_Describing meetings of a traffic manager with Sioux Indians and
sudden millionaires._
It is a curious truth that the only considerable railway retreat from
Canada by United States interests was made by J. J. Hill, one of the
syndicate which brought the C.P.R. to fruition. He was a pioneer in
Red River navigation which Eastern Canadians, bound for Fort Garry,
used in summer. His association with Donald Smith and George Stephen,
future members of the House of Lords, transformed a little Minnesota
line from the derelict property of Dutch bondholders into the Great
Northern and opened the way to a Canadian farm boy’s control of
American railways without parallel before his time.
Hill retired from the C.P.R. when it was determined to build the
Superior section from Sudbury to Port Arthur, nominally because
he feared the ability of the C.P.R. to support itself through so
much wilderness, but really because it would prevent his own roads
carrying the through traffic between Eastern and Western Canada, from
Sault Ste. Marie to Winnipeg, for which connection the C.P.R. line to
the Soo, through Sudbury, had been built.
The Northern Pacific receivership finally threw that system into
Hill’s control. Grain rates to Duluth from Minnesota and North Dakota
were still higher than they were from Manitoba to Fort William. The
extension of traffic in Canada therefore, would tempt the American
farmer to demand, in his own territory, as favourable a treatment as
his Canadian competitor received on his own soil.
The possibility of the Northern Pacific lines in Manitoba becoming
part of a Canadian system was enlarged by a change of Government in
Winnipeg. With its best brain, and chief driving force transferred to
the Interior Department at Ottawa, the Greenway administration fell
into a slough of complacent reliance for continuing power upon what
it had done to deprive the C.P.R. of its detested monopoly, and to
facilitate settlement of the empty, fertile northwestern quarter of
the province.
The general election at the end of 1899 destroyed the Greenway
Government. On the morning after the polling I happened to meet the
Premier on the train. He was frank enough to attribute the defeat
to excessive cocksureness. Later, he was sent to Ottawa, where he
was a useful, though not a brilliant, commoner alongside his former
attorney-general, Mr. Sifton, who was the federal general for the
Liberal party all through the West, for the elections of 1896, 1900,
1904 and 1908.
Sir John Macdonald’s son, Hugh John, who had joined the Tupper
Government in 1896 as Minister of the Interior, and was practising
law in Winnipeg, became Premier in January, 1900; passed a
prohibition bill, which was disallowed at Ottawa, resigned the
premiership to oppose Sifton in Brandon later in the year, and was
succeeded by R. P. Roblin, who had left Prince Edward county twenty
years before, and was farming near Carman.
In 1900 Mr. Mann, as Sir Donald Mann recalls the episode, while
passing through St. Paul on the way to Toronto, called upon his old
friend Mr. Hill, and incidentally enquired whether the Northern
Pacific would sell its Manitoba lines to the Canadian Northern.
Incidentally, also, Mr. Hill replied with an axiom of railway
practice: “No railway ever sells branch lines to another railway.”
But, he remarked, in further incidental conversation, a railway might
sell branch lines to a Government.
Nothing more was said upon the subject at that time. But next
morning, instead of being in Chicago, Mr. Mann was in Winnipeg,
enquiring of Premier Roblin whether his Government would consider
buying the Northern Pacific lines in Manitoba, and turning them over,
later, to the Canadian Northern.
There was nothing disagreeable to the successors of the victors at
Fort Whyte in the idea of a transaction which promised that the
C.P.R. would at last meet real competition from southern, central and
northern Manitoba to Lake Superior. But the Roblin Government was
young, and required time to think. It was finally decided that if the
lines were procured it must be without an undertaking to deliver
them to any third party.
So it came about that, in the session of 1901 the Manitoba
Legislature passed an Act which transmogrified the Northern Pacific
Manitoba feeders into Canadian Northern lines. In less than five
years from Billy Walker getting his first highball (no connection
with whiskey) from Dad Risteen, chief and sole conductor of the Lake
Manitoba Railway and Canal Company, we were hauling wheat from Swan
River and Grand View, and from Brandon and Hartney, over our own
lines into our own terminals at Winnipeg, and to Emerson, whence the
Northern Pacific carried it to Duluth.
We could not deliver wheat to Port Arthur in 1901, but we did take
part of that year’s crop over our own lines to that port, for on
January 1st, 1902, connection was completed at Bear Pass, a few miles
east of Rainy Lake, and Manitoba had a juncture with Eastern Canada
independent of the C.P.R. If the C.P.R. could have prevented it, Port
Arthur never would have renewed its youth through the advent of the
Canadian Northern. A fight was on, which never sacrificed official
and personal courtesies, and never relaxed the vigilance of the
senior, or restricted the pertinacity of the junior road.
The Canadian Northern, with a thousand miles of track through the
best sections of Manitoba, and with immigration beginning to reach
the West in a volume not approached since the feverish period of the
foolish land boom, had passed almost unobserved by the public, from
a local to an interprovincial proposition as to territory; and to an
international factor as to finance.
Lloyd George, when he was merely the little Welsh attorney and had
been the pro-Boer of the irresistible tongue, and was certain of an
unwelcome inclusion in the next Liberal Cabinet, became accustomed
to hearing his friends discuss the probabilities of his party
leadership, some time. He comes from the Snowdon country, and knows
the ascents to that highest peak in England and Wales, particularly
the ridge near the summit which over there is called the Saddleback,
but on this continent would be named the Razorback. He was not blind
to the possibility of eminence which fascinated his friends, but used
to say to them, “Oh, I don’t know; I haven’t crossed the Saddleback
yet.”
The Canadian Northern Saddleback was the old Dawson route between
Rainy River and the Kaministiquia. To cross it was a feat which was
all the more dramatic for its having to be performed in the London
money market against extraordinary endeavours to make of the feat a
fatality.
What the C.P.R. regarded as a too daring invasion of its fiscal
domain synchronized with an abstraction from its western force of
our first general traffic officer, with duties entirely in the
dual revenue department. Additions to mileage were coming like
triplets and twins, and there was plenty to keep the superintendent
busy in enlarging staff and equipment, and in general management.
Somebody with thorough knowledge of traffic conditions and intimate
experience of the West was required. We found him in George H. Shaw,
assistant general freight agent of the C.P.R. Mr. Shaw and I remained
colleagues for seventeen years, when he took his ease on a retiring
allowance, the just criticism of which is that it might have been
more commensurate with the extreme value of his service.
It has been suggested before in these drafts on memory that things
regarded as being entirely matter-of-course appear in their true
perspective only when the mellowing hand of age rests upon them. You
see men working at their appointed job, and the job seems all there
is about them. But in the West, until yesterday, when you met a man
up to the ears in prosaic detail, you never knew with what romantic
aspect of the pre-historic age he was a living link. My old colleague
is one of these; as any, who are lucky enough to go round the
Mississauga course with him--for he has played himself into a second
coltage--and can start him on a trail of reminiscence, will discover.
George Shaw comes of a political family established in the county
of Lanark during the building of the Rideau Canal, as a military
expedient against possible unpleasant sequelæ to the war of 1812. His
grandfather sat in the Parliament of the province of Upper Canada,
twenty years before Confederation. His father was a keen politician
at Smith’s Falls; and would have had his boys maintain the family
tradition. He tells a political and a railway story about a farmer
at Merrickville, whom we will call McWhilt. Young Shaw was made a
scrutineer for an election. In Lanark every vote was as identifiable
as its caster, and the scrutineer checked off the lists furnished him
as the electors declared their preference--the ballot had not yet
been adopted. Shaw senior came in late in the afternoon, looked over
the polling record, and found that McWhilt had not voted.
“Send for him,” was the order: “He’s promised to vote for Haggart.”
McWhilt was sent for and voted for Gould, the Liberal.
When Shaw, senior, heard the news he was too astounded to say more
than “I’ll make him pay that note to-morrow.”
One snowy night the engineer of a train between Merrickville and
Smith’s Falls thought he bumped something at a crossing; but saw
nothing to make him stop the train. Arrived at Smith’s Falls he
looked around for signs of an accident, and found them. On the
cowcatcher was the box of a bobsleigh, with McWhilt fast asleep in
it, so much repose may conviviality induce.
At eighteen years of age, with the profession of civil engineer
as his objective, George Shaw was appointed to a party that was
to survey Indian reserves in Rupert’s Land. Chicago and St. Paul
furnished the way in; and the steamer International down the Red,
from several miles north of Grand Forks, completed the last stage to
Winnipeg.
Shaw was one of a small proportion of first-class passengers. The
berth was of child-like dimensions. For washroom in the morning he
was directed to the bow, where stood a bowl, stool, with a bucket and
rope alongside. The passenger let down his bucket into the river,
drew all the turbid water his fastidiousness could use, and made the
best of a towel which had once been laundered.
It was a fitting prelude to a Western career which was to have
a great traffic-bearing intimacy with the whole of the empty
sub-continent which the boy surveyor was to see--an era of
transformation unexampled in Britannic history.
The time was eight years after Riel was the President of the
Provisional Government of Rupert’s Land, with a Council and Cabinet,
and the future Lord Strathcona had helped a Convention to draw up a
Bill of Rights for a Government which was heralded by the Fort Garry
paper, the New Nation, with an editorial as redolent of revolution
as anything that these latter times have produced. As a curiosity in
Western political literature it is worth giving:
“The confirmation of Louis Riel as President of the Provisional
Government of Rupert’s Land by the Convention was announced mid
salvos of artillery from the Fort and cheers from the delegates.
The town welcomed the announcement by a grand display of fireworks,
and the general and continued discharge of small arms. The firing
and cheering were prolonged into the night, every one joining in
the general enthusiasm, as the result of the amicable union of all
parties on one common platform. A general amnesty to political
prisoners will shortly be proclaimed, and the soldiers remanded to
their homes to await orders, and everything will be placed on a peace
footing. Vive la Republique!”
This phase of the second republic set up in Manitoba within two years
was not as remote in men’s memories when Shaw reached Winnipeg as
the opening of the Great War is in ours. It was part of a situation
in which the Indian was still an uncertain, indeed a threatening
ingredient. The surveying of the Indian reserves, hundreds of miles
northwest of the Red River, where the posts of a few fur traders
had afforded the only semblance of modern law and government, until
the arrival of Governor Laird at Battleford, in 1876 to inhabit the
quarters built by Hugh Sutherland, was the first long step toward
the agriculture which has made Saskatchewan the greatest wheat
growing province of the British empire. One of the Saskatchewan
farmer organizations owns and operates about three hundred and fifty
elevators at as many shipping points, and has increased the capacity
of its own elevator at Port Arthur--eight hundred miles from the
centre of the province--to seven and a half million bushels, and has
acquired the old Canadian Northern elevator, with a capacity of seven
million bushels more.
Shaw went to Battleford, the infant capital of the North West
Territories, with the party that was in charge of George Simpson.
It travelled by Red River train of tireless carts. The surveyors
and their camping entourage walked beside their vehicles the whole
of the six hundred and fifty miles to Battleford. The route was via
Portage la Prairie, Fort Ellice, where the Qu’Appelle joins the
Assiniboine; the Touchwood Hills, Humboldt (where a Canadian Northern
division point was established within twenty-five years), and
Batoche, where the South Saskatchewan was passed at Gabriel Dumont’s
Crossing.
Every white man in the country could tell of fights and murders
laid to barbarian account. Sixteen years previously fifteen hundred
settlers had been butchered in Minnesota by the Sioux. During the
spring of 1876--two years before--Custer’s force of eleven hundred
men had been wiped out by the Sioux, in Montana. Bands of Sioux had
come into the Canadian territory, and had always said they had no
quarrel with the children of the Great White Mother. Some had settled
near Portage la Prairie, and had behaved very well, on the whole.
When exterminations were so recent, and relatively so near,
travellers into the Great Lone Land didn’t feel as safe as if they
were in Montreal. There had been one rebellion of Metis at Fort
Garry; and Riel and Gabriel Dumont, who ferried the Simpson party
across the river a few miles from the present Rosthern, were yet to
head a second revolt.
A prophet would have been called a fool if, as the surveyors trailed
across the site of the present Rosthern, and the land where the
world’s champion wheat has been grown by Segar Wheeler, he had said
the elevators there would supply the youngest member of the party
with waybills representing over a million bushels of wheat exported
in a single season.
During the surveying of Red Pheasant’s reserve, south of Battleford,
which is now crossed by the Grand Trunk Pacific branch from Naseby
to the old town of Battleford, Shaw was out alone when he saw an
Indian on a hill, and flashes of sunlight proceeding from his hand.
After a while the Indian was joined by thirteen others, mounted,
who brought his horse with them. They were the advance guard of a
remarkable company of Sioux, who were visiting as far north from
their own Montana, to estimate the prospects of continued happiness
in the ancient, unfrontiered hunting grounds. They were not looking
for buffalo, for not many were then left on the Canadian prairies,
partly because of the reckless slaughter that had gone on everywhere,
and partly because Sitting Bull was herding survivors below parallel
forty-nine.
The touring Sioux were of the ten thousand who had destroyed Custer’s
army two years before, and were using their share of the plunder. The
scout’s flash was from a heliograph, and was no doubt informing those
who later came up that a lone Paleface was on the rolling plain. The
couple of hundred Sioux--who presently camped near Red Pheasant--had
United States army wagons, tents, rifles, ammunition--everything that
civilization could usefully furnish for such a country. They were
a much finer race, physically, than the Crees who were about to be
allocated to reserves.
The Sioux visitation had some influence on a situation which carried
much anxiety to Governor Laird, as well as a very real danger to all
the whites in that part of the country, and also to the whole future
of Western Canada.
The half dozen reserves around Battleford having been delimited,
the Simpson party started for Edmonton, by way of Frog Lake and
Fort Pitt--Frog Lake where nine people were massacred during the
second Riel rebellion, still seven years in the future; and Fort
Pitt, which, at that perilous time, was precipitately evacuated by
Inspector Dickens, son of the novelist. At Fort Pitt the party was
ordered back to Battleford. On September 17th a general election had
put Sir John Macdonald again in power, and some wise person in Ottawa
assumed that favour depended on halting a company of chainmen two
thousand miles from the nearest Canadian railway station.
With the rest of the party Shaw spent the winter of 1878-9 at
Battleford. It was a winter free from dull care--cold but gay; simple
in its furnishings, but abounding in social diversions. Reports came
in, though, that it was a winter of want for the Indians, and that
trouble might be looked for in the spring, unless a miracle happened
to their food supply.
From time immemorial the Indian had been accustomed to an abundance
of buffalo meat, limited only by his ability to slaughter it. Sitting
Bull’s herding of the buffalo in Montana brought great privation to
the Crees and Blackfeet. In the spring of 1879 they assembled at
Battleford, demanding assistance from the Canadian Government.
Shaw saw five thousand of these tented seekers after charity
camped around the tiny capital. The barracks were on the narrow
tongue of land just above where the Battle empties into the mighty
Saskatchewan. The town was on the south side of the smaller river--a
poor little collection of buildings which the Indians could have
destroyed with no more trouble than is involved in firing dry wooden
structures anywhere.
Governor Laird, the tall thin Prince Edward Islander, who had come
from Charlottetown journalism into politics, was a negotiator for
the entry of the island into Confederation, became the Minister of
the Interior in the Mackenzie Government, and had received the first
governorship of the North West Territories in the same year that
Laurier was first appointed a Minister of the Crown, was very well
fitted for a post requiring many diplomatic qualities.
Next to his extreme height his most memorable physical characteristic
was his long hair; the fashion of which he had abbreviated long
before his last special tour of the West, when he was a venerable and
honoured sharer in the celebration of the creation of the provinces
of Alberta and Saskatchewan at the beginning of September, 1905.
The feeding of five thousand Indians was an imperative duty of
Governor Laird as long as there was anything to feed them with. He
had no authority to commandeer provisions from the Hudson’s Bay
Company, on Indian account. But the Company had heavy stores of
pemmican in their warehouse, and Laird drew upon them, while he
was trying to secure the necessary powers from Ottawa. The Indians
demanded treaty guarantees against their extinction by starvation.
Their attitude was discomforting. They knew what had been done to
Custer only three years before. They had seen, and knew the source of
the rich equipment of the Sioux, who had visited them the previous
summer. For many years there had been an obviously increasing threat
of the submergence of their own autonomy and self-respect by white
men whose far-distant friends, they had been told, drove iron horses
that breathed out fire and smoke. The reserves recently staked out
were too suggestive of imprisonment. Now, it was mooted, the time
had come to put an end to this threat. If the young braves had been
uncontrolled there might easily have been a repetition of the Custer
massacre, with little chance of serious resistance from the handful
of whites planted upon the Battle and the Saskatchewan.
As part of the inauguration of government in the Territories a
telegraph wire had been strung from Fort Garry to Prince Albert, via
Qu’Appelle and Humboldt, and to Edmonton, via Battleford. Part of the
line the passengers on the Canadian Northern west of Humboldt can
still see from the train for many miles. The service was liable to
interruption without notice. On the fringe of the wooded country a
moose might rub down a slender poplar pole, and ground the wire. The
wind in a naked country might do a similar disfavour to civilization.
Repair gangs were neither numerous nor swift of movement. It was
truly a Canadian National Telegraph, but its appropriate name was the
Canadian Now and Then.
Laird wired to Ottawa for special authority to deal with the whole
situation as he deemed best. For many days, no answer came to
repeated requests to the Department. At last he appealed direct to
Sir John Macdonald, the Prime Minister. Sir John’s conviviality was
for long a feature of the political landscape. Governor Laird, it was
believed, caught a glimpse of it in the telegram that eventually did
arrive from Ottawa: It said. “Get your hair cut.” Not another word
was received from the outside world for three weeks, thanks to one of
the interruptions of transmission already mentioned.
Before the end of the 1879 season Shaw found that sleeping on the
ground filled him with rheumatism; and he returned home convinced
that civil engineering was not his mission in life. But he had seen
the West in what has since become its most glamorous guise; and,
having imbibed the waters of the Saskatchewan, he was to fulfil the
saying that those who have once so tasted are fated to return to
the scene of so much fortune. You would never think that the dapper
foremaster who skips around his eighteen holes on the Mississauga
course had been through the peril of annihilation by scalping knife
and tomahawk with Governor Laird forty-five years ago; but it is the
truth--and one of the truths that very often indeed, are stranger
than fiction.
Once more in Montreal, Shaw studied law; but law was ever a
dry-as-dust affair; and by 1880 he accepted advice to seek a
railway career, via the unfailing portal of Pitman’s shorthand. The
practitioner who so advised him moved to Milwaukee, and in 1881 sent
word that a job was open in the offices of the Chicago, Milwaukee and
St. Paul Railway, that city. Shaw got his job and its inducement to
become an American citizen.
In the following summer--1882--not liking Milwaukee too well, he saw
the former general manager of the road in the office--Van Horne, who
had gone to Winnipeg the previous winter to build and run the C.P.R.
He asked Van Horne about prospects of a job in the Winnipeg office.
“Sure,” said Van Horne; “here’s a pass from the border into
Winnipeg”--and he wrote one in pencil.
Once more Shaw was headed for the Canadian prairies, and did not
leave them for Toronto and Mississauga until the Canadian Northern
had become a transcontinental system. He was with us from the taking
over of the Manitoba Northern Pacific by the Canadian Northern, till
the taking over of the Canadian Northern by the Canadian Government.
The changes he shared in are those which should furnish the real
substance of this story. Others which he closely observed were
peculiar to his personal association with the C.P.R. One of two
which must be set down, whatever else is left out, relegates the
ballad of the Miller of the Dee to the dreary commonplaces.
Thirty years ago the Ogilvie Milling Company was the big business in
grain buying and flour making in the West. Its many elevators along
the C.P.R. and the Manitoba North Western, were as prominent as the
Saskatchewan farmers’ own grain houses are to-day. The Company’s
accountant was Fred Thompson who came from Montreal to Winnipeg in
the same year that Shaw returned from Montreal to Winnipeg. He had
been in the Exchange Bank, and in six years rose to the Ogilvie’s
managership.
The ten years that followed saw various mutations in the milling
business that have a romance of their own. As a whole, the country
was poor enough, but where so many natural resources are being
developed over so much of a continent, great enterprises will grow,
here and there, men will become rich, and financiers will evolve from
clerks and lumberjacks. Within the C.P.R. sphere of influence, its
superintendent of telegraphs, Charles Hosmer, developed from a key
tapper to a capitalist, first on the side, and then all the way. His
responsibilities have included the Presidency of the Ogilvie Flour
Mills Co., millers to the King.
In 1898, the president, William Ogilvie, died. One very cold day,
during the winter ensuing, George Shaw was in Montreal on C.P.R.
business. Returning to the Windsor he was spoken to by Fred Thompson,
who was more obviously agitated than managing millers of eminent
sobriety and unimpeachable Anglican integrity are wont to be.
[Illustration: SIR WILLIAM VAN HORNE
“A dynamo, run by dynamite”
(P. 40)]
[Illustration: E. W. BEATTY
“Whom his countrymen will have abundant cause to honour”
(P. 306)]
“Come up to my room,” said Thompson, “I want to tell you something.”
Shaw pleaded a dinner engagement, but his old friend would not be
denied. “Come up, anyway,” he pleaded, “I won’t keep you long.”
Arrived in the room, Thompson put off his coat, threw himself on the
bed and lay there in much distress.
“Don’t talk for a little while,” he begged. Shaw read the paper for a
quarter of an hour, and then rose. Thompson begged for more time, and
again Shaw tried to read the news, and to divine Thompson’s malady.
At last Thompson said:
“Shaw, I’ve made a million dollars to-day, and I can’t get over it.”
Shaw thought the malady needed an alienist, and expressed his
disbelief.
“Oh, yes, I have,” Thompson persisted. “I’ve bought the Ogilvie
Milling Company, and the deal’s worth a million dollars to me.” He
explained how Hosmer and the Allans had found the money; and the
direction of the Merchants’ Bank was involved in the transaction.
The agitation superinduced by an avalanche of wealth subsided
in due course; and Fred Thompson developed a remarkably cool
imperturbability in presence of oodles of cash.
Next evening Shaw was again in the Windsor rotunda when whom should
he see but George Lane, the famous rancher of Calgary. George Lane
is a character in candour as well as a Croesus in cattle. The
embodiment of geniality, he doesn’t expect the milk of human kindness
to flow through or about a business transaction. He says:
“If after chewing the rag for a day or two I make a deal, and the
other fellow says ‘Come and have a drink,’ I say to myself ‘George,
you’re beat.’ If he offers me a second drink, I say, ‘George, you’re
beat to death’.”
Shaw was surprised to see George Lane at Montreal in midwinter.
“What are you doing so far from home?” he asked the great cattle man.
“I thought you’d be preventing your steers from freezing to death on
the ranges.”
“I’ve been down to Quebec,” Lane replied.
“Quebec? But there are no cattle shipments at this time of year to
take you to Quebec.”
“It’s been about cattle all the same,” said Lane. “Come up to my
room. I’ve got to tell somebody something or bust, and it won’t do to
tell it here, with so many people around. Come on up, quick.”
George Lane, cattleman, didn’t throw himself on the bed, but quickly
announced,
“I’ve made half a million dollars to-day.”
Remembering the previous evening Shaw did not suppose this was a case
for an alienist, and opened his ears for the facts.
“I’ve bought the Allans’ ranch in the Foothills,” said Lane. “They
were in such a hurry to sell that they don’t know to a few thousand
how many head are on the property, but I do. The outfit’s worth half
a million more than they asked me for it. I only just found out why
they were so darned anxious to sell. They’ve gone into the Merchants’
Bank and the Ogilvie Milling Company, and want ready money. I don’t
carry half a million in my jeans, but I know where to get it. I had
to tell somebody the d---- news, and you’re the first friend I saw in
the hotel.”
One all-in-the-day episode from Shaw, and we must leave him to his
golf. In the spring of 1883 he was sent to Port Arthur to receive
the first steamer load of passengers that was to enter Winnipeg
direct from an Ontario port. The boat was the City of Owen Sound,
from Owen Sound, which the C.P.R. had made its Lake Huron terminus,
failing to arrange for Collingwood. There was practically no landing
accommodation--the hour for porters on Thunder Bay had not yet
struck. Three hundred and fifty passengers disembarked and their
baggage was handled by the C.P.R. officers, of whom Shaw was one.
Among them was a young engineer who, from having been a chainman
on the Credit Valley line was on the way to a job on the Superior
section of the C.P.R. His name was MacLeod. He was to become chief
engineer and general manager of the Canadian Northern Railway, and
build more miles of railway in the prairie country than any other
man.