There was nothing disagreeable to the successors of the victors at Fort Whyte in the idea of a transaction which promised that the C.P.R. would at last meet real competition from southern, central and northern Manitoba to Lake Superior. But the Roblin Government was young, and required time to think. It was finally decided that if the lines were procured it must be without an undertaking to deliver them to any third party.
So it came about that, in the session of 1901 the Manitoba Legislature passed an Act which transmogrified the Northern Pacific Manitoba feeders into Canadian Northern lines. In less than five years from Billy Walker getting his first highball (no connection with whiskey) from Dad Risteen, chief and sole conductor of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company, we were hauling wheat from Swan River and Grand View, and from Brandon and Hartney, over our own lines into our own terminals at Winnipeg, and to Emerson, whence the Northern Pacific carried it to Duluth.
We could not deliver wheat to Port Arthur in 1901, but we did take part of that year’s crop over our own lines to that port, for on January 1st, 1902, connection was completed at Bear Pass, a few miles east of Rainy Lake, and Manitoba had a juncture with Eastern Canada independent of the C.P.R. If the C.P.R. could have prevented it, Port Arthur never would have renewed its youth through the advent of the Canadian Northern. A fight was on, which never sacrificed official and personal courtesies, and never relaxed the vigilance of the senior, or restricted the pertinacity of the junior road.
The Canadian Northern, with a thousand miles of track through the best sections of Manitoba, and with immigration beginning to reach the West in a volume not approached since the feverish period of the foolish land boom, had passed almost unobserved by the public, from a local to an interprovincial proposition as to territory; and to an international factor as to finance.
Lloyd George, when he was merely the little Welsh attorney and had been the pro-Boer of the irresistible tongue, and was certain of an unwelcome inclusion in the next Liberal Cabinet, became accustomed to hearing his friends discuss the probabilities of his party leadership, some time. He comes from the Snowdon country, and knows the ascents to that highest peak in England and Wales, particularly the ridge near the summit which over there is called the Saddleback, but on this continent would be named the Razorback. He was not blind to the possibility of eminence which fascinated his friends, but used to say to them, “Oh, I don’t know; I haven’t crossed the Saddleback yet.”
The Canadian Northern Saddleback was the old Dawson route between Rainy River and the Kaministiquia. To cross it was a feat which was all the more dramatic for its having to be performed in the London money market against extraordinary endeavours to make of the feat a fatality.
What the C.P.R. regarded as a too daring invasion of its fiscal domain synchronized with an abstraction from its western force of our first general traffic officer, with duties entirely in the dual revenue department. Additions to mileage were coming like triplets and twins, and there was plenty to keep the superintendent busy in enlarging staff and equipment, and in general management. Somebody with thorough knowledge of traffic conditions and intimate experience of the West was required. We found him in George H. Shaw, assistant general freight agent of the C.P.R. Mr. Shaw and I remained colleagues for seventeen years, when he took his ease on a retiring allowance, the just criticism of which is that it might have been more commensurate with the extreme value of his service.
It has been suggested before in these drafts on memory that things regarded as being entirely matter-of-course appear in their true perspective only when the mellowing hand of age rests upon them. You see men working at their appointed job, and the job seems all there is about them. But in the West, until yesterday, when you met a man up to the ears in prosaic detail, you never knew with what romantic aspect of the pre-historic age he was a living link. My old colleague is one of these; as any, who are lucky enough to go round the Mississauga course with him—for he has played himself into a second coltage—and can start him on a trail of reminiscence, will discover.
George Shaw comes of a political family established in the county of Lanark during the building of the Rideau Canal, as a military expedient against possible unpleasant sequelæ to the war of 1812. His grandfather sat in the Parliament of the province of Upper Canada, twenty years before Confederation. His father was a keen politician at Smith’s Falls; and would have had his boys maintain the family tradition. He tells a political and a railway story about a farmer at Merrickville, whom we will call McWhilt. Young Shaw was made a scrutineer for an election. In Lanark every vote was as identifiable as its caster, and the scrutineer checked off the lists furnished him as the electors declared their preference—the ballot had not yet been adopted. Shaw senior came in late in the afternoon, looked over the polling record, and found that McWhilt had not voted.
“Send for him,” was the order: “He’s promised to vote for Haggart.”