Thus is the entire route one of exceptional beauty and never-failing interest. From the first to the last there is not a dull moment. And in crossing the wonderful bridge that connects Kaien Island (on which Prince Rupert stands) with the mainland, the traveller finds something to enlist his enthusiasm for science as well as that enlisted for nature. This bridge is nearly a thousand feet in length, and includes six spans, two of which are of two hundred and fifty feet each. The engineers encountered great difficulty, because of the furious racing of the water through the channel, so that at times the divers could not descend. The conditions not unfrequently reduced the working hours to little more than three out of the twenty-four.
The construction of the Grand Trunk Pacific that extended the western lines of the Grand Trunk System from Winnipeg to Prince Rupert was an epic story of the Dominion. For it was really one of the determining events of British Empire history, as well as an exceptionally potent factor in the contemporary development of Canada. It has not only changed the map of the country, but also takes its place in international advancement. To open a new and vast territory whose splendour of scenery, incalculably marvellous resources, and climatic conditions are such as to invite and sustain immigration is an achievement that brings to bear a signal influence upon the peoples of the entire European continent and even upon the Orient. It was at once the opening of a new realm for human life. Education and culture are invited to enter. It is hardly possible for the mind to grasp, or for the imagination to picture, all the possibilities of the future that are initiated by so great an enterprise. The Indian trail, the packhorse, the canoe, gave way to the steel tracks, the luxurious trains of vestibuled cars laden with civilisation advancing into the wilderness. A great Canadian railway is not built to meet the recognised demands of settlement. It has to act as pioneer and create the conditions that make settlement possible. Its construction is, literally, the manifestation of belief in the things not seen. It is a creative power prospecting for paths of national destiny.
The story of that reconnaissance through hundreds of miles of an apparently impenetrable wilderness is one to haunt the imagination. It is a story of hardships and of heroisms. Emerson declares that
"The hero is not fed on sweets."
The pathfinder shares the usual experience that invests heroism.
It is to Charles Melville Hays that the conception of thus extending the Grand Trunk System is primarily due. Mr. Hays was endowed with the "seeing eye." He was gifted with that penetrating order of comprehension that swiftly discriminates between the possible and the impossible, and sets the key of achievement accordingly. He was not infelicitously called "the Cecil Rhodes of Canada." With that same brilliant capacity to conceive new combinations that build up new orders of life, Mr. Hays had that tenacity of purpose which alone renders such conceptions available, and he had an even larger power than that of the Empire builder in Africa for relating his dream to definite conditions.
It is recorded that there came a morning in Canada when the Dominion awakened "to experience a thrill of excitement from the Atlantic to the Pacific." For the newspapers had announced that a new Transcontinental railway was to be undertaken, and that the Grand Trunk System was the initiator of this stupendous scheme. It seems that Mr. Hays himself had conveyed to the press merely this laconic statement overnight, and it was the spark that incited a very conflagration of discussion. There was an instantaneous public clamour whose geographical limits were only defined from Halifax and Vancouver, from Dawson to Hudson Bay. But when the morning dawned, and the startlingly interesting news incited the pursuit of the President of the Grand Trunk System for fuller information, that distinguished official had already boarded his steamer and was fairly off on the high seas for Europe. The man at the head of a railway system that, by the addition of its new western lines, attains to no less than 8115 miles in extent, with its inestimable potentialities of service, may well be accorded rank among the notable figures whose genius and courage have helped to shape the destiny of the Dominion.
In the work of constructing this great trans-continental road, Mr. Hays called as his lieutenant, in 1909, Mr. Edson Joseph Chamberlain. Mr. Chamberlain was Vice-President and General Manager of the Grand Trunk Pacific for three busy years, and after the tragedy of the Titanic in 1912, he was called to succeed Mr. Hays as President of the Grand Trunk System.
The chief engineer in charge of the construction of the Grand Trunk Pacific was Mr. J. B. Kelliher. With him went a party of gentlemen to make the preliminary exploration after the surveyors had made their pioneer report on the possibilities of the route. While they had secured a general impression of the topography, the problems that remained were intricate and manifold.