Describing meetings of a traffic manager with Sioux Indians and sudden millionaires.
It is a curious truth that the only considerable railway retreat from Canada by United States interests was made by J. J. Hill, one of the syndicate which brought the C.P.R. to fruition. He was a pioneer in Red River navigation which Eastern Canadians, bound for Fort Garry, used in summer. His association with Donald Smith and George Stephen, future members of the House of Lords, transformed a little Minnesota line from the derelict property of Dutch bondholders into the Great Northern and opened the way to a Canadian farm boy’s control of American railways without parallel before his time.
Hill retired from the C.P.R. when it was determined to build the Superior section from Sudbury to Port Arthur, nominally because he feared the ability of the C.P.R. to support itself through so much wilderness, but really because it would prevent his own roads carrying the through traffic between Eastern and Western Canada, from Sault Ste. Marie to Winnipeg, for which connection the C.P.R. line to the Soo, through Sudbury, had been built.
The Northern Pacific receivership finally threw that system into Hill’s control. Grain rates to Duluth from Minnesota and North Dakota were still higher than they were from Manitoba to Fort William. The extension of traffic in Canada therefore, would tempt the American farmer to demand, in his own territory, as favourable a treatment as his Canadian competitor received on his own soil.
The possibility of the Northern Pacific lines in Manitoba becoming part of a Canadian system was enlarged by a change of Government in Winnipeg. With its best brain, and chief driving force transferred to the Interior Department at Ottawa, the Greenway administration fell into a slough of complacent reliance for continuing power upon what it had done to deprive the C.P.R. of its detested monopoly, and to facilitate settlement of the empty, fertile northwestern quarter of the province.
The general election at the end of 1899 destroyed the Greenway Government. On the morning after the polling I happened to meet the Premier on the train. He was frank enough to attribute the defeat to excessive cocksureness. Later, he was sent to Ottawa, where he was a useful, though not a brilliant, commoner alongside his former attorney-general, Mr. Sifton, who was the federal general for the Liberal party all through the West, for the elections of 1896, 1900, 1904 and 1908.
Sir John Macdonald’s son, Hugh John, who had joined the Tupper Government in 1896 as Minister of the Interior, and was practising law in Winnipeg, became Premier in January, 1900; passed a prohibition bill, which was disallowed at Ottawa, resigned the premiership to oppose Sifton in Brandon later in the year, and was succeeded by R. P. Roblin, who had left Prince Edward county twenty years before, and was farming near Carman.
In 1900 Mr. Mann, as Sir Donald Mann recalls the episode, while passing through St. Paul on the way to Toronto, called upon his old friend Mr. Hill, and incidentally enquired whether the Northern Pacific would sell its Manitoba lines to the Canadian Northern. Incidentally, also, Mr. Hill replied with an axiom of railway practice: “No railway ever sells branch lines to another railway.” But, he remarked, in further incidental conversation, a railway might sell branch lines to a Government.
Nothing more was said upon the subject at that time. But next morning, instead of being in Chicago, Mr. Mann was in Winnipeg, enquiring of Premier Roblin whether his Government would consider buying the Northern Pacific lines in Manitoba, and turning them over, later, to the Canadian Northern.