Chapter XIII: Intensive and Extensive Work

The Canadian Pacific Railway, after terrific fighting against heavy odds, had reached its objective in the completion of the main line from sea to sea. It was a thin steel line reaching across the continent. But the driving of the last spike at Craigellachie simply gave the Company a base of operation from which to reach out for other conquests, in order that the work already done might prove productive of the best results. Mr. Van Horne, who had a perfect passion for doing new things and for bringing unknown places into the limelight, saw tremendous opportunities looming up for the full play of his abilities in that regard.

It was well for the road and for Canada that he saw the vista thus opening up ahead with the lure of great prospects for the exercise of his powers. Because otherwise he might have taken up work elsewhere. It is well known that more than one board in the States was ready to throw its presidency at the head and the feet of the man whose astonishing record on the Canadian Pacific had attracted the attention of the railway world. In fact Van Horne, on reaching Montreal after returning from Craigellachie, found a letter (and others followed from several directions) from Mr. Jason C. Easton, a great banker and railway man in Wisconsin. The letter expressed the hope that as Van Horne had only agreed to stay with the Canadian Pacific for five years, he would soon go back to the States and take a railway presidency there.

But besides the fact that the bigness of the task still to be undertaken in Canada held him to this country, the truth is that he had become personally attached to President George Stephen and his Scottish-Canadian associates. A little sidelight is thrown upon this phase of the matter by the incident connected with the driving of the last spike by Mr. Donald A. Smith (Strathcona). Mr. Smith owned a country home near Winnipeg, called Silver Heights, once the property of the Hon. James McKay, the handsome and famous frontiersman and interpreter who had such a large share in the making of the successful Indian treaties on the plains. After his removal to Montreal Mr. Smith allowed the house to remain closed except for the caretaker and those who looked after the farm stock and such like. On the way west by special train to Craigellachie, Mr. Van Horne thought it would be a good idea to have the house at Silver Heights opened up and have a spur-track laid to it from Winnipeg, as a surprise to the veteran who was to drive the last spike. When the train returned to Winnipeg the engine was reversed and the special began backing out of the station. Mr. Smith after a while noticed it, and then began to look out of the window. In a little while he said: “Why, gentlemen, if I can believe my eyes this ground looks familiar and there are Aberdeen cattle just like mine and that place looks like my house.” The train stopped and the conductor shouted “Silver Heights.” Mr. Smith was delighted beyond measure and again and again expressed his appreciation of the courtesy and thoughtfulness that had planned the surprise. It was just one of the ways by which the apparently unemotional Van Horne paid chivalrous personal compliment to the men whose character and courage he had learned to respect as they stood by him to their last dollar in the great task to which he had given himself so determinedly for four laborious years.

When Mr. Van Horne reached Montreal, after the opening of the main line, he began to speed up the plans he had been putting already in operation for the perfecting of the road and the increase of traffic in all directions. The quality of the road-bed was of even higher standard than the Government contract required. It will be remembered that once, when the road-bed was still new, Van Horne had aboard his train a number of Eastern men who were going out West in regard to the valuation of the Government section of the road constructed by Onderdonk. While still on the Canadian Pacific section in the mountains, Van Horne walked up the platform at Field and said to the engineer, Charley Carey, a fearless, skilful driver, “Let her out a bit, Charlie, we will show these fellows that they are on a railroad fit to run on, though the Government section is not.” Charlie “let her out” and made a fifty-one-mile run in an hour and wound up by doing the seventeen miles from Golden to Donald in fifteen minutes, and all safe. When they pulled up there, with a flourish and flashing fire on the rails as the brakes were put down hard to prevent running by the platform, the gentlemen from the East needed no further demonstration. The Canadian Pacific road-bed was all right even in those early days.

But Van Horne knew that much had still to be done. Construction had been careful, but rapid, and steel and stone and cement would have to replace many wooden culverts and bridges. Trestles had to be filled in or replaced by stone or steel. Rolling stock, shops, roundhouses, yards, stations, wharves and all manner of similar things had to be provided. Branch lines to feed the main line would have to gridiron the country, and connections would have to be made with the big systems south of the line.

Incidentally, it was as a result of his observation before he came to Canada at all, that he insisted on the Canadian Pacific keeping such auxiliary utilities as the telegraph, express and sleeping car departments. These also in their several ways would be feeders to the main treasury account. They were not the big tent, as Van Horne said, using a circus illustration; but the side-shows, as he called them, went a long way to increase the receipts. It had been the custom in other places to let other organizations have these franchises, but Van Horne said they took the cream of several kinds of business and “left the skim milk to the railway.” Van Horne wanted the cream, as the road would need the money; and so the Dominion Express and the Canadian Pacific Telegraphs and the Railway’s own sleeping cars, got into business for the big Company from the start. And these, like the dining car department and others of the same type, are marvels of service and efficiency, as every one now knows.

To speak about the creation of traffic is to use a somewhat peculiar, but well-founded, expression, because, in this case, it applies to traffic which had practically no existence before. Nothing escaped Van Horne’s notice. In the evening hours when he would be in camp on the prairie during construction time, he took delight in planning sports of various kinds for the men. “A change is as good as a rest,” is an old saying with a lot of truth in it. I have seen men apparently fagged out with a day’s march become lithesome as kittens over a game of baseball in the evening on the plain. Mr. Van Horne, who was a true artist, became interested in the bleached bones of buffaloes amongst the construction tents. And many a great buffalo head with its wide white frontal bone did the big railroader adorn with sketches made in coal or pencil, to the delight of the onlookers. And at the same time he was thinking of traffic in these buffalo bones. In my boyhood I have ridden through acres and miles of prairie where the white bones of the buffalo “lay thick as the autumnal leaves in Vallambrosa.” These acres of skeletons were an indictment against the selfish and greedy buffalo-hunting sporting men who had rounded up the herds, killed them by thousands, and took nothing but the tongue and the hide. Van Horne saw in these vast surface cemeteries how the slaughtered buffalo could still be of value. And so he had men gather up the bones and pile them in great heaps along stations and sidings, to be shipped by trainloads to Eastern factories that were glad to get them. Thus the railroader, who got the material for the cost of gathering, made good profits for the Railway, and at the same time cleared the land of an encumbrance. The man who could think of such things was not likely to fail in creating traffic.

Van Horne was anxious to get the country settled up along the great spaces in the Middle West. So he lured many cattle-men across the line by the advertising he did for the rich grazing lands in the southern portion of the North-West Territories, as the prairie country was then described. He drafted some striking and rather freakish advertisements for billboards in Eastern Canada, thus “capitalizing the scenery” of the Great Lakes and the mountains and making a special bid for tourist traffic. Some of these posters, such as “Parisian Politeness on the C. P. R.” and “‘How High We Live,’ said the Duke to the Prince,” are somewhat belittled by smart modern advertisers; but somehow they stuck in the memory of those who saw them, and that is the acid test of all advertising. The stream of tourists or other travellers on the main line was a very small rivulet in those early days, and there are records of cars with one or two passengers. But all passengers became enthusiasts over the comfort and courtesy of the road, so that the movement of travellers is now a steady-flowing river of humanity which, in certain seasons, almost overflows in a great tide of sightseers and business people.

It is interesting to recall in connection with Mr. Van Horne’s endeavours to secure settlers by various immigration plans, that he studied social conditions amongst the incoming settlers. That was before the day of rural telephones and motor cars, and he discovered without much difficulty that one of the obstacles to settlement of the prairies at that period was the dread of loneliness and isolation. And the keen-minded railroader formulated a plan to offset that dread in the minds of possible newcomers. He thought that tracts of land should be surveyed so as to permit settlers to live in communities at the apex of a triangle. In order that they might enjoy the social amenities and advantages of community life while their farms spread out from that place of common residence to the farther extremity of the land they held. It is of additional interest to recall that the introduction of the rectangular system of land survey from the United States led to considerable unrest in the Canadian West. It gave Louis Riel a chance to play on the emotions of the half-breed settlers on the South Saskatchewan River, where these settlers desired to hold their land as the early settlers did on the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, their homes near together on the river bank and the farms running back some distance on the plain. And Riel told the half-breeds that the Government wanted to break up their social life and make it difficult for them to have schools and churches and business places near at hand. In fact, the introduction of the rectangular survey, with its comparative isolation, was one of the prime reasons at the base of the Riel Rebellion. So that Mr. Van Horne had a good idea in operation when he advocated the settlement of newcomers close together. The Government, however, did not adopt the scheme. Some settlers, like the Mennonites, followed the plan of community settlement, even though the square farms made them lose time in going backwards and forwards to their work.

Mr. Van Horne’s efforts for the settlement of the country led also to his company building immense elevator accommodation at the Great Lakes and providing facilities for transport thereto.

There were flashes of humour in this grim fight for the settler. Mr. Van Horne was restively asserting one hard year that the grain-buyers who were paying only thirty-five cents a bushel for wheat were practising highway robbery on the farmer. Mr. L. A. Hamilton, the Company’s land commissioner, said to him, “Why not go in and outbid the grain-buyers.” The idea appealed mightily to Van Horne and he sent Alex Mitchell, a grain man from Montreal, to the West to organize some agency and offer fifty cents a bushel. No one knew that Mitchell was acting for the Canadian Pacific, but when he offered fifty cents a bushel, grain poured in on him till all the cars were full and bags of wheat were piled up along station platforms on account of the car shortage. Then the enemies of the Railway who were on the lookout for chances to find fault with the Railway and who, of course, had no idea that the Railway owned the wheat, attacked the Company because it could not take care of the crop and ship it out of the country. These active enemies got photographs taken to show the congestion of the grain at stations and on platforms along the line. Van Horne said nothing, but had these photographs bought up by scores and sent abroad to show that the prairies were so productive that the railway was caught unprepared to handle the enormous crops. All this was great immigration material, and a boomerang for the men who had gone to the expense of getting the photographs.

These things indicate how eagerly Mr. Van Horne was trying to get the country settled, and generally to build up within its borders, prosperous and successful communities. There is a theory in the minds of some kinds of people that a railway like this has been always bleeding the country to death. Hardly any theory could be more assinine and ridiculous. It could only spring from the alleged brains of the unthinking, even though it passes muster as a piece of stump or soap-box oratory. It may sound well as a vote-catcher, but thinking people will not be deceived by such a manifest contradiction in terms. The country and the railway, in such a case as this, must stand or fall together. Each is necessary to the prosperity of the other. Hence for one to attempt the destruction of the other is practically a round-about, but effective, way for that one to commit suicide. And a business concern has sense enough not to commit suicide. In this connection there is a fine paragraph in a sort of valedictory review of the history of the Canadian Pacific Railway, given in 1918 by Lord Shaughnessy, then President of the Company and Chairman of the Board. It is quoted here in advance of the chronological order of our story, because it is specially applicable to the point we are discussing, namely, the interdependence of the country, and the road. The paragraph is as follows: “The shareholders and Directors of the Company have always been impressed with the idea that the interests of the Company are intimately connected with those of the Dominion, and no effort or expense has been spared to help in promoting the development of the whole country.” This statement was intended to cover the whole record of the railway, and Lord Shaughnessy had such an outstanding reputation for stern rectitude and straight-flung veracity that we are fully warranted in taking it at its face value. Hence when we recorded above the efforts of Mr. Van Horne to extend and create the business of the road in the years immediately succeeding the completion of the main line, we were justified in saying that Mr. Van Horne’s endeavours in that regard were in the interests of both the railway and the country. The Canadian Pacific was from its inception an integral factor in creating and extending the social and productive activities of Western civilization.

Mr. George Stephen (first knighted and then raised to the peerage as Lord Mount Stephen, in recognition of his great services to the empire as a railway builder) held the Presidency of the Canadian Pacific from the beginning in 1880 till 1888, when Mr. Van Horne succeeded him. There was something very fine in the deep personal friendship that existed between these two men. And there is something almost pathetic in the correspondence carried on between them over Mr. Stephen’s desire to retire from the Presidency, and later on, when his health and age demanded rest, from the directorate of the road. The President and Mr. Van Horne had been specially close personal friends from the beginning, and their intense struggle to build the railway had cemented their friendship into a type of affection that was unmistakable, even though these two strong men were not of the kind to be demonstrative before the curious onlookers by the wayside of life. Stephen, on undertaking the Presidency in 1881, had indicated even then his purpose to retire when the task of building the road across the continent was completed. The greatness of this task was even then foreseen, although the enormous difficulties that developed, as we have noted in previous chapters, could not have been anticipated by finite vision. The burden of responsibility carried by the President was well-nigh crushing. And there is no doubt that Stephen, at times, felt keenly the fact that not only did some public men in Canada actually oppose what he was trying to do for the country, but that even some of those who had stood as sponsors for the railway undertaking were so slow to appreciate the terrific strain upon Stephen and his colleagues that they only came to their assistance after they were humbly besought for aid. Stephen’s nature was sensitive under these discouragements, but he kept his word and stayed till the main line was built. It was largely at Van Horne’s request that Stephen kept on for two years more and thus gave the General Manager a chance to consolidate and conserve what had been accomplished as well as proceed with extensions and branches. But in 1888 Stephen retired from the Presidency, and Mr. Van Horne was the logical choice to be his successor. In a fine letter which has vivid historical interest to all who know something of the stress and strain of his term of office, Sir George Stephen, under date of August 7th, 1888, wrote to the shareholders of the Company, his resignation. After referring to his determination, at the outset, to remain in office till the completion of the main line, Sir George relates how he remained two years more at the request of his colleagues. Then he goes on to say, “warned now by the state of my health, finding that the severe and constant strain which I have had to bear for the last eight years has unfitted me for the continuous and arduous work of an office in which vigour and activity are essential; feeling the increasing necessity for practical railway experience; and believing that the present satisfactory and assured position of the Company offers a favourable opportunity for taking the step I have so long had in contemplation, I have this day resigned the Presidency of the Company which I have had the honour to hold since its organization.” After referring to the fact that he would continue to have an abiding interest in the Company and remain meanwhile on the Board of Directors, Sir George, reticent and undemonstrative Scot though he was, goes on to say an evidently heartfelt word for the incoming President, as follows: “It is to me a matter of the greatest possible satisfaction to be able to say that in my successor, Mr. Van Horne, the Company has a man of proved fitness for the office; in the prime of life, possessed with great energy and rare ability, having a long and thoroughly practical railway experience and above all an entire devotion to the interest of the Company.” And so Mr. Van Horne succeeded in the Canadian Pacific Presidency, his friend, who was raised to the peerage, choosing the title from one of the lofty peaks in the Rockies. Thus did George Stephen, erstwhile “herd laddie” from the North of Scotland and draper’s apprentice from Aberdeen, become Lord Mount Stephen, and retire to spend his closing years at a beautiful country seat in the Old Country, where he had some rest from the heavy burden of responsibility.

But Mount Stephen still remained on the Directorate of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and many questions were still referred to him and many communications by letter and cable passed between him and Mr. Van Horne. There was some serious effort on the part of Grand Trunk men in London to bring about a unification of the two railways to be operated under the capable direction of Mr. Van Horne and his colleagues. But some indiscreet action on the part of Grand Trunk Directors in regard to advancing rates in order “to get all they could out of the people of Canada,” caused Van Horne to call negotiations off and say he would have no more discussions with men at long range. He had no great love for men who had tried to block the Canadian Pacific in the money markets of London, and he had no faith in the idea that a railway in Canada could be run satisfactorily if men in London were interfering. So the negotiations were ended and the Grand Trunk went on its extraordinary way. But that way is not part of our story.

As we have been discussing the intimate relationship between Mount Stephen and Van Horne, it is interesting to note that, much to the latter’s regret, the former President of the road, on account of his health condition demanding release from business, began to express again his desire to resign from the Board of Directors. He had remained on the Directorate and had been actively interested, as we have seen. But now he must have complete rest from responsibility. He was pressed to stay on the Board with less active participation, but he declared that “he could not be a figurehead and give himself no concern,” a statement which all directors of all companies should take to heart these days. And there is something touching in the fact that Mount Stephen, himself feeling the results of the heavy strain, began to warn Van Horne to be careful of his health and to throw more responsibility on others. As a matter of fact Van Horne was doing this within a short time after he became President. For Shaughnessy was moved up to be a Director and Vice-President and was making his brilliant business qualities felt in the management of the great enterprise he had seen grow from a small beginning.

But Van Horne consented with great reluctance to Mount Stephen’s retirement. The caution of the quiet Scot had been a fine counterpart to the intense and almost headlong impetuosity of the practical railway builder, and a great friendship had grown through the years. So that we are not surprised when we find that Van Horne had written Mount Stephen saying, “Your withdrawal would not be the withdrawal of a Director, but of the soul of the enterprise.” The business world is sometimes as drab and dead and unemotional as a sand waste, but it has its oasis spots, and words like those just quoted mark one of them. During those years, however, it is a notable thing, that whenever a proposal was made even by Mount Stephen to Van Horne, that the business administration of the Canadian Pacific Railway should be conformed to English methods, the bluff railroader refused point-blank. He said that “the English methods work in England, but they will not do here.” He allowed that the English system of stabilizing the financial conditions of a railway was the best, but when it came to operating the road the extent and character of Canada made English methods wholly inapplicable. Mount Stephen knew that Van Horne was a past master at administrative operation, and wisely counselled English capitalists to trust in Van Horne and his Canadian associates to run the road. When I say “Canadian associates” the expression must be understood as meaning that men resident in Canada were to administer and operate the Canadian Pacific Railway. Many of these men were Canadian born; others in the early days were from outside; but throughout the years they have constituted a wonderfully able and efficient and splendidly loyal staff. We have gone forward of events somewhat, owing to our discussing Lord Mount Stephen’s retirement and the relationship subsisting between him and the new President. We may go back a little and see the work of the railway under Mr. Van Horne in that high office. No other name could have been suggested to succeed Mount Stephen, but there is something exhilarating and encouraging to all young men on this continent in contemplating the career of Mr. Van Horne, who though born in another country and of alien parentage, came into the British Dominion of Canada and not only overcame any resentment against his intrusion, but who “made by force his merits known,” till he came to be acknowledged as one of the foremost citizens of Canada.

Mr. Van Horne, both before and after he became President of the Canadian Pacific, set himself not only to create local traffic, travel and immigration as already recorded, but he also very particularly began to secure branch lines and connections as feeders to the long main line from ocean to ocean. In this sort of work he was in his element, planning new lines and building them, buying out old roads and putting new life into them, getting access to the big centres of the East and linking up with the railway systems south of the line. This immense task of opening new lines and establishing new industries has been continued by all Van Horne’s successors till the Dominion and a good deal of the States knows the Canadian Pacific as it knows its city streets and country roads. In fact the Canadian Pacific is so ubiquitous that men take with the utmost gravity the old joke that the clocks of the country are set to the railway time as if the road was in control of the calendar. All these sayings, grave and gay, indicate such a widening of the sphere of this road since the last spike was driven that the mystic monogram “C. P. R.” is understood by every passer-by and the house-flag of the Company’s fleet is known upon the seven seas of the world. About this tremendous expansion and a few of the men back of it we may study more in the next chapter.