Before leaving the Alberta at Fort William, the time is put back an hour. It recedes as we travel westward, and advances for east-bound travellers. The time of the Dominion is taken from Montreal, and is numbered, for convenience and business purposes, consecutively, that is to say, they have no a.m. or p.m. to confuse their train-service, and their watches have the double numbers, and one p.m. becomes thirteen, and two p.m. fourteen, and so on. A proposition has just been made in the Dominion Parliament to equalize the time, but it will not pass, at all events, this session.
Fort William was one of the advanced posts of the Hudson Bay Company. It is now a swamp laid out in streets at right angles, with wooden houses, overshadowed by some enormous grain elevators. Doubtless it has a great future before it. We wait here five long hours for the west-bound train.
CHAPTER III.
BY THE GOLDEN WAVE TO THE FAR WEST.
Our journey to the Far West, through golden wheat, began at Fort William; from there the Canadian Pacific takes us across to the ocean.
The C.P.R., with its 2990 miles of railway, is the iron girdle that binds Canada together from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. She gives cohesion to this conglomerate whole, with its varieties of climate and production. Every mile of the line is worth a mile of gold to the country, for at every place where she lays down a station, that place becomes a town, a centre of population, civilization, and wealth to the surrounding district. This railway has been the great explorer, the great colonizer, the great wealth producer of Canada. It is the artery of the body of the Dominion.
One has constantly to remember that six or seven years ago all this country through which we are passing was an unexplored wilderness. A little band of plate-layers, headed by a surveyor, true pioneers, must have forced their way through, hewing trees, blasting rock, and making the silent woods resound with the voice of civilization, occasionally coming across the track of some Indian encampment or the marks of a bear. It must have required great forethought and organization from headquarters to have the plant and stores ready to push on day by day, whilst the railway in rear acted as the pioneers' single communication with the outside world, as they plunged deeper and deeper into the forests. The average speed of construction was about five miles a day, and the greatest length laid in one day was twelve and a half miles. The portion of line between Port Arthur and Fort William was the most difficult to devise. Indeed, several times the engineers despaired. The railway is divided into divisional sections, with a superintendent at each. These again are divided into sections, with a surveyor in charge; and we frequently pass their lonely section houses. Every portion of the line is inspected once a day, the workmen using a trolly, which can be lifted on and off the track. It is a single line, and there is only one passenger train daily east and west.
The trains are very long and heavy, often consisting of eight or nine cars some eighty feet in length, weighing as much as fifty tons each. They would jump the track if lighter. Our train to-day was of this length, and carried a human freight of 286 persons, exclusive of the numerous officials. The sleepers or sleeping-cars are most elegant, with their polished pine wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and their pale sea-green brocade hangings.
The colonist cars on these trains are excellent, and always, we noticed, well filled. They have berths like the sleeper, only with no upholstery, but the colonist can buy a mattress and pillow at Montreal for a dollar or two. They have a stove where they can cook their own provisions, and on landing from the ocean steamers they get into this car, live in it, and come as far west as they want to without change or stoppage.