CHAPTER VIII
A Constructive Genius
Mr Van Horne, who was a native son of Joliet, Illinois, struck Winnipeg just as 1882 was dawning, and the thermometer was ranging around forty below zero. Those of us who were born in or near Winnipeg can testify that in such an hour the ozone makes one tingle with energy, and leads to an active life as a natural consequence. Van Horne was an embodiment of driving power anyway, and perhaps the stimulating atmosphere raised that power to a high algebraic degree. Certain it is that every one around Winnipeg, especially in the service of the new railway, realized that a human projectile had been shot into the community and that things had to move on under its impulse or move out of the way. So distinctly was this felt, that not only was the climate rather frigid, but the social atmosphere around offices and clubs took on a certain degree of coolness. That any one should come in from the outside and, after a brief survey, should start in to make swift changes and equally swift appointments, regardless of social or political influence, was not likely to make the man who so acted a general favourite. But in a short time the marvellous efficiency of the man commended him to everybody worth while. His bigness in ignoring any prejudice against him, his hearty, magnetic and utterly unaffected personality, soon won the respect of his men in all ranks and he in turn came swiftly to have a high respect for the courage, ability and initiative of the Canadian people. For a while he had to have around him some experts from his own country, like that Master-Superintendent, John M. Egan, whose ability as a practical railroad builder was a great asset to the new enterprise. But Van Horne soon had a small army of Canadians in training under his own leadership, and to them he became deeply attached. It is now, at least, an open secret that when men back in the States heard that his reception in Winnipeg was rather cool they sent him word “to come back to your friends and let the Canadians build their own road.” But Van Horne, knowing that his own brusque entry and method laid him open to some blame for the situation, and knowing also the solid worth of the people to whom he had come, declined to return. Again, a few years later, when the Canadian Pacific Railway project seemed on the point of failure for lack of funds, even though the Directors had put their all in the great venture, some one said to Van Horne that he need not worry, because there were positions waiting for him across the line any time he wished to go there. But he stood by his guns and said that he was not going back to the States—“I’m not going to leave the work I have begun. I’m going to see it through, no matter what position is open to me in the United States.” The time was to come, however, when even the iron nerves and the tremendous staying power of this apparently stolid and determined scion of the Netherlands were to be tried to the limit, and when Van Horne found in Canadian men the invincible spirit which made their joint work a sort of miraculous success.
In the meantime, when he had done some highly necessary things in Winnipeg, in that fateful year of 1882, he went down to Montreal to meet President Stephen and the Directors. No doubt there was a mutual “sizing up” of each other, but with satisfactory results. The President and Van Horne took to each other at once, and became thenceforward the two that did the most perfect team work. But they could not have pulled the enterprise far without the steady, persistent co-operation of the other Directors. They all got into the harness and they all fell in with the Western teamster’s homely prescription for success: “Keep the tugs tight; never mind the hold-backs.”
Thenceforth Van Horne became, till the completion of the Transcontinental, the trusted railway expert and, in this regard, completely supplanted Hill, who had been the only man of the original Canadian Pacific Syndicate who was a practical railroader. Under the leadership of Van Horne, Canada would now begin to grow her own railway men as a home product.
One of the items taken up on the occasion of Mr. Van Horne’s first visit to Montreal was the construction of the Railway over the rock-wilderness on the North Shore of Lake Superior. The Mackenzie Government, as we have seen, thought that section could wait for a somewhat indefinite period, and in the meantime Mackenzie said that the great fresh-water sea could be used as a link in transportation. Then, when the Stephen-Hill Syndicate was formed, both of these gentlemen agreed with the policy of not constructing that section until there was more settlement in the West. But Stephen and Hill, not believing in the tardy water-stretches as links in railway construction, proposed to build from the East to Sault Ste. Marie, and there join up with a branch of Hill’s road, the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba, to which, as the architect of their fortunes, they were financially and otherwise attached. This of course would have given Hill, in large measure, the control of Canadian traffic from East to West.
It will be recalled that neither Sir John Macdonald nor Sir Charles Tupper, his fighting Railway Minister, approved of this American link in the road, and that in England they had broken with Sir Henry Tyler, of the Grand Trunk, on that particular point. And when Van Horne went east to meet the Directors in 1882, he made short work of the plan which both Stephen and Hill had cherished. He felt that to give Hill’s road the haulage of through Canadian traffic over a section of his track would make the Canadian Pacific a sort of subsidiary of his line, and such a situation was abhorrent both to Van Horne’s railroad instincts and to his estimate of his ability to run his own road. In a proper sense of the word Van Horne was always egoist enough to assert his own dignity when occasion required. In fact he would let no man rob him of the opportunity of boasting on any occasion when it seemed legitimate and necessary. Hence, when he met the Canadian Pacific Directors, at that first meeting, he drew for them a verbal picture of what the traffic on an all-Canadian route from ocean to ocean was to be in the future, and by the time he was through his visualizing, the President and the other Directors let this new General Manager have his will. Van Horne was no half-way man, and when he started out to build the Canadian Pacific Railway he was going to put emphasis on the word and idea of Canadian. The day was to come when, despite some partisan and political mud-throwing, all true Canadians would acknowledge that the big railroader was right. Of course, this action of Van Horne and the Directors was, as already intimated, the last straw for Hill. He was too keen and clear-headed a man not to understand that he and Van Horne, with their big projects more or less competitive, could not work together to advantage. So he withdrew with some emphasis, but we are not to forget that he made railroaders of Stephen, Smith and Angus, and that through his recommendation, Van Horne came to Canada. The Canadian boy, James J. Hill, who had left his home in Rockwood, Ontario, to seek his fortune in the States, and become a maker of its North-West, also did, for various reasons and motives, a good day’s work for his native land.
When Van Horne met the Directors in Montreal they discussed also the momentous question of the route to be followed. When Sandford Fleming was Chief Engineer during the regime of the Hon. Alexander Mackenzie, the line was mapped out to cross the Red River at Selkirk, thence westward through the North Saskatchewan country, crossing the Rockies by the Yellowhead Pass, and so on to the Pacific. But the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, in 1881, decided for a southerly route through Winnipeg, and across the plains and then through the mountains by the Kicking Horse Pass. For the most part the engineers preferred the Yellowhead Pass, on account of the comparatively easy grades and fewer obstacles in the way. Van Horne favoured the Kicking Horse Pass and the Directors agreed to that also, although up to that time there had been no pass discovered through the Selkirk range that lay right beyond the Rockies like an impregnable rampart. But if no pass was found through the Selkirks, the track might be laid in a more roundabout way along the Columbia. Once again these men were making a big venture under the leadership of Van Horne, who seemed to be having pretty much his own way at the Board meeting. The Directors had secured him at a large salary because he was a practical railroader, and they were evidently going to give him opportunity to earn it by letting him assume heavy responsibility.
The change of route from the Yellowhead to the more difficult Kicking Horse Pass has been much discussed and, in some considerable degree, criticized. But there were weighty reasons for the change as Van Horne saw them. The transcontinental route from the East through the Kicking Horse Pass was one hundred and twenty-five miles shorter that the other, and that is an item, when the costs of construction were considered, as well as time in the trip across the continent. Besides that, the Kicking Horse route, if adopted, would preclude the possibility of any railway building between the Canadian Pacific and the boundary-line and thus draining traffic towards the States. The great valleys of the Kootenay, the Columbia and the Okanagan were more accessible by the Kicking Horse route, and such valleys are supreme in productiveness in British Columbia. And I am not sure but Mr. Van Horne, with his strong sense of the artistic and the scenic splendour of the southern route, felt that in the future it would, as a tourist route of unequalled attractiveness, become one of the greatest and most remunerative assets of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The supremacy of the Kicking Horse route in that regard has been fully recognized by world-travellers. The famous Sir Edwin Arnold, author of “The Light of Asia,” who had been in practically all countries, one day said to Mr. Castell Hopkins, of Toronto, as they met on a Canadian Pacific Railway train in the Rockies, “These vast ranges exceed in grandeur the Himalayas, the Alps and the Andes, all of which I have seen.” The matchlessly inspiring scenery of this route will always remain to make it an irresistible magnet to tourists and travellers generally. For the rest of it, any problem in gradients will vanish at any time desired, by the lowering of grades and electrification, if ever the situation demands such action.
Before leaving the Kicking Horse Pass discussion, it may be interesting to some of our readers to relate the origin of this striking name. When I first went down along the river I recall some one on the train who told his version by saying that the name was given to the river because as it rushed down the grade it was constantly thrown back in splashing spray by the rocks, as if by the kicking of a horse. This is a poetic description of a very turbulent stream where the rocks look vicious enough to kick anything to pieces that might be hurled against them, but it is not the real origin of the name. The prosaic fact is that when, in 1858, Capt. Palliser and Dr. (later Sir James) Hector were exploring the region they were leaving the camp by this river one morning and Hector, while trying to round up a straying packhorse, was kicked in the chest by his own riding horse as he was passing him. Hector was laid up in the camp for several days, and the incident was so impressed on the explorers that they anathematized and immortalized this lively animal by calling the river and pass after him.
When Mr. Van Horne went back to Winnipeg from the meeting of Directors in 1882, things looked well around that Western gateway city because the advent of the Canadian Pacific had given rise to a real-estate boom whose intoxicating influence had gone to people’s heads so that they were all hilariously rich, at least in imagination, and, therefore, indomitably optimistic. This phase of undue excitement passed, but Winnipeg is my old home city, and hence I am able to testify that in no city with which I am acquainted was it so true, as it used to be said of the people of Winnipeg, that “they lived on hope.”