bout de papier, Vol. 14, No. 4 (1997) — Winter 1997 // Hiver 1997, pp. 38–39
LORD STRATHCONA. A BIOGRAPHY OF
DONALD ALEXANDER SMITH by Donna
McDonald, Dundurn Press, Toronto, 1996,
600 p. $34.99
Reviewed by D.M.L. Farr
“Is it not positively amazing what the Scot can grow to imagine, undertake and accomplish?” So said Andrew Carnegie of Donald Smith, Lord Strathcona, in 1906. Of course he might also have said it of himself. Strathcona’s life is the ultimate Horatio Alger story in Canadian history. A poor boy from the east coast of Scotland, he came to Canada at age eighteen as an apprentice-clerk in the Hudson’s Bay Company. Beginning his fur trading career in the unpromising setting of Labrador, he rose through the ranks to become chief commissioner of the fur trade in Canada, land commissioner and eventually governor, a post he was still holding when he died in 1914. Along the way he made a colossal fortune in railroading and banking. He started with the little St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway and expanded his interests to encompass management and investment roles in the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railways. He was a principal shareholder of the Bank of Montreal and later its president. Beside this eminently successful business career existed another range of accomplishments: intermediary between the Macdonald government and Louis Riel in the Red River troubles and agent in bringing Manitoba into Confederation; a Member of Parliament from Manitoba and later Montreal; the man whose vote brought down the Macdonald government in the Pacific Scandal; High Commissioner of Canada in London for almost twenty years; the best-known representative of the British overseas empire in the metropolis of the empire. Finally there is Strathcona the philanthropist, giving away seven and a half million dollars and over a million pounds in his lifetime, a sum for which the current value would be at least fourteen times greater. Surely Donald Smith’s was a career of Olympian proportions.
In her new biography Donna McDonald has meticulously recounted all these aspects of Strathcona’s life and more. Her book is as prodigious as the man: 500 pages of text, thirty pages of notes, ten pages of bibliography. In addition it contains a list of Strathcona’s donations and bequests, a list of his shares and investments and six pages of genealogical charts outlining Donald Smith’s extended family. The detail provided is so overwhelming that the reader fears from time to time that he is lost in an impenetrable forest. But long biographies are presently much in vogue, a fashion that gives a contemporary sanction to McDonald’s extended treatment of her subject.
To this reader, however, the biography would have profited from more rigorous editing. There are a few historical slips, some minor, some of more consequence. McDonald, a Canadian writer and arts administrator living in London, is very good in describing Smith’s personal life, especially his long attachment to Bella, the wife of his early fur trading days. She is less sure in assessing Strathcona the public figure. Strathcona has not been fortunate in his early biographers. One was too laudatory, another too tightly supervised. One was venomously unfair. W.L. Morton, who knew Manitoba and the fur trade better than anyone else, died before he could bring order to the Strathcona story. McDonald’s is far and away the best treatment but an editor’s blue pencil would have made it a more focussed account and spared the reader some tedious detail.
Readers of bout de papier will be especially interested in the four chapters that describe Lord Strathcona the high commissioner in London. Appointed by Mackenzie Bowell in 1896, he served under three prime ministers — Tupper, Laurier and Borden — before he died, still in office, in January 1914. He was not the politician/ high commissioner his predecessor, Sir Charles Tupper, had been. Some writers have claimed that Tupper was a member of Macdonald’s cabinet the whole time he was in London. This is manifestly untrue but there is no question that Macdonald saw Tupper as a close colleague who happened to be residing in London rather than in Ottawa. He called him back to serve as minister of finance for a year when he needed him and consulted him frequently. Strathcona did not have this relationship with Laurier and then Borden. His views were sought where appropriate but he never tendered political advice. He was respected for his vast experience, his shrewd common sense, his useful contacts with British business and political figures. Both Laurier and Borden pressed him to stay on in his post, even though, in his nineties, his strength and abilities were failing.
Whereas Tupper had devoted himself to furthering Canada’s trade relations with Britain and the Continent through commercial diplomacy, Strathcona saw immigration and investment as his priorities. His first task, he believed, was to make Canada better known in the United Kingdom, not an easy assignment at the high point of empire when British colonies all over the globe were clamouring for attention in the metropolis. Although a plodding speaker, Strathcona was indefatigable in publicizing Canada through talks and lectures, exhibitions and newspaper coverage. His preferred medium was entertaining and this he carried out on a lavish scale. A garden party at his country estate would involve 8000 invitations; his Canada Day receptions in town at least 1000 guests. Contrary to what some writers have said, he drew his salary as high commissioner but used his private means to augment his allowances for office expenses and entertaining.
Strathcona was convinced that Canada’s future lay in attracting more immigration from Britain and northern Europe and more capital. He tried to win control over the emigration agents in Great Britain from Sir Clifford Sifton and the department of the interior but was successful only in a nominal sense. He sought immigrants in Germany and Austria even though their governments had made it illegal to promote emigration. He worked to improve transportation lines within the British Empire. Penny postage was one means, the Pacific cable another. Then there was the “All Red Route,” steamships and the trans-continental railway linking Europe and the Orient through Canada. The CPR was instrumental here; private business and public purpose constructively combining. Strathcona kept clear of the debates taking place in Britain at the end of the Victorian period on the future structure of the empire. He favoured a distinctive Canadian identity in the empire (a national flag would help) but he distrusted schemes for closer political ties. He thought an imperial council would be useful but he was vague about its powers. In the Boer War his views on Canada’s participation were very close to Laurier’s although he had more sympathy for Major General Hutton, the insubordinate commander of the Canadian militia, who had to be relieved of his post. The motto on his first coat of arms was “Perseverance” and pragmatism was always Strathcona’s watchword. In spite of his wide experience gained over many years, he was never a leader but one who excelled in putting into practice the ideas of others.
About Strathcona the man McDonald has much of interest to say. For example, his title, which sounds so authentically Scottish, was his own creation. “Strath” is Gaelic for “broad valley” but “cone” he added because he liked its sound as an ending. His immense wealth did not come from the CPR and the Bank of Montreal but from the United States railway shares which he owned, mainly in the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific. He was helped, throughout his business career, by the interlocking network of Scots in North America. George Stephen, his closest business partner, was a cousin and uncles and cousins were to be found throughout the fur trade. Scottish connections were not responsible for his success but they offered opportunities. Then there is the intriguing matter of Strathcona’s marriage to Isabella (Belle) Hardisty in Labrador in 1853. Bella’s first marriage, also contracted in the wilderness, was irregular; the standing of her son from that marriage was questionable; her marriage to Donald Smith was without benefit of clergy; their only child, a daughter, was a mature woman before her parents underwent a marriage in New York on the 43rd anniversary of their original co-habitation. Strathcona eventually secured two peerages, the second designed to allow him to pass on the barony to his daughter, Margaret Howard. Like Agnes Macdonald after John A’s death, she became a baroness in her own right; unlike Agnes Macdonald, she possessed the means to maintain the dignity of the title.
Strathcona’s life is a part of the transition of a frontier Canada to a modern industrialized state, a unit in a global financial economy. At a number of crucial moments in our history he was a key figure. Although not in the first rank of Canadians who made a difference in the life of their country, he is squarely and prominently in the second rank. A quiet, private man, he was once described as “pawky.” The dictionary defines this Scottish expression as “shrewd, cunning, artful.” Strathcona was this, but more. He was always the Scot living abroad, as was Macdonald. But, like John A., he became, by his own terms, an authentic Canadian. Donna McDonald has done us a service in so richly chronicling the life of this remarkable man.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 14, No. 4 (1997) — Winter 1997 // Hiver 1997, pp. 38–39. Read the rest of this issue →
