In this vivid newspaper piece, Thomas Wilby recounts his 1912 cross-Canada drive, blending sharp humor with serious advocacy. Starting in Halifax to polite indifference and ending in Victoria to cheers, he charts the journey’s rising public interest while exposing the dire state of Canadian roads.
Wilby coins “transcontinentalism” to describe the mix of hardship and exhilaration behind motoring across a new country — axle-deep mud, tired gearboxes, and daring canyon crossings.
At its core, the piece is a passionate call for a national highway and publicity bureau. Wilby argues it would be Canada’s best investment and greatest revenue generator — uniting provinces, boosting tourism, attracting investments, and opening up the country's scenic wealth to the world.
The Vancouver Sun, November 25, 1912.
FULL TEXT
When I started from Halifax on August 27 last, to motor of Vancouver Island, most people thought I would never reach my destination. Haligonians showed a polite and kindly interest. But, I suspect, they considered me something of a freak. The mayor was away - “everybody” was away.
The car pulled in a belated appearance one cloudy, chilly afternoon, three days after the date of the intended start, and a lifetime of “hustling” had to be crowded into a few minutes in order to dip the wheels of the car into the Atlantic, to fill the flask with the precious drops from the ocean and to get the ceremony of the sendoff by the deputy mayor and the presentation of his official letter performed at all.
The first encouraging cheer came from a duet of throats at Amherst. At St. John's, N. B., the chair swelled to a course, led by the mayor and the automobile association. Quebec “processioned” us. At Montreal the press cameras were in full play; At Toronto the banquets began.
And Winnipeg the ladies began to grow enthusiastic and to decorate the car with the “purple and fine linen” of pennants.
Then came the eager cooperation of Prairie towns, like Brandon, Moose Jaw, swift current and Regina; the interest of the government through their premiers; pilots, public speeches and banquets galore, culminating in the delivery of the honey facts and other letters and the civic welcome at the Progress club at Vancouver, the rousing cheers by the last post of the Canadian highway at Alberni, and the concluding official banquet of the Victoria Automobile club.
Which all reminds me in its ascending scale of enthusiasm of the French sentry who, on being asked for news of Napoleon, after his escape from Elba, said: “The scallywag has landed at Antibes: the Little Corporal has reached Lyon: the colonel of artillery has passed through Fontaineblau: His majesty, the Emperor Napoleon, has entered the Tuileries!”
Sensation of Transcontinentalism
“Transcontinentalism" - that new form of motoring which I have had the privilege of introducing into this country - does not seem an inviting sport to the average man acquainted with Canadian roads.
He is quite unappreciative of that sensation that the car is about to shoot up in the air like a rocket; or that the earth often appears to be falling away from underneath, threatening to leave one poised in midair or to drop one with a crash.
He has a prejudice against a hidden gopher hole which may almost “telescope” one; those sudden rises in the ground providing all the sensations of negotiating a five-barred gate with the likelihood of coming a cropper on the other side, and that riding over lock road which is a series of bookings and tossings, of swayings and wrigglings, when the car rocks and heaves through the high willows and over the uneven surfaces until one wonders why every bolt and nut has not spilled itself loose on the ground.
For a lifetime the car may have to plow its way on “low,” to the steady grinding, moaning protest of the gears, as it careens like a ship, broadside onto the hollows. From “low” into “high,” and back into “low” again, and the renewal of all the dislocating jerks on the nape of the neck, the punches in the small of the back, the thrusts and digs and twists which threaten a lifelong separation of soul from body! But - and herein lies one of the charms of transcontinentalism -nothing serious ever happens!
The steep pitches which to the city-bred motorist threaten dislocation, the winding down grades by the river which looks like an annihilation, the narrow ledges of sand or rock above the yawning precipice, the cloud bursts and the roaring canyon winds and torrents - these comparative terrors of transcontinental navigation are forgotten in the delights of miles and miles of gentle coasting for hours when the car careers along in a series of chutes - now madly fleeing down one hill under no power but its own momentum, and then shooting up the opposite one and over the ridge and round by the alkali slough, and so on ad libitum, as though it had solved the problem of perpetual motion and gloried in the discovery - of days in the fresh breeze that blows out of the eye of the West across the eternal trails of a prairie peopled by the majestic wraiths of the past; of moderate altitudes under starry nights when the emerald lakes glisten silverly in the moonlight.
The purring of the motors, the hum of the differential, the tap-tap-tapping of the valves, and the sense of going forever onward to some distant goal - all these are among those indefinable things which filled the transcontinental motorist’s heart with joy.
No Road Across Canada
I motored 4,000 miles from east to West, in order to see it first hand what kind of a road existed across Canada which could be turned into a national Canadian highway.
I found an undeveloped and broken road – a spavined, disjointed, dislocated thing in a setting of scenic glory. It had more ailments than mileage, and there were places where it had shrivelled to less than a trail - Until the outside world was no bigger than the four sides of a farm or the walls of a shack. There were spots, as on the Lake Superior shore, where humanity and it parted – where hermit man symbolized tragedy, solitude, desolation!
Can it be that the moral force of the Canadian people has not as yet been developed along the lines of national roads - that Canadian democracy still so individualistic that it has an insecure grasp on fundamentals? Trunk roads, which are national undertakings in European countries, have hitherto had no place in dominion affairs, and the immense potentialities which lie in interprovincial co-operation in roadbuilding are only beginning to be understood; For example, in Manitoba and British Columbia, where a provincial east-to-west highway is under construction.
Now, why is Canada calling today for a transcontinental road?
For it is calling, and with no uncertain voice. It spoke through the universal corporation, which made the true measure of the success of my tour, through the messages of mayors, boards of trade and automobile associations, through pledges to support any tangible scheme for the construction of a transcontinental road. Canada knows that she needs this road to make her unified and firm - to bring solidarity to her wide-separated provinces. She needs it for the commercial benefit of her farmers. She needs it to exploit her unique scenery.
Judged By Its Roads
As a nation builds its roads, so is it in its social and economic life. Canada is no exception to this rule that the highway is a most serious and fundamental factor in national policy. What must be done to give this transcontinental road to Canada - to make it complete? It is obvious that the poor stretches must be improved, steep grades revised, narrow places widened, crooked spots straightened, and missing links supplied.
The first of these missing links occurs today between Ottawa and North Bay. One can get as far as Mattawa by road, but North Bay might be an island, so isolated is it on the east and the west, while it's all but inaccessible from the south, the direction from which I reached it. To get to North Bay via Kingston and Toronto, and thence northward through Gravenhurst, Scotia Junction, and Trout Creek, my car was twice placed out of commission.
It was rushed at hills that no car ever has or ever will climb without the string of six horse teams; It plowed through swamps in an apparent attempt at mechanical felo de se; it almost shook itself apart on log roads and all but worried itself into its grave foolishly endeavoring to force its way through deep sand pockets, and as it lay silent and all together Motionless in hastily improvised hospitals, one felt guilty of a flagrant act of uncalled for cruelty to - automobiles.
Was I asking too much of one car? Must the tour end then and there?
It was pleasant to know that the government was building a trunk road from North Bay to Sault Ste. Marie. My joy, however, was short-lived. A mile out of town, the road ended on a huge rock, and did not begin again until close to sturgeon falls, some 20-odd miles further west. then it was broken in all sorts of unexpected places all the way to Sudbury, beyond which it was again interrupted for 17 miles between Algoma and Blind River.
Once at the Soo there was no alternative but to ship the long-suffering vehicle across Lake Superior to Port Arthur. Only a short Highway runs north along the shore out of the soo, just leaving a gap of 350 miles between the Soo and Port Arthur.
As I restlessly paced the steamer’s decks, tasting the bitter wormwood and gall of my disappointment, and gazing for hours on the jagged coastline, the impulse of the pioneer spirit was strong upon me.
I would have liked the spring ashore and hew out a path through this No-Man's land of New Ontario, across which civilization had made a flying leap.
The popular belief is that muskeg and rock, river and force make both trails and roads impossible, that the same difficulties are encountered in much of the 400 miles between Port Arthur and Winnipeg in the little land of the thousand lakes.
Here the old Dawson route, built at the time of Wolseley’s Red River expedition to Winnipeg, and now falling into disrepair, is more a water than a land route and the troops were conveyed by scows, which still lie rotting in the lakes.
A few weeks later I found myself examining this deserted country from the vantage point of the C.P.R. observation car. The level prairie extended for many miles east of Winnipeg, and joined young forests, level country, and miles upon miles of rock-free, cleared lands with all the material for making gravel or the best of stone roads close at hand.
Ignored and Neglected
I was agreeably surprised to see that the shoreline of Lake Superior was fairly level and cleared; that the towns and settlements were already more or less connected with good, natural roads; that there were immense wide places with gravel and sandy soil; that there was always room to go around any bad spot; that the “forest” was mostly young fir and birch and that the railroad was only occasionally hemmed in, as at Jack fish. The scenic vistas of shore and lake were superb.
There was seldom a river to bridge, and swamp land always offered higher ground nearby. Nine hundred miles of the heart of Canada ignored and neglected!
The same corresponding stretch of territory in the United States has been utilized, populated and provided with a network of highways. If I had tried to motor along the Lake shore I should have been compelled to travel many hundreds of miles through that alien country before I could have reached Canadian territory again.
Who would presume to say that road building is impossible here? Is not the key to the present situation in Ontario to be found in our false Canadian idea as to the need of population before road building?
But if the geographical heart of the nation beats sluggishly, the lifeblood is pulsating vigorously in the West. Road building is a slogan of political policy. The Wild Prairie Trail is being transformed and tamed to modern uses, even if, alas, it is sometimes improved to its detriment.
In British Columbia, no natural obstructions block the way to the construction of boulevard-like surfaces, running beneath towering peaks and giant firs. But I arrived a little too early for British Columbian. His house is not yet in order, rapidly as he is moving to the completion of a tourist paradise. I had to use his lakes; I had to even sling on to his railroad ties at dead of night and tear my rubber tires to ribbons in three hours of bouncing on a notorious loop above yawning precipices; The car had to be holed up steep grades by block and tackle time without number; And hundreds of miles of detour had to be made because the surveyed route or the routes under construction were not available.
The most westerly point reached on my tour was Alberni, V.I., where I found myself at least face to face with the first signpost of the Canadian Highway Association. A narrow arm of the Pacific leaves the prosaic patch of Earth into which it has been thrust.
We cheered the brave little post as we might have cheered the national flag; the canners fired off salvos; and the pilot car let the way to Victoria, where the final scene of the mixing of the Atlantic water with the Pacific and the Hospitality of Victorians was to close the long journey.
Four thousand two hundred miles in fifty-one days! And all the way, Canadians, as one man, had come forward to further the cause of the Canadian Highway.
Big Money In A Highway
The Transcontinental Highway will be one of the greatest revenue producers that Canada has ever known. There is big money in it. it should be ready and perfected for traffic on Dominion day, 1917, when will be solemnly ushered in the semi-centennial of Canadian Federation.
With that Jubilee of the Canadian people some fitting honor should be paid to the memory of that father of the transcontinental highway, Sir James Douglas, who in constructing along the Fraser in the ‘50s the first section of that national highway of his dreams saved Canada for the Canadians.
Thousands of tourists will flock along this great scenic thoroughfare - this uninterrupted chain of macadamized or gravel roads stretching from horizon to horizon, it's “Alpha” in the Evangeline country in the east and it's “Omega” on Vancouver Island, Canada, as yet has not made the most of its scenic resources.
What of the historic picturesque charm of the mountain-fringed bay of Fundy, of the Blue Hills of the Minas, of the Dutch-like sweep of the Tantramar marshes, of theturgid flood of the Petticodia’s “bore” and the soft color harmonics of the long valley to the city of St. John?
What of the pastoral symphonies of the valleys of St. John and the Madawaska Rivers, where fertile banks are dotted with white church spires and balloon like white clouds scud over the hills of the emerald isles of Temiscouata lake, to disappear beyond the jagged peaks of the Laurentian mountains with guard the majestic waters of St. Lawrence?
What of quaint Quebec and the quainter Habitant country, with its patriarchal simplicity, its primitive methods and life?
What of the broad bosom of the Ottawa, which encompasses lakes and rapids and forests, Indian legends and traditions, of the great game preserve of Algonquin park, to the Muskoko and Great Lakes, of the golden prairies and the land of the bunch grass where plain and mountain blend at the Crow's Nest Pass and the way winds insidiously by valley and ridge, by raging river canyon, by lake and smiling fruit-lands, topped by the glistening ice-peaks of the towering Rockies?
Are not all these beauties as well worth exploiting today as - for example - the scenic beauties of Switzerland?
Exploit Scenic Beauties
And how has Switzerland - how has any country - successfully exploited its scenic beauties? By roads, well built and systematically kept up - roads that have invited, that have lured, armies of money-spending tourists from throughout the world.
Is it of any use for Canada to build fine trunk roads from the international boundary line into the country, unless she gives tourists a road to travel when they have arrived.
I repeat - a scenic highway from sea to sea will be one of the greatest sources of revenue of which Canada has ever dreamed. It will open up the Dominion to the world. It will accomplish what the railroad amid pessimistic howls and indomitable faith, began.
All the premiers with whom I have been in communication have expressed themselves enthusiastically about the benefit of a transcontinental highway. But the tendency everywhere is to build roads regardless of their continuity and of their benefit to the nation as a whole.
Surely we have to get beyond local considerations and to concentrate our roadbuilding efforts upon one good continuous national road across the continent.
Cannot the Dominion government now step into the breach? Can it not help Ontario to fill the road gap of 900 miles by initiating a policy of supervision of a great trunk road from east to west?
Had it not been for the action of the senate, a million dollars would have been voted this year for trunk road construction, a proportionate grant being made to each province. Whether or not, under existing conditions, the provinces would have permitted the Dominion government to say how that money should have been expended and to the building of which roads, it should be applied, I do not know. But obviously no province, any more than a private individual, can look a gift horse in the mouth. If, as everyone believes, a vote of a million dollars will be increased to two million dollars next year, the Dominion government would surely have every right to make the grant conditional upon the expenditure of the entire sum upon the most profitable Canadian investment today - a transcontinental highway.
But cannot the Dominion government go even one step farther by establishing a Department of Public Roads at Ottawa, which shall have the duty of showing municipalities and farmers working on the roads under statute labor the best methods of construction and upkeep?
Canada Needs a Publicity Bureau
We want - and we want it at once - a national publicity bureau conducted in conjunction with provincial governments and municipalities along the Transcontinental Highway.
The purpose of this bureau should be the exploitation of the scenic, historic and health attractions along the route of this highway. It should have branch offices at each port and at foreign capitals, and circularize an international public, as Switzerland has done.
It should “run” the highway as a business proposition, pure and simple.
This is the century of Canada - a time when she is making a bid for the best blood from the old nations.
The highway is the medium at hand, for which the tourist will come the Inquirer, the investor, the master builder, the “ready cash” settler, the capitalist. And Canada needs to employ every means in her power to secure men such as these.
The construction of a transcontinental highway is a duty Canada owes to herself, to the empire and to civilization at large.