Canada To-day and To-morrow

by Arthur E. Copping

TYPICAL NEW TOWN IN SASKATCHEWAN, VIEWED FROM THE PRAIRIE

STREET SCENE IN A NEW TOWN

Yes, yes, I could see all that; but, still, the virtues of the C.P.R. had not been explained away to my satisfaction. Many transportation and other companies have an interest in serving the public, but they act within the limited sanction of prearranged routine, and their servants are held in leash by red tape. I had never before come across a capitalistic corporation which offered a helping hand to anyone in need of it, dealing with each case on its merits. I had never before encountered a capitalistic corporation which, through its thousand and one agents, acted in all matters with ungrudging and anxious zeal. All along the broad tract of country that it serves, the C.P.R. is a watchful, ministering, unseen, personal force. It is actuated by an almost paternal but wholly unobtrusive sense of responsibility towards the country it has created and the people that country contains. I might fill this chapter with different examples of how interest is shown and assistance rendered. I can even give an example that is of purely personal application to myself. Last autumn it became known to the C.P.R. that I, a visitor from England, was laid up with a temporary indisposition in a hotel at Gleichen, Alberta. The C.P.R. wrote to say it was sorry! You may smile, gentle reader, but such was the pleasant fact; nor am I prepared to deny that the process of convalescence was assisted by the knowledge that, in my short lapse from health, I had the brotherly sympathy of an institution that represented £80,000,000 of capital.

Common sense scouts the idea that the C.P.R., in the pains it takes to assist the farmers of the prairies and the fruit-growers of British Columbia, is actuated by a conscious desire for more freight (it already carries 113,000,000 bushels of grain per annum), or for more passengers (of whom its yearly total has grown to 11,000,000—a figure, by the by, which, since it is larger than the population of the Dominion, shows that many Canadians travel frequently). Nay, the country having now entered upon an era of rapid and automatic growth, the prosperity of the C.P.R. is bound to increase, irrespective of what may be called the fraternal side of its activities. What is more, it has been shown to the satisfaction of financial experts that even were the C.P.R. divorced from its railroad, and the revenue derived therefrom, it could continue to pay its 10 per cent. dividend.

No; I am convinced that to explain the personal services that the C.P.R. renders to the community, to understand why the C.P.R. is a kind of joint stock Government, we must hark back to the conditions that fixed its traditions.

In its early days the C.P.R. had to face powerful enemies, great difficulties, and the burden of anxiety that is inevitable where heavy capital outlay has to precede opportunity of remunerative revenue. Its critics said the line could never pay. Its promoters were supported only by their faith—their faith in a population that had not yet arrived. Nowadays it is difficult to realise that in 1885 men had still to be convinced of the fertility of the western prairie. For centuries it had yielded the world nothing but the furry coats of the animals roaming its unpopulated wilds. Even amid the strenuous work of constructing the line at high pressure—with gangs of engineers, navvies and station-builders forming a great graded army of men, accompanied by thousands of horses, which pressed forward in orderly sequence from section to section, each camp of toilers working in an organised relation to the base of supplies following them across the country—even at that initial stage of its vast enterprise did the C.P.R. begin studying the interests of the future settlers. Special agricultural gangs were put on the construction trains, and at intervals of about twenty miles they alighted and ploughed a few acres, which were afterwards seeded, with the result that, though the cultivation was of the roughest, and no measures were taken to keep marauding animals at bay, such heavy and excellent crops were produced that the high potentialities of soil and climate were triumphantly advertised. Thus early did the C.P.R. “show the way” and identify itself with the practical interests of settlers in the West. It had land to sell them, it was providing them with lines of communication, with means of transport. It followed that the new population would be largely dependent upon the railway. But the railway would be wholly dependent upon the new population. Its fortunes were contingent upon this one factor—whether people should come and prosper and be satisfied. That factor controlled the C.P.R.’s policy and established its principles. For its rescue from the sea of financial indebtedness could alone be effected by the settler.

To the extent of that indebtedness I have already given some clues. Let me give a few more.

The 200-miles section along the north shore of Lake Superior cost £2,400,000, a path having to be blasted through granite and flint, in which process £420,000 worth of dynamite was used. At Pic River stone piers had to be built to carry an iron truss bridge at an elevation of one hundred and ten feet above the water level. At Jackfish Bay three miles of winding track were necessary to accomplish half a mile of progress, the bridges, tunnels and galleries on that section costing £300,000. In 1882 four thousand men, having 3,400 horses and 1,700 four-wheeled wagons, were at work on the road, fixing rails, sleepers, spikes, fishplates and bolts. In fifteen months 677 miles of main track and 48 miles of sidings were constructed, ten million cubic yards of earth being moved in the process. Between Calgary and the Bow River Pass from two to three miles of bridges had to be made. Between Port Moody and Kamloops—213 miles—the engineers had to cut twenty tunnels, representing a total length of one mile and three-quarters, through granite and crystalline limestone. In the mountain district of the west the line had to reach a height of 5,321 feet above sea level. Kicking Horse Pass presented engineering problems which could only be successfully surmounted by protracted toil; but British Columbia was impatient for the railway, and so at that point a temporary section was constructed which sacrificed the easy gradient elsewhere secured, and for years afterwards several powerful locomotives were required to pull each train up the consequent “Big Hill.” That formidable incline has since been superseded by an alternative section, costing £300,000, and being seven miles of winding track, which embraces two spiral tunnels through the mountain, and two steel bridges (separated by only a few hundred yards) over the Kicking Horse River, which, by the way, is crossed nine times by the C.P.R., six of the bridges being within a distance of twelve miles. Another zig-zagging piece of work occurs in the Illecillewaet Valley, where the line turns south, crosses a high bridge and curves back almost to the starting-point, but at a lower level, then forms another great curve across a ravine, being 120 feet lower down on its return, afterwards doubling upon itself and crossing and recrossing the river; so that a spectator on one of the neighbouring heights can see a sinuous railway that reveals six tracks running almost parallel to one another, each on a different level and each supported largely by huge trestle bridges. Miles upon miles of the line, where precipitous mountains are skirted, had to be protected by timber corridors roofed at an angle to deflect avalanches.