_Beginning the story of the Canadian Northern as a pioneer line with
a staff of thirteen._
A merciful Providence, which keeps us from seeing far ahead, gave to
none of the men concerned in operating the first commercial train
that ran upon what was to become the Canadian Northern System, the
faintest idea of what was ahead. We should have invited the Tempter
to take a back seat, no doubt, if we had heard, on the fifteenth of
December, 1896, when one of our two engines pulled out of Gladstone
for Dauphin on the rails of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal
Company, that, ten years from that night we should be celebrating
publicly the opening of a railway from Toronto to Parry Sound, and
privately the taking over, while the speeches at the Board of Trade
banquet in the King Edward, were being made, of two hundred and fifty
miles of the Regina-Prince Albert line from the Canadian Pacific;
that our total mileage would then be over thirty-five hundred; and
that, after another ten years, there would be in operation under our
control nine thousand five hundred miles of railway.
But all that was in store; and, as I happened to be the only
operating officer who was concerned in every phase of that
extraordinary expansion, perhaps my feeling should be rather
like that of the oldest inhabitant, who imagines that the former
times were better than these. But, as a matter of fact, though I
am the senior of all the general officers who served the Canadian
Northern Railways, I am not the real patriarch of the service. To
three friends of mine, who were on the line before me, I want to
pay high and sincere tribute--to Billy Walker, Philip Price James,
(affectionately known as “Joe Beef”) and Dad Risteen. “Joe Beef” is
still on the job in Manitoba, as a locomotive engineer. Dad Risteen
was our first conductor, and is still taking up tickets between
Winnipeg and Somerset. But Billy Walker died when these recollections
were being printed.
I joined the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company only a few days
before unofficial operation began; so that I had nothing more to do
with the construction than to oversee the accounts receivable by the
North Western for hauling material to the new base of activity.
Construction opened in the preceding April. It is part of the railway
game that during construction trains must be run, and a certain
transportation business be done by the contractors, as soon as some
track has been laid and ballasted into a fairly safe condition.
Settlers who have suffered hardships because there was no railway,
and who see rails, ties and camp supplies brought in, are like the
newly rich lady showing the magnificent bathroom of her latest
mansion to visitors, with whose admiration she agreed, saying, “Yes,
isn’t it lovely? Do you know, sometimes when I come in here to look
at it I can hardly wait till Saturday night.”
So, during the building season Billy Walker was engineer and Dad
Risteen the conductor of construction trains. Both had come from the
C.P.R., where they were known as absolutely competent men. A proper
appreciation of the values of the trade unions which have wrought
certain revolutions in railway practice does not make one forget that
there was a certain advantage in running a pioneer road with helpers
who were blessed with the pioneer spirit, as Billy, and Joe, and Dad
most excellently were.
The time table over my desk shows we operated one mixed train each
way twice a week. We had running rights over the Manitoba North
Western from Portage to Gladstone. The first winter, though the road
was graded and rails were laid from Gladstone to Sifton, sixteen
miles beyond Dauphin, we only operated beyond Dauphin once a week. To
Dauphin we ran 100 miles, over our own track, and 36 miles over the
North Western.
Sifton, by the way, was not named after Sir Clifford Sifton, but his
uncle, who derived salt from the springs near Lake Winnipegosis,
which had partially supplied the population long before a steam
whistle disturbed the prairies’ peace.
“Service” was our motto. We had more stopping places to the ten
miles, I think, than any railway in the world. Only a few of them
were on the time table. Over most of the route, where settlement was
beginning, we put down and took up passengers and way freight to
suit our patrons’ pleasure. For seventy-two miles, between Plumas and
Dauphin, we hadn’t a telegraph station.
It wasn’t of us, but it might have been, that this story was told:
Certain passengers of a railway through ill-settled bush country
observed the train stop at Nowhere, and saw a woman come from a cabin
in a clearing and speak to the conductor. She returned to the cabin,
and the train stood so long that an explanation was sought from the
conductor.
“Oh,” he said, “that’s all right. This lady goes to market every
Saturday with us, to sell her eggs. This morning she’s one short of
two dozen. We’re waiting because one of the hens is on.”
Our time for the one hundred and twenty miles from Portage to Dauphin
with a mixed train, was six and a half hours. Though punctuality was
occasionally more of an ambition than an achievement, we kept good
time on the whole; thanks to the driving of Billy Walker and the
whole-souled devotion to business of Dad Risteen. We didn’t have an
express service of our own, except so far as everything was express.
But each train had a couple of brakemen, and Dad made it his business
to know all about all the way freight that had to be unloaded at each
stop; and he would hang in and help his brakemen unload.
The two nights a week on which the train came into Dauphin saw a big
crowd in waiting at the station. Sometimes immigrants received a too
flattering impression of the importance attached to their arrival.
The superintendent almost lived on the line in those days, and
sometimes he helped in handling traffic. Dad Risteen, after he had
taken up his tickets, and pored over the way bills, would come into
the second of our complete passenger equipment of two second-hand
coaches, and say, his face beaming like a rising sun, “Mr. Hanna,
we’re having a good day to-day. She’s carrying five hundred and
forty-three dollars.”
Across more than a quarter of a century I take off my hat to Dad
Risteen, for as whole-hearted, diligent, able and enthusiastic a
fellow-worker as ever railway chief had.
The same is true of the engineers. Billy Walker drove the engine, and
“Joe Beef” hostlered it in the little frame roundhouse across the
Vermilion river at Dauphin, until there was work for him also on the
road.
In those far-off days the system of running engines in chain gangs
had not come in--treating throbbing ironhorses as if they were mere
electric cars, to be driven by any man who comes next on a list.
During waits on the road Billy fussed with his engine as if she were
a child, and in the roundhouse Joe was blithe as a lark, cleaning
up and banking the fires on Monday and Friday nights, ready for the
return trip to the Portage next day.
The Canadian Northern era of expansion required us to find names
for about six hundred towns, and about as many shipping points.
Dauphin has always ranked as premier among the first-born of these
communities. The name, of course, comes from the lake near by, which
was so called by the earliest French explorers. The first trading
post was built near the lake, it is believed by one of Verendrye’s
sons.
The present town was started in a wheat field. It has always
had a fine class of citizens. The relations between the railway
superintendent and the townsfolk were more intimate than was possible
when the terminus of a new enterprise had become a division point for
a multiplying east-and-west traffic, and had grown from a few dozen
to several thousand inhabitants.
The feeling on both sides was of the friendliest goodwill. One
recalls, with unaffected pleasure, a kindly and too appreciative
article in the Dauphin press, I think in the second year of our
service, which said of the superintendent, “Who knows that some day
he won’t be rushing through Dauphin in a private car.”
The Dauphineers were of that blest portion in the nation which lives
and learns. One recollection of their capacity in that way is a
bright and shining example of how deputations to railway officers may
discover that all the wisdom doesn’t invariably reside with those who
feel bound to make complaints.
Fundamentally the Lake Manitoba was a colonization road. During the
first summer of its construction the general election brought the
Laurier Government to power. A month before we began regular service
Attorney-General Sifton of Manitoba became Minister of the Interior,
and responsible for immigration. In 1897 the work was done which
resulted in the first considerable settlement of Galicians in the
prairie country--they came into the territory northwesterly of Lake
Manitoba.
Except the settlements of Mennonites between Winnipeg and the
boundary, Manitoba had been almost entirely settled by Ontario and
Old Country people, with the French-speaking Canadians numerous
around St. Boniface, and in the Provencher district, east of
Winnipeg. The advent of large numbers of people from southeast Europe
was viewed with alarm by many excellent citizens; and there was much
grumbling among the elect as the Galicians hove in sight.
I accompanied the first party which was destinated for Dauphin. They
camped outside the town--not a very fashionable looking crowd, it is
true. The women with handkerchiefs over their heads, their footwear
made entirely for enduring ease, and their waistlines uncontrolled,
deceived some onlookers as to their suitability for rearing Canadian
citizens.
Pretty soon a deputation of townsmen waited upon Superintendent
Hanna, with strong, straight intimation that by this unsolicited
invasion a grave error in judgment had been committed, and a menace
to the peace, order and good government of the realm introduced among
a people who deserved a better fate. This threatened tide must be
rolled back. And so on and so forth.
Superintendent Hanna reasoned with the deputation as well as he
could, pointing out that these people had been attached to the soil
for centuries; that they were accustomed to work, and not afraid of
it; that their poverty was the best incentive to them to make good in
a land where they would be free from some of the afflictions of their
former country--compulsory military service, for instance.
The deputation went away as little satisfied with the prospects of
this intrusion as they were when they came. The superintendent turned
to more customary duties.
A couple of hours later the chiefs of the deputation returned to
retract their objections to the Galicians. From shirts, and from
stockings above the unfeminine-looking footgear, there had been
brought forth enough cash to buy two thousand dollars’ worth of
supplies from Dauphin merchants; and faith and charity had begun
to work up to lively hope among the stores that this was a mere
shadow of things to come. The might of economics in social life
never received a more vivid vindication than was furnished the
superintendent on that day.
In case it should not be convenient to recur to this question of
the settlement of non-English-speaking farmers in the West, let me
go back upon and ahead of my story. In the Saltcoats region of the
Manitoba North Western a farm instructor for British newcomers was
appointed in the person of Tom MacNutt, an old Ontarion who has
been Speaker of the Legislature at Regina, and M.P. and chairman of
the Liberal caucus at Ottawa. During the Sifton immigration regime
Galicians were planted in MacNutt’s constituency of Saltcoats,
where, in 1911, ten thousand non-English-speaking natives of Europe
were living, of whom about half were from Austria-Hungary. He tells
how a Scotchman became a leading champion in the press of the
exclusion of these “undesirable” foreigners.
Among the MacNutt civic functions was that of coroner. He was obliged
to hold an inquest on a Galician boy, accidentally killed. Driving
to the farm with a doctor he asked what arrangements had been made
for an interpreter, and was told that Mrs. Wilson would translate the
evidence.
Mrs. Wilson proved to be a perfect interpreter, and as pretty as
she was efficient. The coroner, seeing the ease with which she took
in all that was said by the witnesses, remarked to himself that she
must have been a school teacher, and wonderfully quick to pick up so
much Galician, while she was teaching a little English. Afterwards
Mrs. Wilson told the coroner that she was herself a Galician, and
introduced him to her husband--the Scotchman who had tried to dam the
Galician tide.
The Canadianization of these people is a question into which one
must not be tempted to stray. Having so largely entered into their
labours we owe it to ourselves, at least, to understand something of
what their contribution to the West, and therefore to the East, has
been. They arrived with very little but the will to work, and the
ability in handi-craftsmanship which is shown in their buildings,
and the excellence of their gardens and farms. The women remained on
the homesteads, tending the cows and hens and doing what they could
in heavier work, while the men earned money in railway construction
gangs, with which to buy cattle and gear. We had them for year after
year, beginning with the line between Dauphin and Swan river. Without
them the settlement of many of the best sections of the West would
have been retarded.
Their names were no doubt written accurately in the payrolls; but
pronunciation of them was not easy to engineers who had received
only a Toronto University education. To save time and prevent
complications each man was given a number. When the Galician
constructionist presented himself at the paymaster’s tent, he was
required to say, besides his number, the name of the boss he worked
under--not always an easy thing, for even our names are not all as
simple as our characters. For all the Canadian Northern life, our
chief tracklayer was Joe Work--truly a prince at his job. His only
blemish was an absent eye. It often happened that when a Galician
came for his pay and was asked for whom he worked he would shut an
eye, and smile.
While we were doing our best to develop the Dauphin country,
during the first year of operation, the line was extended to
Winnipegosis. We had no access to Winnipeg; but this did not prevent
our proprietors from buying the charter for a railway east of
Winnipeg--the Manitoba and South Eastern. Once more, I think, there
was no clear conception of the extensions that were to follow. But
there was the urge to the place whence they go down to the sea in
ships. At the end of our second season--1898--we opened the first
section of the line to Lake Superior--forty-five miles from St.
Boniface to Marchand, in the bush, west of the Lake of the Woods, the
first time table of which, typewritten for economy’s sake, also hangs
in my Toronto office.
At the beginning of my connection with the line, I continued on duty
for a time with the North Western, and made my headquarters once
more at the Portage, though my family remained in Winnipeg. But, at
the end of 1898, with one line west of Lake Manitoba, and another
going east to the Lake of the Woods, I became more or less of a
shuttle--and have been shuttling ever since across a loom of steel,
which never seems to have decided how wide a fabric it would evolve.
As the nineteenth century was dying, cordwood was still a
considerable aid to Winnipeg comfort; and the rather swampy Marchand
region its most convenient source of supply. Our eastern line was
started as a cordwood carrier--and more. We set up a woodyard and
sold scores of trainloads of tamarac, poplar and jack pine--ninety
per cent. of our traffic. Our terminal was at St. Boniface; so that,
literally we were at the gate of good things--this institution that
looked so feeble, and was indeed feeble in body, whatever its daring
was in mind. We were able to place our cars in the Winnipeg C.P.R.
yards. The C.P.R. was kind to us, as the mighty knows how to be to
the meagre.
We had begun with two engines, fifty new freight cars, made by the
Crossens, of Coburg, two second-hand passenger cars, bought from
the Rathbuns, of Deseronto, and an uncertain number of flat cars,
which had been used on construction. We had to buy more second-hand
equipment for the eastward adventure, but, as to flat cars for the
cordwood, our conductor, Percival, had a brave habit of borrowing
such as he could collect, in the C.P.R. yards, without asking
anybody’s leave.
The late Sir William Whyte frequently laughed with us over this
manifestation of Percival’s trust in the C.P.R., which Sir William
used to observe from his window in the old station overlooking the
yards. The Muskeg Limited, as our train became known, had its own
place in Winnipeg transportation, and its name ought not to be
forgotten.
On the whole, then, it can be said that as a company of railway
adventurers, we were the lineal successors of The Farmer Outfit,
which Mackenzie took into the Rockies in 1884. But we had avoided
some mistakes, which others, later, failed to avoid; and we had some
results to show, of which it is pertinent, now to speak.
The mistake avoided was the common one of acting as if fine shows
made fine roads. Mackenzie and Mann had been through a mill which was
addicted to grinding exceeding small. They both came from pioneer
farms. Their railroading experience began with the rough and tumble
of construction camps, and frequent reliance on bannock and sowbelly.
They never supposed that office furniture could offset a lack of
revenue. They started pioneer roads like pioneer roads.
Though their first superintendent had tasted of the London
administration of the Grand Trunk, and had filled a chair in the
head office of the New York Central, he had also seen the prolonged
effects of too much optimism at Portage la Prairie, had lived through
three years of a branch line’s receivership, and had never forgotten
the early days in Scotland, when the office equipment of a frugal
management included chairs made out of barrels, and a couple of
doorknobs functioning as very efficient inkwells.
From time to time one has heard the scoffer in the land and on the
train--sometimes when using a pass--comparing Canadian Northern
infancy with Canadian Pacific maturity and Grand Trunk Pacific
magnificence. It was met silently by the reflection that cutting
your coat according to your cloth is often a financially hygienic
science--it was with us twenty-five years ago.
The result? I have said that the bargain with the Manitoba Government
provided that we need not pay interest on the guaranteed bonds for
three years. But by hewing to the pioneering line, and with men
like Billy Walker, “Joe Beef” and Dad Risteen, we paid our fixed
charges out of revenue from the start. The first year’s earnings were
sixty thousand dollars. The staff, superintendent and all, totalled
thirteen, until it was deemed expedient to touch a less ominous
figure by engaging a boy.
The original office force, the father of the accounting staff of
the Canadian Northern, was Cecil Friend, taken from his post as
secretary to Robert Kerr, western passenger traffic manager of the
C.P.R. He is a man to whom all who have ever worked with him, are
devoted. When we became a transcontinental system he was moved from
Winnipeg to Toronto, and is now at the Montreal headquarters. While
we were colleagues he saw his jurisdiction extend from himself as
sole accountant, to a staff of over four hundred people exclusively
engaged in his department, and receipts grow from sixty thousand to
sixty-seven million dollars a year.
If an example of the constancy with which all hands kept at the job
of keeping down expenses and putting up revenues be appropriate, I
may be forgiven for repeating what happened one summer day. There
was an unavoidable accident, a little north of Plumas--a heifer was
caught by the cow catcher, and her legs broken. The superintendent
happened to be on the train, also a brakeman who had been a butcher.
The heifer was useless to the farmer, except as beef, for which
his claim on the company would make a low allowance. The train was
halted while the brakeman-butcher killed and dressed the heifer, the
passengers surrounding the operation. The carcass and hide were put
in the baggage car; the carcass was sold to the contractor, whose
construction camp was west of Dauphin, the hide was turned into the
ordinary channels of trade; the farmer’s claim was paid in full from
the receipts for meat and hide, and four dollars were carried into
the treasury.
In a way, the turn of the century was the most fateful pass in
Canadian Northern history, for it brought into the obvious the fact
that a new system of railways was coming into existence, as distinct
from several apparently disconnected, and almost aimless branches,
headed for nowhere in particular.
The last year of the nineteenth century carried us to Erwood, seven
miles beyond the Manitoba boundary, into what was still the North
West Territories, and a few miles east of where the line to the Pas
and Hudson Bay branches off. The name, by the way, gives a modified
immortality to E. R. Wood, the Toronto financial and Y.M.C.A. leader.
Theretofore the intention had been to make the road to Prince Albert,
through the Swan River and Carrot River valleys, the main line to
Edmonton. As a concomitant to this expansion it is worth noting that
the implement manufacturers moved their credit frontiers a hundred
miles north about this time.
In 1900, then, the main line turned west from Dauphin through Gilbert
Plains, a marvellously attractive locality for the farmer; and
twenty-six miles, to Grandview, were built. The eastbound line from
Winnipeg had sixty-five miles added to it. In April the eighty-seven
miles that had ventured out of Port Arthur towards Duluth as far
as Gunflint, were bought. The Port Arthur, Duluth and Western, of
official documents, had become known to the public as The Poverty,
Agony, Distress and Want Railway. Its acquisition immediately changed
the character of our eastern section, for it became part of a main
line, which was being extended to meet the original Manitoba and
South Eastern and the Muskeg Limited. A month previously the Canadian
Northern Company came into existence, to control and develop what had
thus far been accomplished.
The C.P.R. monopoly had been broken by the Northern Pacific, but the
new development had halted when the Northern Pacific fell on evil
days, and was still awaiting the rejuvenating advent of J. J. Hill.
Still, lines running to Winnipeg from the boundary, to Portage from
Winnipeg, to Brandon from Morris, in southern Manitoba, a fifty-mile
stretch to Hartney, and a couple of offshoots from Portage, had been
built; altogether 350 miles.
There were rumours that the Northern Pacific would get out of Western
Canada, and the busy tongue of speculation began to predict that
these two fellows, Mackenzie and Mann, who knew how to catch on,
but did not know how to let go, would soon have some new stunt to
show the West. The guess was justified; for the first year of the
twentieth century saw the Northern Pacific retire in favour of the
Canadian Northern, which was fully launched on the high road to an
expansion without parallel in the history of transportation.
The C.P.R. was not alarmed, but it was very observant. There was a
world of difference between being kind to a few branch lines that
were as much feeders of the C.P.R. as if they belonged to it, and
welcoming a challenge to its supremacy of transportation to and from
the head of the Great Lakes.