Beginning as Telegraph Operator He Built the Canadian Pacific.
“WHAT is success?” questioned Sir William Van Horne, half-reclining
within the hospitable arms of a big chair in his luxurious residence in
Shelbrooke Street, Montreal.
“You, Sir William, should surely know,” I remarked. “You are accredited
by the world with being very familiar with it.”
“There are numerous subjects upon which the world and I do not agree,”
replied, with a smile, the famous railroad builder.
“What is success?” he repeated slowly. “You might say, of course that
it is the achievement of a purpose, but in the selection and formation
of your purpose you may have made a failure, and then the whole is
failure.
“Is contentment success? I am sure it is not. Is wealth? Not by any
means. Is power? Not at all.”
Sir William was silent for a moment.
“The truth is,” he said suddenly, “the word success is one of the
hardest in the language to define, and I won’t attempt it. I should
say however, that a man’s real success in life can be pretty accurately
measured by his usefulness as a member of society.
“He may be rich or poor, courted or ignored, but if he does things
which at once or eventually make for progress in the world he is most
assuredly a success. If, for example, he discovers something new in
science, invents a valuable article, paints a great picture, writes a
great book, develops a great industry, or——”
“Or builds a great railroad?” I interrupted.
Sir William smiled, and after a pause remarked, “I suppose you
intend that to be a personal allusion, but we are not discussing
personalities. I will say, however, that some of the men whom down in
the States you call captains of industry have my admiration. I care
very little whether they give money to charity, whether their work is
colored by an active consciousness of its value to anybody outside of
their families, their friends and themselves. Most of the men of this
stamp are just in their dealings, and it is to their initiative force
that the United States owes her material greatness. They have started
wheels of industry that have given honest work and many of the comforts
of life to millions of self-respecting men. They are rich, yes, and we
say that riches do not constitute success. Nevertheless, these men have
achieved it in one of its highest forms.”
It was very plain from his manner that in making these remarks Sir
William’s thoughts were quite remote from his own career. Yet he
himself is one of the most conspicuous and striking representatives on
the continent of the class of men he was discussing. His humble start
as a small boy in a railway station, contrasted with his present place
as a giant in the field of railroading, indicates the height of his own
achievement. His career has been a long series of upward steps.
At an age when most boys are playing marbles in short trousers, young
Van Horne, forced by the death of his father to earn his own living,
obtained a place as general utility boy at a railroad station in the
county in Illinois in which in 1843 he was born. Here he saw and
seized his first opportunity; that is, he taught himself telegraphy.
With this knowledge and a robust personality as his only assets, he
journeyed to Chicago and found a position as telegraph operator in the
offices of the Illinois Central Railroad. But he did not long hold
this place. The telegraphic keys were too small for him. Before he
was twenty-two he had gone over to the Chicago & Alton road and was
dispatching trains—work of so responsible a character that no railroad
company would think for an instant of entrusting it to the ordinary
inexperienced youth. But the chief requisite of the train despatcher is
care, and care was only one of young Van Horne’s conspicuous qualities.
He had a combination of others that overshadowed it and brought him
promotion to the place of superintendent of telegraphy.
His work was still too easy for him, so they made him a division
superintendent. He was now where the officials of other lines could
see him, and the Wabash road took him away from the Chicago & Alton to
make him their general manager. He was about thirty years old at this
time, but he was already looming so large among the railroad men of the
Middle West that when the directors of the Southern Minnesota Railway,
which was in the hands of a receiver, bethought themselves to look
about for a man who could rehabilitate their road, their eyes fell upon
young Van Horne, and they asked him if he thought the line could be
made to pay.
He replied that he thought so, and gave his reasons. They then asked
him to assume the management of the moribund property. He liked then,
as he does now, this kind of a job. There were chances in it far
above the mere satisfactory performance of routine duty. There were
opportunities here to create, to develop, to quicken into new life; and
the young man’s instincts were all in this direction. So he took hold
with enthusiasm, and put the company on a paying basis with a rapidity
that amazed the stockholders who made him president. He went back to
the Chicago & Alton in 1878 as general manager.
In a lifetime of work very few railroad men achieve as much as this,
but Van Horne was still in his thirties and was just beginning.
The Canadian Government had been trying for several years to push
from the Ottawa Valley a road of steel across its vast domain to the
Pacific Ocean, and it had found the task too much for it. Surveys had
been made, but there had been comparatively little work of actual
construction. Finally, in 1880, it was decided to allow the project
to become a private enterprise, and in 1881, under the auspices of
Sir Donald Smith, now Lord Strathcona, the Canadian Pacific Railroad
Company was organized.
After Sir Donald had found the immense amount of money that was
required, his greatest care was to find a man to take charge of the
construction, much of it through unknown wildernesses, of the longest
railway that had ever been projected. The length of the proposed line
and the nature of the country through which it was to pass, made this
the most stupendous railway undertaking the world had seen. It was
necessary to procure a man fitted for a Herculean task. Sir Donald took
stock with the railroad men of the New World and decided that the most
promising of them all was William C. Van Horne.
The latter went into the work like a football player bucking the line
on a university team. An army of men was hired. At an average speed of
three miles a day for many months the steel rails were pushed into the
vast forests and the trackless prairies of the Northwest. At last the
workmen, urged incessantly by the directing mind of General Manager Van
Horne, attacked the Rocky Mountains, and under the charges of picks and
powder the mountains made way. At the end of the third year the summit
of the Rockies had been reached, and before another twelve months had
gone by the forbidding passes in the Selkirks were thundering and
trembling from the assaults of dynamite.
The last rail of the main line was laid in November, 1885. In the
meantime the company had been acquiring branch connections, and before
the end of the year was in possession of nearly forty-five hundred
miles of track. Before another six months had passed a great system
was fully equipped and Canada had her railway from the Atlantic to the
Pacific.
The contract had called for the completion of the road in ten years.
Van Horne and his men had finished it in five. Since then the system
has been extended until now it embraces nearly ten thousand miles of
track, and steamship lines cross the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
One may travel eighteen thousand miles on the route and property of
the Canadian Pacific. Cities and towns, many thousands of farms and
factories, have sprung up along the way. A new commonwealth in the
Northwest has been developed. And it has been done under the general
direction of Sir William C. Van Horne.
This is why Canadians, when asked to name living men who have done
most to develop the Dominion, couple his name with that of Lord
Strathcona. The latter, then Sir Donald Smith, had the courage to
assume a burden of railway construction that had proved too heavy for
the Government. He thus made possible Canada’s only transcontinental
railway. Lord Strathcona financed the road, but Sir William Van Horne
built it. The latter was its president from 1888 until 1899, when,
the creative work being done, the chief difficulties surmounted, he
resigned the presidency in favor of Sir Thomas Shaughnessy, and assumed
work of less detail as chairman of the board of directors.
Plain William C. Van Horne became Sir William in 1894, when he was
knighted by the queen for his high value as a worker in her domains in
North America. Being nothing if not democratic, he was inclined, until
he became used to it, to wax jocular about his title.
“I’ll wager,” he is reported to have said one day soon after he had
received it, “that my old friends among the railroad boys down in
Chicago, who used to call me Bill, will make some pointed remarks when
they learn that I am Sir William now.”
His bluff geniality is one of the things that Canada likes best about
Sir William. She claims him as a citizen, since his greatest work has
been done and he has lived for years within her boundaries. She is
proud of him and he is proud of her.
“Very few people,” he said to me, “have more than a faint idea of
the marvelous resources and possibilities of this country. In the
provinces of Quebec and Ontario the innumerable streams rushing down
from the mountains offer sufficient water power to run the factories
of a nation. A beginning has been made here that will eventually lift
this locality into one of the leading industrial and electrical centers
of the continent. In the making of paper in particular it will be
preëminent. Much of the pulp wood used in paper manufacturing has thus
far been obtained from Maine, but the supply there will be exhausted
in less than five years, and then the paper makers must come to Canada
for their supply of pulp. There are already extensive pulp wood
industries in the Province of Quebec, but these are bound to be greatly
multiplied.”
“It is in the Northwest, however, where millions of acres of land await
only the plow and seed to produce the finest wheat in the world, that
the most inviting opportunities for young men are to be found. The
Canadian Northwest is much as was the great region of the United States
west of the Mississippi River fifty years ago. It is a country at the
outset of its development—a country which needs and will adequately
reward the vigorous efforts of young manhood.”
“In your field of railroad building I presume there will be great
opportunities?” I remarked.
“Undoubtedly,” replied Sir William.
“Is the railroad business a good one for a young man?”
“It is as good as any,” answered Sir William thoughtfully, “if a young
man is content to work for a salary all his life. But he should not
be content with this. The salary habit is a bad one, very easy to
acquire, and very hard to shake off. The man with his stipend every
week is apt to settle into a groove. He adjusts his mode of life to his
Saturday envelope. It gets to be about the most important thing in his
existence. He becomes tied up to it, and is afraid to make a move that
will disturb this pleasant union. Always acting under the direction of
somebody higher up, he loses his power of initial effort, and never
develops to the full extent of his possibilities. He is likely to be
a dependent all his life. If after long years of service he loses his
place, as often happens, he is nearly helpless.
“I should say to the young man, strike out for yourself as soon as you
can. Don’t be afraid to take a chance. Most of the interest of life
lies in its uncertainties. You will have your tumbles, of course, but
the exercise of standing on your own legs will give you strength to get
up again and push on. One of the drawbacks about a salaried place is
that a man is apt to lose keen interest in his work, and interest is at
the foundation of energy, of concentration of inspiration, even, of all
the elements, in brief, that go to make up an adequate performance.
“If you are interested, you will be working with vigor long after most
other men have knocked off, tired out, as they imagine. I don’t care
to talk about myself, but I will say that whatever my efforts have
amounted to they have been impelled by strong interest. The man who
feels no enthusiasm for his work will never accomplish anything worth
while. Work that is interesting does more than all the doctors to keep
men alive and young. I endorse what Russell Sage says about vacations.
I don’t believe in them. When a man who has worked hard for many years
decides that he has earned a long vacation, and retires from business,
it almost invariably means the beginning of the end for him.
“There is nothing strange in this. He has suddenly cut off the
interests of a lifetime, and no longer has momentum to carry him along
the road of life. On the other hand, look at the old men who have not
retired. Russell Sage himself is an excellent illustration; but in his
city, New York, where the business pace is supposed to be very swift
and wearing, there are many others—patriarchs to whom the allotted
span of threescore years and ten is beginning to look like comparative
youth, and yet who still are handling great interests. If they had
stopped work when they had made fortunes, most of them would have been
long since dead.
“Several years ago a London physician of Lord Strathcona informed him
that he was in a bad way; that his friends would be mourning his loss
in a week unless he permitted himself to relax. In less than a month
the death of the doctor made it impossible to withdraw his injunction,
so Lord Strathcona has been on the go ever since. He is over eighty
now, and is so vigorous that he thinks nothing of taking little
business trips from London across the Atlantic and the continent of
North America to Vancouver.
“I believe in recreation of course, but I think it should be of
a kind that involves activity of the brain. My own mental rest I
find in painting pictures. I am very fond of doing landscapes. This
takes my mind into a sphere rather remote from railway earnings and
expenditures, and is refreshing.”
Sir William showed me a number of his paintings. Some were hung on
his walls among those of well-known landscape artists, and in the
comparison they suffered not a particle. I commented upon this fact.
“You can’t be much of a judge of art,” he answered with a smile. In
this matter, however, many good judges are agreed. It is remarkable
that a rough and ready man of affairs, a captain of industry in the
true sense, should be able to paint pictures of a quality that many a
professional artist might well envy. But Sir William has even wider
interests than railroad building and painting. He is largely identified
with financial enterprises of great magnitude in the United States,
and at present is much absorbed in developing the resources of Cuba,
upon which island he believes there are opportunities among the finest
in the world for men of either large or small capital.
In addition to these pursuits he is a botanist and geologist of wide
and accurate knowledge, and has for years been a close student of the
civilization and art of the Orient. Nothing delights him more than a
conversation on the art products of China, and he takes great pleasure
in showing his friends beautiful specimens in his large collection of
Oriental pottery and pictures. Supplement to these interests those of
the practical farmer and you will have a partial idea of the range
of accomplishments of a man who was making his living at the age of
thirteen, and is self-taught.
Sir William has an extensive farm not far from Winnipeg. On a recent
occasion, when the agriculturists of the region were holding a meeting
to discuss their relations with the Canadian Pacific Railway, and to
air some little grievances which they thought they had, Sir William was
present, and was called upon to make a speech. He slowly arose, and the
tillers of the soil settled back in their chairs to listen to words of
great weight and finality from the master spirit of the road.
“I am inclined to think, gentlemen,” said Sir William in one of his
opening sentences, “that we farmers are pretty well treated by this
road.” From this point the agriculturists were with him to a man, and
they left the hall with the feeling that their interests could not be
otherwise than well looked after by the railroad company, since at the
head of it they had a fellow-farmer.