CHAPTER VIII.
Recording the first encounter of Mackenzie and Mann, with mules for a stake.
It seems scarcely possible that the electric railway is only thirty years old. The marvel of Chicago, to a visitor less than thirty years ago, was the system of street cars moved by cables running between and beneath the rails. Winnipeg had a single track horse-car system, with passing sidings. It was the enterprise of Albert Austin, in these days president of the Consumers’ Gas Company of Toronto. The city gave a franchise to the Winnipeg Electric Railway Company, the creation of Mr. James Ross, of Montreal, Mr. William Mackenzie, who had recently come into control of the Toronto railway situation, and Mr. D. D. Mann.
There was some confusion as to the Austin franchise’s priority of right. Indeed, Mr. Austin contended that the electric franchise was erroneously given. At all events, the electric cars started to run on the streets before the horse cars were run off the streets. We enjoyed the spectacle of Dobbin competing against the harnessed lightning, and the experience of a cut-rate business in fares, the like of which was never before, and has never since been seen. Rides were three cents each, and fifty tickets were sold for a dollar. Business institutions laid in stores of tickets, against the day when rates would rise. In the end, of course, the more modern method won out. The Winnipeg Electric Railway, which had its own difficulties, due to comparative scarcity of population, has come to earn a yearly revenue of over $3,500,000.
Becoming the first auditor of the company brought me into contact with the president, Mr. Mackenzie, of Toronto, and led to a connection of twenty-six years with the phenomenal expansion of a railway system, which is now the main hope of prosperity for a national property. I had met Mr. Mann almost immediately after arriving at Portage la Prairie, in 1886. As there are some misapprehensions in the public mind about the earlier association of these remarkable men, perhaps it is as well to tell the authentic story.
As a western worker, Sir Donald Mann preceded Sir William Mackenzie by several years. He brought the first locomotive into Winnipeg on Christmas Eve, 1879, having come down the Red River during the previous summer. Sir William Mackenzie’s first essay in Western development was in 1884, when he took contracts on the mountain section of the C.P.R.
It is a mistake to suppose that that was Mackenzie’s first experience in railway construction. He had had a contract on the Victoria Railway, between Port Hope and Orillia, via Blackwater, now called the Midland section of the Canadian National System. That was one of the first great enterprises, outside his beloved insurance, in which the late Senator Cox was heavily concerned as a financier. Mackenzie had taught school, and had done some building. He had also worked in the Lake Simcoe and Muskoka territory when it was furnishing Toronto with most of its lumber and fuel.
When the Mackenzie men, teams, and equipment began work in the region of Banff, where James Ross, the chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific, had charge of a construction then unexampled in Canada, they became known as “The Farmer Outfit”, because their harness and get-up generally were more like the appurtenances of Ontario than the gear of truly Western operators.
Over twenty years afterwards, when a distinguished party was travelling to Edmonton for the inauguration of the province of Alberta, they drove from the end of Canadian Northern steel, several miles east of Vermilion, to the new capital. One of the guides over the unfamiliar trails was bridge builder Weller, who told the stranger he was driving that he was with Mackenzie on his first contract in the mountains. He was still the same Mackenzie, Weller said, though bigger business left him little time to fraternize with his old associates.
“There is no Sunday time to be killed in tents,” he said, “by sitting around the stove on chilly nights and singing Sankey’s hymns. Mr. Mackenzie was quite a singer in those days, but only on Sunday nights.”