The Boy in the Picture

Review by Neil Reynolds

Globe and Mail October 11, 2010

 

Boys used to quit school honourably – either to find work as apprentices and learn a profession by doing it, or to seek adventure, fortune and fame. Remarkably, these boys often achieved notable things. Kingston author Ray Argyle tells the compelling story of one such lad in The Boy in the Picture: The Craigellachie Kid and the Driving of the Last Spike. This is the story of Edward Mallandaine, the boy who stood behind CPR financier Donald Smith as the great man drove in the last spike – on Nov. 7, 1885 – of the legendary railway that joined Canada from coast to coast.

The night before the historic occasion, Edward – determined to be a part of history – caught a ride on a flatbed to Craigellachie, a settlement in the B.C. hinterland. It snowed hard, then turned to sleet. Through the pitch-black night, “Edward was stiff and half-frozen,” as Mr. Argyle describes it. He finally found shelter, near the site of the ceremony, in a boxcar. When the ceremonial moment arrived early the next morning, he squeezed his way, chilled and wet, through the throng of assembled dignitaries.

“Can I get in?” he asked, moving closer to the action.

“Whadda yuh doin’ here?” someone shouted. “Get away, kid.”

“Let him in,” one of the railway managers shouted. “Don’t you know that’s the Craigellachie Kid?”

Moments later, Edward Mallandaine made history.

Pierre Berton was the first historian to tell Edward’s story (The Last Spike: The Great Railway 1881-1885), but Mr. Argyle knew Edward Mallandaine. “I had the privilege of knowing Edward when he was a very old man and I was a very young boy,” Mr. Argyle says in introducing this inspiring tale. His family rented a house from Mallandaine in Creston, B.C., a mountain town that Mallandaine helped to found. Mallandaine collected the rent each month – and entertained young Argyle with stories of his life-and-death adventures as a pony-riding postman on a wild frontier.

“When Edward died,” Mr. Argyle says, “I was close to the age he had been at Craigellachie.” Edward quit school to go fight for Queen Victoria during Louis Riel’s North-West Rebellion – but, alas, got there too late. He was 18 when Smith drove in the last spike. Mr. Argyle celebrates the young Edward as an iconic figure himself – another boy with a burning ambition to share “in the building of a boisterous, confident country.”

Edward Mallandaine was born in Victoria on June 1, 1867 – one month before Confederation. He devoured Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published when he was 9 – and his conduct confirmed it. His teacher at Victoria Central School, a certain Mr. Pleace, regarded him as a delinquent and called him “fleabag.”

“Eddie, you bag of fleas, quit squirming,” Pleace shouted one day. “You will never set the harbour on fire.”

Along with his younger brother, Edward “set the harbour on fire” the very next day – almost burning down the James Bay Bridge. He reported his achievement to his teacher: “I did set the harbour on fire – really and truly I did.” He took pride in his flogging – “the best I ever had.” He shared a certain zest with Tom Sawyer – and with Twain himself. (Twain quit school at 11 for a full-time job as a printer’s apprentice – a decision he later justified by noting that libraries have more books than schools do.)

In 1889, the 22-year-old Edward struck out on his own – staking a 180-acre site overlooking Kootenay Lake where he helped established Creston, married the town’s first teacher and lived happily ever after. He died in 1949 at 82.

Mr. Argyle tells this Boy’s Own tale superbly. But then he lived a Tom Sawyer life himself, quitting school at 16 and roaming the country. He ended up in Toronto with careers in newspapers and advertising. (He sold his own company, Argyle Communications, to Environics in 2001). Now, he’s a prolific author. The Boy in the Picture is his third book in two years. “It proves you’re never too young to have a dream,” he says, “or too old to fulfill it.”

 

Review By J.D.M. Stewart

Canadian Children’s Book News

Few, if any photographs in Canadian history are as famous as the one showing the hammering of the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885. It provides a rich opportunity for storytelling because of the number of people in that iconic photo, including a young boy who somehow managed to find his way into an indelible piece of Canadian history.

Just how did a teenager insert himself between Donald A. Smith, hammering the spike, and Sandford Fleming? Ray Argyle tells the story of Edward Mallandaine, the 18-year-old boy-cum-adventurer, who travelled from BC to the Northwest Territories (now Alberta) hoping to join the militia and be a art of the military force taking down Louis Riel during the Northwest Rebellion in 1885.

As a young boy himself, Argyle got to know the elderly Mallandaine and heard a number of his stories. In this book, he recounts them in fictionalized form with imagined dialogue as we relive Mallandaine's escapades, whether it is being accosted by thieves while he works to deliver mail by horse, or in his encounters with Dukesang Wong, the Chinese navvy who left behind an extensive written account of his own. This neeting is one of the more interesting set pieces of the book.

More could have been written about the photograph itself, a recounting that takes up just one small chapter of the book. What does this photograph still mean today? How did someone so young and unrelated to the CPR make it in, anyway?

The book's set features on selected historical topics related to the CPR are useful. A perusal of the book by teachers would certainly allow them to enhance any lessons related to a study of the photograph itself. Beyond that, this book would most appeal to keen history students in Grade 8, and beyond.

(J.D.M. Stewart teaches Canadian history at Bishop Strachan School in Toronto.)