True Patriot Love by Michael Ignatieff

an opportunity to give a new country a university of world quality. He took Queen’s by the scruff of the neckand doggedly remade it in the image of the universities he knew from Scotland and Europe, luring professors from overseas and persuading Fleming to become the chair of the Board of Governors.
    In September 1883, Fleming, now on the board of the CPR, went west to see how the work was progressing and Grant went with him. This time, they wanted to be the first Canadians to cross Canada by the pass through British Columbia’s Kicking Horse River valley, the new route discovered by the American railway engineer Major A.B. Rogers. By then, the railway ran to Calgary, and so the journey that eleven years earlier had taken them two months now took a matter of days. Fleming and Grant were disillusioned by what they saw as they journeyed west: the frenzied land speculation, the disintegration of the Western Cree, now reduced to begging at the railway stations, and the toxic resentment of the railway company by the farmers and merchants forced to pay the railway’s monopoly prices for freight.
    They missed the joys of the old days, bursting into full gallop on the plains, like schoolboys out for a holiday run, camping at night under the stars and waking the next morning to the Metis cry
“Leve! Leve!”
    In Calgary they saddled up pack horses and a team and set off into the Bow Valley, happy to be out on the trail again with wranglers and horsemen and cowboys. But theywere getting a bit old to be playing this game, a university president and a railroad tycoon well into their middle age, and they discovered that the trail up to the Rogers Pass was as tough as anything they had encountered on their earlier trip. The trail was dizzyingly steep, unstable underfoot and encumbered with deadfall. The two men had to muster all their determination to get to the top. Finally, one September afternoon, aching, bruised and dirty, they blundered their way to the summit and found Major Rogers and his survey party awaiting them.
    A grand afternoon ensued. A picnic was spread out on the grass. Grant said some prayers, and even Rogers, a famously coarse and hard-driving sinner, bowed his head. Afterward, Fleming broke out Havana cigars and everyone had a celebratory smoke for the occasion, all envisaging the day when the railway would come through the pass and link the provinces into a single nation. As the light began to fade that September afternoon, the festivities concluded with the improbable spectacle of Grant and Fleming, two grand adolescents, playing leapfrog in the meadow, while Major Rogers looked on, smoking his cigar.
    Two years later, Fleming journeyed out west again, this time in the company of Donald Smith. The train took them through the Kicking Horse Pass to a ceremony that marked the conclusion of the whole great adventure. Grant doesn’t figure in the famous photograph of the driving in of the last spike—it is dominated by a top-hattedFleming and Smith—but he was there in spirit. Even the name that Fleming and Smith chose for the place where that spike was driven had special meaning for a Grant. The name they chose—Craigellachie—happened to be the ancestral home of the Grant clan, and every Grant knew the war cry “Stand Fast, Craigellachie!”
    The railway secured Canada’s continental future and guaranteed that the West would not be absorbed by the Americans. Yet Grant knew by then that all national dreams, all acts of nation building, at least in Canada, are achieved at someone’s expense. The railway destroyed a rival way of life. By 1885, the Plains Cree were on reservations. The railway was used to ferry troops to put down Riel’s second rebellion, the last stand of the Metis, French and Aboriginal way of life built on the buffalo hunt and the fur trade. Riel stood trial in Regina that year. The country was bitterly divided over Riel’s fate, with Orangemen in Ontario calling for blood and Quebec