_Recalling Van Horne and the Canadian Pacific challenge to the Grand
Trunk._
At sixty, one cannot realize how long he has lived until he sits down
and counts up the revolutions he has seen since he arrived at man’s
estate.
Of course, one does not mean political revolutions, merely; although
they are becoming too numerous to mention. I left Scotland before the
man who produced the crops from which the rent rolls of the House of
Lords were paid could vote for a member of the Parliament which might
send his sons to the wars. When I came to Canada in 1882, the St.
Lawrence, below Montreal, flowed through a country that was about as
clear of forests as it is to-day. But Ontario forty years ago, was
half bush. Toronto was warmed with more wood than coal in winter.
My friend Noel Marshall was called the wood king of this city. His
trainloads of cordwood arrived almost daily from the territory around
and beyond Lake Simcoe.
The locomotive with the big funnel-top out of which came wood sparks
and smoke was still common on the railways. There wasn’t an air
brake on a train. The electric light was just beginning to take its
place among the marvels of the age; but the electric street car was
only the dream of foolish persons who imagined that harness could be
put upon the lightning. The telegraph was everywhere with the steam
locomotive. But, though men had talked to each other from almost
incredible distances, and prophecies were made by daring spirits
about what would some day be accomplished by the human voice over
an electrified wire; if you wanted to speak to a man in his office
across the street, you crossed the street.
One of the surest things in human existence, to most shrewd people’s
way of thinking, was the impossibility that men should ever fly.
Anybody who would have predicted that in his lifetime it would be
possible to send his voice out into the atmosphere in the form of
a silent wave of ether, have it picked up by a piece of wire a
thousand miles away and turned again into his voice so that one or
one thousand people standing in a park could hear it as plainly as if
the living person shouted into their ears--why, for such a prophet
the only appropriate abiding place would have been where brains had
ceased from troubling, and wisdom was at rest. As for the motor car,
although the horseless vehicle was a subject of prophecy, the wildest
visionary never proposed anything like the present speeds and dangers
of the streets.
The advances that have been made in moral and social standards are,
in their spheres, as remarkable as those just suggested are in the
mechanical helps of life. But before we come to them, and their
relation to one or two of the more remarkable variations from the
way of conducting railways forty years ago, suppose we take a look at
the railway situation from the constructional point of view, as it
was in Canada when my service began with the Grand Trunk.
Towards the C.P.R. the high and mighty Grand Trunk directors in
London had a disdain not unlike what their successors felt for the
Canadian Northern when it first stretched its hand towards the London
money market. The year that began my service produced two most
remarkable developments in the general scheme and the administration
of the C.P.R. The first day of 1882 saw the first day’s work of Van
Horne as general manager of the C.P.R. The first year’s work of Van
Horne saw also the abandonment of the plan of first reaching Winnipeg
by rail from Eastern Canada via Sault Ste. Marie, instead of by Port
Arthur. To give an idea of the atmosphere that it was sought to
develop in the London money market at that time, it is interesting
to see a pamphlet that was issued under Grand Trunk auspices, in
opposition to the proposal to build the C.P.R. around the north shore
of Lake Superior.
The territory now traversed by three transcontinental lines was
described as “a perfect blank, even on the maps of Canada. All that
is known of the region is that it would be impossible to construct
this one section for the whole cash subsidy provided by the Canadian
Government for the entire scheme.”
This view was not a purely Grand Trunk bogey. It coloured the Liberal
party’s opposition to the C.P.R. Thomas Robertson, founder of the
Toronto candy-making firm, used to tell with much glee how his old
friend who became Senator Jaffray, president of “The Globe”, and of
the Imperial Bank, was in the habit of declaring that he would not
risk his life on a train north of Lake Superior in winter.
Grand Trunk understrappers, of whom I was one, had no direct
contact with the big fighting that was going on between the old
Canadian railway and the new, looking to the future control of
transcontinental business. But we could feel temperatures; and we
picked up information about the forces that were playing against each
other, which, perhaps, the ordinary reader of the newspapers did not
gather from what came out of the West. As a matter of fact, not much
did come out of the West, where the most extraordinary phase of a
most extraordinary phase of modern railway construction was being
accomplished. There was no telegraph connection over all-Canadian
territory between Montreal and Winnipeg, and the newspaper services
were meagre indeed, compared with what they are now.
Of all the departments of railway construction and operation, only
one of the C.P.R. was located in Montreal in 1882--the purchasing
department. Its chief was a young fellow named Shaughnessy. Except
in age, there wasn’t much difference between the purchasing agent
of 1882 and the peer who resigned the C.P.R. presidency thirty-six
years later. Mr. Shaughnessy had arrived early in the year, from the
Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, whose general manager, Van Horne,
had been given charge of the completion of the C.P.R. The financial
chiefs of the young railway, notably George Stephen, had their
headquarters in Montreal. But they were generally regarded as having
other major interests.
Among the Grand Trunk wise men, the enterprise that was poking its
nose into the barbarian wilderness was looked upon with an almost
amused toleration. In their own estimation, the Grand Trunk offices
at Point St. Charles were a sort of Imperial hub. The C.P.R. was very
much of a colonial affair, don’t you know--indeed, with a general
manager from Milwaukee, rather too Yankee an affair, if the truth
must bluntly be uttered.
But, even then, there were the symptoms of a somewhat chastened
mood in the Grand Trunk. For the year 1882 had produced results
which, when they were predictions during the previous winter, were
laughed at; but when they were achievements at the end of the year
were ominous indeed. The Van Horne regime on the C.P.R. was the most
remarkable innovation that had happened to the business life of the
Dominion. Its first year had seen the construction of about five
times as many miles of railway as the C.P.R. had laid during any
previous year; and most of that on the remote prairies. The promise
to begin, in 1883, building around the north shore of Lake Superior
looked like business--and business it was.
I think Van Horne had never been in Montreal when he took over the
job of general manager of the Canadian Pacific on January 1, 1882,
at Winnipeg. He came east shortly afterwards, and gave Ottawa and
Montreal a few tastes of his quality. He did not settle in Montreal
until after his first astounding Western season was ended. In
midwinter, with little preparation made for the spring opening, Van
Horne announced that he would lay five hundred miles of track on the
prairies in the season of 1882. His advent at the head of affairs
was not welcomed by a staff of Canadians and old countrymen. He
was a Yankee. He was astonishingly aggressive. His vocabulary had
all the certainty that belongs to the Presbyterian conception of
everlasting retribution, without its restraint. He laughed at other
men’s impossibilities, and ordered them to be done--a dynamo run by
dynamite.
The only way to get construction material to Winnipeg and the West
in time for the spring opening was from the south. Van Horne bought
rails in England and Germany, had them shipped to New Orleans, and
hauled in trainloads up the Mississippi Valley. He made a contract
with a St. Paul firm for the grading, up to the point of actually
laying ties and steel, from Oak Lake, west of Brandon, to Calgary.
The day after the contract was signed they advertised for three
thousand men and four thousand horses.
Van Horne organized his own gangs of tracklayers and kept them
right on the heels of the graders. There was delay in starting
work, because the Red River Valley above Winnipeg was abnormally
flooded. Then the contractors didn’t work fast enough. On threat of
cancelling the whole thing Van Horne speeded up the construction.
Working furiously into the freeze-up, finished only 417 miles on the
prairie section. But the work done elsewhere did complete over five
hundred miles of construction that year; and it was plain that the
new driving force would get even greater results another season.
The next year saw steel laid right to Calgary and immense progress
made between Lake Nipissing and Thunder Bay. This piece of work
caused J. J. Hill to drop out of the C.P.R., and to become a business
enemy of Van Horne’s. Hill, an Ontario farm boy, had induced Donald
Smith (afterwards Lord Strathcona) and his cousin George Stephen
(Lord Mountstephen) to join him in getting hold of a Minnesota
railroad that had been financed by Dutch bondholders. This road
developed into the Great Northern, out of which Smith and Stephen
made, it has been stated, more money than they did out of the C.P.R.
These associates created the syndicate which obtained the C.P.R.
charter, and began construction. Things were dragging, and it
seemed likely that the ten years stipulated for with the Canadian
Government would be needed to complete the road to the Coast, when
Hill recommended that Van Horne be made general manager, with large
powers. The appointment was made, but before long, Hill and Van Horne
clashed, as strong men often do.
When Van Horne took hold, a railway was under construction from
Callender (just east of North Bay) to Sault Ste. Marie, where it
was to tie in with the Hill road and its Winnipeg connections. The
line from Port Arthur to Winnipeg was well advanced; and the utmost
use was to be made of the possibilities of lakes navigation for
communications with Eastern Canada under all-Canadian auspices. But
it was figured that the line around Superior would be too costly and
too unremunerative an undertaking for many years. All the traffic
during non-navigation months would go over the Hill line--and that
was one of several reasons for Hill’s going into the C.P.R.
Van Horne wasn’t afraid of the emptiness between Lake Nipissing
and Thunder Bay. He figured the through traffic would be enough to
offset the disadvantage of practically no local business through
the wilderness. He saw that, with Hill in the strategical position
he had marked out for himself, the C.P.R. couldn’t well be its own
master--rather, perhaps, that Van Horne couldn’t be its master. Sir
John Macdonald and the Government had always wanted to reach the
West over all-Canadian rails. And so it came about that Van Horne’s
arrival at Montreal, after the 1882 construction season, for his
permanent headquarters, synchronized with the beginning of the
Superior Division construction or, rather, with the sending in of
supplies during the winter, for the 1883 work. It turned out that
three seasons’ construction completed the Lake Superior Division, and
the first trains from Montreal to Winnipeg ran in the fall of 1885.
The new atmosphere which had begun to affect railway business in
Canada can be partially appreciated by those who were not within its
influence. A tremendous, and at times terrifying, power had come on
to the job of Canadian development. The Grand Trunk bucked it openly
in London, and quietly derided it in Canada. In Montreal, though,
we were so far from the West--always bear in mind that it wasn’t
till late in 1885 that you could travel in the same train across
the Province of Ontario--that the tales which came through of what
was happening in the North West seemed about as far-fetched as Mark
Twain’s yarn of the jumping frog.
For instance, it was a matter of knowledge that the C.P.R. charter
provided for the line to be built through the Yellowhead Pass, since
taken by the Grand Trunk Pacific, and the Canadian Northern, and to
end about where Prince Rupert now is. The route had been changed; and
instead of going through Battleford, the newly-established capital
of the North West Territories, and up the North Saskatchewan Valley,
the C.P.R., we were informed, was going to Fort Calgary up the Bow
river (which becomes the South Saskatchewan where it is joined by the
Red Deer), and was then to get through the mountains, and reach the
Pacific ocean--somehow. And, in very truth, it was some somehow.
First of all there were doubts as to whether a railway could be put
through the Kicking Horse Pass. Then, once over the Great Divide, the
Fraser Valley must be reached either by crossing the mighty Selkirk
range, or by going hundreds of miles round the big bend of the
Columbia. No pass through the Selkirks was known. Few men believed
one could be found. But Van Horne headed his road for the foothills,
taking chances on making a fairly economical approach to the Pacific
ocean, to obtain which he sent explorers into the appalling waste of
mountains. At last, after incredible hardships, Major Rogers and a
companion named Carrol found the Pass that is forever associated with
the major’s name; and the C.P.R. went through, as all the world knows.
I shall come to a very pleasant duty presently, when something is
to be said about railway location, and some of the locators I have
known and worked with. It will be seen that they are all of the
Rogers spirit, though, happily for themselves, they are not all of
the Rogers attitude towards their own financial interests. Rogers
was a Yale graduate of high standing, but a lover and liver of the
wild, if ever there was such a creature. His discovery of the Pass,
made during days of semi-starvation, and dreadful peril to man and
beast, was acknowledged by the C.P.R. with a check for five thousand
dollars. Van Horne, meeting Rogers in Winnipeg a year later, reminded
the major that he hadn’t cashed the check.
“What!” roared Rogers. “Cash that check? I wouldn’t take a hundred
thousand dollars for it. It is framed and hangs in my brother’s house
in Waterville, Minnesota, where my nephews and nieces can see it. I’m
not in this game for money.”
To indicate the general temper of those early construction days
in the prairie country one can take room for only two sidelights
on the Van Horne regime, which became traditional with all the
surviving old-timers who were lucky enough to behold it. Van Horne
wasn’t an engineer, but he had all the natural aptitudes of one,
and a Napoleonic hatred of “can’t”. One day he sent for a locating
engineer, threw a profile to him and said:
“Look at that. Some infernal idiot has put a tunnel in there. I want
you to go up and take it out.”
“But this is on the Bow River--a troublesome section. There may be no
other way.”
“Make another way.”
The engineer stood, irresolute. Then, Van Horne:
“This is a mud tunnel, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“How long would it take to build it?”
“A year or eighteen months.”
Van Horne thumped his desk and shouted: “What are they thinking
about? Are we going to hold up this railway for a year and a half
while they build their damned tunnel? Take it out.”
The engineer started off with the plan; but turned at the door.
“Mr. Van Horne,” he said, “these mountains are in the way, and the
rivers don’t run right for us. While we’re at it we might fix them
up, too.”
Whereat the big chief exploded with laughter. But there’s no tunnel
on the Bow, and the line wasn’t held up eighteen months.
Those who knew Van Horne in his later years are familiar with his
habit of keeping a cigar in his mouth, often unlit. He was, though, a
great smoker; and when, during his last illness but one, the doctor
reduced him to three cigars a day, he had some made over a foot
long. Just before he finished his first whirlwind year at Winnipeg,
he threw an unextinguished cigar stub into the waste basket, and
the building--the Bank of Montreal, in the upper storey of which
the C.P.R. had its headquarters--was burnt to the ground. Bank and
railway moved to Knox Church, and Van Horne had his office in the
pastor’s vestry; and Ogden, the auditor, presided in the Sunday
school room.
In view of Van Horne’s vocabularian range, it seemed an incongruous
association; but it may have had something to do with a remark made
thirty years afterwards by Van Horne to one of his astonished friends:
“All my religion,” he said, “is summed up in the golden rule; and I
practise it; and I think I am the only man in business who does. What
are you laughing at?”
Perhaps the best picture of the Van Horne who put zip into the C.P.R.
was written in the Winnipeg Sun:
“Van Horne is calm and harmless-looking. So is a she-mule; and so
is a buzz-saw. You don’t know their true inwardness until you go up
and feel them. To see Van Horne get out of the car and go softly up
the platform you would think he was an evangelist on his way West to
preach temperance to the Mounted Police. But you are soon undeceived.
If you are within hearing distance you will have more fun than you
have ever had in your life.”
So much for the temper that was in the Canadian railway situation
forty years ago. West of old Ontario there wasn’t much else but land,
water and temper. When Van Horne went to Winnipeg between the Lake of
the Woods and the Great Divide, and from the United States boundary
to the Arctic ocean, red and white people combined were only sixty
thousand. British Columbia, which had come into Confederation on
promise of railway connection with the East, contained fifty thousand
people, of whom half were Indians.
Allowing for the low traffic value of the Indians, it is a liberal
computation that from the American boundary to the Arctic Circle
there weren’t forty people per mile to create the business between
the Ontario frontier and the Pacific Ocean. Van Horne’s faith was
force and his force was faith. Never was there a greater combination
for a greater adventure. Literally, according to its faith, it has
been to the C.P.R.