The name of Alexander Mackenzie, the stonemason, who succeeded Sir John Macdonald as Premier of Canada in 1873, deserves to be uttered with profound respect. By the most intense application to work and the most diligent use of his opportunities in the right way, he rose steadily, not only in circumstances, but in the esteem of his fellow-countrymen, till he attained the highest office in the gift of the Canadian people. Born in the Highlands of Scotland, he came out to Canada as a young stonecutter. He returned some thirty years later to the romantic scenes of his childhood as the Premier of the Dominion, a credit alike to the land of his birth and the land of his adoption. Once, in my student days, I met him in Winnipeg. He had made the trip to the far West, but was in poor health—a rather pathetic figure, I thought, whose unflinching resistance of down-grade influences had made his public life harder than stonecutting.

But while we thus pay him personal tribute, we find that, whether as a result of the dissolution of the Allan Company, or pressure of lean years, or the lack of enthusiasm amongst his following in the House, Mackenzie, despite his good intentions, made little progress with the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway during his five years in office. It was not easy for Mackenzie and his supporters, after attacking the general extravagance of Sir John Macdonald’s plan for a transcontinental, to accommodate themselves to carrying out the scheme of a railway from ocean to ocean. Edward Blake, Mackenzie’s great lieutenant, had openly said more than once that the rounding out of Confederation by pledging a railway to British Columbia within a fixed term was too costly. The population of the West Coast Province was only some ten thousand or so of white people, he said, and this country was “a sea of mountains.” One of the chief newspapers of Mr. Mackenzie’s party said that the Canadian Pacific “would not pay for axle grease” over certain sections. Mr. Blake, it is true, in 1891 visited the West Coast over the completed railway, and made a brilliantly humorous and eloquent apology for his mistaken conception of the country. But that was too late to help Mackenzie with his problem, and the fact that Mr. Blake and some others of his party actually voted in the House against Mackenzie’s proposal regarding the Esquimault railway on Vancouver Island did not help the heavily burdened Premier. But one must allow that it is much easier to be optimistic about British Columbia now than it was at that time. Very few people then dreamed of the development that could and would take place in the Province which Mr. Blake, speaking for thousands in the East, called “a sea of mountains.” It looked like that in those days before the world knew that British Columbia had not only mines and forests and fish, but that vast areas would be opened up along the rivers and in the mountain valleys which would prove immensely adapted to agriculture, fruit-growing and dairying. Therefore let us be kind to the men who were sceptical about the whole railway undertaking. We are quoting their scepticism here only to show the problem that Premier Mackenzie had to face when he came into power in 1873. Under all the circumstances he did the best he could at the time—that is, the best that could be done by any man who lacked the full-hearted support of some of his own friends, and who felt that to meet the demands of the naturally impatient and almost resentful British Columbia, was practically impossible in the lean years that seemed imminent and beyond his power to control.

But Mackenzie began on the problem and we find him, in 1874, in an election address to his own constituents in Lambton, Ontario, unfolding his plan. Briefly, the transportation system was to be a sort of amphibious animal. Mackenzie, realizing that traffic by water is the cheapest type of transportation, thought he saw a possibility of securing a transcontinental, without undue cost, by utilizing “the magnificent water stretches” across Canada, linking them together by rail as funds would be available. In this way he claimed that railway construction would be gradual enough to avoid excessive financial expenditure, and that the country would be gradually settled. Settlement would keep abreast with railway construction and thus the possibility of having the railway going ahead of the settlement across an uninhabited, and therefore unproductive, country would be eliminated.

Mr. Mackenzie was perfectly sincere in this, as he was in everything. The plan was not without merit under the circumstances, but it had defects which arose out of a lack of knowledge of the Western country generally, and particularly of the attitude of the people of British Columbia. It also ignored the strange, but characteristic, impulses of human nature in regard to migration. Every now and then in history some section of humanity strikes its tents and goes on the march, railway or no railway. Especially does the Star of the Empire draw people westward. Before there was a railway in the West at all, many of my own kith and kin loaded their few belongings on ox-carts and took their way five hundred miles north-westward to Prince Albert, on the North Saskatchewan. And so also will some people go on in advance of the railway, despite all advice to the contrary. For years I heard it said by some that had the Canadian Pacific not been built so rapidly, settlement would have been more compact along the line. But this theory is contradicted by the actual fact, as we saw it, that when the trains were only running to Brandon, west of Winnipeg, settlers were leaving the train there and trekking on westward with prairie schooners. Great numbers may not thus go forward in any particular case, but since a country grows by the enterprise of the adventurous, it becomes the duty of such a country to follow with utilities, the people who thus widen the horizon of the land.

Moreover, Mackenzie’s well-intentioned policy of using the water stretches would have made transportation too slow and too expensive for shippers, owing to the constant need for transfers, with necessary delays and damages. And, most important of all, that policy indicated too tardy a construction of the transcontinental to satisfy British Columbia, which had entered confederation on the distinct understanding that a railway would be built to the Pacific within reasonable time.

Mackenzie made an effort, by sending Mr. J. D. Edgar to British Columbia, to secure a modification in the terms of Confederation in regard to railway construction. This mission was resented in British Columbia, and Mr. Edgar was recalled. The people of British Columbia looked on the attempt to change the Confederation terms as a breach of faith on the part of Canada, and said so in their usual straight-flung words. Both parties put the case before Lord Carnarvon, who offered to arbitrate. His award was on the whole rather favourable to Mackenzie’s effort for modification, and was accepted in the meantime as the best obtainable. British Columbia, feeling that even the modified terms would not be carried out, began to discuss withdrawing from Confederation, and motions to that effect were actually submitted in the Legislature.

Things were not looking well, and that master diplomat, Lord Dufferin, then Governor-General of Canada, resolved to visit the West Coast, accompanied by his gracious lady. They crossed via Chicago and San Francisco by rail, thence by H.M.S. Amethyst to Vancouver Island. They were warmly welcomed to Victoria, but were given, from the beginning, to understand that British Columbia wanted the railway and wanted it without delay. At one point they saw a horse blanketed and upon the blanket were the words “Good, but not iron.”

In Victoria arches were numerous. One arch had an inscription, “Our railway iron rusts,” and another very conspicuous one had the menacing message “Carnarvon terms or separation.”

Lord Dufferin knew his relation to the Crown and to the Government of the day too well to allow his courtesy to run away with his conception of duty as Governor-General of Canada, and so he declined to drive under the arch which had upon it the threat of secession. So he ordered the carriage to detour until that arch was passed. Afterwards Lady Dufferin said, “The Governor-General would have driven under the arch if one letter had been changed so as to have the inscription read ‘The Carnarvon Terms or Reparation.’ ” The incident caused some excitement, but Lord Dufferin knew his constitutional law too well to be moved. On the whole the visit of this brilliant diplomat and magnetic orator made a great impression for good. His speech at the close of the tour of the Coast was a noble eulogy of the wonderful beauty and potential wealth of British Columbia. While not becoming a partisan advocate for the Dominion Government, Lord Dufferin expressed his view that Mr. Mackenzie had done his best under all the circumstances, and would continue so to do while he was in power. The speech of the eloquent and tactful Governor-General had a pronounced effect in allaying the indignation of the people against the Government of the day. They settled down to wait development with as good grace as possible.

However, after waiting two years more without seeing any railway construction begun on either the mainland of British Columbia or Vancouver Island, Premier George A. Walkem, in the Legislature at Victoria, moved the famous resolution to the effect that unless the Dominion started railway construction by May of 1879, the Province of British Columbia should withdraw from the Confederation and even ask damages from Canada for delay in carrying out their railway promises to the Province. This extraordinary motion was carried by fourteen to nine, with the probable intention of waking up both the Imperial and Canadian Governments to the discontent on the Western Coast. The resolution reached Ottawa in October, 1878, just after the Mackenzie Government had been defeated, and owing to the confusion caused by the change it was put into some pidgeonhole for a rest, and did not reach London till March, 1879. By that time Sir John A. Macdonald, who had come back to power with his aggressive and indomitable Railway Minister, Sir Charles Tupper, was getting down to a new programme of railway building, and British Columbia, in consequence, was becoming more contented and hopeful. So no one asked any questions when the famous secession resolution of the British Columbia legislature found oblivion in the files of Downing Street.

All this does not mean that Mr. Mackenzie was inactive in the matter of the transcontinental railway. Considering the facts we have mentioned already, namely, that many of his chief supporters were lukewarm in regard to the whole project, which they considered premature, and the further fact that there was a cycle of lean years, he strove to get things moving, but the chariot wheels dragged. There was no popular enthusiasm over the undertaking, because the times were hard and there was general failure on the part of the people to get a vision of the illimitable possibilities that lay to westward. But some progress was made. Extensive surveys were carried forward. And several contracts were let for the easier portions of the route. The hard places, like the North Shore of Lake Superior, and the mountains in British Columbia, were not attempted. Lord and Lady Dufferin, at Emerson, Manitoba, in 1877, drove the first two spikes in the portion which started at the international boundary-line, where the railways linked up with an American line. This was later called the Emerson Branch, and ran from the boundary east of the Red River through St. Boniface, across from Winnipeg, to East Selkirk. From Selkirk a portion of the railway to Thunder Bay, on Lake Superior, was begun. It was the plan of the Mackenzie Government to cross the Red River at Selkirk, and strike westward over the prairies, side-tracking Winnipeg, which was then becoming a considerable centre of population. I recall a locomotive round-house at East Selkirk built in Mackenzie’s time, but later abandoned when the line was changed to run through Winnipeg. Budding political orators made merry over this round-house, as being the only assurance they had that a road which would require the stabling of iron horses at a divisional point would some day be constructed.

The slow progress of transcontinental railway building afforded ammunition to the opponents of the Mackenzie Government in the House of Commons. And there is no record of an Opposition ever allowing an opportunity to oppose to go by unused. In one year we find that redoubtable fighter, Dr. (later Sir) Charles Tupper, moving a long resolution urging the Government “to employ the available funds of the Dominion to complete the road.” This was voted down. Next year that unique, somewhat peculiar, but quite brilliantly versatile publicist, Mr. Amor de Cosmos, of British Columbia, moved a vote of censure on the Government for the slowness of their building of the road to the Coast. This resolution did not get far in the House. The Coast was so far away that the project of building all the way to the Pacific gave even the Opposition a chill when it came squarely before them. Hon. George W. Ross, a Mackenzie supporter, moved that only such progress should be attempted as would “not increase the existing rates of taxation,” which manifestly would mean not much progress. Dr. Tupper came back to the attack in April, 1877, with a motion of censure, but this was negatived also. During all this time that astute statesman, Sir John A. Macdonald, was studying the political horoscope, and all of a sudden, in 1878, he propounded a policy of protection and railway construction which caught the popular imagination and he was swept into power again. There was a swift revival of optimism, because there was a revival of trade, and the wave carried the Canadian Pacific Railway enterprise on its crest to new heights of success.

Whether a protective tariff brings real or fictitious prosperity, and whether it enriches the few or the many, are questions which are fortunately outside the scope of this book. But, anyway, the fact, historically, is that with the advent of Sir John Macdonald and his National Policy of protection in 1878, there came quite a pronounced outburst of new faith in the future possibilities of Canada. There were, no doubt, other subsidiary causes, and some even hold that lean and fat years come in cycles. But, in any case, there was a decided restoration of public confidence in all legitimate business enterprises, and, what was still more important, there came a distinctive national sentiment and pride which made the vast project of the Canadian Pacific Railway from ocean to ocean a distinct possibility.

Portions of the railway had already been under construction by the Mackenzie Government, as we have seen. These portions were mainly east of the Red River, but surveys had been carried on with far-reaching results in the mountain region of British Columbia. These surveys were under the general direction of Mr. Marcus Smith, an engineer of remarkable experience and ability. He had done work in the British Isles and Spain before coming to this side of the ocean, where he was on service in South America, as well as on the Grand Trunk and the Intercolonial in the older parts of what is now Eastern Canada. The other day here, through the kindness of Mr. Newton Ker, now head of the Coast Department of Lands for the Canadian Pacific, I had the privilege of reading a scrap book kept by Mr. Marcus Smith over many years, and willed by him to Mr. Ker. This book indicates that Mr. Smith had a very wide interest in social, civil and political life, as well as in his own special vocation of engineering. The man who gathered that collection of articles together had a big outlook on things, and would regard his work in the mountains as of national significance.

The remarkable explorations of Mr. Walter Moberly, who later discovered the Eagle’s Pass by watching the flight of eagles evidently following a fish-stream, had produced good results and his experience in connection with the building of the famous Yale-Cariboo wagon road made his later services specially valuable. Mr. Henry J. Cambie, and Mr. Thomas H. White, his personal assistant and associate in solving the engineering problems through the Fraser River canyons, are still, happily, living in Vancouver, highly regarded as citizens who did their share of nation building. Other noted engineers of that period in British Columbia were H. T. Jennings, H. P. Bell, Henry MacLeod, C. E. Perry, G. A. Keefer, Joseph Hunter, L. B. Hamlin, W. F. Gouin, C. F. Harrington, E. W. Jarvis, John Trutch, C. Horetzky, C. H. Gamsby and, later on, Major Rogers, after whom Rogers’ Pass was named, although Moberly always contended that the pass had been discovered by Albert Perry, one of his assistants in a survey in 1866. Of course there were many others, but these are representative of the famous body of men who made their way along the dangerous rivers, through the tangled forests, by precipitous cliffs and across terrific canyons, until they finally found safe location for the steel trail through a region that many had pronounced to be impenetrable—a sort of supernatural barrier interposed between the prairies and the Western sea. Most of these men have, as already intimated, passed over the Great Divide into the Unseen; but, at great cost to themselves in hardship and suffering and privation, they made it possible for the people of to-day to travel in rolling palaces where once they themselves trod with aching and weary feet. Let us highly honour the memory of the engineers and surveyors and their men, who were the forerunners of the mighty engines which now thunder through the echoing mountain passes, along which these heroes of the transit and the chain, long years ago, pursued their painful and precarious way.

The Macdonald Government came back into power in 1878, as we have seen, on the wave of the National Policy movement. But, for two years, they worked on the lines of their predecessors and linked up some of the disconnected portions of the road which Mr. Mackenzie had constructed in various localities, mainly between the Lakes and the Red River. Then Sir Charles Tupper, that militant and aggressive Minister of Railways, took the bold plunge and let to Andrew Onderdonk, a young American railroader of San Francisco, contracts to build portions of the Canadian Pacific through “the sea of mountains” in British Columbia. Canada was young at the railway business, as indicated by the fact that it was an American who got the contract to build the first parts of the mountain road. Later on, as the construction of the road from ocean to ocean began to get under way, Canadians developed by the score into great practical railway builders. Young men who had begun by chopping in the bush grew into contractors for getting out ties for the track-layers, and finally themselves took contracts for actual building of the railway over rock and boulders, through mountain vastnesses and quaking bogs until the steel reached tide water. It was in itself an act of splendid audacity for a people of less than four millions in number to start on the task of throwing a railway across an immense and almost uninhabited continent to the shores of the Western sea. And this daring on the part of the young Dominion was backed gallantly and effectively by scores of native-born Canadians who, with genuine Canadian initiative, learned a new trade and followed it with tremendous energy and skill.

It has been my good fortune and privilege to meet many of these men. Some of them made money and some of them did not. The task of calculating the cost of a piece of work over a given stretch of country, where unexpected obstacles emerged, was not easy. There were stretches on the North Shore of Lake Superior where the old Laurentian rocks had to be blasted to pieces at a cost of half-a-million a mile. There is a well-known muskeg east of Winnipeg where seven tracks went under, till a solid foundation was secured in what looked for a while like a bottomless pit. And there were tunnels and bridges and cuttings in the mountains which challenged the resources of a race of Titans. So, we say, these contractors did not, by any means, always make money. But my knowledge of them leads me to say that very few of the contractors or engineers cared for the money end of it in any case. They felt that they were engaged in a work of significance, not only to Canada and the Empire, but to the world, and that was an inspiration worth while. I recall being told by the secretary to one of the most famous of these railway builders that, so intent was this railway man on his work, that he very often forgot to have money enough in his pocket for personal necessities. In one sense he handled millions; but, only for the precaution of his secretary who knew his ways, this railway magnate would often have been personally stranded. “He thought so little of money,” said the secretary, “that he hardly ever carried any with him. But he was generous withal. The real fact was he was so engrossed in the great enterprise of helping to build a road across Canada that he forgot his own personal needs.”

Going back to Mr. Andrew Onderdonk, it is interesting to recall his influence on the social life of British Columbia by his importation of a few thousand Chinese coolies to work on railway construction. Mr. Onderdonk claimed that he was unable to get enough white men who were willing to do that particular kind of work. Be that as it may, the present fact is that we have a very large Chinese population in this Province which faces the Orient. It is equally sure that the presence of so many Orientals causes many serious problems. It is fashionable for some people who do not know the history, to lay the responsibility for the presence of Chinese here on the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. But the fact is that it was Mr. Onderdonk who imported these Oriental coolies while the road was still under Government supervision, two or more years before the Canadian Pacific Railway Company was formed. It is only fair always to apportion praise or blame justly, so that every one shall bear his own burden of responsibility without having to carry more than his share. Hence, the company, be it known, was not the originator of the importation of Chinese coolies for the construction of the road. On this subject we are not now moralizing either way, but are simply making a statement of historical fact.

In any case, Mr. Onderdonk knew the business of railway construction and kept steadily on, taking over some portions from other contractors, till he had the steel laid from Port Moody to Kamloops, and made a creditable record for railway building across an exceedingly difficult section of Canada. In fact, Sir Charles Tupper, the militant Minister of Railways, said quite openly that, though the construction of a piece of the road on the Pacific Coast would not mean much till it was linked up with the Eastern part of Canada, he wanted to get the mountain section under construction without delay for certain reasons. One was that the construction of that exceedingly difficult section, if successfully accomplished, would show the possibility of the whole task of the transcontinental being completed in due time. The other, of course, was that the people of British Columbia, fortunately for them, had several ably-insistent and politely-vociferous leaders who would give no rest to any Government till the work of railway construction had actually begun on the Coast. There were some prominent men elsewhere who did not look at things in the same light. An Opposition in Parliament opposes the party in power as a sort of a constitutional principle, nominally at least, for the safety of the country, which otherwise might have unwise legislation imposed on it. But even apart from that, we need not now look with undue criticism on the record of men like the Hon. Edward Blake, a statesman of great ability and integrity who, when Onderdonk was going ahead with his contracts in the mountains, moved in the House of Commons in 1880 that “the public interests require that the work of constructing the Pacific Railway in British Columbia be postponed.” Others of his party took the same stand, and it must be admitted that, apart from the prerogative of an Opposition above indicated, the whole project seemed vast enough to appal men who did not personally know the West well enough to visualize its illimitable future. The gigantic undertaking, as already mentioned, looked well nigh quixotic for less than four millions of people, and the fact that there were, in the years following, times when the whole effort seemed on the verge of disaster, ought to restrain our wholesale condemnation of early sceptics. Incidentally, it ought to bring us to the salute when we think of the railway builders who fought their amazing difficulties and, by fighting, gathered strength to win out in the end.

Andrew Onderdonk in the mountains and other contractors between Lake Superior and the Red River, were doing good work, but their detached pieces of road ended in the air. And Sir John A. Macdonald was quick to see that something more had to be done. Accordingly, at a Cabinet meeting at the close of the first session after his return to power, Sir John brought up the question of building railways in the North-West in order to attract immigrants. Sir Charles Tupper, who, being at the head of the Department of Railways, had made special study of the situation, agreed with Sir John that something should be done at once and neither one of them was in love with the idea of Government ownership and operation of railways. Sir Charles thought the policy of a transcontinental should be again emphasized, and that a responsible company should be secured to build it. Sir John said that was always his idea; but it was a “large order” and they had better take a week to think it over. On the appointed day Sir Charles submitted a carefully prepared report in favour of a through line, built, owned and operated by a chartered company. Putting it in brief form, the suggestion was that the Government should complete and hand over to such a company the parts of the railway then built or under construction, estimated at about seven hundred miles, which, when finished, would have cost about thirty-two millions of dollars. The portions of the road then built, or being built, were the lines from Port Arthur to Winnipeg, from Kamloops to Port Moody and the Emerson Branch on the east side of the Red River, from the boundary-line to St. Boniface and Winnipeg. In addition to getting possession of these portions, the company would receive a cash grant of twenty-five millions of dollars, and fifty (later reduced to twenty-five) million acres of land along the railway.

The suggestion was heartily agreed to by Sir John, and the Cabinet was unanimously in favour of the plan proposed. The Cabinet adjourned immediately after the decision was made. The members thereof had good reason to call it a day. The Rubicon had been crossed and the country was on the march to a new destiny. There were to be many obstacles encountered before the objective would be reached. It was a mighty venture of faith, but men of thought and men of action would clear the way.

Meanwhile the contractors on the portions under construction carried on, but the Government was looking eagerly to the financial magnates of the Old Land to form a company to carry out its policy. Yet, despite a visit of Sir John, Sir Charles and the Hon. John Henry Pope to London, there was no rush on the part of British financiers to build a railway across a vast, thinly populated continent. And when it looked as if there was going to be a disappointing set-back, there arose a small group of men on our own continent who were destined to lead in making the projected transcontinental what Lord Shaughnessy, a few hours before his death, called so finely, in a conversation with President Beatty, “a great Canadian property and a great Canadian enterprise.” We shall, in the next chapter, meet the men who came to the rescue.

Playing safe” is a better programme than reckless foolhardiness, but it is a poor programme as compared with the spirit of adventure. Without adventure, based upon faith, humanity’s horizon would never have widened out and new continents and new avenues for the expenditure of human energy in great enterprises for the good of mankind would never have been discovered. Satisfaction with present attainment means stagnation, and it is better to reach out after the apparently unattainable than to allow our God-given energies to suffer atrophy through disuse.

In our present study of the building of a great railway across Canada, traversing vast unpeopled plains, and boring its way through what some had declared to be impassable mountain barriers, it is a very interesting thing to find the enterprise somewhat closely linked up with a certain other organization that had been chartered in 1670, under the title of “The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson Bay.” The big word in that title is the word “adventurers,” and it applies both to the men who hazarded their capital and to the men who fared forth from the Old Country into the unknown spaces of the new continent on this side of the sea. This Hudson’s Bay Company not only attracted attention to the new world that had still to be conquered, but its able and resourceful employees in the North-West became distinct elements in the progress of the country.

In this particular connection one Donald Alexander Smith (later Lord Strathcona) who had come out from Scotland as a lad to Labrador, in the service of the Company, had risen to be head of that Company in Canada at the time of Confederation, and was a member of the House of Commons for Winnipeg when the project of a transcontinental railway loomed up as an actual possibility. Mr. Smith was a restlessly ambitious man, or he would not have so risen, and there is no doubt in my mind (and I knew him in his later years) that when the discussion arose he began to cherish the hope of being an instrument in linking up the East and West in some way by the much-discussed railway.

Since writing this I came across a letter, dated November, 1872, at Stuart Lake, B.C., from the Hudson’s Bay Company factor then in charge there, to the officer in charge at another post. This letter not only shows that the Hudson’s Bay Company, instead of retarding the opening up of the country by rail as some have affirmed, was actively assisting and making possible the work of explorers and surveyors who were beginning to blaze the way for the road. And it also shows that Mr. Donald A. Smith was, even that far back, on his own behalf and on behalf of the ancient fur-trading organization, contributing his quota in that direction. Here is an extract in the letter from one Hudson’s Bay man to another: “The bearer is a botanist belonging to the railway survey who arrived here in company with an engineer, and who is the bearer of a letter from Mr. Donald A. Smith to us men in the service to assist the surveyors as far as possible. He also showed me a letter from Mr. Sandford Fleming, authorizing the engineer who goes down the Skeena to sign any bill of expenses he may have with the Hudson’s Bay Company and it will be good. I have told him that you would forward him to Victoria and push him through as quickly as possible. The engineer’s name is something like Horetzkie.” The writer of that letter had caught the name of the engineer all right. And it shows not only how these Hudson’s Bay posts made the work of these and other explorers possible, but in this particular case it links the name of Donald A. Smith with the new day that was dawning.

I do not think that Mr. Smith was by any means the ablest of the men who later formed the Canadian Pacific Railway Company Board. But he was unquestionably the pivot on which the project turned, from its doubtful success as a Government undertaking, to its becoming an accomplished fact as a privately owned and operated concern.

And it happened on this wise. Mr. Smith had to travel frequently between West and East, through St. Paul, Minnesota, on his way from Fort Garry to Ottawa and Montreal, in connection with parliamentary and Company business. In St. Paul he usually called on Mr. Norman W. Kitson, a Canadian, formerly a Hudson’s Bay factor, and met along with him another Canadian, James J. Hill, who was then in the coal business. Kitson and Hill were both interested in transportation to the Red River country, and were anxious to get a hold of a three-hundred-mile railway called the St. Paul and Pacific, running from St. Paul to the Red River, and later to westward, if it could be kept going. This road had fallen into misfortune because grasshopper plagues and Indian troubles and massacres had depopulated the territory through which it ran. So the Dutch bondholders had thrown it into the hands of the receiver, and the bonds were not saleable in the ordinary way. Hill and Kitson, who knew more about the country than the Dutch bondholders, felt that the road could be built up into a really valuable concern, and Smith thought the same. But they lacked the capital to acquire it.

Mr. Smith, on arrival in Montreal, told all this to his cousin, Mr. George Stephen, another Scot, who had prospered well in business and was President of the Bank of Montreal. Stephen (later Lord Mount Stephen) was a man of unusual strength and vision. They talked it over with Mr. R. B. Angus, also a Scot, and a very able business man, who was, at that time, general manager of the same bank. Stephen and Angus agreed generally with Smith, but they had not then seen the country and were not of the kind to be rash. However, in 1877 Stephen and Angus had to be in Chicago on banking business and, having a few days at their disposal, decided to run up to St. Paul and see Hill and his country. They saw both, as well as the railway, and were satisfied it had a big future. The grasshoppers were disappearing, the Indians were all peaceful or dead, and settlers would rush in to the rich areas. Stephen was a man of swift action when he was satisfied, and so he hied himself away to Amsterdam, got an option on the railway and came back with that option in his pocket. The necessary money was raised, bonds were later on floated, and Stephen, Hill, Angus, Smith (all Canadians), with John S. Kennedy, of New York, took over the railway and the land-grant. We need not follow the history of that St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway (which later developed into “Jim” Hill’s Great Northern); but everything seemed to come the way of the adventurous Canadians who had risked much on it, and they became multi-millionaires in a surprisingly short time.

It was to this group of men, who were doubtless ready to be approached, that Sir John A. Macdonald, after having tried in vain in Europe, turned, when even Sir Charles Tupper, who was never disposed to be afraid of anybody or anything, called the Premier’s attention to the prodigious task ahead if the Government itself attempted to build and operate a railway across Canada from sea to sea. By these financial men and a few more, as we shall see, the project that had terrified Governments of both political shades was undertaken, and by them it was ultimately, and after terrific struggle, carried to completion. Even Mr. J. J. Hill came in at the outset, but, differing from the rest on the policy of building over the North Shore of Lake Superior and thus having an all-Canadian route, and finding it impossible to serve two masters in two railways that would clash somewhat, he retired soon after the Canadian Pacific Board was organized. But we are not to forget “Jim” Hill, a Canadian abroad, for it was through him that the great triumvirate, Stephen, Smith and Angus, got a taste for railroading and a certain training therein which stood them and Canada in good stead in the stormy days that lay ahead.

It was, in a sense, natural that the men we have mentioned should take hold of the Canadian Pacific undertaking. Some of them, at least, knew the great West-land by actual observation. The others would bank on the statements of those who knew the country. Stephen was the most cautious and so the least inclined to take risks in regard to such a colossal enterprise. But once he entered upon it, we are probably safe in saying that, though he had his hours of depression, he became the mainstay of the Board in the dark storms of difficulty that were at times to settle down on the project during the desperate days that were ahead. All three, Stephen, Smith and Angus, hailed from the land where there is a saying, “A stout heart to a stey bræ.” And these men and their associates were to face, in every sense of the word, “steep hills” in the financial world as well as in actual rock-ribbed obstacles to railway building, greater than any contemplated by the originator of the inspiring saying quoted above. There was to be a time, as we shall see later, when Stephen’s famous cablegram to Smith, in the single Gælic word “Craigellachie” (stand fast), would be needed as a ringing admonition to men in Canada whose resources became so completely exhausted that failure seemed practically inevitable.

In the meantime we have only reached the stage in our story where these men, Stephen, Smith and Angus, reinforced by another highly capable, careful and successful Montreal man, Mr. Duncan McIntyre, at the threshold of the gigantic undertaking, were in consultation with the Macdonald-Tupper administration at Ottawa on the subject. They all sensed the almost overwhelming bigness of the task and, although they were attracted by the challenge of its immensity, and were prepared to accept that challenge, they all realized that they should try to secure the co-operation of the world’s financial centres before they could even hope for success. Hence we find, in the summer of 1880, Sir John Macdonald, Sir Charles Tupper and John Henry Pope sailing for London, in company with Stephen and McIntyre, to interest British capitalists. Englishmen are generally willing to take a “sporting chance” and plunge into an adventurous scheme. But this project of building a railway across the continent through Canada’s far stretches of thinly populated country, with the gigantic engineering problems of the rock region on the North Shore of Lake Superior and the apparently impenetrable barrier of the mountains in British Columbia, was too large an order for the most courageous of London’s money magnates. It is doubtless a good thing for Canada that the delegation had to return from London empty-handed. Projects and business concerns owned and operated by long-range directors and shareholders have never been a huge success in Canada, unless practically conducted by local advisory boards, and railways are no exception to that rule. More important still, this fruitless search for financial assistance put Canadians on their mettle by throwing them back on their own resources at the outset, and thus developing the strength and the endeavour which a big undertaking always brings if bravely attempted. It was a good training in national athleticism, and the young Dominion that had to wrestle with difficulties at the beginning developed astonishing strength and initiative power. Later on, when, within a few months of the last spike on the road, the youthful giant had reached the limit of resource, and was in danger of falling short, British capital was to come in to help to a triumphant finish. But the time was not yet.

The delegation to London returned to Ottawa in 1880, and the Government signed a contract with George Stephen, Duncan McIntyre, of Montreal; James J. Hill, of St. Paul; John S. Kennedy, of New York, and four outside this continent, Cohen, Renach & Company, of Paris, and Morton, Rose & Company, of London, though in the latter case it was really the New York firm of Morton, Bliss & Company that went into the organization. It is interesting from a psychological standpoint to find that the name of Donald A. Smith, one of the big three, was not in this original contract. Ever since the day when Mr. Smith had cast his vote in the House of Commons, in 1873, against Sir John Macdonald in the matter of the “Pacific Scandal,” as Macdonald’s opponents called it, or the “Pacific Slander,” as Sir Charles Tupper designated the affair, there was, to put it mildly, a coolness between Smith and Sir John. For these two to be in the conferences that would often arise between the Canadian Pacific directors and the Government, would throw a wet blanket on the meetings. Later on these two became punctiliously friendly, and even though Mr. Smith’s name was not visibly in this original Canadian Pacific Railway Company, every one knew (including the keen-minded Sir John) that he was actually in it for all he was worth.

The contract terms sound generous enough if we could only keep out of our minds the tremendous extent of the undertaking and the endless risks taken by the new company, in view of the fact that the real cost of the railway from ocean to ocean was almost a haphazard conjecture. Up to the date of the signing of the contract the way through the mountains of British Columbia was unsettled, and the character of the work on the North Shore of Lake Superior was practically unknown. That North Shore problem had frightened Sir Henry Tyler, President of the Grand Trunk, in London, from going into the Canadian Pacific scheme, partly because that eternal wilderness had no prospect of local traffic compared with a line south of the Boundary, but partly also because the interminable miles of rock to be built through looked too formidable to be attacked. Take it all round, the terms of the contract signed in Ottawa may have looked too generous to the man on the street. But only men of courage who visioned the far future would have set their names to a covenant to build thousands of miles of a railway which not only some public men, but some experts also openly declared would “never pay for the axle grease.”

Briefly stated, the Government agreed to give the new syndicate the seven hundred miles of railway already built or under contract to be built by the Government, together with twenty-five millions in money and twenty-five millions of acres of selected land in the West. In addition, the syndicate was promised exemption from import duties on all material brought in for construction, from taxes on land for twenty years after Crown patents were issued, as well as freedom from taxes on stock and other property for all time, together with exemption from regulation of rates till ten per cent. had been earned on capital invested. To guard against premature competition by roads connecting with the States, the Government agreed that for twenty years no charter would be granted to any railway south of the Canadian Pacific Railway from any point at or near the Canadian Pacific Railway except such as should run south-west or westward of south-west; nor to within fifteen miles of the Boundary-Line.

In Winnipeg, in my student days in the 80’s, I recall hearing many rather stormy discussions over this contract at public meetings, because the West was particularly affected. The two things most strenuously opposed, as being too generous to the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, were the grant of land, which was said to be too large, and the section which prevented competing lines being built to the south. Neither of these objections ever seemed to me very reasonable. The land grant looked large; but land was worth very little before the railway came in to make it valuable. In my boyhood I knew that some of the land along the Red and Assiniboine Rivers (and there is no better land anywhere) was sold for fifty cents an acre. If the twenty-five millions of acres given to the railway were valued at pre-railway prices the amount would not be great. When the railway was built the price of land went up with a rush, but it must be borne in mind that it cost the Company millions to bring the railway in, to make the land worth while. And it should also be remembered that the railway made other people’s land as valuable as its own, although the increase to the other people did not cost them anything beyond their ordinary taxes. In any case the land went up when the railway came in, but the railway did not come in by magic. It is interesting to recall in this connection that Sumner, a famous statesman in the American Republic, once advocated giving half of one of the great agricultural States in the West to any one who would build a railway through it, as it was of little use till a railway would enter. What some people in Canada, who denounced the Government for giving twenty-five millions of acres, might have said if the Canadian Pacific Railway had been offered one-half of the Middle West, would probably be too incoherent to print.

We may read later something of the cyclonic protests made in my native Province of Manitoba against the section of the contract which denied to any others the right to build railways south of the Canadian Pacific into the States; but, like many other movements, the one against this temporary monopolistic clause was, to say the least, lacking in proper perspective. The Canadian Pacific Railway Company, to enable Canada to keep faith with British Columbia and thus hold Confederation together, was struggling to build two thousand miles of road over a territory where there was little prospect for years of a paying traffic. It is hard to see that it would have been just, without adequate compensation to the Canadian Pacific, to allow other railways to hamstring the transcontinental by building in the only region where there was population enough to give a railway some reasonably remunerative business.

A rather peculiar thing was that no one objected to the cash subsidy except those who attacked the whole business from end to end, as ruinous to the young Dominion. Reasonable onlookers, however, who knew something of the tremendous cost of construction over certain sections, thought the syndicate was mad to tackle it at almost any price. Later on these reasonable people found justification for their view in the fact that construction was costing in some sections half-a-million a mile—though even they would have gasped if they knew that in after years a single tunnel in the mountains was to cost over eight millions to construct. There were some who considered that the free gift to the company of several hundred miles of railway, built by the Government over a term of years, was too generous. But Canadian Pacific Railway experts in 1889 testified before an Interstate Commerce Inquiry, and said that parts of the Government sections were unwisely located, and the cost of joining up with these unwisely located sections was so great that the amount the sections were supposed to represent should be heavily discounted. It is possible that experts will always differ over this big contract of 1880 which, for years, furnished offensive and defensive political orators with abundant ammunition in party conflicts.

As I write these paragraphs regarding the famous contract between the Canadian Government and the pioneer railway across Canada, I have before me the Dominion Statute of 1881 in which the contract is incorporated. It has some rather illuminating clauses, of which I here quote a few. In the section of the Act in which the Company is required to complete the work by the year 1891, and the section in which the Government is required to complete and hand over certain portions of the railway then under contract, both parties are safeguarded by the words “unless prevented by the act of God, the Queen’s enemies, intestine disturbances, epidemics, floods or other causes beyond control.” That was sufficiently comprehensive to guard against any contingency. There is a very interesting statement at the conclusion of section 7 of the Act, where, after saying that the road built by the company and the portions built by the Government when completed, shall become the absolute property of the Company, the Act goes on to say: And the Company shall thereafter and for ever efficiently maintain, work and run the Canadian Pacific Railway. I think the testimony of all is that the Company is living up to that contract, since its amazing efficiency is the admiration of the world. But the words “for ever” indicate with unconscious frankness that the Government had grown weary of Government construction, ownership and operation of such an immense project, and was devoutly thankful to hand it over for all time to a responsible private organization.

The contract which we have been thus studying had to run the gauntlet through Parliament, and we shall follow its course there and the new programme of railway building by the new Company in the ensuing chapter.