Building the Railway

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Rejecting these little history pulps out of hand would be a mistake.
Yes, there are blots of sophomoric humour and scads of whacky cartoons,
and the text tends to emphasize elements in the historical record that
are gross in almost every meaning of the word. Yet, these are books
written for and in the argot of the juvenile lumpenproletariat, tracts
to entice the wayward and stimulate the backward, an effort to take the
gospel of Canadian history into the heart of preteen darkness.

Any such effort requires confidence and panache, qualities that Ted
Staunton, Brian Goff, and Remie Geoffroi possess in abundance. Sir
Sandford Fleming, perhaps Canada’s closest match for Benjamin
Franklin, is introduced as Sandford Standard Time and drawn as a
balding, bearded, elderly gentleman, reclining on a beach in Hawaii, a
glass of champagne at his left hand, paying rapt attention to a watch on
his right wrist(!). “Up until [he was charged with surveying the route
for the Canadian transcontinental], he’d been busy setting up the
Intercolonial RR back east. Later, taking time out from speeches, chess
games, painting, writing prayer books, and being ambassador to Hawaii
(tough job, but someone’s got to do it), Fleming would realize that
for a railroad to stay on schedule right across a continent, times would
have to be coordinated, or standardized. He cooked up a system that
split the world into 24 time zones. For this he became Sir Sandford
Fleming, which shows that it pays to be punctual.” In Canadian Crime
he describes how and why the Canadian experience was initiated in sin,
and subsequently shaped by iniquity of every kind: murder, theft,
drunkenness, riot and rebellion, graft, corruption, and public
(government) theft of private (citizens’) property. After a chapter on
“Sweet and Sour Swindles,” Staunton describes how police were
“invented” and crime was punished (or not, as the case might have
been).

It’s all very witty and entertaining. Moreover, there may be enough
electrical energy in these works to jump-start some of the academic
malingerers they were designed for. Both books are recommended.