Though he is to-day a British subject, Sir Henry was born an American. His boyhood home was in Lafayette, Indiana. From St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire and the University of Pennsylvania, he went to the Pennsylvania Railroad. He rose to be manager of the Long Island Railroad, where he had much to do with the construction and operation of the Pennsylvania Terminal in New York City. England sent for him in 1914 to manage the Great Eastern Railway, which has the largest passenger traffic of any railroad in the world, and during the war he was in charge of all British army transportation in Europe.
Sir Henry is not the first railroad genius America has furnished to Canada. Lord Shaughnessy, for many years the president and then the chairman of the Canadian Pacific, was born in Milwaukee. When he was a boy of fifteen he went to work for the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad. I once spent a morning with him in his office at Montreal, where he told me of his early career and his vision of the future of Canada and the great transportation system that he had raised up from infancy. His successor, E. W. Beatty, is the first Canadian-born president the Canadian Pacific has ever had.
Thomas Shaughnessy came to Canada at the invitation of William Van Home, another American. Van Home became the manager of the project after the government had given up hope of building a road across western Canada. It was he who carried it through the early period of desperate struggle with the wilderness and the equally desperate fight for money with which to meet the payroll. Years ago he established the present policy of courtesy to passengers, and placarded the system with a demand for “Parisian politeness on the C. P. R.” During their régime, both men had associated with them many other Americans whom they called to Canada to lend a hand in one of the greatest transportation jobs the world has ever known.
CHAPTER XXII
THE LAND OF FURS
For four hundred years furs from Canada have been warming the flesh and enhancing the charms of feminine beauty. It is to-day the chief breeding place of animals valued for their skins, and it is likely to remain so for centuries to come.
When the settlement of North America was at its beginning, the French adventurers making fortunes in furs did their best to discourage the incoming colonists, for they knew that this meant the death of the wilderness. If they could have had their way, all that is now Canada would have been left to the Indian trappers and the white traders who relieved them of their annual catches. As it is, improved methods of transportation, trapping, and hunting are reducing the available supply, and the demand is such that the furriers have had to popularize skins formerly despised as too common, and many Canadians have gone into the business of breeding fur-bearing animals.
The fur business of Canada has its beginning when the company trader strikes a bargain with the Eskimo for his season’s catch of the white fox of the arctic and other skins.
The Hudson’s Bay Company has more than two hundred trading posts where Indians, Eskimos, and white trappers exchange furs for goods. Eighteen of the stations lie near or north of the Arctic Circle.