Before the era of railways, dwellers in New Brunswick who wished to go to Quebec used not infrequently to go on foot through the intervening wilderness in the winter time. So the first Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick once tramped through the snowy woods to visit his brother the Governor-General, Lord Dorchester; and so in 1813, when the war with the United States was raging, some companies of New Brunswick troops marched on snowshoes to the aid of their hard-pressed brethren in Canada. Much later, if a traveller wished to go from Nova Scotia to Toronto, it was the easiest way to take ship to Boston, and go thence through the “States” by rail to “Canada”—as the Nova Scotians continued to call the provinces touching on the St. Lawrence for long after the name was extended to the whole Dominion. This journey to “Canada” was quite an adventure to an untravelled person who had been born and brought up almost within sound of the sea. But the long-delayed construction of the “Intercolonial” gradually changed that condition of affairs.
The Grand Trunk is the pioneer of the several great company-owned railway systems, having absorbed many of the smaller railways begun in the fifties. For years it was not a profitable undertaking to its shareholders; but now its lines make a regular network in the older portions of Canada; and the Grand Trunk Pacific is being rapidly pushed to completion north of its older competitor in the West, the Canadian Pacific Railway. It is expected that when this “National Transcontinental Line” is finished it will shorten the trip round the globe by a week.
It is helping, moreover, to give Canada breadth from south to north. Already settlers are going into the so-called “Great Clay Belt” of good agricultural land in Northern Ontario. Already a string of little towns has sprung up along the Grand Trunk Pacific in the western provinces. Already its new seaport—“Prince Rupert”—five hundred and fifty miles north-west of Vancouver, and five hundred miles nearer to the east than any other Pacific Coast port, is an accomplished fact, where a population of four or five thousand is impatiently awaiting the uniting of the two portions of the railway which are being built westward and eastward, to meet in the mountains. Prince Rupert is close to some of the best fishing grounds in the world; and when the Grand Trunk Pacific line is completed it will put the fisheries of the North Pacific Coast in touch with a host of new markets.
It is difficult for people who have lived always in small well-settled countries to imagine what the opening of a great new railway means to the Dominion.
Over seventy years ago the people who see visions and dream dreams were prophesying a new trade route between east and west, by which the teas and silks of China and Japan would be brought by steam power along rivers, canals and railways across what is now the Dominion of Canada. In 1846 Sir Richard Bonnycastle, lieutenant-colonel of the Royal Engineers, predicted “We shall yet place an iron belt from the Atlantic to the Pacific—a railway from Halifax to Nootka Sound—and thus reach China in a pleasant voyage.” Three years later another officer of the Royal Engineers, Major Carmichael Smith, published a pamphlet urging the construction of an “Inter-oceanic railway from Halifax to the mouth of the Fraser river,” with a map upon which he traced a line almost identical with the routes ultimately adopted for the Intercolonial and Canadian Pacific Railways. But it was not until 1870, when British Columbia agreed to come into Confederation on condition that the inter-oceanic railway should be built, that any definite step was taken towards the construction of Canada’s first “transcontinental line.”
In the following year surveys for the line were begun under Mr. (afterwards Sir) Sandford Fleming. But the end was not yet in sight. The construction of the line was an immense task to be undertaken by a country so young and so sparsely settled as Canada, and fourteen strenuous years of political strife and struggle against all kinds of difficulty were to pass before the last spike of the railway was driven by Lord Strathcona (then Sir Donald Smith) at Craigellachie in the Eagle pass.
To the company, which finally built the line, the government gave $25,000,000 (£5,130,000) in cash, an even greater value in portions of the road already constructed, and twenty-five million acres of land, scattered through the prairie provinces, and the Canadian Pacific Railway is now a very wealthy corporation, which carries on numerous enterprises outside the actual business of railway transportation. For instance, there is a fleet of seventy-three Canadian Pacific Railway steamships, most of which are large vessels sailing the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Great Lakes. These ships carry annually over half a million passengers and give employment to over twelve thousand men. The company also owns a number of luxurious hotels, including the happily-named “Château Frontenac,” which the new arrival from Europe, coming up the St. Lawrence, can scarcely fail to notice, crowning the rock of Quebec, near to the spot where old Count Frontenac, from his little “Château St. Louis,” lorded it over the rough bushrangers and determined churchmen of New France.
The company still owns some ten or eleven million acres of land in the four western provinces; and during recent years has inaugurated a policy of irrigating some naturally rather arid lands in Alberta and preparing there what are known as “ready-made farms,” for suitable immigrants. This experiment has inspired the governments of some of the provinces to make similar preparation for immigrant farmers. The preparation of the farms for their future owners is, of course, a business enterprize; none the less it has smoothed the way for many newcomers.
Looking at the map of the country served by the Canadian Pacific, we see no longer a line but a network of lines (even in the West) where fifty years ago it was generally supposed that nothing would grow. It is Canada’s vast wheat fields, which have made possible her huge railway systems, and while new lands are year by year being brought under cultivation, the railways will continue to add to their mileage. On the other hand, every year the new lines of railway open fresh lands to settlers.
Another Canadian railway that has a remarkable record is the Canadian Northern, which claims to have grown at the rate of a mile a day for the last sixteen years. This railway also has obtained most liberal government assistance and is a transcontinental system in the making. In fact, contracts are let for the completion of the whole distance between the city of Quebec and Port Mann in British Columbia; but it has gone on the plan of building short lines in different districts, to be afterwards combined and connected to form the whole system. Already it has run many branch lines from Winnipeg—westward and northward and southward—into the great grain-growing districts, and in 1912 it hauled no less than sixty million bushels of wheat.