After his advent in 1882, it did not take Van Horne long to establish his supremacy. The president of the C.P.R. was George Stephen, who became Lord Mountstephen. But he had removed to England, and Van Horne had a free hand in Canada. He had his faults, of course; but he was a big man, who saw railway policies in a big way. His attitude to the farmers was like his attitude to poor little lines like the Manitoba North Western. He knew that the more the farmers received for their crops, after paying freight charges, the more they could buy, and the more west-bound freight the C.P.R. would carry. He knew that the small railway was acting as a feeder to the C.P.R. for both outbound and inbound traffic. He gave the weak line a square deal every time until it became apparent that it was intended to compete with the C.P.R. in the long-haul business. Then there was a fight, in which his antagonist needed all his wits if he wished to admire himself when peace was restored.
Well, the Farmers’ Union busied itself with the scandal, as the Union called it, of Manitoba farmers having to sell their wheat for many cents a bushel less than their brethren did a few miles away. Just as the Canada Colonization Company is not the pioneer in financing land settlement, so the grain growers’ organizations of this century were not the first farmers’ bodies to jump into the business of grain buying, in self-defense of the farmers’ interests.
The Farmers’ Union began to buy wheat along our side of the border at higher prices than were paid by the Manitoba elevator and milling people. For some time there was a great deal of puzzlement as to how in the world Purvis and his men managed to buy grain, and pay for it. The truth was that the C.P.R. and the Bank of Montreal, its very good friend, had a hand in the revolution—not purely as a sort of joint Santa Claus for the farmer, but because it was not good business to allow the farmer to be ground beneath the upper and the nether millstone.
I do not suggest, of course, that any railways have been operated in Western Canada purely as philanthropic enterprises. The farmer hardly claims that distinction for himself. But I do assert that the element of public service and public fairplay has entered more largely into railway administration than the public has often been informed; and that, often and often, compared with his fellows, in purely private undertakings, the lot of the railway president, manager, and financier has not been a happy one.
CHAPTER VII.
Telling how Manitoba struggled through an era of expansion and the war of Fort Whyte.
Winnipeg was at a peculiar stage of its growth at the time of my transfer there from Portage la Prairie when, in 1893, the Manitoba North Western went into a receivership, because it couldn’t pay its fixed charges and the Allan interests became tired of finding them from private sources. Probably not many of the well-known men of the city appreciated that they were participants in a phase of North American history which would soon become almost as extinct as the dodo, and would be clothed, for those who had eyes to see, with a certain glamour of the age of chivalry.
The knighthood that flowered among the Indians, fur traders, and original farmers of the Great Lone Land, has not yet been accorded the idealism of the Crusades, or the picturesqueness of Robin Hood. The country had few ladyes fayre. The dusky maidens who became the queens of many mixed unions were attractive enough in their way, though they were never protected by moats and drawbridges; nor were their favours courted with armour and lance. But there were other elements in a unique style of living to which, one day, the touch of some wizard of romance will be applied. The buffalo was to be replaced by the plowman, the Indian to be superseded by a more industrious relative, and the ironless Red River cart to be run off the trail by the iron horse.