This view was not a purely Grand Trunk bogey. It coloured the Liberal party’s opposition to the C.P.R. Thomas Robertson, founder of the Toronto candy-making firm, used to tell with much glee how his old friend who became Senator Jaffray, president of “The Globe”, and of the Imperial Bank, was in the habit of declaring that he would not risk his life on a train north of Lake Superior in winter.
Grand Trunk understrappers, of whom I was one, had no direct contact with the big fighting that was going on between the old Canadian railway and the new, looking to the future control of transcontinental business. But we could feel temperatures; and we picked up information about the forces that were playing against each other, which, perhaps, the ordinary reader of the newspapers did not gather from what came out of the West. As a matter of fact, not much did come out of the West, where the most extraordinary phase of a most extraordinary phase of modern railway construction was being accomplished. There was no telegraph connection over all-Canadian territory between Montreal and Winnipeg, and the newspaper services were meagre indeed, compared with what they are now.
Of all the departments of railway construction and operation, only one of the C.P.R. was located in Montreal in 1882—the purchasing department. Its chief was a young fellow named Shaughnessy. Except in age, there wasn’t much difference between the purchasing agent of 1882 and the peer who resigned the C.P.R. presidency thirty-six years later. Mr. Shaughnessy had arrived early in the year, from the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, whose general manager, Van Horne, had been given charge of the completion of the C.P.R. The financial chiefs of the young railway, notably George Stephen, had their headquarters in Montreal. But they were generally regarded as having other major interests.
Among the Grand Trunk wise men, the enterprise that was poking its nose into the barbarian wilderness was looked upon with an almost amused toleration. In their own estimation, the Grand Trunk offices at Point St. Charles were a sort of Imperial hub. The C.P.R. was very much of a colonial affair, don’t you know—indeed, with a general manager from Milwaukee, rather too Yankee an affair, if the truth must bluntly be uttered.
But, even then, there were the symptoms of a somewhat chastened mood in the Grand Trunk. For the year 1882 had produced results which, when they were predictions during the previous winter, were laughed at; but when they were achievements at the end of the year were ominous indeed. The Van Horne regime on the C.P.R. was the most remarkable innovation that had happened to the business life of the Dominion. Its first year had seen the construction of about five times as many miles of railway as the C.P.R. had laid during any previous year; and most of that on the remote prairies. The promise to begin, in 1883, building around the north shore of Lake Superior looked like business—and business it was.
I think Van Horne had never been in Montreal when he took over the job of general manager of the Canadian Pacific on January 1, 1882, at Winnipeg. He came east shortly afterwards, and gave Ottawa and Montreal a few tastes of his quality. He did not settle in Montreal until after his first astounding Western season was ended. In midwinter, with little preparation made for the spring opening, Van Horne announced that he would lay five hundred miles of track on the prairies in the season of 1882. His advent at the head of affairs was not welcomed by a staff of Canadians and old countrymen. He was a Yankee. He was astonishingly aggressive. His vocabulary had all the certainty that belongs to the Presbyterian conception of everlasting retribution, without its restraint. He laughed at other men’s impossibilities, and ordered them to be done—a dynamo run by dynamite.
The only way to get construction material to Winnipeg and the West in time for the spring opening was from the south. Van Horne bought rails in England and Germany, had them shipped to New Orleans, and hauled in trainloads up the Mississippi Valley. He made a contract with a St. Paul firm for the grading, up to the point of actually laying ties and steel, from Oak Lake, west of Brandon, to Calgary. The day after the contract was signed they advertised for three thousand men and four thousand horses.
Van Horne organized his own gangs of tracklayers and kept them right on the heels of the graders. There was delay in starting work, because the Red River Valley above Winnipeg was abnormally flooded. Then the contractors didn’t work fast enough. On threat of cancelling the whole thing Van Horne speeded up the construction. Working furiously into the freeze-up, finished only 417 miles on the prairie section. But the work done elsewhere did complete over five hundred miles of construction that year; and it was plain that the new driving force would get even greater results another season.