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After the low-key ceremony that marked the completion of Canada’s transcontinental railway, William Van Horne, his son Bennie, and other members of the official party with their guests scrambled aboard their special train. It then set off for Port Moody, winding its way along the Thompson River Valley and down the scenic Fraser Canyon to the Pacific port. There they boarded the steamer Princess Louise, which took them for a sail around beautiful Burrard Inlet and English Bay. Then they crossed to Vancouver Island for a round of congratulatory speeches in Victoria, the capital of British Columbia. Finally they returned to the mainland, where they climbed aboard the special train headed for Winnipeg.

But amid all this solemnity, Van Horne could not resist an elaborate practical joke. It centred on Donald Smith, the man who had driven the iconic last spike just the week before and who owned several residences in Canada. One of these properties, Silver Heights, was located a few miles west of Winnipeg, and here Smith kept a herd of Aberdeen cattle. Van Horne had arranged for a party to be staged in the then unoccupied house on the estate. He had a spur line built from Winnipeg to the residence, hired cooks and domestic helpers, and ordered vast quantities of the best food and drinks. Close to noon on November 15, when the special train entered the spur, the party was deep in conversation, and Smith did not notice that the engineer had reversed the engine. Then, suddenly, he spotted “a very neat place” and some fine Aberdeen cattle. “This is really very strange,” he said, puzzled, and, when the house came into view, he thought he was truly going crazy: he had never seen another place “so exactly like Silver Heights.” At this point his companions all burst out laughing — and Smith, glancing outside, began to laugh too. Van Horne’s imaginative practical joke had stuck just the right note for the occasion.

Another milestone for the CPR arrived on June 28, 1886, when the first transcontinental passenger train departed from Montreal bound for the Pacific coast. Anticipating the day when bales of silk would soon be arriving from China and Japan, the city fathers hung silken banners on the engine and ordered a fifteen-gun salute. As the smoke-belching train drew slowly out of Dalhousie Square station, bound for Port Moody, Van Horne heard the guns of the Montreal battery boom and the loud cheers of the assembled crowd echo around him.

Already, however, Van Horne knew that massive repairs were needed on many sections of the trans-Canada railway. In June 1885 George Stephen had confidently told the CPR shareholders that the CPR’s main line would be completed and in perfect condition by the spring of 1886 — that it would exceed the standards fixed in its contract with the government. But construction had proceeded so rapidly that the company had resorted to using many temporary structures. Whenever Van Horne went out on the line, he realized that it had been merely slapped down in places and that, for hundreds of miles, it consisted of little more than ties and the two rails that lay across them with a row of telegraph poles along one side. On the Prairies the line had little or no ballast, and in more rugged country, particularly in the western mountains, it skirted many minor obstructions instead of barrelling through them. North America’s first true transcontinental railway was therefore crooked in places and full of curves. To further complicate matters, the railway trestles that had been built of timber instead of masonry or iron were so rickety that trains had to crawl across them. Moreover, many a station, loading dock, or warehouse also needed to be rebuilt or enlarged.

Van Horne therefore had to set to work immediately to supervise the huge task of rebuilding long stretches of the line. Since this required additional money, he had to lobby for funds from a disgruntled government to complete the work. He also had to wrestle with the fallout from disputes and litigation with contractors on the Lake Superior section, and with the government on the rugged Fraser Canyon section that had been built by the American contractor Andrew Onderdonk.

As always, countless little details that related peripherally to the running of a railway competed for his attention. There was a steady stream of inquiries about employment opportunities and a barrage of requests for free passes. Notable among these were endearing queries from Father Albert Lacombe, who sought reduced fares and the use of a car for a priests’ excursion. Van Horne had first met the renowned missionary to the Blackfoot Indians at Rat Portage, when the rugged priest was attending to the spiritual needs of hundreds of drinking, blaspheming, fighting railway construction workers. This first meeting with Lacombe made a profound and lasting impression on Van Horne. Later, both he and the CPR would owe a huge debt of gratitude to “his special friend” for doing much to ease relations between the Blackfoot and the company during construction on the Prairies. Of course his requests had to be granted.

One excursion stood out above all the others for Van Horne — the journey taken in July 1886 by Sir John A. Macdonald and his formidable wife, Agnes, to the West. Pressure of business had prevented the prime minister from travelling on the first scheduled transcontinental train trip, and this one would be the only visit he ever made to the Great West. Van Horne provided the best, as he outfitted a private car for Sir John’s party with fine-meshed window screens to keep out the dust and the mosquitoes. He also arranged for most of the travelling to be done by night to allow the honoured guests ample time for rest and the opportunity to see scenery along the entire line by daylight. Lady Macdonald made the most of it, as she rode on the exposed locomotive cowcatcher for almost all the journey between Canmore, Alberta, and Port Moody — a distance of nearly six hundred miles.

That same July, Van Horne embarked on the first of his annual inspection tours from Montreal to the West coast. Usually he was accompanied by a few CPR co-directors and personal friends, and occasionally by Bennie and other family members. These trips became noted for their good company and good cheer, much of it supplied by Van Horne himself. He often treated his guests to boyish practical jokes, assisted by Jimmy French, his incomparable black porter. A short, thickset man with a highly mobile face and a quick wit, French was devoted to the CPR, Van Horne, and his family. When Addie was ill in 1891, for instance, he repeatedly visited their Montreal home to inquire about her health and to recommend a reviving trip under his care in the Saskatchewan — Van Horne’s private car.

Once the transcontinental railway was constructed, George Stephen focused almost exclusively on financing and large policy questions, and he left the day-to-day management of the CPR to his vice-president, Van Horne. With full operational control, Van Horne turned most of his attention to developing traffic, for only if there was sufficient freight and passenger business could the railway earn enough to meet its staggering financial charges. In the next few years he diversified the company’s operations by acquiring grain elevators, flour mills, express and telegraph operations, port facilities, maritime fleets, agricultural and timber lands, and numerous tourist services, including hotels. In terms of actual rail operations, he not only continued the policy of acquiring a network of rail lines in the settled industrial regions of eastern Canada, but he also strove to develop rail links to established markets in New England and the American Midwest.

In the grand vision entertained by Van Horne and George Stephen, the CPR was more than just the first pan-Canadian corporation — it was part of an integrated transportation network that would girdle the globe. “Canada is doing business on a back street,” Van Horne once observed. “We must put her on a thoroughfare.”

To put the CPR on a thoroughfare, he arranged for the company to operate steamships on both the Pacific and the Atlantic coasts. In 1886 the company presented a formal tender to the British government to provide a first-class, subsidized mail service between Hong Kong and Vancouver: it would charter steamships for the following year and use its own ships in 1888. After long and complicated negotiations between the CPR and the British and Canadian governments, the company finally won a formal contract for the mail service. No sooner was this done than the CPR ordered three liners in 1889 to maintain the monthly service — the Empress of India, Empress of Japan, and Empress of China. Van Horne named all three vessels, choosing the designation “Empress” to reflect the ships’ superiority over all anticipated competition. He also designed the red and white checker-board house flag that was flown on all Canadian Pacific ships for the next eighty years. Efficient to operate, mechanically sound, aesthetically pleasing, and well upholstered, these vessels earned a reputation that other lines found difficult to equal.

Van Horne swelled with pride on April 28, 1891, when the graceful, clipper-bowed Empress of India docked in Vancouver. The first of the majestic Empress liners to be completed, she had sailed from Liverpool for the Pacific by way of the Suez Canal. More than a hundred first-class passengers had booked passage for what would be the closest thing to a world cruise that had yet been offered. When the liner docked at Vancouver, Van Horne and some of the company directors were on hand to welcome her. As part of the welcoming ceremonies, a grand banquet and ball were staged at the Hotel Vancouver. However, since Van Horne disliked large, formal functions, he departed for Montreal that very afternoon.

In these same years, Van Horne hired New York society architect Bruce Price, who had designed Montreal’s Windsor Station, to design the Banff Springs Hotel and Quebec City’s Château Frontenac. The CPR’s vice-president also immersed himself in immigration schemes, continued to sponsor artists and photographers to capture CPR landmarks, and invented numerous catchy slogans to lure tourists to Canada. The picturesque mountain hotels designed by Price and Thomas Sorby were all part of Van Horne’s grand scheme to generate traffic for the railway and to make the line’s costly mountain section pay for itself. “Since we can’t export the scenery, we’ll have to import the tourists,” he reportedly said as he contemplated the stunning mountain views. He advertised the Rockies as “1001 Switzerlands Rolled into One.” And, to attract tourists to this part of the world, he set out to provide first-class travellers with excellent ship and train service and superior hotels that commanded the choicest mountain views.

Banff Springs Hotel, the most celebrated of the CPR’s mountain hostelries, owed its construction indirectly to the discovery of several natural hot springs on the flanks of Sulphur Mountain. Van Horne visited the springs early in 1885 and immediately sized up their tourist potential: “These springs,” he said, “are worth a million dollars.” He decided to build a top-notch hotel near the springs, at the confluence of the Bow and Spray Rivers, and instructed Bruce Price to draw up the plans. But the construction met with one conspicuous mishap. When Van Horne visited the building site in the summer of 1887, he was outraged to see that the contractor had oriented the hotel backwards, thereby providing the kitchens with the best view of the mountain ranges and the valley below. One colleague observed: “Van Horne was one of the most considerate and even-tempered of men, but when an explosion came it was magnificent.” Fortunately, the solution was simple: Van Horne called for a sheet of paper, sketched a rotunda pavilion on the spot, and directed that it be situated to provide hotel guests with a magnificent view.

When the hotel was completed in the spring of 1888, Van Horne boasted that it was the “Finest Hotel on the North American Continent.” Soon it welcomed the first of the thousands of tourists who would visit it each year. But the Banff Springs Hotel also performed another, more significant role: it initiated the “chateau style” that came to characterize many of the hotels erected by the CPR and other railways, as well as railway stations and apartment complexes. Even several large government buildings in Ottawa adopted this style.

It is impossible to know how much Van Horne contributed to the design of the Banff Springs Hotel and Windsor Station, the CPR’s principal terminal and administrative headquarters, but he did make a considerable contribution to Quebec City’s Château Frontenac. Van Horne watched over every stage of this hotel’s design, and he even took Bruce Price out in a small boat on the St. Lawrence River one day to make sure that the elevation of the building’s imposing round tower was “sufficiently majestic.”

Van Horne’s architectural flair was also put to good use designing the prototype for the quaint CPR log stations that soon became famous in the mountains of British Columbia. When CPR officials could not decide what should replace the boxcar that had been serving as a primitive station at Banff, Van Horne discussed the problems with officials at the site. Then he grabbed a sheet of paper, sketched a log chalet, and, gesturing in the direction of the mountain slopes, announced: “Lots of good logs there. Cut them, peel them, and build your station.”

Van Horne also commissioned artists to produce paintings to hang in company hotels and in the private collections of CPR directors. In an unusual promotional scheme, he offered artists free transportation and accommodation to paint the magnificent scenery along the CPR line that pierced the Rockies and the Selkirk Mountains. In the summer of 1889 he dispatched the well-known American painter Albert Bierstadt and several other artists to the West, instructing them to paint large oil canvases of designated landmarks. On behalf of his colleague George Stephen, he asked Bierstadt to produce a large painting of Mount Baker — and told him the precise vantage point from which to paint it. He then judged the final product, even though Bierstadt was one of the most respected of all Rocky Mountain landscape painters, and Stephen was a connoisseur and patron of fine art.

Another artist recruited by Van Horne was John Hammond, who journeyed west to Asia to promote the newly inaugurated connections that enabled CPR steamships from Vancouver to meet P & O liners from the Orient. By this means, English and European tourists could travel around the world, with the CPR furnishing the needed link. Hammond toured the Japanese countryside, sketching scenes for paintings that were designed to entice tourists to the Far East.

Not surprisingly, Van Horne threw himself into the CPR’s wide-ranging promotional campaign to attract settlers to the Prairie West. At the time, Maritimers and Quebecers were still pouring into the New England states in search of jobs, and Van Horne set out to persuade them to settle instead in Canada’s Northwest Territory. He even appointed priests as colonizing agents to encourage the recruitment of French Canadians who were already toiling in factories across the border. He loved to compose catchy slogans to capture people’s attention. When the company’s passenger service was inaugurated, people in Montreal, Toronto, and other large centres were puzzled and astonished one morning to see billboards featuring the word “Parisien Politeness on the CPR,” “Wise Men of the East Go West on the CPR,” and other such jingles.

The Canada Northwest Land Company was established earlier as part of the land-settlement campaign, and Van Horne served for years as its president. He had his own pronounced views on land settlement. Central to his thinking was the belief that homesteaders should be grouped in settlements and not be separated from each other by large, unoccupied spaces. “You have no doubt observed,” he wrote his friend Rudyard Kipling, who had probably met Van Horne on one of his trips to England, “that the largest buildings in the new western states and in western Canada are usually large insane asylums.” Isolation, he told the famous writer and Imperialist, had contributed more than any other factor to filling these buildings. For the man who was “out all day busy with his work,” isolation did not present a major problem, but it did to “the woman who eats out her soul in loneliness.” He urged the Canadian government to change its surveying system in the Northwest. Rather than the block pattern it favoured, the government, he said, should provide for triangular farms that radiated out from small centres of settlement. These centres, in turn, should be clustered around a larger village and be connected by roads. The government, however, rejected his farsighted suggestion.

In addition to all his other responsibilities, Van Horne was also involved in litigation relating to the section of the railway, built for the government by Andrew Onderdonk, which extended from Port Moody through the Fraser Canyon to Savona’s Ferry at the western end of Lake Kamloops. Neither George Stephen nor Van Horne believed that this part of the line had been soundly constructed. After inspecting the section in 1886, they concluded that only extensive and hugely expensive reworking would bring the line up to standard.

But who would be liable for this repair, estimated to be as high as $12 million? Opposing this view was John Henry Pope, the minister of railways and canals when this particular stretch was constructed. Pope was convinced that the work had been well done and, when he stood his ground, the stage was set for a protracted feud between him and Van Horne. Relations between the men became especially bitter in 1887, when the CPR launched a multimillion dollar claim against the government. In its claim, the company contended that the disputed section did not measure up to the required standards outlined in the Act of 1881. But the hard-working, conscientious Pope was convinced that he was right, and he dismissed the Canadian Pacific’s claim. It was, he said, merely a scheme on the part of Van Horne and his associates to extort even more money from the government.

Eventually both parties agreed to arbitration, and, although the arbitrators began their sittings in February 1888, they did not get an agreement for more than three years. During that investigation, arbitration counsel and witnesses spent weeks at a time along the disputed portion of the line. Van Horne was the chief witness and, in late June 1888, he journeyed west to Vancouver, where the court’s sessions continued day after day in the Hotel Vancouver. There he was subject to searching cross-examination by the leading legal figures of the day. As he delivered his opinion of the contested work he was characteristically blunt, if not reckless. His assessment led one of the arbitrators to remark out of court that, if one-half of what Van Horne said was true, the company ought to stop operating the line immediately. Collingwood Schreiber, the engineer-in-chief to the federal government, went so far as to tell Pope that, by trashing the government construction and claiming that the section was dangerous, Van Horne had placed himself in an untenable position. Given that he had not taken a single precaution against accidents, “should an accident occur, he would find it difficult to keep outside the walls of the Penitentiary.”

However, the greatest demand on Van Horne’s attention in these years was the agitation in Manitoba for “free-for-all” railway construction. At the root of this discontent was the monopoly clause in the CPR’s charter: it forbade other federally chartered companies from building south of the CPR’s main line, except in a southwest direction, and even then no competing line was to come within fifteen miles of the international border. Manitobans protested vigorously against this clause, goaded by their fear of monopolies and high freight rates and their growing sense of alienation from eastern Canada.

After the federal government disallowed three acts intended by the Manitoba government to encourage local railway construction, a storm of indignation swept across the province. Meetings were convened everywhere to protest against the perceived outrage and to draw up plans to prevent any repetition of it.

By 1887 Manitoba had become a hotbed of disallowance agitation and railway plotting. In the resulting turmoil, George Stephen and William Van Horne became, for Winnipeggers, the two most unpopular men in Canada. Van Horne retorted that, when the citizens decided to burn them in effigy, they would need one mattress for Sir George, but two to do justice to him! Finally, in April 1888, legislation was presented to the House of Commons to do away with the monopoly clause. But Van Horne still got his revenge — in the “Battle of Fort Whyte.”

In 1888 the Northern Pacific Railroad set out to lay its Portage la Prairie line, known as the Northern Pacific and Manitoba Railway. Some fifteen miles west of Winnipeg, its tracks were poised to cross those of a CPR branch line, deep in the heart of CPR territory. The Northern Pacific and Manitoba laid its track up to the CPR branch line, installed a diamond crossing, and then continued on its way — all in the dead of night. The next day, CPR men ripped out the crossing. An infuriated Van Horne instructed his western superintendent, William Whyte, to take appropriate action. In the middle of the following night, an old CPR engine was ditched at the crossing point and some two hundred and fifty men from the CPR’s Winnipeg shops were summoned to prevent its removal. Soon swarms of Northern Pacific workers showed up and, for five days, insults were traded back and forth. They did not cease until the Manitoba government called out the militia and had three hundred special constables sworn in specifically to lay the crossing, by force if necessary. With this action, bloodshed was averted.

The issue was finally left to the Supreme Court of Canada to decide. Its ruling, delivered that December, was in favour of the Northern Pacific and Manitoba. The combatants dispersed, the track was laid, and the diamond was reinstalled. The CPR had surrendered, but Van Horne’s reckless actions constituted a public relations disaster for the railway. Whatever meagre support it had left in Manitoba quickly vanished.

By this time, however, Van Horne was president of the Canadian Pacific Railway. On April 7, 1888, he was unanimously elected to the position at a meeting of the board of directors in Montreal. George Stephen, who had resigned from the position after seven years of almost constant anxiety and struggle, deemed it right that somebody experienced in railway administration should take his place.

Before leaving for a holiday in England in September 1889, Stephen went to great pains to smooth the way for Van Horne in his dealings with the prime minister. In a letter to Macdonald, he wrote:

You may be sure of one thing, Van Horne wants nothing from the Government that he is not on every ground justified in asking. You are quite “safe” in giving him your whole confidence. I know him better, perhaps, than anyone here and I am satisfied that I make no mistake when I ask you to trust him and to dismiss from your mind all suspicion that would lead you to look upon him as a sharper bound to take advantage of the Government every time he gets the chance.

Then, after Stephen retired in England, he dispatched a steady stream of letters to his successor. Van Horne in turn used him as a sounding board and the CPR’s direct link to the British financial markets. He took care to keep Stephen abreast of CPR developments in frequent telegrams and letters. Strangely, despite their long and close association, these communications were written in a surprisingly formal style. Stephen continued to serve as a CPR director and member of the executive committee until his resignation in 1893.

After he became president of the CPR, Van Horne had the continuing support of able and hard-working colleagues. The most important of these men was the assistant general manager, Thomas G. Shaughnessy. His love of minutiae, talent for administration, and acumen for business had been abundantly demonstrated over the years, and Van Horne would continue to depend on him. In fact, he appointed Shaughnessy assistant to the president in 1889.

George Stephen (later Lord Mount Stephen). The Scottish-born financier was the first president of the Canadian Pacific Railway, in which capacity he became a good friend of Van Horne.

Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada, PA207269.

As president, Van Horne received a substantial boost in salary — from $30,000 to $50,000 per annum, retroactive to the beginning of the year. His new title did not, however, increase his responsibilities in any way. He was already in full control of company operations — and had been for years. Still, the announcement of his new appointment must have filled him with pride. After all, at the comparatively young age of forty-five, he had become the president of a railway system that comprised over five thousand miles of line, owned 14 million acres of land, and boasted assets of $189 million. Moreover, because of the connections it had forged with American lines and with China, Japan, and the Maritime provinces (through the Short Line, which, when completed, would link Montreal with the Maritimes), the CPR was indeed a global transportation system. As such, it afforded unlimited challenges for the ever-ambitious and creative Van Horne, who now occupied the leading post in the Canadian railroading world.