Who was Labrador Smith ?

[SwampDonkey]

This one is for all you Rail Roaders ;D

[SwampDonkey]

second clue:

born August 6, 1820 in Scotland, died January 21, 1914. Immigrated to Canada in 1838. Had a career spanning 75 years.  ;D

[SwampDonkey]

third clue:

He was given administrative control over the seigneury of Mingan (in modern Labrador) in late 1843.

[SwampDonkey]

4th clue:

Became Chief Factor in charge of the Labrador district in 1862

[SwampDonkey]

5th Clue:

Helped establish the textile manufactory, Paton Manufacturing Company, in Sherbrooke, Quebec in 1868

[SwampDonkey]

6th clue:

In 1869 he was sent to the Red River Settlement in present day Manitoba by the Canadian government to negotiate with Louis Riel, leader of the Red River Rebellion.

[SwampDonkey]

7th clue:

In the 1870's he was responsible for negotiating the transfer of HBC land to the federal government.

[SwampDonkey]

8th Clue:

On December 27, 1870, he was elected to the provincial legislature for the riding of Winnipeg and St. John defeating John Christian Schultz's ultra-loyalist Canadian Party. This provoked a riot with Ontario soldiers stationed in Winnipeg.

[SwampDonkey]

9th Clue:

Was elected to the Canadian House of Commons for the newly-formed riding of Selkirk in early 1871. He sat as an Independent Conservative, and initially supported the government of John A. Macdonald, got re-elected in 1872.

[SwampDonkey]

10th clue, last one for tonight. ;)

In 1875 he was among the incorporators of the Manitoba Western Railway. He was also a partner in the Red River Transportation Company, which gained control over the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad in March 1878. In May 1879, he became a director in the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway Company, having control over 20% of its shares. He was subsequently a leading figure in the creation of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

[Mr Mom]

dont know but very interesting.

[etat]

Donald Alexander Smith

[etat]

Smith Drove the Last Spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway. 

among his many other accomplishments............

[SwampDonkey]

Ck, goes to the head of the class.  ;)

Donald Alexander Smith, 1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal

Here's some more info.

- He drove the Last Spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway, 7 November 1885, Craigellachie, British Columbia
- He became president of the Bank of Montreal in 1887.
- He raised Lord Strathcona's Horse (Royal Canadians), a private unit of Canadian soldiers, during the Boer War
- He was involved in the creation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, of which he became the chairman in 1909. Smith subsequently used his influence to make the company a major supplier of the British navy.
- with George Stephen, he donated the money to build the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal
- he helped establish a school for women in 1884 at McGill University
- and upon his death in 1914 he had served a seventy-five year tenure with the Hudson's Bay Company, which remains a record. The 'Company of Adventurers' is over 300 years old.

So there ya have it. ;D

[sawguy21]

And who says history is dull? He was a fascinating character and a major force in shaping Canada as we see it today

[SwampDonkey]

Chosen to Hammer in the last spike

Smith had travelled west aboard his private railway car, Matapedia*, as part of a small train that included Van Horne's Saskatchewan, a baggage car and the engine. As they puffed across the country, crews were racing to lay the final links through Kicking Horse Pass.The rails from east and west were due to abut at Eagle Pass, a forlorn spot in the Monashee Mountains that Van Horne had named Craigellachie, after the clan stronghold of Smith's and Stephen's ancestors in Moray, Scotland. (these two were cousins). ....The celebration was to be a very Canadian occasion with no pomp and little ceremony in contrast to similar railway spike ceremonies in the US.  Lord Lansdowne, then Governor General, had commissioned a silver spike for the occasion, but Van Horne was his usual practical self. "The last spike," he decreed, "will be just as good an iron one as there in between Montreal and Vancouver, and anyone who wants to see it driven will have to pay full fare."
   On the misty morning of November 7, 1885, Major A.B. Rogers, who had found the pass for the railway through the Selkirk Mountains, held the tie bar under the final rail in place for the ceremonial finish. Smith's first feeble blow merely turned the designated spike's head, bending it. Roadmaster Frank Brothers yanked it out, replaced it with a new one, and Smith carefully tapped it home. Alexander Ross, the hunchback photographer from Winnipeg, took his famous shots, but except for a thin cheer there was little rejoicing. The only sound that reverberated in that historic canyon was the thump of Smith's maul. For a long moment there was silence, as if those present were remembering all the anguish that had led to this moment. "It seemed," recalled Sir Sanford Fleming, the CPR director who had first suggested the practicality of the transcontinental railway twenty-five years earlier, "as if the act now performed had worked a spell on all present. Each one appeared absorbed in his own reflections."
   Smith said nothing. Van Horne gruffly allowed that "the work has been done well in every way." But it was the conductor of the little train, now cleared to head due west, who pronounced the ceremony's most dramatic line when he shouted: "All aboard for the Pacific!"**



Lois Riel , the Metis leader fighting for land rights in two rebellions was hanged 9 days later for high treason.

Sir Charles Tupper, the Minister of Finance of the day, declared that " the Canadian Pacific Railway would have no existence today, notwithstanding all the the Government did to support that undertaking, had it not been for the indomitable pluck and energy and determination, both financially and in every other respect, of Sir Donald Smith" (Lord Strathcona)

Footnotes:

*Named after a fishing river on the Gaspe in Quebec which feeds in to the  Restigouche River, that empties into the Bay of Chaleur in NB. George Stephen built a fishing lodge near it's head and is now the Reford Gardens.

**The engine that pulled the train west was scrapped and the Matapedia burned on her trucks at Princeton, BC, in 1952, but Van Horne's private car has been preserved by the Canadian Railroad Historical Association. The maul used by Smith to pound in the last spike was last seen in the basement of his Montreal house being used to break up coal lumps for the furnace. The spike that was bent and pulled out had small pieces of it cut out and incorporated into spike-shaped diamond brooches for Lady Strathcona, Lady Shaughnessy, and the wife of the Governor-General. What remained of the spike was presented by the current Lord Stratcona to the CPR at a centenary ceremony on condition it was put on display. It is on permanent loan to the Transport Museum in Ottawa sitting on a teak block Lord Stratcona himself made. Craigellachie itself never prospered and was abandoned after WW2, the site of the last spike was landscaped for a centennial re-enactment in 1985 and was never maintained afterward. The station was closed and the passenger train never pulled into the Craigellachie station again. A wreath throwing ceremony was planned as the train passed by the spot of the spike, but the engineer never let the crew know in time when he slowed the train. So the opportunity was missed and the CPR heads didn't care.

Excerpt from "Merchant Princes", by Peter Newman

[sawguy21]

There is very little there today except for a commemorative cairn and a highway sign. The CPR track crews had to keep a close eye on it though, souvenir hunters kept pulling spikes. :

[SwampDonkey]

In 1887, Smith and his cousin George Stephen financed the building of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. Smith donated several $million to McGill University, of which he became chancellor, directing that some of the funds be used to provide for the admission of women. In his honour, McGill's first 8 female graduates, who received their BA degrees in 1888, called themselves the "Donaldas".

To display his wealth and influence, Smith built a mansion on two properties at the corner of Fort and Dorchester streets. The exterior was brownstone, brought from the Ontario Credit Valley, and the front door opened onto a magnificent three-story $50,000 mahogany staircase, carved by artisans who dovetailed all the parts so that not a single nail was used in it's construction. The second-floor ballroom was overlooked by a marble balcony to accomodate the musicians.

http://www.imtl.org/montreal/building/Maison-de-Lord-Strathcona.php

[petefrom bearswamp]

What a wonderful part of Canadian history which was read with keen interest by a US native. ( who enjoys forays into my neighbor to the north.)
Pete

[SwampDonkey]

Smith's cousin, George Stephen retired to England and turned the CPR over to Van Horne, who transformed it into an integrated transportation system, building grain elevators, hotels, and steamships, as well as infusing the railway with the same gusto that had allowed him to build it in the first place. He later threw railways across Cuba and Guatemala but his loyalty was to the CPR. On the day he renounced his US citizenship he said, "Building that railroad would have made a Canadian out of the German Emperor."

One of Van Horne's ploys was to test future employees with his cigar trick. When a firm of cut-rate tobacconists had capitalized on his fame by calling a five-cent brand the "Van Horne", he ordered several boxes of the leafy horrors, removed their bands, and mixed them with expensive perfectos in his humidor. Prospective employees, wishing to acknowledge his reputation as a connoisseur, would inhale the tarry mixture, then ecstatically compliment him on the delightful aroma.  He once hired a man mainly because he had butted one of the dud cigars after his first whiff and demanded: "How much does the stable boy charge you for these things?"

During Van Horne's final illness, his doctors limited him to three cigars a day. He meekly agreed. But by next morning he had a box of specially rolled two-foot-long perfectos brought to his bedside, and so puffed contentedly the prescribed three a day, four hours each, until he died on September 11, 1915, aged 72 years.

Now entering his nineties, Lord Strathcona, as High Commissioner for Canada, had his most significant adventure in securing adequate fuel reserves for the Royal Navy during WWI. He had been interested in petroleum exploration since it was reported to him that the CPR construction crew drilling for water in southern Alberta had struck gas. Besides retaining the HBC's rights to minerals found on the lands it sold to the Dominion of Canada, he also instructed the new Canadian Committee to search for oil. Not much happened at first, but Strathcona was rewarded with a rich geological sample of oil seepage formations found near what is now Norman Wells in the Northwest Territories. This reserve still produces a million barrels a year, located on the Mackenzie River. Through his Scottish connections, he obtained control of Burmah oil, a firm founded in 1886 by Glasgow engineers who pioneered the extraction of oil from shale. This was at the time when marine engines where now being fired by oil instead of coal, which began to revolutionize the world's navies. To secure a source of oil for the Royal navy during the war, Stratcona financed 1.5 million pounds in return for 75,000 shares in a Burmese-Persian exploration for oil. The venture struck oil in Maidan-i-Naftun soon afterward and quickly outlined a major oilfield. Winston Churchil, who was First Lord of the Admiralty, urged Stratcona to sign over the Persian concessions to the British Crown for 2.2 million pounds, giving the navy 20 years`of oil at a price that saved enough money to build all the pre-war dreadnoughts. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company later grew into British Petroleum of today.

By the summer of 1913, Strathcona looked and acted his 93 years. The old man's proud chin no longer jutted out before him but looked more like a man-mad jaw in which the paraffin was melting.  In June 1913, he presided for the last time over the Hudson's Bay Company's annual Court. Too weak to stand or even to read his own remarks, he sat before a representative gathering of the Company's shareholders like a stuffed effigy of himself - mute, barely emitting any vital signs, yet still there, the Governor and a Bay man to the end. His final function as High Commissioner to Canada was the giant Dominion Day reception he had given every year July 1 at Queen's Hall. He tirelessly shook 2300 hands, but his voice, never very strong, had given out. A month later, he decided on a lightning visit to Canada to inspect his latest investment, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal. Strothcona reminded his wife Isabella he might not be well enough to return to England. She herself had suffered several mild strokes and was not well enough to travel. She insisted on going to see him off and he last saw her on the platform, lifted by four men, gazing directly into the window of his private carriage, waving her fond farewell. She passed away Nov 12, 1913 from pneumonia. Ten weeks later on January 21, 1914, now 94, he died of heart failure. He and his wife (whom were married together 3 times) were buried at Highgate Cemetery in North London, the same graveyard shared my Karl Marx. His coffin was followed by a single wreath of lilies and heliotrope orchids. He had dispersed $25M of his estate to McGill, Queen's, Yale, Cambridge, and Aberdeen universities, as well as a dozen poor divinity schools and underfunded hospitals.

[from Merchant Princes, 1991]

[SwampDonkey]

Smith had earned a barony with the title: Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal, of Glencoe, co. Argyll, and Mount Royal, Quebec, Canada.

He had a large estate in Glencoe Scotland where he built Glencoe House, which became a hospital for the elderly in the 1950's until 2003 when the doors were finally closed.

In 2001 the remaining estate lands were sold by Strathcona's heirs, comprising of about 130 acres, including the largest stretch of the River Coe; a half share of the historic Eilean Munde (traditional burial place of the McDonalds of Glencoe); The ruined Old Mill of Glencoe; the Crofters Common Grazings; the last remaining Ancient Woodlands of Glencoe; Fishing rights on Loch Triachtan; plus 8 miles of Salmon netting rights on Loch Leven.

http://www.glencoe-heritage-trust.com/history.html