Читать книгу Quest Biographies Bundle — Books 26–30 - Wayne Larsen - Страница 3

At last the development that William Cornelius Van Horne has set his sights on has arrived: the driving of the last spike on the Canadian Pacific Railway’s trans-Canada line. It is November 7, 1885, a dull, raw day in Craigellachie in British Columbia’s Eagle Pass, west of Revelstoke in the Rocky Mountains.

The photograph that records this epochal event in Canadian history shows a phalanx of dark fir trees and cedars and in front of it a crowd of men. Workmen, surveyors, construction managers, and curious onlookers, they crane forward to watch a white-bearded figure in a stovepipe hat stoop to pick up his maul and complete the line. The first choice to perform the task was Governor General Lord Lansdowne, the son-in-law of Queen Victoria, but neither he nor George Stephen, the CPR president, can be here. So the honour falls to Donald Smith, a company director who twelve years later will become Lord Strathcona.

Smith swings at the tie held in place by Major A.B. Rogers, the engineer in charge of the CPR’s Mountain Division, but his first blow bends the iron spike so badly that it is quickly replaced with another. On his second attempt Smith succeeds. The audience, overawed, remains silent for a moment, then breaks out with a resounding cheer. Before long, the shrill whistles of the surrounding locomotives join in the hearty applause.

William Van Horne, the CPR vice-president, the man who had managed the building of this ribbon of steel that linked the country east to west, steps forward to make his speech: “All I can say,” he says tersely, “is that the work has been well done in every way.”

He has succeeded in hurling twenty-four hundred miles of railway track across half a continent, much of it in wilderness. Moreover, he has done so in far less time than anyone had predicted. Alexander Mackenzie, Canada’s second prime minster, announced in October 1875 that the road “could not likely be completed in ten years with all the power of men and all the money of the Empire.” The current Canadian government also allowed a decade for the construction of the railway, but Van Horne has managed to complete it in less than half that time — four and a half years.

The superhuman dynamo who pushed through the construction of the Canadian Pacific’s main line was an American. William Cornelius Van Horne, the son of Cornelius and Mary Van Horne, was born on February 3, 1843, in the now abandoned village of Chelsea, just west of the town of Frankfort in Illinois.

He was descended from Jan Cornelissen Van Horne, a true pioneer who left Amsterdam for America in 1635 and helped to found New Amsterdam (now New York City) on Manhattan Island. Van

Perhaps the most famous Canadian photo. It shows Lord Strathcona driving the last spike at Craigellachie. The bearded, corpulent figure on his right is Van Horne.

Courtesy of the Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal, MP-000.25.971.

Horne’s paternal grandfather, Abram, or “the Dominie,” as he was affectionately known, was a highly respected minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. He followed the example of other Van Horne males by marrying into a prominent Dutch-American family, the Covenhoven clan. Although Abram’s ministry covered a large area in New York State and his fees were lamentably small, he was able to maintain himself, his wife, and nine children in comfort thanks to the substantial legacies that both he and his wife had received from their fathers. With this generous assistance, they supported as many as twenty slaves and continued the Van Horne and Covenhoven family traditions of abundant hospitality.

Van Horne’s father was therefore born into a stable and prosperous family. The Dominie hoped that Cornelius would also enter the ministry, but this high-spirited son had other plans. In 1813, when he was only nineteen, he married Elizabeth Vedder and the following year, after graduating from Union College in New York, he embarked on law studies. Cornelius was enjoying the income and prestige from a successful law practice when, in 1832, he suddenly uprooted his family and took them by covered wagon to the distant frontier state of Illinois. Like thousands of other restless Yankees at the time, he turned his back on the sophisticated community in which he had grown up and the relative security that it offered and struck out for the American Midwest. What motivated him, we do not know. It might have been a sense of adventure or a wish to escape the conventions of life on the eastern seaboard. Or it might have been some vague, undefined dissatisfaction and a belief that utopia existed in the wilderness of Illinois, destined to become the fastest-growing territory in the world in the mid-nineteenth century.

In today’s world of paved roads and sleek airplanes and trains, it is hard to imagine the gruelling journey that the young family took. For transportation, they relied on the “prairie schooner,” a heavily laden, covered wagon that bumped along dusty, bone-bruising trails. To reach their destination, the Van Hornes travelled for hundreds of miles along these rutted paths, forded rivers, and braved severe weather conditions. As they did so, they hoped to avoid the many deadly diseases common at the time or confrontations with hostile Indians.

Once arrived in Illinois, the family cleared land and constructed a cabin in New Lenox Township, in the northern part of the state. Two years later, however, they moved to nearby Frankfort, settling about a mile west of the hamlet, where Van Horne was born. Their new home was carved out of the wilderness on land that would be surveyed for the town of Chelsea in 1848–49.

In this sparsely settled part of what would become Will County, Van Horne’s father became a respected community leader. He continued his law practice and also served as the first schoolmaster in the area and as Will County’s first postmaster and justice of the peace. In all these roles, he was respected for his force of character, his shrewdness, and his “bold, outspoken way of giving vent to his honest convictions.” In due course his son William came to be noted for these same characteristics.

Unfortunately, Cornelius’s early years in Illinois were scarred by tragedy. A daughter died in infancy and, in 1838, his wife, Elizabeth, passed away, leaving him with four young children. He sent them to live with relatives or friends. To add to his burden, in the winter of 1839–40 the family home was “consumed by fire.”

After the blaze, which claimed his homestead, barns, books, and other personal effects, Cornelius set about building a new home. In this he was aided by his brother Matthew, a prosperous farmer who had settled nearby with another brother. It was to this log house in 1842 that Cornelius brought his second wife, Mary Minier Richards, the daughter of a Pennsylvanian mother of French origin and an American father of German descent who had immigrated to the colonies as a young man.

William Cornelius Van Horne was the first child of this second marriage and, in less than a decade, he was joined by four siblings: Augustus Charles in 1844, Elizabeth in 1846, Theodore in 1848, and Mary in 1852. Interestingly, both of William’s brothers also took up a railway career, but neither rose to such lofty heights as he did. As the first-born, William soon exhibited many of the characteristics that psychologists associate with the oldest child — natural leadership, reliability, conscientiousness, and a striving for perfection. These same traits would prove indispensable in advancing Van Horne’s career.

For a person whose destiny was to be linked with railways, the 1840s was an exciting period in which to be born in the United States. In the first explosion of railway construction, the amount of track more than tripled, from three to nine thousand miles. In the 1850s, work gangs laid another twenty-one thousand miles of track and provided the country east of the Mississippi River with its basic overland transportation networks. The 1840s also witnessed the perfection of railway construction techniques and the tentative emergence of the railway as the “first modern business.” Such was the enormity of the impact of these developments that we can compare it to the influence of the Internet on present-day North American business and society.

This decade also saw the emergence of the second marvel of communication — the telegraph — which also had a profound influence on Van Horne’s life. In 1843, Congress voted to pay Samuel Morse to build the first telegraph line in the United States, from Washington to Baltimore. The following year Morse sent the first message on this line. Soon the telegraph was sending instantaneous messages along copper wires, which ran alongside the railway lines that would shortly span the American continent. Like the railway, the telegraph would help to shrink distance and create a sense of community. It would also further the railway careers of those who, like Van Horne, became knowledgeable about its technology and adept at using it.

Before the family moved to Joliet, Illinois, some fourteen miles from Chelsea, William Van Horne’s world was defined by the homestead and its immediate surroundings. Most important was the spacious log house built on the brow of a hill overlooking a valley. In the woods, not far from the house, was a stable and other log outbuildings, while nestled in the valley, beside Hickory Creek, was a largely inactive sawmill.

When he was six years old, young William began attending school. Weather permitting, he would trudge a couple of miles to the small schoolhouse, undoubtedly a one-room building, where children of all ages were taught by a single teacher in a room heated by a wood-burning stove. To reach this Spartan place of instruction, he made his way through woods, hoping all the while that he would not encounter one of the wolves that also made its home there.

These rambles sowed the seeds for two hobbies that would become lifelong passions — paleontology and art. He had few toys to play with, so he began to collect pebbles from the stream that flowed at the base of the hill near his home. One day, when he was still very young, he found a thin piece of shiny black stone.

He eagerly scooped it up, but, to his great disappointment, it changed to a lacklustre grey as it dried. Still, he carried it home to his resourceful mother, hoping she would be able to restore its bright colour. She could not, but she did something even better.

She told William that his stone was a piece of slate and that he could use it to make marks on another piece of slate. Intrigued, he began to scratch on slate at every opportunity and soon moved on to crude drawings of children, dogs, and horses. When the soft slate wore out and he could not find any more pieces to replace it, he turned to drawing on the white-washed walls of the family home. Mary, who also had a gift for art, encouraged him to continue, and Cornelius aided and abetted the cause by bringing home chalks and pencils from Joliet. Before long, young William had covered every wall in the house, as high as his small arm could reach, with drawings. His parents had opened a new world of art to him, and, in time, he became a proficient amateur artist.

When William was seven, his parents took him with them on one of their visits to Joliet, a small town some thirty-seven miles southwest of Chicago and named after the French-Canadian explorer Louis Joliet. It was William’s first trip outside the valley, and he never forgot how awestruck he was by the number of two-storey houses he found in the town. The following year, 1851, Cornelius moved the whole family to Joliet, no doubt to obtain better schooling for his children and more opportunities for himself. All at once, young William’s horizons expanded dramatically.

Joliet, a flourishing town of some two thousand inhabitants, seemed huge and impressive to the young boy. It had a school, a church, a courthouse, shops, and also the National Hotel, with such wonders as fresh spring water in its basement kitchen and a bell system connecting the rooms to the office. Ever since the opening of the Illinois-Michigan canal in 1848, this landmark hostelry had provided accommodation for the thousands of passengers who travelled by boat along those waters. And, when the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad came to Joliet in 1852, the hotel began shuttling passengers from its front door to the station in a bright yellow bus drawn by a team of grey horses.

No sooner had Cornelius Van Horne resumed his law practice and settled the family into their new home than he plunged into municipal politics. In 1852 Joliet was incorporated as a city and, in its first municipal election, Cornelius was elected mayor. As he also served as justice of the peace for Joliet and Will County, he had considerable status in the community.

William revelled in the new opportunities he found in Joliet for collecting rocks and in his free time eagerly explored the grasslands along the banks of the Des Plaines River. He noticed that some of the rocks contained fossils, so added a separate category in his collection for them. One day he found a perfect trilobite outline embedded in a stone on Joliet’s main street, and he returned that night with a hammer to chip it out. So began his hobby of collecting fossils, and, in the course of his life, he would discover and classify many new species. Like so many other Victorians, he became a zealous naturalist, keen not only to build up his collections but to organize them, too.

In his later years, William Van Horne became convinced that every boy should have a hobby that involved a collection of some sort. There was no better way to prepare the mind for complex management, he wrote to a friend:

The best thing a boy can do is to begin to collect. Let him collect something — I don’t care what it is — and you will find he begins to notice, and from noticing, he begins to classify and arrange. Interest develops, and wherever he goes there is nothing connected with his collection about which he is not keenly interested. The real education for a boy is simply a matter of impressions. These cannot be selected for him, but they colour the whole of his life.

The school that William attended in Joliet was typical of its time: it drilled him in the “Three Rs” — reading, writing, and arithmetic — but covered little more. Nevertheless, despite the dull routine and strict discipline, he mastered the basic skills well. He also became an avid reader, grabbing every book he could lay his hands on and soaking up knowledge like a sponge.

Young William’s love of books even caused him to switch Sunday schools. He and his brother Augustus initially went to the one at the church their mother attended, St. John’s Universalist Church. When William heard that the Methodist Sunday school had “the better books,” he persuaded his parents to let him go there. And so he was exposed to the teachings of Methodism, whose emphasis on self-denial, personal holiness, and careful stewardship helped to inspire the lives of many well-known capitalists, such as Sir Joseph Flavelle, one of Canada’s most respected businessmen and philanthropists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If these qualities helped Flavelle in his meteoric rise from humble beginnings to celebrated businessman and financier, they probably influenced William, too — even though he had no interest in organized religion as an adult.

William’s world was suddenly shattered in July 1854, when he was only eleven: his father came down with cholera and died. Although he left no description of how his father’s death affected him personally, this loss must have been profound. It was probably responsible for the bouts of melancholy that afflicted him in the years just before his marriage. Cornelius Van Horne left a good name, but, his son did say, he also left “a lot of accounts payable and some bad accounts receivable.” As a lawyer, he seldom took fees, and, even when he possessed not a penny himself, he often refused payment for his services. In a draft letter written to his grandson decades later, William Van Horne confessed, “I could not understand it then, and I am not quite sure that I do now, but this occurred in a newly settled country where all were poor alike.”

Mary was left with five children to raise and, ever resourceful and courageous, she managed to keep “bread,” usually hominy, on the table by taking in sewing and by selling produce from her garden. Even so, the family was forced to move from a comfortable home with spacious grounds to a small cottage. While still a child, William learned that life is a struggle and that his progress through it would depend to a great extent on his own efforts.

To help support his family, William worked whenever he could out of school hours, splitting logs and delivering telegraph messages from Joliet’s telegraph operators. While waiting for the messages, he listened carefully to the tapping instrument and watched the tape slowly unwind as it spelled out the message in dashes and dots. Later he wrote: “I was put on the station service and as I was very young, the men didn’t mind my asking questions, and what is more, they answered them and told me things.” He learned more than anyone realized at the time, and it is quite probable that this new technology subtly but effectively gave him a sense of the larger world beyond Joliet.

Despite his intelligence and superb memory, William was easily bored at school. To fill the hours, he often drew caricatures of his teachers and the students sitting near him. In the schoolyard he enjoyed brawling with the other boys, offered to take on all comers, and usually won. But all these boisterous hijinks came to an end the day he was caught caricaturing the school principal. The punishment he received was so severe that, although he was only thirteen, he chose never to return to school. By then, however, he had acquired quite a good education by the minimal standards of the day. He could read, write, and reason well. More important, he was curious about many things and he loved to learn. These qualities served him well as he left his boyhood behind and entered the adult world of work and responsibility.