“Sure,” said Van Horne; “here’s a pass from the border into Winnipeg”—and he wrote one in pencil.
Once more Shaw was headed for the Canadian prairies, and did not leave them for Toronto and Mississauga until the Canadian Northern had become a transcontinental system. He was with us from the taking over of the Manitoba Northern Pacific by the Canadian Northern, till the taking over of the Canadian Northern by the Canadian Government. The changes he shared in are those which should furnish the real substance of this story. Others which he closely observed were peculiar to his personal association with the C.P.R. One of two which must be set down, whatever else is left out, relegates the ballad of the Miller of the Dee to the dreary commonplaces.
Thirty years ago the Ogilvie Milling Company was the big business in grain buying and flour making in the West. Its many elevators along the C.P.R. and the Manitoba North Western, were as prominent as the Saskatchewan farmers’ own grain houses are to-day. The Company’s accountant was Fred Thompson who came from Montreal to Winnipeg in the same year that Shaw returned from Montreal to Winnipeg. He had been in the Exchange Bank, and in six years rose to the Ogilvie’s managership.
The ten years that followed saw various mutations in the milling business that have a romance of their own. As a whole, the country was poor enough, but where so many natural resources are being developed over so much of a continent, great enterprises will grow, here and there, men will become rich, and financiers will evolve from clerks and lumberjacks. Within the C.P.R. sphere of influence, its superintendent of telegraphs, Charles Hosmer, developed from a key tapper to a capitalist, first on the side, and then all the way. His responsibilities have included the Presidency of the Ogilvie Flour Mills Co., millers to the King.
In 1898, the president, William Ogilvie, died. One very cold day, during the winter ensuing, George Shaw was in Montreal on C.P.R. business. Returning to the Windsor he was spoken to by Fred Thompson, who was more obviously agitated than managing millers of eminent sobriety and unimpeachable Anglican integrity are wont to be.
SIR WILLIAM VAN HORNE
([P. 40])
E. W. BEATTY