The Canadian Civil War: Volume 3 - West to the Wall

by William Wresch

Chapter Two

  What’s the Wall?

  So, where to start? The whole discussion began with the Panama Canal, so I decided to begin with canals. Somehow the French were master canal builders. Well, it took about 45 seconds of research to debunk that one. The Suez Canal? Just a ditch in the sand. The first Suez Canal was built in 500 BC by Persian King Darius I. Not exactly an engineering challenge. The Red Sea and the Mediterranean are the same level, so you just need to dig a ditch to connect them. Shovel the sand out of the way and you have a canal. Darius did it by hand. Two thousand, three hundred, and fifty nine years later, the French finally had the talent to push sand around too. It took them ten years and they did such a shoddy job, even today ships have to go slowly through the canal or their wakes will disturb the sand along the edge and fill in the canal. Basically, what I read confirmed everything I already knew about French engineering.

  What kind of colossal ego would believe that having dug a ditch through sand they were now ready to dig a canal across Panama? A French ego, of course. They finish the Suez project in 1869. By 1881 they are over in Panama digging again. Now here I have to admit at least a little sympathy. Any map shows a mountain ridge running down the middle of the isthmus. A very reasonable conclusion would be to make a cut through the ridge, and the two oceans meet in the middle. After all, it is just 48 miles from one side to the other, about half the length of the Suez Canal, so, how hard can it be? As it turns out, the mountain ridge is the problem, ironically not because it is so hard, but because it is not. If it were solid rock, workers could cut through it, and the sides would stay where they were. But the ridge turns out to be a mess of rocks and clay and mud that is totally unstable, so if you cut down the middle, the sides just slide down and fill in the cut. You can then pull that stuff out, but more just slides down from the side. So you start thinking you need to make a cut a few hundred yards wide (and several miles long), and end up making a cut wider and wider – and still miles long. In short, the mountain ridge is defective. You could spend a century pulling dirt out of the cut and more would still just keep tumbling in (and does to this day).

  And also, there was malaria. 22,000 dead in just 8 years. Recruiting got difficult so the company tried to keep talk of the deaths down, but word got out. As for fixing the problem, yes, Pasteur had identified germs as a cause of disease, but he did not identify mosquitoes as a carrier of those germs. The germs could just be part of the “bad air” – “mal-aria”. Having blown through 287 million dollars and 22,000 lives, the company went bankrupt and people started going to jail for fraud. So much for the French canal.

  Anything in the history about U.S. culpability? No. The whole event pretty quickly stacks up to massive overreach and bad luck. You can’t blame the Americans for soggy mountain sides and diseased mosquitoes. It was a dozen years before the U.S. bought out the French interests and gave it a go. And it was then that we pulled a fast one on the Columbians, but cheating them has nothing to do with what we might have done to the French. If we had any culpability there, I wasn’t seeing it. And at least from an engineering and medical side, there was much to be proud of. We put in locks to raise the water level once we saw it was going to be impossible to keep lowering the mountains, and our medical people made the mosquito connection (after over 5,000 workers had died), and cleaned up the environment. Or to put it in a way I could never say in class – we had better engineers and better doctors than the French. And that’s the end of that.

  Except I was still missing something. Why was this even an issue for upper class Canadian kids? At twenty their world is cars, music, dates, wine, dancing, dates, dates, dates… Why in the world would they give two seconds thought to a French engineering failure in 1889? Blame it on the Americans? Sure. Why not? We are the perpetual enemies. But with so many other legitimate conflicts between us, why would this pretend issue even come up? And what the hell is The Wall?

  Time to talk to Elise.

  Here I need to explain our workdays. Elise continued to run a major department in the Interior Ministry. She worked long days. Worse, while she had always been a pretty social person, now it appeared more and more of her evening events were required appearances. We still got to some of the old parties we had gone to before, but now they were mixed with more formal affairs with an older crowd. I am not sure which of us was more bored with some of these dinners, but I do know she hid her boredom better than me. We’re both on the happy side of thirty and still find it a bit of work to make conversation with people twice our age.

  Once a week, sometimes twice, we had an evening to ourselves, and where once I might have taken her to a nice restaurant, now we both preferred to spend the evening in our own home. I had left the ground floor unremodeled so far, but we had plans for all the rooms down there, especially the kitchen which even Elise admitted needed some work (what it needed was a complete tear down). We had worked over plans and I had agreed to use plumbing and electrical contractors for the project (I chose not to tell her I would be flying the plumbers and electricians and all their fixtures in from Philadelphia). So visualize if you will a large kitchen with a large stove and lots of cabinets and counter tops, all decades old and looking it. But we saw it not just as it was, but as it would be soon, and we enjoyed it.

  When we had evenings to ourselves, I tried to leave all school work at school, and Elise tried to leave work at her office. I got home around 7:30 and she would make every effort to get home by 8. I would wait in the kitchen and try to get started on a salad while I left a bottle of wine to breathe. Elise would come in the front door, take off her coat and then her shoes, and then kiss me. And we would say nothing. Since each of us was essentially paid to spend the day talking, it felt marvelous to have some silence. Eventually one of us would break the silence, but neither of us was ever in a hurry. Just standing together was perfect.

  When we did break the silence, it was usually me who started. I could talk about work, Elise could not. She might make general observations about the political scene, stuff I might see on tv, or she might comment on one of her coworkers who had said something clever or done something funny, but while I might be her fiancée, I was also a foreigner, so she had to screen her remarks. She was good at making split second decisions about how far to take a conversation, but on occasion I could almost see the wheels turn as she debated where she could let a conversation go and where she had to draw the line. Her options were doubly restricted in that I was not only a foreigner, but my family did lots of business in Canada, so anything she said might also provide business information which could be considered an insider advantage. She was careful, and I was careful not to push. And I have to admit it felt good sometimes to have a break from politics and from the conflict dividing the north and the south. It appeared the fall elections in Louisiana had quieted the most extreme groups at least temporarily, but surely there was much going on beneath the surface that Elise knew about and worried about and couldn’t take home with her.

  I decided my job was not to be an outsider but to be comic relief. I would tell stories about my students or colleagues, and we always had house plans to occupy our conversations. That night we had a short conversation about what to eat for dinner and began getting things out and on the stove, at which point I backed away to let Elise work her magic while I set the table, poured the wine, and stayed out of the way. She was part way through a sauce when I asked the question I had fumbled all day.

  “What’s The Wall?”

  “Are you asking about the mountains? Planning to do some skiing?” As she stirred the sauce she moved with a rhythm that distracted me for a minute, but I managed to get back on the subject.

  “No skiing, and yes, I think I am talking about the mountains, but why use the expression The Wall?”

  “Because that’s how we see the mountains to the west. They are a wall, for better and for worse. For better, they protect the western
flank of the country. You Americans have attacked several times, but never from that side. Sorry, dear one, but you are an American and your countrymen have attacked several time.”

  “Of course we have. Canada is full of beautiful women. Why would we not want to be here?” She was still moving in the rhythm and I was moving closer.

  “You are such a charmer and such a bull shit artist. Did I get the American expression right? Here we would talk about buffalo parts, but it makes the same point. You lie with real skill.” There was a look on her face like she knew I was getting closer and she did not mind. At least I think that’s what she was thinking. I accepted what I took to be an invitation and wrapped my arms around her from behind. Dinner might be late tonight.

  “And what’s the worst part of the wall?” At this point I wasn’t really paying any attention to anything I was saying, but somehow my mouth kept moving.

  “It keeps us in. Having access to the Pacific would mean the world to us.”

  “So, go over. We have roads over the Appalachians.”

  “You might want to take a closer look at a map. These are not the Appalachians.” I think the conversation lasted a little longer, but we had not had an evening together for over a week, and one thing led to another and that sauce never did get finished, although at least this time I remembered to turn the stove off.

  Elise not only gets home later than I do, but she goes to work earlier. The typical professor works 60 hours a week. I am sure Elise and her colleagues dream of having such a short week. So the next morning I cleaned up around the kitchen after she had gone, took another look at the plan we had drawn up for the room, and thought about geography. I had spent my youth in and around the Appalachians. To me, those were mountains. The mountains in the west were bigger I knew, but I had no real sense of them. You drove over the Appalachians, so if the western mountains were bigger, you just drove longer. But apparently it was not that simple. On the other hand, how hard could it be? A wall? Really?

  And this led to the next topic from the night before. “Access to the Pacific would mean the world to us.” Really? What more did they need? They had access to the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, they had the Great Lakes, they had the Mississippi Valley – and they wanted more? And even if they did want to access the Pacific, they could use the Panama Canal the same as we did. It’s not like we stand in their way. Well, actually we have blocked it during times of war, but it had been decades since the last war, so that hardly counted.

  What if there was no wall? Would they have extended Canada to the Pacific? There would not be the nations of California and Oregon on the Pacific, just one very large Canada. That would have been formidable - a nation connecting the two oceans with plenty of resources in between. No such country existed. China was big, and so was Russia and Brazil, but they only showed one face to the world. They only had one coast to build on. A Canada with two? Plus the Gulf? Wow.

  By now I had drained my second cup of coffee and was headed to the university, but my imagination was still on the Pacific. I am a pretty disinterested driver, and given that I was driving the crowning achievement in French automotive engineering which might fall apart at any moment, I always feel like I should apologize to the public at large for my driving skills, but I know I was really bad that morning. Fortunately neither my car nor I committed any major faux pas and I got parked outside my office without mishap.

  Feeling a bit scattered, I made it to my graduate seminar. I had about a dozen first year graduate students in a seminar we formally called “Historical Perspectives” but everyone informally referred to as “The American side of the Story.” The students were pretty secure in their historical knowledge and their Canadian views, and so did not feel threatened by anything I might say that could contradict the lifetime of historical knowledge they had absorbed. In some ways, it made the class fun. I wasn’t going to convince them of anything. I was just going to show that the facts could be seen from a different perspective. They found that a bit amusing. I suppose I could have found their attitudes annoying, after all, I was right and they were wrong (well, maybe), but they were actually pretty nice people, and I knew if I had been teaching a similar seminar in Virginia, the students there would have been just as secure in their assumptions/beliefs/prejudices. After all, we all know what we know.

  The nominal topic of the day was Washington’s invasion of Ohio, and they had each come with a three-page presentation on why he had invaded. Since one of the main purposes of the course was to improve their research skills, they were to find at least six different primary sources that helped explain the invasion. The archives at the university were pretty good, and of course more and more source material is being digitized and made available, so they could find diaries and letters and even purchase orders from the libraries here in Canada or back in the U.S. My job was to help them find the best sources and to help them better understand the relative quality of what they found.

  They probably should have demanded their money back for that morning, because I did none of what I was supposed to do. Instead, they had barely sat down and got their papers or digital tablets out when I took the class off in a direction you could probably predict.

  “I see you are all prepared with your Washington materials. Nice work. Now let me ask you to think about your materials differently. The man we will discuss today is Georges deWash. He is a count from a leading family and he has been asked by a provincial governor to explore, and possibly conquer, the land over the mountains – a largely unpopulated land called Oregon.” There were chuckles over “Georges deWash” but only consternation when I said the word “Oregon.”

  “Professor, it doesn’t work.” Gerard was the smallest of my students but seemed to have the highest energy level. He was always first to reply to any question. “It’s not the same thing at all.”

  “Why not? Washington gets over the mountains and takes the headwaters of the Ohio. Once there, he has easy access to the rest of the region. Our new ‘deWash’ takes the headwaters of the Columbia River and he has a straight shot to the Pacific and all the rest of the region. The comparison couldn’t be simpler.”

  “Sorry professor, but it’s not that simple.” This is from a young woman at the end of the table. She had the short haircut and thin build of the intense young scholar. I would bet any money she had her Ph.D. in no more than four years. “We study this idea from grammar school on. Our country has produced dozens of deWashes. Probably hundreds. But you can’t get over the wall.”

  “And even if you could,” Gerard was always interrupting the others. It was like they talked too slowly. “You have the desert and then the other mountains. It’s like the wall is a double wall with a moat in the middle. Centuries ago we sent group after group on horseback over the wall, and if they came back at all, it was to tell us it can’t be done.”

  “But that was more than a century ago,” I said. “Surely Puegeot could make a vehicle now to get over.”

  “But now is too late.” Gerard was leaning well over the seminar table, stretched as big as he could make himself as he emphasized his point. “Now Oregon is occupied. The Columbia Valley is home to millions. The time to take it would have been almost two centuries ago, certainly within fifty years of when Washington tried to take the Ohio. We would never attack Oregon now. I am not sure even Washington would attack Ohio now. The death count would be astronomical.”

  And that pretty well ended the discussion. What I thought might be an interesting intellectual exercise, a chance to view one historical event from another perspective, wasn’t going anywhere. It was the Wall again. These were the brightest history students in their generation, and they were certain of one thing in their nation’s history – the Wall was impenetrable.

  The young woman at the end of the table – Felicite – then decided to end the discussion with a suggestion that added another wrinkle to the subject..


  “If you have any questions about how bad the Wall really is, you might ask President Jolliet about one of his ancestors who was killed on his way to the Wall. If ever there was one event that settled the matter, it was his death. If a Jolliet can’t get over the wall, no one can.” There was an interesting note of pride in her voice which made me wonder if she was shirt-tail relation. It seemed like much of elite Green Bay was connected. And I have to admit I felt a bit of pride at the moment as well, since she was recognizing that I had contact with the ex-president, not a small thing to the status conscious.

  I won’t describe any more of the class. The students had done a pretty good job preparing for class, and I was impressed by their research. I was still getting used to the students in Canada, but I had to admit that at least at this elite university, they were almost as good as the students I had studied with in the U.S.

  But while I listened to their presentations, my mind kept going back to Felicite’s comment about the Jolliet relation. Here I was, supposedly writing a general biography about the Jolliet family, and I did not know about this incident. Who was he, and what had killed him? The weekend was coming up and I decided that rather than spend the days hanging the new closet doors in the master bedroom, I would hit the digital library. At the moment, it seemed like I was the least knowledgeable person in my history seminar, and I didn’t want that to continue.