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Recalling Van Horne and the Canadian Pacific challenge to the Grand Trunk.

At sixty, one cannot realize how long he has lived until he sits down and counts up the revolutions he has seen since he arrived at man’s estate.

Of course, one does not mean political revolutions, merely; although they are becoming too numerous to mention. I left Scotland before the man who produced the crops from which the rent rolls of the House of Lords were paid could vote for a member of the Parliament which might send his sons to the wars. When I came to Canada in 1882, the St. Lawrence, below Montreal, flowed through a country that was about as clear of forests as it is to-day. But Ontario forty years ago, was half bush. Toronto was warmed with more wood than coal in winter. My friend Noel Marshall was called the wood king of this city. His trainloads of cordwood arrived almost daily from the territory around and beyond Lake Simcoe.

The locomotive with the big funnel-top out of which came wood sparks and smoke was still common on the railways. There wasn’t an air brake on a train. The electric light was just beginning to take its place among the marvels of the age; but the electric street car was only the dream of foolish persons who imagined that harness could be put upon the lightning. The telegraph was everywhere with the steam locomotive. But, though men had talked to each other from almost incredible distances, and prophecies were made by daring spirits about what would some day be accomplished by the human voice over an electrified wire; if you wanted to speak to a man in his office across the street, you crossed the street.

One of the surest things in human existence, to most shrewd people’s way of thinking, was the impossibility that men should ever fly. Anybody who would have predicted that in his lifetime it would be possible to send his voice out into the atmosphere in the form of a silent wave of ether, have it picked up by a piece of wire a thousand miles away and turned again into his voice so that one or one thousand people standing in a park could hear it as plainly as if the living person shouted into their ears—why, for such a prophet the only appropriate abiding place would have been where brains had ceased from troubling, and wisdom was at rest. As for the motor car, although the horseless vehicle was a subject of prophecy, the wildest visionary never proposed anything like the present speeds and dangers of the streets.

The advances that have been made in moral and social standards are, in their spheres, as remarkable as those just suggested are in the mechanical helps of life. But before we come to them, and their relation to one or two of the more remarkable variations from the way of conducting railways forty years ago, suppose we take a look at the railway situation from the constructional point of view, as it was in Canada when my service began with the Grand Trunk.

Towards the C.P.R. the high and mighty Grand Trunk directors in London had a disdain not unlike what their successors felt for the Canadian Northern when it first stretched its hand towards the London money market. The year that began my service produced two most remarkable developments in the general scheme and the administration of the C.P.R. The first day of 1882 saw the first day’s work of Van Horne as general manager of the C.P.R. The first year’s work of Van Horne saw also the abandonment of the plan of first reaching Winnipeg by rail from Eastern Canada via Sault Ste. Marie, instead of by Port Arthur. To give an idea of the atmosphere that it was sought to develop in the London money market at that time, it is interesting to see a pamphlet that was issued under Grand Trunk auspices, in opposition to the proposal to build the C.P.R. around the north shore of Lake Superior.

The territory now traversed by three transcontinental lines was described as “a perfect blank, even on the maps of Canada. All that is known of the region is that it would be impossible to construct this one section for the whole cash subsidy provided by the Canadian Government for the entire scheme.”

This view was not a purely Grand Trunk bogey. It coloured the Liberal party’s opposition to the C.P.R. Thomas Robertson, founder of the Toronto candy-making firm, used to tell with much glee how his old friend who became Senator Jaffray, president of “The Globe”, and of the Imperial Bank, was in the habit of declaring that he would not risk his life on a train north of Lake Superior in winter.

Grand Trunk understrappers, of whom I was one, had no direct contact with the big fighting that was going on between the old Canadian railway and the new, looking to the future control of transcontinental business. But we could feel temperatures; and we picked up information about the forces that were playing against each other, which, perhaps, the ordinary reader of the newspapers did not gather from what came out of the West. As a matter of fact, not much did come out of the West, where the most extraordinary phase of a most extraordinary phase of modern railway construction was being accomplished. There was no telegraph connection over all-Canadian territory between Montreal and Winnipeg, and the newspaper services were meagre indeed, compared with what they are now.

Of all the departments of railway construction and operation, only one of the C.P.R. was located in Montreal in 1882—the purchasing department. Its chief was a young fellow named Shaughnessy. Except in age, there wasn’t much difference between the purchasing agent of 1882 and the peer who resigned the C.P.R. presidency thirty-six years later. Mr. Shaughnessy had arrived early in the year, from the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, whose general manager, Van Horne, had been given charge of the completion of the C.P.R. The financial chiefs of the young railway, notably George Stephen, had their headquarters in Montreal. But they were generally regarded as having other major interests.

Among the Grand Trunk wise men, the enterprise that was poking its nose into the barbarian wilderness was looked upon with an almost amused toleration. In their own estimation, the Grand Trunk offices at Point St. Charles were a sort of Imperial hub. The C.P.R. was very much of a colonial affair, don’t you know—indeed, with a general manager from Milwaukee, rather too Yankee an affair, if the truth must bluntly be uttered.

But, even then, there were the symptoms of a somewhat chastened mood in the Grand Trunk. For the year 1882 had produced results which, when they were predictions during the previous winter, were laughed at; but when they were achievements at the end of the year were ominous indeed. The Van Horne regime on the C.P.R. was the most remarkable innovation that had happened to the business life of the Dominion. Its first year had seen the construction of about five times as many miles of railway as the C.P.R. had laid during any previous year; and most of that on the remote prairies. The promise to begin, in 1883, building around the north shore of Lake Superior looked like business—and business it was.

I think Van Horne had never been in Montreal when he took over the job of general manager of the Canadian Pacific on January 1, 1882, at Winnipeg. He came east shortly afterwards, and gave Ottawa and Montreal a few tastes of his quality. He did not settle in Montreal until after his first astounding Western season was ended. In midwinter, with little preparation made for the spring opening, Van Horne announced that he would lay five hundred miles of track on the prairies in the season of 1882. His advent at the head of affairs was not welcomed by a staff of Canadians and old countrymen. He was a Yankee. He was astonishingly aggressive. His vocabulary had all the certainty that belongs to the Presbyterian conception of everlasting retribution, without its restraint. He laughed at other men’s impossibilities, and ordered them to be done—a dynamo run by dynamite.

The only way to get construction material to Winnipeg and the West in time for the spring opening was from the south. Van Horne bought rails in England and Germany, had them shipped to New Orleans, and hauled in trainloads up the Mississippi Valley. He made a contract with a St. Paul firm for the grading, up to the point of actually laying ties and steel, from Oak Lake, west of Brandon, to Calgary. The day after the contract was signed they advertised for three thousand men and four thousand horses.

Van Horne organized his own gangs of tracklayers and kept them right on the heels of the graders. There was delay in starting work, because the Red River Valley above Winnipeg was abnormally flooded. Then the contractors didn’t work fast enough. On threat of cancelling the whole thing Van Horne speeded up the construction. Working furiously into the freeze-up, finished only 417 miles on the prairie section. But the work done elsewhere did complete over five hundred miles of construction that year; and it was plain that the new driving force would get even greater results another season.

The next year saw steel laid right to Calgary and immense progress made between Lake Nipissing and Thunder Bay. This piece of work caused J. J. Hill to drop out of the C.P.R., and to become a business enemy of Van Horne’s. Hill, an Ontario farm boy, had induced Donald Smith (afterwards Lord Strathcona) and his cousin George Stephen (Lord Mountstephen) to join him in getting hold of a Minnesota railroad that had been financed by Dutch bondholders. This road developed into the Great Northern, out of which Smith and Stephen made, it has been stated, more money than they did out of the C.P.R. These associates created the syndicate which obtained the C.P.R. charter, and began construction. Things were dragging, and it seemed likely that the ten years stipulated for with the Canadian Government would be needed to complete the road to the Coast, when Hill recommended that Van Horne be made general manager, with large powers. The appointment was made, but before long, Hill and Van Horne clashed, as strong men often do.

When Van Horne took hold, a railway was under construction from Callender (just east of North Bay) to Sault Ste. Marie, where it was to tie in with the Hill road and its Winnipeg connections. The line from Port Arthur to Winnipeg was well advanced; and the utmost use was to be made of the possibilities of lakes navigation for communications with Eastern Canada under all-Canadian auspices. But it was figured that the line around Superior would be too costly and too unremunerative an undertaking for many years. All the traffic during non-navigation months would go over the Hill line—and that was one of several reasons for Hill’s going into the C.P.R.

Van Horne wasn’t afraid of the emptiness between Lake Nipissing and Thunder Bay. He figured the through traffic would be enough to offset the disadvantage of practically no local business through the wilderness. He saw that, with Hill in the strategical position he had marked out for himself, the C.P.R. couldn’t well be its own master—rather, perhaps, that Van Horne couldn’t be its master. Sir John Macdonald and the Government had always wanted to reach the West over all-Canadian rails. And so it came about that Van Horne’s arrival at Montreal, after the 1882 construction season, for his permanent headquarters, synchronized with the beginning of the Superior Division construction or, rather, with the sending in of supplies during the winter, for the 1883 work. It turned out that three seasons’ construction completed the Lake Superior Division, and the first trains from Montreal to Winnipeg ran in the fall of 1885.

The new atmosphere which had begun to affect railway business in Canada can be partially appreciated by those who were not within its influence. A tremendous, and at times terrifying, power had come on to the job of Canadian development. The Grand Trunk bucked it openly in London, and quietly derided it in Canada. In Montreal, though, we were so far from the West—always bear in mind that it wasn’t till late in 1885 that you could travel in the same train across the Province of Ontario—that the tales which came through of what was happening in the North West seemed about as far-fetched as Mark Twain’s yarn of the jumping frog.

For instance, it was a matter of knowledge that the C.P.R. charter provided for the line to be built through the Yellowhead Pass, since taken by the Grand Trunk Pacific, and the Canadian Northern, and to end about where Prince Rupert now is. The route had been changed; and instead of going through Battleford, the newly-established capital of the North West Territories, and up the North Saskatchewan Valley, the C.P.R., we were informed, was going to Fort Calgary up the Bow river (which becomes the South Saskatchewan where it is joined by the Red Deer), and was then to get through the mountains, and reach the Pacific ocean—somehow. And, in very truth, it was some somehow.

First of all there were doubts as to whether a railway could be put through the Kicking Horse Pass. Then, once over the Great Divide, the Fraser Valley must be reached either by crossing the mighty Selkirk range, or by going hundreds of miles round the big bend of the Columbia. No pass through the Selkirks was known. Few men believed one could be found. But Van Horne headed his road for the foothills, taking chances on making a fairly economical approach to the Pacific ocean, to obtain which he sent explorers into the appalling waste of mountains. At last, after incredible hardships, Major Rogers and a companion named Carrol found the Pass that is forever associated with the major’s name; and the C.P.R. went through, as all the world knows.

I shall come to a very pleasant duty presently, when something is to be said about railway location, and some of the locators I have known and worked with. It will be seen that they are all of the Rogers spirit, though, happily for themselves, they are not all of the Rogers attitude towards their own financial interests. Rogers was a Yale graduate of high standing, but a lover and liver of the wild, if ever there was such a creature. His discovery of the Pass, made during days of semi-starvation, and dreadful peril to man and beast, was acknowledged by the C.P.R. with a check for five thousand dollars. Van Horne, meeting Rogers in Winnipeg a year later, reminded the major that he hadn’t cashed the check.

“What!” roared Rogers. “Cash that check? I wouldn’t take a hundred thousand dollars for it. It is framed and hangs in my brother’s house in Waterville, Minnesota, where my nephews and nieces can see it. I’m not in this game for money.”

To indicate the general temper of those early construction days in the prairie country one can take room for only two sidelights on the Van Horne regime, which became traditional with all the surviving old-timers who were lucky enough to behold it. Van Horne wasn’t an engineer, but he had all the natural aptitudes of one, and a Napoleonic hatred of “can’t”. One day he sent for a locating engineer, threw a profile to him and said:

“Look at that. Some infernal idiot has put a tunnel in there. I want you to go up and take it out.”

“But this is on the Bow River—a troublesome section. There may be no other way.”

“Make another way.”

The engineer stood, irresolute. Then, Van Horne:

“This is a mud tunnel, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“How long would it take to build it?”

“A year or eighteen months.”

Van Horne thumped his desk and shouted: “What are they thinking about? Are we going to hold up this railway for a year and a half while they build their damned tunnel? Take it out.”

The engineer started off with the plan; but turned at the door.

“Mr. Van Horne,” he said, “these mountains are in the way, and the rivers don’t run right for us. While we’re at it we might fix them up, too.”

Whereat the big chief exploded with laughter. But there’s no tunnel on the Bow, and the line wasn’t held up eighteen months.

Those who knew Van Horne in his later years are familiar with his habit of keeping a cigar in his mouth, often unlit. He was, though, a great smoker; and when, during his last illness but one, the doctor reduced him to three cigars a day, he had some made over a foot long. Just before he finished his first whirlwind year at Winnipeg, he threw an unextinguished cigar stub into the waste basket, and the building—the Bank of Montreal, in the upper storey of which the C.P.R. had its headquarters—was burnt to the ground. Bank and railway moved to Knox Church, and Van Horne had his office in the pastor’s vestry; and Ogden, the auditor, presided in the Sunday school room.

In view of Van Horne’s vocabularian range, it seemed an incongruous association; but it may have had something to do with a remark made thirty years afterwards by Van Horne to one of his astonished friends:

“All my religion,” he said, “is summed up in the golden rule; and I practise it; and I think I am the only man in business who does. What are you laughing at?”

Perhaps the best picture of the Van Horne who put zip into the C.P.R. was written in the Winnipeg Sun:

“Van Horne is calm and harmless-looking. So is a she-mule; and so is a buzz-saw. You don’t know their true inwardness until you go up and feel them. To see Van Horne get out of the car and go softly up the platform you would think he was an evangelist on his way West to preach temperance to the Mounted Police. But you are soon undeceived. If you are within hearing distance you will have more fun than you have ever had in your life.”

So much for the temper that was in the Canadian railway situation forty years ago. West of old Ontario there wasn’t much else but land, water and temper. When Van Horne went to Winnipeg between the Lake of the Woods and the Great Divide, and from the United States boundary to the Arctic ocean, red and white people combined were only sixty thousand. British Columbia, which had come into Confederation on promise of railway connection with the East, contained fifty thousand people, of whom half were Indians.

Allowing for the low traffic value of the Indians, it is a liberal computation that from the American boundary to the Arctic Circle there weren’t forty people per mile to create the business between the Ontario frontier and the Pacific Ocean. Van Horne’s faith was force and his force was faith. Never was there a greater combination for a greater adventure. Literally, according to its faith, it has been to the C.P.R.