What is now a part of the Souris branch of the C.P.R., began as the Oregon and Transcontinental, and ended at the then forlorn station of Starbuck. The Great Northwest Central had a charter from Brandon to Battleford. It crawled for fifty miles northwestward and then stalled till the inevitable happened.
We heard repeatedly of projected lines in what, from the meridian of Winnipeg and the Portage, seemed the Never-Never Country, bounded by Prince Albert and Edmonton, four hundred miles apart on the North Saskatchewan. At last they were built. Of the granting of one charter by the Dominion Parliament so far as one can recall, no definite information filtered through to the accounting department of the Manitoba North Western, though it was freighted with more of Canadian destiny than all the others put together. It was obtained by the Davis firm of contractors, and carried a land grant and authority to reach Hudson Bay—the charter of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company. It lay like a derelict upon a tideless shore, and appeared to have no chance of activity for years after the Never-Never country had been traversed by two sets of rails.
The Regina and Long Lake line was built from Regina to Prince Albert in 1889 and 1890 for a company whose moving power was the firm of Osler, Hammond and Nanton of Toronto and Winnipeg. The construction was across a virtually uninhabited stretch of two hundred and twenty miles between the Qu’Appelle River at Lumsden and the town of Prince Albert. Most of the track was put down during a summer at the end of which according to Joe Work who had charge of laying the rails, and later became chief track layer for the Canadian Northern, it was not safe to ride or drive a horse at night, because the cracks in the ground made by the drought were so wide that hoofs could be caught in them, legs broken and steeds destroyed.
Saskatoon, at the crossing of the South Saskatchewan river, was in the midst of what was often called “The Desert”. Its main business came from its being the station for Battleford, eighty miles away. Ten years after the line was laid there was only one homesteader between Saskatoon and the Qu’Appelle. The land grant was considered worthless—I believe it was written down optimistically by one presumed authority as being worth fifty cents an acre.
About the same time the Calgary and Edmonton was built, the steel reaching Red Deer the first season, and Strathcona, across the river from Edmonton, the next fall. The country passed through had more rainfall than the Regina-Prince Albert territory; but there were practically no settlers in it. Following this, track from Calgary to Fort MacLeod was laid, to procure Lethbridge coal, and later to the Kootenay where Dawson and Tyrrell in 1883 had proved that there were almost illimitable deposits of fuel.
That is where railway development in the West stood when I was removed to Winnipeg in 1893. Prices were lower than ever on the prairie. Wheat sold for 35 cents a bushel. Milch cows could be bought for less than thirty dollars. Eggs at eight cents a dozen, bought the farmer’s wife no silks or satins.
For three years, while the North Western was hoping against hope that it would be able to stand ultimately on its own feet, and Mr. Nanton, the Sir Augustus of these more expansive years, was keeping an extremely watchful eye on all expenditures, I was doing my best for a small family. At night I was the first auditor of the Canadian Fire Insurance Company, the creation of R. T. Riley, who doesn’t live as many anxious days now as he did then, and who was later to become a highly valued colleague on the National Railways’ directorate. At night also, I was the first auditor of the Manitoba Gas and Electric Company, and the Winnipeg Electric Railway Company, which was controlled by the contractors who had built the lines to Prince Albert and Edmonton.
It was that auditorship and the neglected charter of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company which brought me to Toronto, ten years later, as third vice-president of the Canadian Northern, a railway which, though its name appears to be dead, will be alive, as railways live, I think, for evermore.