[Cover Illustration]
[Illustration:
_Mount Sir Donald and Illecillewaet Glacier_
_Lake Louise_
_Moraine Lake_
_The Bow River Valley and Banff Springs Hotel_
_Typical Canadian Pacific Scenery_]
The Romance
_of the_ Canadian
Pacific Railway
_By_
R. G. MacBETH
_Author of “The Making of the Canadian West,”_
_“The Romance of Western Canada,” Etc._
THE RYERSON PRESS
TORONTO
* * * * *
Copyright, Canada, 1924, by
THE RYERSON PRESS
CONTENTS
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Chapter Page
I. Famous Forerunners 1
II. The Approach to a Great Task 11
III. Giants in Action 18
IV. The Chariot Wheels Drag 33
V. Getting Up Speed 43
VI. A Great Adventure 53
VII. The New Company 67
VIII. A Constructive Genius 79
IX. Crossing the Prairie 94
X. Battling for Life 110
XI. Ocean to Ocean 129
XII. Guardians of the Road 151
XIII. Intensive and Extensive Work 164
XIV. The Guiding Hands 181
XV. The Wonders of the Deep 207
XVI. War Service 220
XVII. The Floodtide of Wheat 235
XVIII. Special Features 245
ILLUSTRATIONS
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Page
Typical Canadian Pacific Scenery _Fron
tispi
ece_
The Bow River Valley and Banff Springs Hotel; Lake
Louise; Mount Sir Donald and Illecillewatt Glacier;
Moraine Lake.
Early Builders 76
Lord Mount Stephen, First President; Sir William Van
Horne, First General Manager and Second President; Lord
Shaughnessy, Early Financier and Third President.
An Interesting Group 93
Lord Shaughnessy, Lord Strathcona (Donald A. Smith),
Lady Strathcona.
The Present Management 188
E. W. Beatty, President; Grant Hall, Vice-President;
I. G. Ogden, Vice-President of Finance; W. R. McInnes, Vice-
President in Charge of Traffic; A. D. Mactier, Vice-President,
Eastern Lines; D. C. Coleman, Vice-President, Western Lines;
Sir George McLaren Brown, European General Manager.
Former Officers 205
The late David McNicoll, Vice-President and General
Manager; the late R. B. Angus.
Recent Developments 252
The Bassano Dam; the Brooks Aqueduct; Supply Farm at
Strathmore, Alberta; Canadian Pacific Docks at Quebec.
* * * * *
_The Romance of the Canadian_
_Pacific Railway_
* * * * *
THE ROMANCE OF THE
CANADIAN PACIFIC
RAILWAY
CHAPTER I
Famous Forerunners
The fascination for studying the genesis of things that exist seems to
be universal. Men have an instinctive and urgent desire to find out how
objects that are seen actually originated. Scientists and savages alike,
for instance, are still hammering out theories as to the process by
which the world was made, though to most of us the most ancient account
is adequate. Once I knew an Indian boy on the prairie who was so curious
to discover how the figure of a dog appeared at the centre of a large
glass “marble” we were playing with, that when I had turned away for a
moment, he broke it open with the back of a tomahawk. Similarly, we have
known exploring scientists who spent laborious lives in the endeavour to
find the sources of a great river.
To be indifferent to the beginnings of things which have become part of
our lives, betokens either the calamitous absence of a thinking mind or
that horrible satisfaction with present possession which ignores the
toil and the tears and the sacrifices of past generations. To persons of
such vacant or selfish natures all the explorers and the pioneers—the
men whose souls yearned beyond the sky-line of their immediate
surroundings—are of no particular account. The untrodden ways which
daring pathfinders opened up with adventurous feet are of no consequence
to the unthinking who settle comfortably on lands pre-empted by the
blood-marked footsteps of the trailmakers.
It is because we are not of the number who are sodden with crass
materialism and seared by the branding iron of greed, that we desire to
learn the history of the things which minister to our continued
existence and comfort in this great new day, the far-off vision of which
made glad the brave seers and workers of earlier times.
These thoughts come to me now just as I am riding westward on the public
observation car of a Canadian Pacific Railway train, through the great
mountains that are piled up on the sunset verge of the Dominion of
Canada. The traditional weariness of travel is practically banished by
these wheeled palaces, which that living, breathing, throbbing
locomotive, under the skilful direction of her driver, draws through
passes and tunnels and glorious river canyons down to the Western sea.
And I thought of how, in times gone by, that Western Sea had been in the
dreams of gallant men who hoped to reach its shores some day. I recalled
how noble sea-rovers, like Henry Hudson and Sir John Franklin, had
thrown away their lives in the attempt to find a North-west Passage by
water across the North American continent, from the Atlantic. And I
remembered, too, how Alexander MacKenzie, the fur-trader, starting by
trail from near the old Peace River Crossing, had gone over the
mountains on foot, and how he wrote on a rock by the Pacific the amazing
inscription, “Alexander MacKenzie, from Canada, by land, July 22nd,
1793.” We call that inscription amazing because behind it and flashing
through it is the story of an invincible will in heroic action and the
record of physical daring unsurpassed in the palmiest days of the
athletes and gladiators in Greece and Rome.
Thus did Alexander MacKenzie blaze the trail across the mountains. If
the North-west Passage by water had proved a myth, MacKenzie
demonstrated the reality of a passage by land which, in the years
afterwards, others would follow. Strange, too, it was that in the same
year, 1793, Captain George Vancouver, an English sea-rover, dropped the
anchor of his wooden, white-winged vessel in the great harbour where
there is now a queenly city bearing his name, on the West Coast of
Canada.
Little did these adventurous pathfinders who discovered mountain passes
and ocean lanes think that, before a century had passed, a group of men
with vision and courage would follow the inspiring example of the
explorers by land and sea, and achieve not only the crossing of a
continent, but the girdling of the earth in a magnificent transportation
system. Yet despite the gloomy prophecies of failure uttered by sceptics
who declared that the thing could not be done, the Canadian Pacific
Railway has driven its iron horses through the mountains to stand by the
Western Sea. And from the land terminals, East and West, this unique
organization has set its vessels on the tides of all the oceans of the
world, as well as upon the gentler waters of our inland seas.
There were many weighty reasons for the building of this railway and the
launching of its great ships, as well as highly important considerations
which demand its continued efficiency in our times. Let us study them
together in this book, which, as an eye witness of the genesis and
development of the railway, though never at any time connected with it,
I have written and published independently, as a humble contribution to
our history as a British Dominion. Like my preceding books, it is sent
out because generations arise which ought to know with what hazard and
struggle on the part of the pioneers the foundations of Canada were
laid.
The name of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company fixes in our minds the
original objects of the road. The Railway was particularly the outcome
of a new national consciousness in Canada, arising out of Confederation,
and it was designed with the special idea of knitting the older parts of
Canada in the East with the newer provinces and territories which were
growing up in the wide West, and which would some day form an integral
part of a Dominion whose Western border would rest on the Pacific tide.
“Westward the star of empire takes its way” is a saying which has found
historical support in the descent of the centuries from the immemorial
East, which is now a graveyard of ancient kingdoms. And once the prows
of exploring vessels struck the Eastern shores of this new continent of
America, there were unresting souls that pressed onward throughout the
years till they reached the pillars of the sunset beside the alluring
Western sea.
In those earlier years Spain was a great sea-going nation and the West
Coast map of the United States is dotted all over with Spanish
nomenclature. This is found also to some degree on the long coastline of
what is now British Columbia, though in this latter region the British
element was always more pronounced owing to the British blood of the
early explorers, both by sea and land, and to the passionate patriotism
of British-born men who were in the employ of the great fur-trading
organizations. In this connection it is interesting to recall the origin
of the name British Columbia. The territory now covered by the province
consisted originally of Vancouver Island and other islands and the
mountain mainland, at one time known as New Caledonia. It was good Queen
Victoria who gave the name of British Columbia to the great mainland
area, and this name was later extended to include Vancouver Island when
both were united in one colony in 1866. The Queen wrote in 1858 to Sir
E. Bulwer Lytton, statesman and novelist too, that the only name she
found on the map of the mainland common to the whole area was Columbia,
but as there was a Columbia in South America and as the United States
people called their country Columbia, at least in poetry, the Queen
thought that British Columbia would be the most suitable name. And
British Columbia it remains to this day, proud to have been named by our
noble Queen and to have sprung from so illustrious an ancestry. Later
on, British Columbia, as we shall see, proved magnetic enough to draw
the steel of the great railway across the continent to the Western
Ocean.
On the general subject, it may be well to remind our readers that a
railway with its locomotive steam engine is a comparatively modern
arrangement for travel, although trucks of various kinds were wheeled on
tracks in the coal mining regions of England two centuries ago. But
George Stephenson, rugged old Scot, with his primitive engine, the
“Rocket,” began as late as 1829, a revolution in modes of travel. There
lived in Manitoba, some years ago, an old railroader, Charles Whitehead,
Senior, who was said to have taken a hand in making the “Rocket” go.
Stephenson’s invention was not a flash in the pan, or, to change the
figure, it did not “go up like a rocket and come down like a stick.” It
stayed, and not only won the prize of £500 for a steam engine that would
actually run and draw, but it became the fruitful progenitor of the
moguls and other colossal “fire-wagons” which rush to and fro on a
gridironed earth in our time. Of course, Stephenson, like all other
originators of new means of transport since the days of Noah, had to
bear the sneers and jocularities of the idle crowd. Some one asked him
what would happen if a cow got on the track, just as Nehemiah’s enemies
suggested disaster to his wall if a fox ran upon it. But the grim old
Scot only replied that it “would be bad for the coo,” and went on to
perfect his engine. Hence came the graceful iron horses which, with
steaming breath, race along the steel trails in all countries in our
time.
Canada had not begun as a Confederation when the first prophecy—an
astonishing foretelling—of the Canadian Pacific Railway was made by
Joseph Howe, in Halifax, in 1851. Canada was then simply the old Central
Provinces of Ontario and Quebec. Down by the Atlantic, Prince Edward
Island, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were, in a sense, isolated British
possessions, which in many ways were in closer touch with the United
States on the Atlantic than with the Canada of that day. Joseph Howe had
been to London and received assurances that the Intercolonial Railway
would be built to link up the Atlantic Maritime areas with Quebec and
Ontario. But Joseph Howe, orator, poet and statesman, saw beyond that
limited plan, and in his address in Halifax in 1851 outlined in his own
masterly way the future of British North America and its immensely
important possibilities. We quote a passage of this remarkable address
as follows:
“With such a territory as this to overrun, organize and improve,
think you that we shall stop at the Western bounds of Canada? Or
even at the shores of the Pacific? Vancouver Island, with its
vast coal measures, lies beyond. The beautiful islands of the
Pacific and the growing commerce of the ocean are beyond.
Populous China and the rich East are beyond; and the sails of
our children’s children will reflect as familiarly the sunbeams
of the South as they now brave the angry tempests of the North.
The Maritime Provinces which I now address are but the Atlantic
frontage of this boundless and prolific region. God has planted
Nova Scotia in the front of this boundless region—see that you
discharge, with energy and elevation of soul, the duties which
devolve upon you in virtue of your position. Hitherto, my
countrymen, you have dealt with this subject in a becoming
spirit, and, whatever others may think or apprehend, I know that
you will persevere in that spirit until our objects are
attained. _I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but
I believe that many in this room will live to hear the whistle
of the steam engine in the passes of the Rocky Mountains and to
make the journey from Halifax to the Pacific in five or six
days._”
To some who heard this remarkable appeal and forecast it may have
sounded like the effort of a rhetorician. In reality it was the
deliberate and well-grounded hope of a man who was a life-long student
of public affairs, who had all the passion of a patriot and the fervor
of a seer, and who desired to see a great British North America in
unified devotion to the ideals of the British people. The fact that
Joseph Howe, in later years, differed from others as to whether this
Federation should be brought about without a plebiscite of the people of
Nova Scotia, does not in any way detract from the extraordinary fact
that in 1851 he prophesied a transcontinental railway, which even in
1871 some prominent public men denounced as a mad and impossible
undertaking. One has to confess that, even twenty years after Howe’s
prophecy, the thing did look impossible; but not only has the apparently
impossible project of a railroad from ocean to ocean been accomplished,
but that trans-continental has become part of a world-encircling
transportation system which is a marvel of efficiency. The Canadian
Pacific Railway not only welded together the scattered areas under the
flag on the North American Continent, but it has taken its place as an
organization of Imperial significance and value in peace and war, as
many events have proven. How and by whom this modern wonder-work has
been done it is our hope and purpose to make known in some imperfect,
but earnest, way in the chapters that follow.
Though planned in the East, where statesmen and financiers were facing
the problems of the New Dominion, it was in the wide West-land that the
need of this transcontinental railway was most manifest, and it was in
the West that the road first appeared. Hence we must study enough of the
history of the West to see the stage set for the entry of the steel
trail. Or, to put this in another way, we should find how the West had
developed so as to successfully challenge the attention of Eastern
statesmen and effectively call for a large Federal expenditure, in order
that it might become linked up with the already developed East for the
welfare of the whole Dominion. With this in view we shall, in the next
chapter, meet those who, before the coming of the railway, began to make
for the West a place on the map of history.