The two drove into Battleford, and stayed at the hotel then kept by Albert Champagne, who became Battleford’s first mayor three years later, sat a term in the Assembly of the North West Territories, and was M.P. for Battleford from 1908 to 1917. Next day the team of horses rested; but the team of men sought no repose. They walked up the river to the ravine where the search had been stopped overnight. The site of the great crossing was there and then determined. Stovel used to say he never walked so fast, in snow or out of it, all his life, as he did on that eighteen mile trip before dinner. Twenty years ago MacLeod was in splendid condition, and a terror to go when his walking mood was on. Stovel had a notion that MacLeod was giving him a silent admonition not to repeat the fears of the day before. Stovel was a good guesser.
On the same trip the Elbow crossing and the one on the South Saskatchewan, at Clarkboro, just east of Warman, were located. On the best available information Armstrong’s surveying party was working on preliminary surveys for a bridge about thirty miles below the Elbow. But as soon as MacLeod had found the crossings that best met the demand for economical grading and bridging, and for good farming country alongside the location, he drove to Armstrong’s camp, and moved the party south, up the valley.
It was the fifteenth of January when MacLeod and Stovel forsook their horses for the train, after a full month of hardship which they didn’t regard as hardship. Indeed, if MacLeod sees this account probably he will wonder why so much has been made of so ordinary an expedition.
The transference of Armstrong’s party contains the genius of MacLeod’s genius. The information that took them thirty miles below the Elbow to survey a crossing was the best information available—until MacLeod himself looked over the ground. What his unassisted eye discerned, the blueprints, the finished bridge, the grades and the daily trains confirmed. It would be the same in Toronto.
My old friend and colleague is a born, incurable, unconquerable pathfinder. We proved it over and over again. He would go out to look for country well adapted for settlement, and a settlers’ railway, and not only find what he wanted, but on the way would discover some improvement in his staff’s locations of other lines that saved thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in construction.
From the interior of our organization, it has been extracted by a faithful memory that MacLeod was later than he expected, returning from an observatory trip in this same Battleford country, where outfits were waiting to begin grading. The few days’ delay meant changed locations over fifty miles of track, on the strength of his overlook of other men’s conscientious and able work. They had the efficiency of training. He had the insight of genius. In instance after instance the stakes that were driven on his observation were found to be in the very spots where the precise levels determined the final location.
One who has been chiefly devoted to operation does not regard himself as an authority on construction. But, in a long generation of experience one learns something of the fundamentals of railway engineering in a country as vast as ours. For finding a road and for building it with the least possible expense and the greatest possible efficiency MacLeod may have had an equal, though I have never met the man who met him. MacLeod certainly has had no superior.
The winter of 1906-7 was one of the worst in western railroad history. It didn’t linger in the lap of spring; it pushed the spring out of its place. Long after the time for the singing of birds had come, an extra-special sleetstorm covered one section of track with so thick a glaze of ice that the only way to get trains over it was to pickaxe the ice from the rails.
Immigration was at the flood that spring. Cities and towns everywhere were preparing for big construction programmes. Something of a blockade was inevitable; but a breakdown in one part of our organization let us into more trouble than honest men deserve. An effort was made to clear up a congestion that was worsening every day, by picking out from as many congested sidings as possible, cars that were most urgently wanted, and making up special trains to meet special urgencies. The result was congestion worse congested, because it took longer to segregate the cars required than to move the whole multitude. Our bill for per diem charges on foreign cars held by us was appalling.
When our interior trouble was fully understood, primarily as the outcome of Mr. Mann and the third vice-president going to Winnipeg to probe the situation, we changed the managerial method, put our superintendents and men on what may be called a course of inter-emulation; with ten days as the time set for abolishing the blockade.