The romance of the Canadian Pacific Railway

by R. G. MacBeth

It was well for the road and for Canada that he saw the vista thus opening up ahead with the lure of great prospects for the exercise of his powers. Because otherwise he might have taken up work elsewhere. It is well known that more than one board in the States was ready to throw its presidency at the head and the feet of the man whose astonishing record on the Canadian Pacific had attracted the attention of the railway world. In fact Van Horne, on reaching Montreal after returning from Craigellachie, found a letter (and others followed from several directions) from Mr. Jason C. Easton, a great banker and railway man in Wisconsin. The letter expressed the hope that as Van Horne had only agreed to stay with the Canadian Pacific for five years, he would soon go back to the States and take a railway presidency there.

But besides the fact that the bigness of the task still to be undertaken in Canada held him to this country, the truth is that he had become personally attached to President George Stephen and his Scottish-Canadian associates. A little sidelight is thrown upon this phase of the matter by the incident connected with the driving of the last spike by Mr. Donald A. Smith (Strathcona). Mr. Smith owned a country home near Winnipeg, called Silver Heights, once the property of the Hon. James McKay, the handsome and famous frontiersman and interpreter who had such a large share in the making of the successful Indian treaties on the plains. After his removal to Montreal Mr. Smith allowed the house to remain closed except for the caretaker and those who looked after the farm stock and such like. On the way west by special train to Craigellachie, Mr. Van Horne thought it would be a good idea to have the house at Silver Heights opened up and have a spur-track laid to it from Winnipeg, as a surprise to the veteran who was to drive the last spike. When the train returned to Winnipeg the engine was reversed and the special began backing out of the station. Mr. Smith after a while noticed it, and then began to look out of the window. In a little while he said: “Why, gentlemen, if I can believe my eyes this ground looks familiar and there are Aberdeen cattle just like mine and that place looks like my house.” The train stopped and the conductor shouted “Silver Heights.” Mr. Smith was delighted beyond measure and again and again expressed his appreciation of the courtesy and thoughtfulness that had planned the surprise. It was just one of the ways by which the apparently unemotional Van Horne paid chivalrous personal compliment to the men whose character and courage he had learned to respect as they stood by him to their last dollar in the great task to which he had given himself so determinedly for four laborious years.

When Mr. Van Horne reached Montreal, after the opening of the main line, he began to speed up the plans he had been putting already in operation for the perfecting of the road and the increase of traffic in all directions. The quality of the road-bed was of even higher standard than the Government contract required. It will be remembered that once, when the road-bed was still new, Van Horne had aboard his train a number of Eastern men who were going out West in regard to the valuation of the Government section of the road constructed by Onderdonk. While still on the Canadian Pacific section in the mountains, Van Horne walked up the platform at Field and said to the engineer, Charley Carey, a fearless, skilful driver, “Let her out a bit, Charlie, we will show these fellows that they are on a railroad fit to run on, though the Government section is not.” Charlie “let her out” and made a fifty-one-mile run in an hour and wound up by doing the seventeen miles from Golden to Donald in fifteen minutes, and all safe. When they pulled up there, with a flourish and flashing fire on the rails as the brakes were put down hard to prevent running by the platform, the gentlemen from the East needed no further demonstration. The Canadian Pacific road-bed was all right even in those early days.

But Van Horne knew that much had still to be done. Construction had been careful, but rapid, and steel and stone and cement would have to replace many wooden culverts and bridges. Trestles had to be filled in or replaced by stone or steel. Rolling stock, shops, roundhouses, yards, stations, wharves and all manner of similar things had to be provided. Branch lines to feed the main line would have to gridiron the country, and connections would have to be made with the big systems south of the line.

Incidentally, it was as a result of his observation before he came to Canada at all, that he insisted on the Canadian Pacific keeping such auxiliary utilities as the telegraph, express and sleeping car departments. These also in their several ways would be feeders to the main treasury account. They were not the big tent, as Van Horne said, using a circus illustration; but the side-shows, as he called them, went a long way to increase the receipts. It had been the custom in other places to let other organizations have these franchises, but Van Horne said they took the cream of several kinds of business and “left the skim milk to the railway.” Van Horne wanted the cream, as the road would need the money; and so the Dominion Express and the Canadian Pacific Telegraphs and the Railway’s own sleeping cars, got into business for the big Company from the start. And these, like the dining car department and others of the same type, are marvels of service and efficiency, as every one now knows.

To speak about the creation of traffic is to use a somewhat peculiar, but well-founded, expression, because, in this case, it applies to traffic which had practically no existence before. Nothing escaped Van Horne’s notice. In the evening hours when he would be in camp on the prairie during construction time, he took delight in planning sports of various kinds for the men. “A change is as good as a rest,” is an old saying with a lot of truth in it. I have seen men apparently fagged out with a day’s march become lithesome as kittens over a game of baseball in the evening on the plain. Mr. Van Horne, who was a true artist, became interested in the bleached bones of buffaloes amongst the construction tents. And many a great buffalo head with its wide white frontal bone did the big railroader adorn with sketches made in coal or pencil, to the delight of the onlookers. And at the same time he was thinking of traffic in these buffalo bones. In my boyhood I have ridden through acres and miles of prairie where the white bones of the buffalo “lay thick as the autumnal leaves in Vallambrosa.” These acres of skeletons were an indictment against the selfish and greedy buffalo-hunting sporting men who had rounded up the herds, killed them by thousands, and took nothing but the tongue and the hide. Van Horne saw in these vast surface cemeteries how the slaughtered buffalo could still be of value. And so he had men gather up the bones and pile them in great heaps along stations and sidings, to be shipped by trainloads to Eastern factories that were glad to get them. Thus the railroader, who got the material for the cost of gathering, made good profits for the Railway, and at the same time cleared the land of an encumbrance. The man who could think of such things was not likely to fail in creating traffic.

Van Horne was anxious to get the country settled up along the great spaces in the Middle West. So he lured many cattle-men across the line by the advertising he did for the rich grazing lands in the southern portion of the North-West Territories, as the prairie country was then described. He drafted some striking and rather freakish advertisements for billboards in Eastern Canada, thus “capitalizing the scenery” of the Great Lakes and the mountains and making a special bid for tourist traffic. Some of these posters, such as “Parisian Politeness on the C. P. R.” and “ ‘How High We Live,’ said the Duke to the Prince,” are somewhat belittled by smart modern advertisers; but somehow they stuck in the memory of those who saw them, and that is the acid test of all advertising. The stream of tourists or other travellers on the main line was a very small rivulet in those early days, and there are records of cars with one or two passengers. But all passengers became enthusiasts over the comfort and courtesy of the road, so that the movement of travellers is now a steady-flowing river of humanity which, in certain seasons, almost overflows in a great tide of sightseers and business people.

It is interesting to recall in connection with Mr. Van Horne’s endeavours to secure settlers by various immigration plans, that he studied social conditions amongst the incoming settlers. That was before the day of rural telephones and motor cars, and he discovered without much difficulty that one of the obstacles to settlement of the prairies at that period was the dread of loneliness and isolation. And the keen-minded railroader formulated a plan to offset that dread in the minds of possible newcomers. He thought that tracts of land should be surveyed so as to permit settlers to live in communities at the apex of a triangle. In order that they might enjoy the social amenities and advantages of community life while their farms spread out from that place of common residence to the farther extremity of the land they held. It is of additional interest to recall that the introduction of the rectangular system of land survey from the United States led to considerable unrest in the Canadian West. It gave Louis Riel a chance to play on the emotions of the half-breed settlers on the South Saskatchewan River, where these settlers desired to hold their land as the early settlers did on the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, their homes near together on the river bank and the farms running back some distance on the plain. And Riel told the half-breeds that the Government wanted to break up their social life and make it difficult for them to have schools and churches and business places near at hand. In fact, the introduction of the rectangular survey, with its comparative isolation, was one of the prime reasons at the base of the Riel Rebellion. So that Mr. Van Horne had a good idea in operation when he advocated the settlement of newcomers close together. The Government, however, did not adopt the scheme. Some settlers, like the Mennonites, followed the plan of community settlement, even though the square farms made them lose time in going backwards and forwards to their work.

Mr. Van Horne’s efforts for the settlement of the country led also to his company building immense elevator accommodation at the Great Lakes and providing facilities for transport thereto.

There were flashes of humour in this grim fight for the settler. Mr. Van Horne was restively asserting one hard year that the grain-buyers who were paying only thirty-five cents a bushel for wheat were practising highway robbery on the farmer. Mr. L. A. Hamilton, the Company’s land commissioner, said to him, “Why not go in and outbid the grain-buyers.” The idea appealed mightily to Van Horne and he sent Alex Mitchell, a grain man from Montreal, to the West to organize some agency and offer fifty cents a bushel. No one knew that Mitchell was acting for the Canadian Pacific, but when he offered fifty cents a bushel, grain poured in on him till all the cars were full and bags of wheat were piled up along station platforms on account of the car shortage. Then the enemies of the Railway who were on the lookout for chances to find fault with the Railway and who, of course, had no idea that the Railway owned the wheat, attacked the Company because it could not take care of the crop and ship it out of the country. These active enemies got photographs taken to show the congestion of the grain at stations and on platforms along the line. Van Horne said nothing, but had these photographs bought up by scores and sent abroad to show that the prairies were so productive that the railway was caught unprepared to handle the enormous crops. All this was great immigration material, and a boomerang for the men who had gone to the expense of getting the photographs.