CHAPTER THREE
The Day Dawned Clear
Mercifully, overnight the temperature crept up toward the freezing mark for the first time that entire month. By 9:00 a.m. the thermometer had nudged just past 0° Celsius (33° Fahrenheit) and as on the previous day the sky was clear — the sun having eroded most of the remaining snow on surrounding hillsides.
In the morning, school children played hooky to visit the grim site. Many years later, Thomas Kilvington remembered being strictly forbidden from visiting the gruesome wreck. Along with other curious classmates, he disobeyed the admonition and hiked the long trip from his home only to immediately encounter his father among the assembled throng!
The view that greeted them was quite different from what it had been the previous night. The near-vertical second car had been dragged down, broken up, and moved aside. Although many “photographic” records of the site taken in daylight show that car still in place, closer examination reveals that the artists had taken licence in trying to illustrate the scene by adding back in the missing detail. Winches had been set up on the two abutments, but attempts to raise the first, practically submerged car were stymied by a section of the bridge that had collapsed on top of it. At daybreak they were finally successful in budging the debris and gaining full access to the car. Some fifteen to twenty bodies were then recovered. Although, at that point, most of the victims had, in fact, been accounted for, it was believed at the time that perhaps another twenty had slipped beneath the ice. What remained of the first car was demolished and efforts to locate the casualties continued. Among the last to be brought to the surface was George Knight the eighteen-year-old fireman from Windsor, Ontario.
In 1857 photography was usually limited to controlled indoor lighting and lengthy exposures, but this salt-paper print by an unknown photographer was captured for perpetuity the morning after the disaster, looking towards Burlington Bay.
Library and Archives Canada, MIKAN 3203866.
After the last wave of victims from the leading car had been accommodated, the pressure on those engaged in the temporary mortuaries began to slacken. Toward the end of the day after the disaster, most of the bodies had been identified and some had been removed to local residences or dispatched to their hometowns. The firebrand rebel William Lyon Mackenzie claimed that even in this process, the Great Western had been so insensitive as to levy a charge of four dollars for the crude box provided to transport each victims’ remains. Mackenzie, no lover of either the political establishment or railways in general, may well have been guilty of broadcasting unfounded gossip — the more likely, since this accusation does not appear to have been levelled elsewhere. Still, it was this sort of writing that generated readership for Mackenzie’s Weekly Record, the radical press of its time.
This 1850s photograph of William Lyon Mackenzie oozes irascibility. The one-time rebel and lifelong reformer was also a dedicated adversary of Sir Alan MacNab, of the Great Western, and of just about anything to do with capitalism.
Niagara Falls Public Library, D422259.
With community hysteria starting to subside and the immediate strain on authorities beginning to slacken, the machine of law and process was put in motion. The coroners retired to the nearby boardroom of the Great Western and empanelled a jury to examine the circumstances surrounding the unnatural deaths of the victims. They then immediately adjourned the inquest to the following day, Saturday.
Even before the jury was struck, the morning after the accident Hamilton City Council was convened to express “heartfelt sympathy to the suffers and friends of the deceased.” They then went on to resolve:
That in humble submission to the Providence of Him, without whom not a sparrow falleth to the ground, but whose inscrutable wisdom permitted this City to be visited by a fearful calamity on the Great Western Railroad, by which some of our most respected friends and citizens have been hurried into eternity, be it therefore resolved that the inhabitants of this City be respectfully required to set apart Monday 16th March as a day of humiliation: they are requested to cease from the ordinary occupations of the week and meet in their respective congregations on that day, and that the proclamation of his Worship be issued to that effect.
While order was being slowly restored, the salvage effort continued. For the second night, workers carried on removing the debris and dragging the canal under the glow of the locomotive headlights and the flicker of myriad bonfires. That night one new resident of Dundas, Britton Osler, who lived three or more miles away at the head of the valley, breathlessly wrote to his brother Featherstone detailing the events and adding: “We can see out of the window now the lights of the bridge where they are yet fishing out the dead.” Perhaps a reflection of his upbringing (his father was the newly appointed Anglican rector to Dundas and Ancaster) he provided the rather unusual headcount of the dead: “4 clergymen, 1 Church of England.” Somewhat luridly, and inaccurately, he wrote: “Mr. Zimmerman of Niagara Falls was among the first to be taken out with his head completely off.” Young Osler, then only eighteen years old, may be forgiven his youthful insensitivity. The letter penned by his mother, Ellen, in Toronto, to his brother earlier in the day had a vastly different timbre. That letter practically screams of a mother’s anxiety and distress.
The family was in the midst of relocating from Bond Head, north of Toronto, to Dundas where the Reverend Featherstone Osler Senior was hoping to provide a better education for his family. The move involving a large family was complex. Two sons, including Britton, travelled ahead, as did their father. One son at least, the younger Featherstone, was to stay in Bond Head for the time being. Their mother, accompanied by younger members of the family, was making the journey that fateful week. That trip was interrupted when eight-year-old William came down with the croup. That necessitated a stay in a Toronto hotel. Two family members then proceeded alone, taking the train immediately preceding the wreck. Britton, undoubtedly on the way to meet that train, wrote to his brother of seeing it cross the Desjardins Canal Bridge from the carriage bridge, above.
Even a century and a half later, Ellen’s letter to Featherstone, hastily scrawled across three pages, still betrays a mother’s distress that her son would be worried about their welfare, as well as her own trepidation when it had seemed possible that the advance party might have been on board: “Martha and John went up yesterday and for some time I thought they must have been passengers on the cars that were lost but they fortunately left by the mid-day train.” She only received assurance of their safety when her husband telegraphed her the same day she wrote the letter, the day after the disaster. Having gasped-out the happy tidings of their safety she reverts with mild incongruity to her role as mother. The very next sentence reads: “Poor Martha had the fits again and what to do with her I know not.”
This 1867 image shows Britton Bath Osler as a dignified legal expert and future prosecutor of Louis Riel. A decade earlier, the scribbled letter to his father, written when the tragic details at Desjardins were beginning to circulate, reveals a more callow youth, preoccupied the grisly details and body counts.
McCord Museum, I-27210.1.
The story of the Osler’s brush with death illustrates the vagaries of fate. Although none were on board, the family’s itinerary seems to have been woven around the tragedy. As with any who just miss or just manage to board a ship, plane, or train destined for disaster, personal lives and history might have had to be rewritten had fate been different.
Young William might well have been aboard and killed. If so, one of the most celebrated Canadian doctors of the time might have never enjoyed his career. William Osler went on to become chief of medicine at Johns Hopkins and a professor of medicine at both Oxford and McGill universities. The youthfully insensitive Britton served as one of the crown prosecutors at the trial of Louis Reil and, curiously, became one of the most prominent railway lawyers of his time. His knowledge of engineering detail became so advanced