Chapter VIII: A Constructive Genius

Mr Van Horne, who was a native son of Joliet, Illinois, struck Winnipeg just as 1882 was dawning, and the thermometer was ranging around forty below zero. Those of us who were born in or near Winnipeg can testify that in such an hour the ozone makes one tingle with energy, and leads to an active life as a natural consequence. Van Horne was an embodiment of driving power anyway, and perhaps the stimulating atmosphere raised that power to a high algebraic degree. Certain it is that every one around Winnipeg, especially in the service of the new railway, realized that a human projectile had been shot into the community and that things had to move on under its impulse or move out of the way. So distinctly was this felt, that not only was the climate rather frigid, but the social atmosphere around offices and clubs took on a certain degree of coolness. That any one should come in from the outside and, after a brief survey, should start in to make swift changes and equally swift appointments, regardless of social or political influence, was not likely to make the man who so acted a general favourite. But in a short time the marvellous efficiency of the man commended him to everybody worth while. His bigness in ignoring any prejudice against him, his hearty, magnetic and utterly unaffected personality, soon won the respect of his men in all ranks and he in turn came swiftly to have a high respect for the courage, ability and initiative of the Canadian people. For a while he had to have around him some experts from his own country, like that Master-Superintendent, John M. Egan, whose ability as a practical railroad builder was a great asset to the new enterprise. But Van Horne soon had a small army of Canadians in training under his own leadership, and to them he became deeply attached. It is now, at least, an open secret that when men back in the States heard that his reception in Winnipeg was rather cool they sent him word “to come back to your friends and let the Canadians build their own road.” But Van Horne, knowing that his own brusque entry and method laid him open to some blame for the situation, and knowing also the solid worth of the people to whom he had come, declined to return. Again, a few years later, when the Canadian Pacific Railway project seemed on the point of failure for lack of funds, even though the Directors had put their all in the great venture, some one said to Van Horne that he need not worry, because there were positions waiting for him across the line any time he wished to go there. But he stood by his guns and said that he was not going back to the States—“I’m not going to leave the work I have begun. I’m going to see it through, no matter what position is open to me in the United States.” The time was to come, however, when even the iron nerves and the tremendous staying power of this apparently stolid and determined scion of the Netherlands were to be tried to the limit, and when Van Horne found in Canadian men the invincible spirit which made their joint work a sort of miraculous success.

In the meantime, when he had done some highly necessary things in Winnipeg, in that fateful year of 1882, he went down to Montreal to meet President Stephen and the Directors. No doubt there was a mutual “sizing up” of each other, but with satisfactory results. The President and Van Horne took to each other at once, and became thenceforward the two that did the most perfect team work. But they could not have pulled the enterprise far without the steady, persistent co-operation of the other Directors. They all got into the harness and they all fell in with the Western teamster’s homely prescription for success: “Keep the tugs tight; never mind the hold-backs.”

Thenceforth Van Horne became, till the completion of the Transcontinental, the trusted railway expert and, in this regard, completely supplanted Hill, who had been the only man of the original Canadian Pacific Syndicate who was a practical railroader. Under the leadership of Van Horne, Canada would now begin to grow her own railway men as a home product.

One of the items taken up on the occasion of Mr. Van Horne’s first visit to Montreal was the construction of the Railway over the rock-wilderness on the North Shore of Lake Superior. The Mackenzie Government, as we have seen, thought that section could wait for a somewhat indefinite period, and in the meantime Mackenzie said that the great fresh-water sea could be used as a link in transportation. Then, when the Stephen-Hill Syndicate was formed, both of these gentlemen agreed with the policy of not constructing that section until there was more settlement in the West. But Stephen and Hill, not believing in the tardy water-stretches as links in railway construction, proposed to build from the East to Sault Ste. Marie, and there join up with a branch of Hill’s road, the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba, to which, as the architect of their fortunes, they were financially and otherwise attached. This of course would have given Hill, in large measure, the control of Canadian traffic from East to West.

It will be recalled that neither Sir John Macdonald nor Sir Charles Tupper, his fighting Railway Minister, approved of this American link in the road, and that in England they had broken with Sir Henry Tyler, of the Grand Trunk, on that particular point. And when Van Horne went east to meet the Directors in 1882, he made short work of the plan which both Stephen and Hill had cherished. He felt that to give Hill’s road the haulage of through Canadian traffic over a section of his track would make the Canadian Pacific a sort of subsidiary of his line, and such a situation was abhorrent both to Van Horne’s railroad instincts and to his estimate of his ability to run his own road. In a proper sense of the word Van Horne was always egoist enough to assert his own dignity when occasion required. In fact he would let no man rob him of the opportunity of boasting on any occasion when it seemed legitimate and necessary. Hence, when he met the Canadian Pacific Directors, at that first meeting, he drew for them a verbal picture of what the traffic on an all-Canadian route from ocean to ocean was to be in the future, and by the time he was through his visualizing, the President and the other Directors let this new General Manager have his will. Van Horne was no half-way man, and when he started out to build the Canadian Pacific Railway he was going to put emphasis on the word and idea of Canadian. The day was to come when, despite some partisan and political mud-throwing, all true Canadians would acknowledge that the big railroader was right. Of course, this action of Van Horne and the Directors was, as already intimated, the last straw for Hill. He was too keen and clear-headed a man not to understand that he and Van Horne, with their big projects more or less competitive, could not work together to advantage. So he withdrew with some emphasis, but we are not to forget that he made railroaders of Stephen, Smith and Angus, and that through his recommendation, Van Horne came to Canada. The Canadian boy, James J. Hill, who had left his home in Rockwood, Ontario, to seek his fortune in the States, and become a maker of its North-West, also did, for various reasons and motives, a good day’s work for his native land.

When Van Horne met the Directors in Montreal they discussed also the momentous question of the route to be followed. When Sandford Fleming was Chief Engineer during the regime of the Hon. Alexander Mackenzie, the line was mapped out to cross the Red River at Selkirk, thence westward through the North Saskatchewan country, crossing the Rockies by the Yellowhead Pass, and so on to the Pacific. But the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, in 1881, decided for a southerly route through Winnipeg, and across the plains and then through the mountains by the Kicking Horse Pass. For the most part the engineers preferred the Yellowhead Pass, on account of the comparatively easy grades and fewer obstacles in the way. Van Horne favoured the Kicking Horse Pass and the Directors agreed to that also, although up to that time there had been no pass discovered through the Selkirk range that lay right beyond the Rockies like an impregnable rampart. But if no pass was found through the Selkirks, the track might be laid in a more roundabout way along the Columbia. Once again these men were making a big venture under the leadership of Van Horne, who seemed to be having pretty much his own way at the Board meeting. The Directors had secured him at a large salary because he was a practical railroader, and they were evidently going to give him opportunity to earn it by letting him assume heavy responsibility.

The change of route from the Yellowhead to the more difficult Kicking Horse Pass has been much discussed and, in some considerable degree, criticized. But there were weighty reasons for the change as Van Horne saw them. The transcontinental route from the East through the Kicking Horse Pass was one hundred and twenty-five miles shorter that the other, and that is an item, when the costs of construction were considered, as well as time in the trip across the continent. Besides that, the Kicking Horse route, if adopted, would preclude the possibility of any railway building between the Canadian Pacific and the boundary-line and thus draining traffic towards the States. The great valleys of the Kootenay, the Columbia and the Okanagan were more accessible by the Kicking Horse route, and such valleys are supreme in productiveness in British Columbia. And I am not sure but Mr. Van Horne, with his strong sense of the artistic and the scenic splendour of the southern route, felt that in the future it would, as a tourist route of unequalled attractiveness, become one of the greatest and most remunerative assets of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The supremacy of the Kicking Horse route in that regard has been fully recognized by world-travellers. The famous Sir Edwin Arnold, author of “The Light of Asia,” who had been in practically all countries, one day said to Mr. Castell Hopkins, of Toronto, as they met on a Canadian Pacific Railway train in the Rockies, “These vast ranges exceed in grandeur the Himalayas, the Alps and the Andes, all of which I have seen.” The matchlessly inspiring scenery of this route will always remain to make it an irresistible magnet to tourists and travellers generally. For the rest of it, any problem in gradients will vanish at any time desired, by the lowering of grades and electrification, if ever the situation demands such action.

Before leaving the Kicking Horse Pass discussion, it may be interesting to some of our readers to relate the origin of this striking name. When I first went down along the river I recall some one on the train who told his version by saying that the name was given to the river because as it rushed down the grade it was constantly thrown back in splashing spray by the rocks, as if by the kicking of a horse. This is a poetic description of a very turbulent stream where the rocks look vicious enough to kick anything to pieces that might be hurled against them, but it is not the real origin of the name. The prosaic fact is that when, in 1858, Capt. Palliser and Dr. (later Sir James) Hector were exploring the region they were leaving the camp by this river one morning and Hector, while trying to round up a straying packhorse, was kicked in the chest by his own riding horse as he was passing him. Hector was laid up in the camp for several days, and the incident was so impressed on the explorers that they anathematized and immortalized this lively animal by calling the river and pass after him.

When Mr. Van Horne went back to Winnipeg from the meeting of Directors in 1882, things looked well around that Western gateway city because the advent of the Canadian Pacific had given rise to a real-estate boom whose intoxicating influence had gone to people’s heads so that they were all hilariously rich, at least in imagination, and, therefore, indomitably optimistic. This phase of undue excitement passed, but Winnipeg is my old home city, and hence I am able to testify that in no city with which I am acquainted was it so true, as it used to be said of the people of Winnipeg, that “they lived on hope.”

However, it remains true also that the collapse of that famous Western real-estate boom, the crash of which affected every place from the Great Lakes to the mountains, made the task of the Canadian Pacific Board and Mr. Van Horne an exceedingly difficult one right at the outset. The sudden deflation in Western land values and the large number of business failures through the recession of the boom wave shook the faith of outsiders in the country’s future and depressed the people within the country at the same time. I have known the West all my life, but I do not recall any period more generally discouraging than that after-the-boom period in the 80’s, during which the Canadian Pacific Railway was begun and carried to an amazingly successful completion. The sudden drop in everything, as well as the rumblings and then the outbreak of the Riel Rebellion on the plains, put, in large measure, a damper on immigration; and railway building through an uninhabited land is not exhilarating work.

These were local conditions, but there were other things which sprang up at the very beginning to make the way of the new railway company hard. A few of these things may be indicated for the benefit of the superficial people who think the Canadian Pacific got an easy start. In reality it had from the first to fight every foot of the way against adverse influences. When the Company had to do its financing it found influential forces barring the doors. The Grand Trunk, with its host of big Directors and shareholders in the Old Country, attacked the new transcontinental which would be sure to invade its rich reserves in Eastern Canada; and so the London market was, in large measure, cold to any efforts made by the new Canadian Pacific Board to raise money in the world’s financial centre. Similarly the United States railways which were headed for the Pacific saw the danger of a successful Canadian rival, and did all they could to prevent the Canadian Pacific from securing any money in New York. With hostile forces thus operating in these two famous money centres, any one can understand that the new Canadian venture was in for a bad time. And we have to add to all these barbed-wire fences around the money markets abroad, the regrettable fact of almost constant nagging and criticism in Canada from sources of such wide range as the “will-never-pay-for-axle-grease” politicians, and the men who wished to cut in with the railway lines in productive territory while the Canadian Pacific was struggling to cross leagues of unpeopled rocks and plains, not to mention the people who thought the new road should benevolently carry everything for them at bare cost.

Keen-minded men like Mr. Van Horne and the Directors of the Canadian Pacific, saw that the way ahead bristled with difficulties. But they declined to quail. They had started on a great adventure and they were looking far ahead so steadily that they were saved from morbid contemplation of what lay between them and the final triumph. Their attitude toward the unproductive Lake Superior North Shore rock-wastes was typically prophetic. Despite the derisive critics who always have ridiculed the inception of big undertakings, the Canadian Pacific Railway men looked beyond the North Shore to the West-land that would someday become the granary of the Empire. Thus did they keep their courage alive. Like a famous warrior of old, they refused to see the intervening difficulties while they knew that across somewhere was the land of promise and the triumph that was worth a great struggle to attain.

When Van Horne left that meeting of Directors in Montreal he hurried back to Winnipeg with the fire of a great railway-building battle in his eye. He felt he had the support of a strong and determined body of men, and they were fully satisfied that they had in Van Horne a man worth backing. They all began to realize very vividly, from the attitude of the financial world as above outlined, that the fabled achievements of Hercules would have to be made real in the building of the road. Van Horne, as the practical builder, set his mind on his own side of the work. His energy had been pretty well tested out in the States, but he knew perfectly well that anything he had done hitherto was child’s play compared to what he was now going to attempt. I was much interested the other day in coming across an item somewhere which suggested that, some years before, Van Horne had been contemplating building a railway in the Western States to tap the Canadian North-West. The vast unpeopled territory, labelled on his map, “British possessions,” appealed to his pioneering and adventurous spirit. It was the land of romance and mystery and of illimitable possibilities, where he could blaze new trails and build steel highways over a territory bigger than half-a-dozen European kingdoms.

And now his opportunity had come in an unexpected, but better, fashion, and, as stated, he set his mind upon it with a sort of terrifying concentration. He found that Government contractors in 1881 had built some 160 miles of railway on the plains. He told the Directors in Montreal that he would build 500 miles on the prairie in 1882. He started in to do it and looked to the Directors to pay the bills. Some years after it was all over Van Horne said one day, as a tribute to the President, “Stephen did more work and harder work than I did. I had only to build the road, but Stephen had to find the money.” Those who remember them both are ready to say that the honours were even. Each did his part well and each had many helpers.

In view of the fact already stated, that Canada was new to the railway-building business, it is surprising to find that Mr. Van Horne brought very few assistants from the States. Besides Egan, who did most excellent work in construction days out of Winnipeg, Kelson of the Milwaukee road was brought to be general storekeeper at Winnipeg. There was urgent need of a key man in Montreal to be the general purchasing agent for the whole road. And as everything had to be purchased for a new undertaking an altogether unusual man was required. Besides other supplies, the man who came as purchasing agent would have to be a sort of quarter-master-general to feed an industrial army spread out in a long line from East to West and with practically no line of communication along which to transport the necessaries of life. For that position Mr. Van Horne had his eye on a young man named Thomas G. Shaughnessy, who had been on his staff in Milwaukee. Mr. Van Horne had opened up offices over the Bank of Montreal on Main Street in Winnipeg. “One day,” says Mr. E. A. James, who was then Mr. Van Horne’s private telegraph operator, “there came into the outer office a fashionably-dressed, alert young man, sporting a cane and giving general evidence of being what we call a live wire. He asked for Mr. Van Horne and gave his name as Shaughnessy. I looked up Mr. Van Horne in another office and gave him the message. He said to the gentleman to whom he was speaking, ‘I am glad Tom has come; he is the man I want for general purchasing agent.’” And thus another notable star swung into the orbit of the new company. But beyond these just mentioned to take hold at the beginning, Mr. Van Horne said no one else was needed from outside, as the new General Manager found Canadians so full of initiative and energy that he had no difficulty in getting men of calibre and zeal without going beyond the Dominion.

Incidentally it may be mentioned that a fire took place in the building during that winter of 1882, and the offices of the railway and the Bank had to be moved to temporary quarters in the old Knox Church building. There Mr. Van Horne occupied the vestry and Mr. I. G. Ogden, who became famous as auditor and finance minister for the road, held office space in the library of the Sunday school, while the bank itself did business in what had been the main auditorium of the church. The quarters were unusual and not very convenient, but the atmosphere would be good.

It was still winter of the year in which Van Horne had said he would build 500 miles of the road on the prairie. He had to wait for the spring’s approach; but meanwhile he was stacking up supplies at Winnipeg, “from the ends of the earth,” as people there said, and in enormous quantities—rails from Britain and the Continent, ties from the woods east of Winnipeg, stone from every available quarry within reach, lumber from the Minnesota country and from the Lake of the Woods. Much of this came in during the frozen months by rail from the south, and the yardmen in the States were delighted to send along whole trains of material for “Van Horne’s road” as they called it. The main thing was to get the stuff forward. And Van Horne kept the wires hot in seeing that there would be no delay.

LORD STRATHCONA (_Donald A. Smith_)

LADY STRATHCONA

_An Interesting Group_]

He became suddenly the organizer of an army—not for destruction, but for construction—a great mobile force which was to move steadily forward under the direction of his genius and daring. That army was to use high explosives and unbounded physical energy, but it was with a purpose to enrich and not to devastate the country. It was to use ploughshares instead of swords, but its victories were to be certain and enduring. The fight was to be hot and at times the line would waver, but there would be no retreat. It will be interesting to follow that army with two such leaders as Van Horne as the master builder and Shaughnessy as the matchless provider of supplies.