CHAPTER V.
Portraying scantily the lives of a poor prairie line and a beloved prairie town.
On the way to the office one morning I heard that Mr. Baker, general manager of a railway in Manitoba, was looking for an accountant. A first effort to meet Mr. Baker failed, and, hearing that he had gone to Ottawa, I found him there. He offered me the post, at a salary of $150 a month, which was little more than I had received in New York. But the prospects in the newest section of a new country seemed better than elsewhere; and so I became the accountant of the Manitoba and North Western Railway, at the headquarters in Portage la Prairie.
The summer of 1886 was the first during which there was direct train service between Montreal and Winnipeg. Leaving Montreal Monday morning, the train reached Winnipeg on Thursday morning, and Portage la Prairie in the afternoon. Through the wilderness around the lakes the C.P.R. had innumerable wooden trestles, since filled in. Some of the engines still burned wood. With a new and unsettled roadbed, it was impossible to make very fast speed.
Port Arthur was still the C.P.R. port at the lakehead. The change to Fort William, because Van Horne and the town couldn’t agree about taxes, was one of those civic tragedies the effects of which time only partially obliterates. Van Horne said he would make grass grow in Port Arthur streets. The prophecy was fulfilled. For years after the removal to Fort William, it was said, all Port Arthur’s local debts were paid by the circulation of the only twenty-dollar bill preserved to the town. Port Arthur began to amount to something when the Canadian Northern came through from the West, and the seven-million-bushel elevator arose, like a temple of prosperity, on the waterfront, at the beginning of this century. Up to that time the C.P.R. had been everything in the West, and, as a natural process, had gobbled up everything in the way of feeders and rivals, including the Manitoba and North Western. An end was to come to this unchallenged supremacy, but nothing could deprive the C.P.R. of its primacy in the West and East—a primacy which has been used, broadly, for the advancement of the country. Every sane Canadian is proud of the C.P.R.
Mr. Baker, my new chief, was originally a railway man. He was an Englishman and had been private secretary to Lord Dufferin, the governor-general. He was on Van Horne’s staff in Winnipeg when the meteor was upsetting many precedents, four years before. The Manitoba and North Western was projected in 1880, as the Portage, Westbourne and North Western. The line was to start somewhere near Portage, and was to reach the northwestern boundary of the province. The town gave the railway a bonus, and so secured the terminals. The line was the first feeder of the C.P.R. in the prairie country. Its constructing engineer was Major Rogers, who discovered the Rogers Pass through the Selkirks, and refused to cash his gift cheque for $5,000.
Those were the days of the first western real estate boom—in some respects the fiercest financial cyclone that ever struck Canada. In a way, the accountant of the Manitoba North Western fell heir to a few of its lugubrious legacies; so that some things about its course in Portage la Prairie will be in order—it goes into the background of the more solid development of the wheaten empire of the plains.
The C.P.R. enjoyed a monopoly in the West. The promoters of the North Western wanted connection, in the future, with some American line at the boundary. They located their terminus at the extreme east of the town, and south of the C.P.R., and, they thought, pre-empted a crossing of the C.P.R. They bought 340 acres for $70,000, nearly two miles from where the terminals were finally established, and built a roundhouse for two engines. It wasn’t then clear which way the town would grow—there was for many years a rivalry between the west and east ends. For an ambitious railway to buy 340 acres, and build a home for two locomotives was regarded as a pretty good insurance of the town developing eastward, and it was confidently expected lots of money could be made out of the sale of the land.