Far ahead of “The Farmer Outfit”, in the vanguard of the graders, was another contractor—the same who had brought the engine across the Red River ice, and had been on the job as the C.P.R. was laid through Brandon, Regina and Calgary. Sir Donald Mann’s reminiscences of a hard season’s work include his first seeing of the governor-general, the Marquis of Lansdowne, and his first meeting with Sir William Mackenzie.
The viceroy was coming east from Victoria over the route to be taken by the C.P.R. The contractor met him on the trail that did duty for a road, and recognized him by his photograph. Since the war, dining with the marquis in London, Sir Donald was interested by his recalling that at the time of his trip across the Selkirks and Rockies, there were only 126,000 people between the Lake of the Woods and the Pacific Ocean.
Of the first contact between Mackenzie and Mann, Sir Donald’s recollection is vivid:
“In the summer of 1884,” he says, “we were having some trouble with our supplies at the head of construction. This was partly caused by the wish of those who had such matters in hand to compel us to buy from them. We wanted the advantage of buying direct from wholesalers and manufacturers, and hauling our own stuff from the end of steel to the front of grading. To do this teaming I had my agents farther east buy and ship a carload of mules. When we received word that they had arrived as far as the cars could bring them, I took a foreman named Dan Mahoney and two or three other men, and started out to fetch them. They were at the Summit—close to where the Great Divide is marked now. The mules had been unloaded and were with another carload in a corral.
“Dan Mahoney and I were picking out what we believed to be our animals when a man with a long black beard turned up, and asked us what we were doing with the mules. I said we were getting ours from the lot. He said the mules were his, and we’d better not interfere with them. The argument livened up a good deal, and was getting warm, when Ross came along, and asked what the trouble was. We told him. He laughed and said we were both wrong and both right. A carload had come for each of us, but owing to some misunderstanding, it had been supposed that they belonged to the same party, and they had been turned into the corral together.
“Ross was never at a loss for a way out of a difficulty; and he undertook to settle this one. ‘You’ll pick teams, turn and turn about, and you,’ he said, pointing to Mackenzie, ‘will have first choice, and he,’ pointing to me, ‘will have the next two, and then one each.’ That was perfectly fair, and the first difference of opinion between Mackenzie and me was over.
“While Mackenzie was choosing his first team Dan Mahoney took me aside and said: ‘You let me pick them mules. I know them all, for I worked at the place they have come from. The best in the lot are them roans. This man won’t guess that; but I know it. Don’t take them in your first pick; and he won’t take them for his second. Then we’ll take them; and you’ll see they’ll turn out to be the best of the bunch.’
“Sure enough, Mackenzie didn’t pick the roans for his second choice, so that at least he didn’t figure them as better than the fifth pair. We took them as our third choice; and they proved to be the best team of all, as Mahoney had said. Mackenzie and I have been in a good many arrangements together since then; but I don’t think any of them gave me more genuine satisfaction than the one in which I took Dan Mahoney’s advice.”
Sometimes books of reference err. “Canadian Men and Women of the Time” is nodding when it states that the Mackenzie-Mann partnership began in 1886. The slip is similar to another in connection with Sir Joseph Flavelle, of whom it is said mistakenly, that he was “long in the dry goods business in Lindsay, Ontario, with his brother, John D. Flavelle.” In 1886 Mackenzie was building snow sheds in the Selkirks; and Mann was fulfilling a twenty-five-mile grading contract on the Manitoba North Western. It was while he was busy with this that I first saw him, in the office of my chief, W. A. Baker, at Portage la Prairie. At that time D. D. Mann was thirty-three years old, very big, and a bachelor; and I wondered who the heavy, slow-moving man was.
The Mackenzie-Mann partnership began in 1888, but it was part of a quartet, and not a duet. The other partners were the late James Ross and the present Sir Herbert Holt of Montreal. The firm took contracts on the Coboconk and Credit Valley lines, and undertook the whole of the C.P.R. short line through Maine to St. John. The Regina and Long Lake, the Calgary and Edmonton, and the line from Calgary to Fort MacLeod followed, between 1889 and 1891. Then constructive energy in the West seemed exhausted. The railway contracting of Mackenzie and Mann entered a state of suspended animation.