“Van Horne is calm and harmless-looking. So is a she-mule; and so is a buzz-saw. You don’t know their true inwardness until you go up and feel them. To see Van Horne get out of the car and go softly up the platform you would think he was an evangelist on his way West to preach temperance to the Mounted Police. But you are soon undeceived. If you are within hearing distance you will have more fun than you have ever had in your life.”
So much for the temper that was in the Canadian railway situation forty years ago. West of old Ontario there wasn’t much else but land, water and temper. When Van Horne went to Winnipeg between the Lake of the Woods and the Great Divide, and from the United States boundary to the Arctic ocean, red and white people combined were only sixty thousand. British Columbia, which had come into Confederation on promise of railway connection with the East, contained fifty thousand people, of whom half were Indians.
Allowing for the low traffic value of the Indians, it is a liberal computation that from the American boundary to the Arctic Circle there weren’t forty people per mile to create the business between the Ontario frontier and the Pacific Ocean. Van Horne’s faith was force and his force was faith. Never was there a greater combination for a greater adventure. Literally, according to its faith, it has been to the C.P.R.
CHAPTER IV.
Reviewing vanished practices, including ticket scalping and fast freight lines.
When the Canadian Pacific Railway was built across the prairies there was no railway for a hundred miles south of parallel forty-nine. Red River carts, canoes and dog-sleds furnished all the transportation between it and the North Pole. Van Horne earned his first freight revenue from the Saskatchewan plains by shipping buffalo bones to Eastern fertilizer manufacturers. When he stopped at construction camps he would draw pictures on buffalo skulls for the men’s amusement in the evening. To build a railway across empty plains and over mountain ranges was regarded as unmitigable folly by many people who believed themselves to be far-seeing.
While it was being done the state of Eastern Canada was not very encouraging. Half of the settled farm land of Ontario was uncleared bush. Farmers received little or nothing for their produce. The cities were small. Manufacturing was in a sickly, uncertain infancy. In average years the country was importing something more than a hundred million dollars’ worth of goods and exporting something less. The interest on borrowed money, therefore, was being paid with more borrowed money. The revenue of the Dominion was about thirty million dollars. You could get good board in Montreal or Toronto for four dollars a week, and very good for six. Everybody was poor.
There isn’t the same sort of plenty in Canada that there was forty years ago—I mean as to eats and drinks, the cost of fuel, and the simplicities of fun. But, on the whole, things are vastly better than they were. Those who discover a moral declension in the people are sorely mistaken.