_Recording the first encounter of Mackenzie and Mann, with mules for
a stake._
It seems scarcely possible that the electric railway is only thirty
years old. The marvel of Chicago, to a visitor less than thirty years
ago, was the system of street cars moved by cables running between
and beneath the rails. Winnipeg had a single track horse-car system,
with passing sidings. It was the enterprise of Albert Austin, in
these days president of the Consumers’ Gas Company of Toronto. The
city gave a franchise to the Winnipeg Electric Railway Company, the
creation of Mr. James Ross, of Montreal, Mr. William Mackenzie, who
had recently come into control of the Toronto railway situation, and
Mr. D. D. Mann.
There was some confusion as to the Austin franchise’s priority of
right. Indeed, Mr. Austin contended that the electric franchise
was erroneously given. At all events, the electric cars started to
run on the streets before the horse cars were run off the streets.
We enjoyed the spectacle of Dobbin competing against the harnessed
lightning, and the experience of a cut-rate business in fares, the
like of which was never before, and has never since been seen. Rides
were three cents each, and fifty tickets were sold for a dollar.
Business institutions laid in stores of tickets, against the day
when rates would rise. In the end, of course, the more modern
method won out. The Winnipeg Electric Railway, which had its own
difficulties, due to comparative scarcity of population, has come to
earn a yearly revenue of over $3,500,000.
Becoming the first auditor of the company brought me into contact
with the president, Mr. Mackenzie, of Toronto, and led to a
connection of twenty-six years with the phenomenal expansion
of a railway system, which is now the main hope of prosperity
for a national property. I had met Mr. Mann almost immediately
after arriving at Portage la Prairie, in 1886. As there are some
misapprehensions in the public mind about the earlier association of
these remarkable men, perhaps it is as well to tell the authentic
story.
As a western worker, Sir Donald Mann preceded Sir William Mackenzie
by several years. He brought the first locomotive into Winnipeg
on Christmas Eve, 1879, having come down the Red River during the
previous summer. Sir William Mackenzie’s first essay in Western
development was in 1884, when he took contracts on the mountain
section of the C.P.R.
It is a mistake to suppose that that was Mackenzie’s first experience
in railway construction. He had had a contract on the Victoria
Railway, between Port Hope and Orillia, via Blackwater, now called
the Midland section of the Canadian National System. That was one of
the first great enterprises, outside his beloved insurance, in which
the late Senator Cox was heavily concerned as a financier. Mackenzie
had taught school, and had done some building. He had also worked in
the Lake Simcoe and Muskoka territory when it was furnishing Toronto
with most of its lumber and fuel.
When the Mackenzie men, teams, and equipment began work in the region
of Banff, where James Ross, the chief engineer of the Canadian
Pacific, had charge of a construction then unexampled in Canada, they
became known as “The Farmer Outfit”, because their harness and get-up
generally were more like the appurtenances of Ontario than the gear
of truly Western operators.
Over twenty years afterwards, when a distinguished party was
travelling to Edmonton for the inauguration of the province of
Alberta, they drove from the end of Canadian Northern steel, several
miles east of Vermilion, to the new capital. One of the guides
over the unfamiliar trails was bridge builder Weller, who told the
stranger he was driving that he was with Mackenzie on his first
contract in the mountains. He was still the same Mackenzie, Weller
said, though bigger business left him little time to fraternize with
his old associates.
“There is no Sunday time to be killed in tents,” he said, “by sitting
around the stove on chilly nights and singing Sankey’s hymns. Mr.
Mackenzie was quite a singer in those days, but only on Sunday
nights.”
Far ahead of “The Farmer Outfit”, in the vanguard of the graders, was
another contractor--the same who had brought the engine across the
Red River ice, and had been on the job as the C.P.R. was laid through
Brandon, Regina and Calgary. Sir Donald Mann’s reminiscences of a
hard season’s work include his first seeing of the governor-general,
the Marquis of Lansdowne, and his first meeting with Sir William
Mackenzie.
The viceroy was coming east from Victoria over the route to be taken
by the C.P.R. The contractor met him on the trail that did duty
for a road, and recognized him by his photograph. Since the war,
dining with the marquis in London, Sir Donald was interested by
his recalling that at the time of his trip across the Selkirks and
Rockies, there were only 126,000 people between the Lake of the Woods
and the Pacific Ocean.
Of the first contact between Mackenzie and Mann, Sir Donald’s
recollection is vivid:
“In the summer of 1884,” he says, “we were having some trouble with
our supplies at the head of construction. This was partly caused by
the wish of those who had such matters in hand to compel us to buy
from them. We wanted the advantage of buying direct from wholesalers
and manufacturers, and hauling our own stuff from the end of steel to
the front of grading. To do this teaming I had my agents farther east
buy and ship a carload of mules. When we received word that they had
arrived as far as the cars could bring them, I took a foreman named
Dan Mahoney and two or three other men, and started out to fetch
them. They were at the Summit--close to where the Great Divide is
marked now. The mules had been unloaded and were with another carload
in a corral.
“Dan Mahoney and I were picking out what we believed to be our
animals when a man with a long black beard turned up, and asked us
what we were doing with the mules. I said we were getting ours from
the lot. He said the mules were his, and we’d better not interfere
with them. The argument livened up a good deal, and was getting warm,
when Ross came along, and asked what the trouble was. We told him.
He laughed and said we were both wrong and both right. A carload had
come for each of us, but owing to some misunderstanding, it had been
supposed that they belonged to the same party, and they had been
turned into the corral together.
“Ross was never at a loss for a way out of a difficulty; and he
undertook to settle this one. ‘You’ll pick teams, turn and turn
about, and you,’ he said, pointing to Mackenzie, ‘will have first
choice, and he,’ pointing to me, ‘will have the next two, and then
one each.’ That was perfectly fair, and the first difference of
opinion between Mackenzie and me was over.
“While Mackenzie was choosing his first team Dan Mahoney took me
aside and said: ‘You let me pick them mules. I know them all, for I
worked at the place they have come from. The best in the lot are them
roans. This man won’t guess that; but I know it. Don’t take them in
your first pick; and he won’t take them for his second. Then we’ll
take them; and you’ll see they’ll turn out to be the best of the
bunch.’
“Sure enough, Mackenzie didn’t pick the roans for his second choice,
so that at least he didn’t figure them as better than the fifth pair.
We took them as our third choice; and they proved to be the best team
of all, as Mahoney had said. Mackenzie and I have been in a good
many arrangements together since then; but I don’t think any of them
gave me more genuine satisfaction than the one in which I took Dan
Mahoney’s advice.”
Sometimes books of reference err. “Canadian Men and Women of the
Time” is nodding when it states that the Mackenzie-Mann partnership
began in 1886. The slip is similar to another in connection with Sir
Joseph Flavelle, of whom it is said mistakenly, that he was “long in
the dry goods business in Lindsay, Ontario, with his brother, John D.
Flavelle.” In 1886 Mackenzie was building snow sheds in the Selkirks;
and Mann was fulfilling a twenty-five-mile grading contract on the
Manitoba North Western. It was while he was busy with this that I
first saw him, in the office of my chief, W. A. Baker, at Portage la
Prairie. At that time D. D. Mann was thirty-three years old, very
big, and a bachelor; and I wondered who the heavy, slow-moving man
was.
The Mackenzie-Mann partnership began in 1888, but it was part of a
quartet, and not a duet. The other partners were the late James Ross
and the present Sir Herbert Holt of Montreal. The firm took contracts
on the Coboconk and Credit Valley lines, and undertook the whole of
the C.P.R. short line through Maine to St. John. The Regina and Long
Lake, the Calgary and Edmonton, and the line from Calgary to Fort
MacLeod followed, between 1889 and 1891. Then constructive energy in
the West seemed exhausted. The railway contracting of Mackenzie and
Mann entered a state of suspended animation.
There is a tradition among his friends that when Mackenzie saw the
finish of these contracts in the West he made up his mind to retire
on his competence, and devote himself to farming at his native
Kirkfield, and to public service in Victoria county. Sir Sam Hughes
used to tell, with as much relish as Sir Donald tells of the contest
over the mules, how he beat Mackenzie for the Conservative nomination
for Victoria and Haliburton in 1891.
But life’s strenuous endeavour was not over for Sir William Mackenzie
in his early forties. Unexpectedly he became connected with the
modernization of the street railway in Toronto--the beginning of
nearly thirty years of achievement such as has not been approached in
Canada by any native son. From a commitment to an electric railway in
Toronto to a similar enterprise in Winnipeg was a natural development
of a genius for courageous initiation, the range of which I do not
think he himself recognized at that time.
The ambition to construct and control a transcontinental railway was
the result of an evolution in two mentalities, working in a single
partnership. Just when it was first consciously entertained perhaps
neither Sir William nor Sir Donald was aware. Certainly, nothing of
the kind was contemplated when their first venture as railway owners
and operators, as distinct from contractors, was undertaken, and I
came into it as the first operating officer.
The conditions affecting the nativity of the Canadian Northern were
extensive and peculiar. The Sutherland project of a railway from
Winnipeg to Hudson Bay had halted at Oak Point, forty miles from
Winnipeg, on the east shore of Lake Manitoba. But the idea of laying
steel to the Bay was never abandoned; and the Dominion charter of
the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company gave the right to build
to tidewater, via northwestern Manitoba, in 1889. The Manitoba
Government was friendly to the scheme from the very practical point
of view of providing facilities for farmers who, though they were
in fine country, could not profitably market their excellent crops,
some for reasons for which they had no responsibility, and some for
reasons which, perhaps, they might have avoided. They could not
flourish without railway transportation.
The main line of the Canadian Pacific came into Winnipeg from almost
due north for twenty miles. Originally, it was to have passed through
Selkirk, leaving ambitious Winnipeg as an important station on a
branch to the American boundary. The line was built almost to the
river, opposite Selkirk, and a round house was erected at Selkirk.
Instead of going west through Portage la Prairie, it was projected
straight northwestward between Lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba, crossed
Lake Manitoba at The Narrows, and continued northwesterly to the Swan
River, where it turned southwesterly, till it was a few miles north
of Fort Pelly.
Thence it took a due west route to the Elbow of the North
Saskatchewan, near to where that river is now crossed by the Canadian
Northern main line. Then, instead of crossing the river, the C.P.R.
was to skirt the southern bank to Battleford, and strike the
Saskatchewan again on its long northwesterly stretch, about twenty
miles above Fort Edmonton, which is the Edmonton of to-day. A new
Edmonton was to arise on the C.P.R. main line, about seventeen miles
south of the present capital of Alberta.
This route was across sections of the prairie country marked on
the Government map, printed in Sandford Fleming’s great report
of 1880, as having “soil of rich quality and pasture land more
or less fertile.” The map is the first in which, to quote from
its superscription, “An attempt has been made to distinguish the
general physical character of the country, on the routes followed
by different explorers and scientific travelers.” The map is one of
the most interesting proofs of the wisdom with which the Canadian
Northern lines in the West were planned; taking in, as they do, the
territory first pre-empted by the Canadian Pacific main line, which
was also commonly known as “The Fertile Belt”.
There was a second location of the C.P.R. main line, which was to
leave Portage la Prairie eight miles to the south, and was to swing
round the Riding Mountains, virtually on the route afterwards taken
by the Manitoba North Western, and was to cross the Assiniboine a
little below where Kamsack now is, and pick up the original location
at Nut Hill, about twelve miles straight north of the present little
station of Rama on the Canadian Northern main line, two hundred and
forty miles from Winnipeg.
The Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company was chartered to enter
this originally selected territory of the Canadian Pacific main
line. Nervy farmers, knowing good country when they saw it, went
into the district around Lake Dauphin, through which the C.P.R. was
to come. Some stuck to their places, even after it seemed that hope
of a railway in their time was vain. There were others, known as the
judgment-proof settlers. They had fled from conditions which made it
impossible for them to profit by their experience, and had come from
hard times to harder.
The wonderful fertility of the Dauphin and Gilbert Plains country,
and the abundance of wood within reach of everywhere made it an ideal
farming territory. One is able to report that J. B. Tyrrell, whose
Western surveys for the Dominion Government began in 1883, and have
covered the country between the Kootenays and Dawson city, between
Edmonton and Chesterfield Inlet, and from Fort Churchill to Winnipeg
and included two summers in northwestern Manitoba, says that if he
were choosing a farm location he would go to the Dauphin country.
Apropos that preference, consider an illustration of how the sober
truth of a scientific bluebook can be regarded as the fiction of a
romancing propagandist.
Tyrrell’s reports to the Geological Survey of his work in 1889 and
1890 make it clear that Lake Manitoba is the remainder of a much
vaster inland sea, which was pretty deep--its shores were high in
the present Riding and Duck Mountains. On the high water line are
deposits of phosphatic shale, the product of immense accumulations
of fish bones, Tyrrell believes. The leaching from these deposits
to the plains below has made the farms in the Dauphin and Gilbert
Plains districts so remarkably fertile that it was found undesirable
to permit the land to lie fallow every third year as in most of the
prairie country. Allow a Dauphin field an idle, clean summer and
the following years the wheat crops will most likely be hopelessly
lodged. It is therefore customary, in order to keep the land clean,
to allow the weeds to get a good start in the spring, plow them in
at the beginning of June, and take off a crop of barley so as to
prevent the following season’s wheat crop from choking itself into
unprofitability.
One summer the Canadian Northern superintendent of publicity was
taking a party of journalists from Winnipeg to Edmonton, and, as his
custom was, he brought aboard the train, at different points, local
men who could tell about their district.
The National Editorial Association of the United States after leaving
Dauphin were bidden to a testimony meeting in the forward coach of
the special train. The publicity superintendent offered a few remarks
on the quality of the landscape the party was viewing, and told of
the phosphatic shale derived from fishbones deposited in the hills,
perhaps five million years ago. He received some attenuated applause
for this narration; but was not flattered later to learn that it was
bestowed for the most colossal, most imaginative fish story that so
seasoned a bunch of newspapermen had ever heard.
The connoisseurs of descriptive narrative were in the mood, though
not the condition, of a distinguished visitor at the Quebec Garrison
Club several years ago, who, having assiduously sampled the visions
that come gaily through the rye, saw, as he was leaving, an enormous
stuffed Lake St. John salmon on the wall, at the stair’s foot. He
gazed at it for a full minute and remarked:
“That’s a d----d lie!”
Parliaments may authorize, but financiers may refuse to finance.
Though the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal charter, land grant and
all, had been obtained by the Davis firm of contractors, they could
induce nobody to furnish the money to build the line and possess
the land. They tried to sell the charter, and in 1892 or 1893 D. D.
Mann began negotiations to buy it. He took an option for a thousand
dollars, and allowed it to expire. He renewed the option for two
thousand dollars, and that also ran out. He figured that, in the end,
the rights could be acquired more advantageously by that form of
attrition of attractiveness.
After nearly three years’ negotiation, the charter at thirty-eight
thousand dollars seemed a good buy, and the prospect of financing
construction pretty fair, largely because two factors in the
situation were in a different case from what they had been when the
idea of laying track into the Dauphin country began to be agreeable.
The Manitoba Government was increasingly eager for better settlement
in the Dauphin district, and the Northern Pacific had gone into a
receivership.
I am not sure that we don’t indirectly owe the National Railways to
the incurable impetuosity of Joe Martin. As we have seen, he was
attorney-general in the Greenway Government when it inherited the
battle against the C.P.R. monopoly in 1888, and was the popular
general of the battle of Fort Whyte. But he was not popular with his
colleagues--very impetuous men seldom are. He resigned from the board
of the Portage Electric Light and Power Company, at the height of
an argument, and was surprised when he came to the next directors’
meeting to hear from President Watson that the resignation had been
accepted.
One evening he returned from Winnipeg to the Portage after telling
Premier Greenway that he was through with his job. When he appeared
at the office later to take up the broken threads of business, he
found Mr. Attorney-General Sifton working coolly at his desk.
Premier Greenway was a farmer, and not given to verbal rapiering.
Otherwise, instead of allowing the fiery Joe to collide with a fait
accompli, he might have emulated Lord North, who, when King George
had at his request dismissed Charles James Fox not long before the
signing of the American declaration of independence, wrote to Fox:
“Sir,--His Majesty has thought proper to order a new Commission of
the Treasury to be made out, in which I do not see your name.”
Clifford Sifton was the subject of political prophecy from his first
appearance in public life. He had come West from Middlesex as a boy
of fourteen. His father had been Speaker of the Assembly. He chose
Brandon as the first field for his legal talents, and quickly became
solicitor of the town. As such he appeared at the private car of the
Deputy Minister of the Interior, who was waited upon by the Town
Council with a request for some improvement in their relationships
with the great Department. The discussion fell naturally into the
hands of the youngest man in the party, whom the deputy felt it his
duty to snub somewhat obviously.
Some years later the deputy saw this young man hang up his hat in
the Minister of the Interior’s room in the Langevin Block. Unwritten
history has it that the deputy found it expedient to become a
full-fledged minister of the exterior after a reasonable period of
meditation had elapsed. On memory’s tablets one does not read his
name.
Twenty-seven years old, Clifford Sifton had come to Winnipeg as
member for Brandon after the general election of 1888, which followed
the Greenway Government’s accession during the preceding winter. Even
if he had had to be pushed into the attorney-generalship, he would
have been the logical, indeed, the only, successor of the excessively
mercurial Martin. It is not critical of the merits of his colleagues
to remark that he was by far the ablest man in the Cabinet. As he was
the first member of a Dominion Government who made an outstanding
success of immigration--it is not difficult to recognize his hand in
the Manitoba administration’s efforts to secure immigration for the
Dauphin country, out of which the Canadian Northern was evolved.
The retirement of the C.P.R. from Fort Whyte, and the abandonment
of its monopolistic privilege, had brought the Northern Pacific
into Manitoba, and promised, for a while, to give the province the
railway expansion it was believed to need. The Northern Pacific, or
its subsidiaries, obtained a charter that allowed it to go almost
anywhere. It was understood that it would enter the country west
of Lake Manitoba and north of Gladstone, thirty-six miles out from
Portage. But the depression culminating in the panic of 1893--which
caused six hundred banks in the United States to suspend, and of
which a sequel was the march of Coxey’s army of unemployed on
Washington from Masillon, Ohio, in April, 1894--threw the Northern
Pacific into a receivership; and there was no prospect of it building
more lines in Manitoba, even with the Government’s guarantee to
pay the interest on its bonds for twenty years. It has always been
understood that the inducement of interest guarantees originated
within the Government. Some day, the story of its inception may be
intimately told.
That, as far as I know, was the introduction to Canada of the
practice of Governments guaranteeing bonds of railway enterprises,
as distinct from cash and land subsidies and the cession of railways
already built, but all-but financially derelict, as had happened in
the case of the C.P.R. The arrangement with the Northern Pacific
had broken down, but it pointed the way of advance to one shrewd
man; and the former contractor of the North Western, the Regina and
Long Lake, and the Calgary and Edmonton, saw in the situation enough
encouragement to take the stalled Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal
Company off the Davises’ hands.
Mr. Mann went to his bankers for assistance. They told him the job
was too big for a lone hand, and counselled that he secure the
co-operation of his old associates. It was that advice which brought
a new orientation to the relationship between Mackenzie and Mann.
There was an idea of asking the Manitoba Government for guarantees of
principal and interest up to sixteen thousand dollars a mile; but
the bankers preferred that the contractors should obligate themselves.
They said, unanswerably, that Governments change in party and
personnel; that the construction of a line in the Dauphin country
was not an assuredly profitable undertaking; and that it was better,
instead of relying too much on political fortune, that the builders
of the line should be vitally concerned in its prosperity.
So, in the end, the guarantee was fixed at eight thousand dollars per
mile, for a hundred and twenty-five miles, with freedom from interest
liability for the company during two years after the completion of
construction.
Under these terms with the Manitoba Government, in the spring of
1896, the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company began construction
from Gladstone, on the Manitoba North Western, thirty-six-miles from
Portage, to Lake Winnipegosis. I was made the first superintendent
of the infant, and on the fifteenth of December, 1896, we began
operation, and issued our first time-table on January 1, 1897, a copy
of which hangs in my office in the Dominion Bank Building, Toronto.
It began for me, indeed, a long avoidance of calm repose.