the south, American railway builders blazed a path of steel into Minnesota. Consequently, for some fifteen years the “outfits” for the northwestern districts were dispatched over the rolling prairies by Red River cart train. At length, the Saskatchewan route was abandoned as a major transportation artery because the boat brigades, continually plagued by sickness, the elements and, at times, plain apathy on the part of the halfbreeds who manned them, met with indifferent success. Along the old portage trail, therefore, a succession of logs were laid over which perspiring crews rolled their cumbersome craft.
The York boat could take on four times the cargo, yet it was too ponderous to drag upstream with ropes.
For decades the story was the same for the hardy canoemen: upstream, a strenuous portage, pulling the frail birch bark craft against the current with ropes downstream, perhaps a partial portage and sometimes a terrifying and occasionally tragic passage through the churning waters with half-laden canoe.īy the end of the eighteenth century the sturdy, flat-bottomed York boat largely replaced the fragile freighter canoe.
The most formidable hazard along its course lay but two miles from where the river emptied into the northern part of Lake Winnipeg here the Saskatchewan dropped some 70 feet over four miles in a series of extremely turbulent and fast rapids. For generations the canoe brigades of the Hudson’s Bay Company had paddled up the mighty Saskatchewan to the very foothills of the Rockies. Twelve years after an eagle pointed the way for him through the Rockies, Moberly, a civil engineer, contractor, surveyor and mountain explorer all rolled into one, was summoned by the Hudson’s Bay Company to overcome yet another obstacle to transportation the turbulent “Grande Rapide” of the Saskatchewan River. Its builder was none other than Walter Moberly-the man blazing the tree high in the Eagle Pass in the opening scenes of CBC’s National Dream series. But its last spike was hammered home in the autumn of 1877, and that event made the Grand Rapids tramway a first in the western interior. It was unquestionably a modest affair: three and one-half miles of frail narrow-gauge track, “oatburners” for motive power, six pieces of four-wheeled rolling stock and a hand car. Nearly one hundred years ago, the Hudson’s Bay Company laid down the first railway in Canada’s old Northwest. If you find any such errors, please inform us, indicating the document name and error.
This online version was prepared using Optical Character Recognition software so that spelling and punctuation errors may have occurred inadvertently. As an historical document, the article may contain language and views that are no longer in common use and may be culturally sensitive in nature. We make this online version available as a free, public service. This article was published originally in MHS Transactions by the Manitoba Historical Society on the above date. MHS Transactions, Series 3, Number 32, 1975-1976 Season The Grand Rapids Tramway: The First Railway in the Canadian Northwest