However, it remains true also that the collapse of that famous Western real-estate boom, the crash of which affected every place from the Great Lakes to the mountains, made the task of the Canadian Pacific Board and Mr. Van Horne an exceedingly difficult one right at the outset. The sudden deflation in Western land values and the large number of business failures through the recession of the boom wave shook the faith of outsiders in the country’s future and depressed the people within the country at the same time. I have known the West all my life, but I do not recall any period more generally discouraging than that after-the-boom period in the 80’s, during which the Canadian Pacific Railway was begun and carried to an amazingly successful completion. The sudden drop in everything, as well as the rumblings and then the outbreak of the Riel Rebellion on the plains, put, in large measure, a damper on immigration; and railway building through an uninhabited land is not exhilarating work.
These were local conditions, but there were other things which sprang up at the very beginning to make the way of the new railway company hard. A few of these things may be indicated for the benefit of the superficial people who think the Canadian Pacific got an easy start. In reality it had from the first to fight every foot of the way against adverse influences. When the Company had to do its financing it found influential forces barring the doors. The Grand Trunk, with its host of big Directors and shareholders in the Old Country, attacked the new transcontinental which would be sure to invade its rich reserves in Eastern Canada; and so the London market was, in large measure, cold to any efforts made by the new Canadian Pacific Board to raise money in the world’s financial centre. Similarly the United States railways which were headed for the Pacific saw the danger of a successful Canadian rival, and did all they could to prevent the Canadian Pacific from securing any money in New York. With hostile forces thus operating in these two famous money centres, any one can understand that the new Canadian venture was in for a bad time. And we have to add to all these barbed-wire fences around the money markets abroad, the regrettable fact of almost constant nagging and criticism in Canada from sources of such wide range as the “will-never-pay-for-axle-grease” politicians, and the men who wished to cut in with the railway lines in productive territory while the Canadian Pacific was struggling to cross leagues of unpeopled rocks and plains, not to mention the people who thought the new road should benevolently carry everything for them at bare cost.
Keen-minded men like Mr. Van Horne and the Directors of the Canadian Pacific, saw that the way ahead bristled with difficulties. But they declined to quail. They had started on a great adventure and they were looking far ahead so steadily that they were saved from morbid contemplation of what lay between them and the final triumph. Their attitude toward the unproductive Lake Superior North Shore rock-wastes was typically prophetic. Despite the derisive critics who always have ridiculed the inception of big undertakings, the Canadian Pacific Railway men looked beyond the North Shore to the West-land that would someday become the granary of the Empire. Thus did they keep their courage alive. Like a famous warrior of old, they refused to see the intervening difficulties while they knew that across somewhere was the land of promise and the triumph that was worth a great struggle to attain.
When Van Horne left that meeting of Directors in Montreal he hurried back to Winnipeg with the fire of a great railway-building battle in his eye. He felt he had the support of a strong and determined body of men, and they were fully satisfied that they had in Van Horne a man worth backing. They all began to realize very vividly, from the attitude of the financial world as above outlined, that the fabled achievements of Hercules would have to be made real in the building of the road. Van Horne, as the practical builder, set his mind on his own side of the work. His energy had been pretty well tested out in the States, but he knew perfectly well that anything he had done hitherto was child’s play compared to what he was now going to attempt. I was much interested the other day in coming across an item somewhere which suggested that, some years before, Van Horne had been contemplating building a railway in the Western States to tap the Canadian North-West. The vast unpeopled territory, labelled on his map, “British possessions,” appealed to his pioneering and adventurous spirit. It was the land of romance and mystery and of illimitable possibilities, where he could blaze new trails and build steel highways over a territory bigger than half-a-dozen European kingdoms.
And now his opportunity had come in an unexpected, but better, fashion, and, as stated, he set his mind upon it with a sort of terrifying concentration. He found that Government contractors in 1881 had built some 160 miles of railway on the plains. He told the Directors in Montreal that he would build 500 miles on the prairie in 1882. He started in to do it and looked to the Directors to pay the bills. Some years after it was all over Van Horne said one day, as a tribute to the President, “Stephen did more work and harder work than I did. I had only to build the road, but Stephen had to find the money.” Those who remember them both are ready to say that the honours were even. Each did his part well and each had many helpers.
In view of the fact already stated, that Canada was new to the railway-building business, it is surprising to find that Mr. Van Horne brought very few assistants from the States. Besides Egan, who did most excellent work in construction days out of Winnipeg, Kelson of the Milwaukee road was brought to be general storekeeper at Winnipeg. There was urgent need of a key man in Montreal to be the general purchasing agent for the whole road. And as everything had to be purchased for a new undertaking an altogether unusual man was required. Besides other supplies, the man who came as purchasing agent would have to be a sort of quarter-master-general to feed an industrial army spread out in a long line from East to West and with practically no line of communication along which to transport the necessaries of life. For that position Mr. Van Horne had his eye on a young man named Thomas G. Shaughnessy, who had been on his staff in Milwaukee. Mr. Van Horne had opened up offices over the Bank of Montreal on Main Street in Winnipeg. “One day,” says Mr. E. A. James, who was then Mr. Van Horne’s private telegraph operator, “there came into the outer office a fashionably-dressed, alert young man, sporting a cane and giving general evidence of being what we call a live wire. He asked for Mr. Van Horne and gave his name as Shaughnessy. I looked up Mr. Van Horne in another office and gave him the message. He said to the gentleman to whom he was speaking, ‘I am glad Tom has come; he is the man I want for general purchasing agent.’ ” And thus another notable star swung into the orbit of the new company. But beyond these just mentioned to take hold at the beginning, Mr. Van Horne said no one else was needed from outside, as the new General Manager found Canadians so full of initiative and energy that he had no difficulty in getting men of calibre and zeal without going beyond the Dominion.
Incidentally it may be mentioned that a fire took place in the building during that winter of 1882, and the offices of the railway and the Bank had to be moved to temporary quarters in the old Knox Church building. There Mr. Van Horne occupied the vestry and Mr. I. G. Ogden, who became famous as auditor and finance minister for the road, held office space in the library of the Sunday school, while the bank itself did business in what had been the main auditorium of the church. The quarters were unusual and not very convenient, but the atmosphere would be good.
It was still winter of the year in which Van Horne had said he would build 500 miles of the road on the prairie. He had to wait for the spring’s approach; but meanwhile he was stacking up supplies at Winnipeg, “from the ends of the earth,” as people there said, and in enormous quantities—rails from Britain and the Continent, ties from the woods east of Winnipeg, stone from every available quarry within reach, lumber from the Minnesota country and from the Lake of the Woods. Much of this came in during the frozen months by rail from the south, and the yardmen in the States were delighted to send along whole trains of material for “Van Horne’s road” as they called it. The main thing was to get the stuff forward. And Van Horne kept the wires hot in seeing that there would be no delay.
