Little Visits with Great Americans, Vol. 2 (of 2) / Or Success, Ideals and How to Attain Them

by Unknown

It was very plain from his manner that in making these remarks Sir William’s thoughts were quite remote from his own career. Yet he himself is one of the most conspicuous and striking representatives on the continent of the class of men he was discussing. His humble start as a small boy in a railway station, contrasted with his present place as a giant in the field of railroading, indicates the height of his own achievement. His career has been a long series of upward steps.

At an age when most boys are playing marbles in short trousers, young Van Horne, forced by the death of his father to earn his own living, obtained a place as general utility boy at a railroad station in the county in Illinois in which in 1843 he was born. Here he saw and seized his first opportunity; that is, he taught himself telegraphy. With this knowledge and a robust personality as his only assets, he journeyed to Chicago and found a position as telegraph operator in the offices of the Illinois Central Railroad. But he did not long hold this place. The telegraphic keys were too small for him. Before he was twenty-two he had gone over to the Chicago & Alton road and was dispatching trains—work of so responsible a character that no railroad company would think for an instant of entrusting it to the ordinary inexperienced youth. But the chief requisite of the train despatcher is care, and care was only one of young Van Horne’s conspicuous qualities. He had a combination of others that overshadowed it and brought him promotion to the place of superintendent of telegraphy.

His work was still too easy for him, so they made him a division superintendent. He was now where the officials of other lines could see him, and the Wabash road took him away from the Chicago & Alton to make him their general manager. He was about thirty years old at this time, but he was already looming so large among the railroad men of the Middle West that when the directors of the Southern Minnesota Railway, which was in the hands of a receiver, bethought themselves to look about for a man who could rehabilitate their road, their eyes fell upon young Van Horne, and they asked him if he thought the line could be made to pay.

He replied that he thought so, and gave his reasons. They then asked him to assume the management of the moribund property. He liked then, as he does now, this kind of a job. There were chances in it far above the mere satisfactory performance of routine duty. There were opportunities here to create, to develop, to quicken into new life; and the young man’s instincts were all in this direction. So he took hold with enthusiasm, and put the company on a paying basis with a rapidity that amazed the stockholders who made him president. He went back to the Chicago & Alton in 1878 as general manager.

In a lifetime of work very few railroad men achieve as much as this, but Van Horne was still in his thirties and was just beginning. The Canadian Government had been trying for several years to push from the Ottawa Valley a road of steel across its vast domain to the Pacific Ocean, and it had found the task too much for it. Surveys had been made, but there had been comparatively little work of actual construction. Finally, in 1880, it was decided to allow the project to become a private enterprise, and in 1881, under the auspices of Sir Donald Smith, now Lord Strathcona, the Canadian Pacific Railroad Company was organized.

After Sir Donald had found the immense amount of money that was required, his greatest care was to find a man to take charge of the construction, much of it through unknown wildernesses, of the longest railway that had ever been projected. The length of the proposed line and the nature of the country through which it was to pass, made this the most stupendous railway undertaking the world had seen. It was necessary to procure a man fitted for a Herculean task. Sir Donald took stock with the railroad men of the New World and decided that the most promising of them all was William C. Van Horne.

The latter went into the work like a football player bucking the line on a university team. An army of men was hired. At an average speed of three miles a day for many months the steel rails were pushed into the vast forests and the trackless prairies of the Northwest. At last the workmen, urged incessantly by the directing mind of General Manager Van Horne, attacked the Rocky Mountains, and under the charges of picks and powder the mountains made way. At the end of the third year the summit of the Rockies had been reached, and before another twelve months had gone by the forbidding passes in the Selkirks were thundering and trembling from the assaults of dynamite.

The last rail of the main line was laid in November, 1885. In the meantime the company had been acquiring branch connections, and before the end of the year was in possession of nearly forty-five hundred miles of track. Before another six months had passed a great system was fully equipped and Canada had her railway from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The contract had called for the completion of the road in ten years. Van Horne and his men had finished it in five. Since then the system has been extended until now it embraces nearly ten thousand miles of track, and steamship lines cross the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. One may travel eighteen thousand miles on the route and property of the Canadian Pacific. Cities and towns, many thousands of farms and factories, have sprung up along the way. A new commonwealth in the Northwest has been developed. And it has been done under the general direction of Sir William C. Van Horne.

This is why Canadians, when asked to name living men who have done most to develop the Dominion, couple his name with that of Lord Strathcona. The latter, then Sir Donald Smith, had the courage to assume a burden of railway construction that had proved too heavy for the Government. He thus made possible Canada’s only transcontinental railway. Lord Strathcona financed the road, but Sir William Van Horne built it. The latter was its president from 1888 until 1899, when, the creative work being done, the chief difficulties surmounted, he resigned the presidency in favor of Sir Thomas Shaughnessy, and assumed work of less detail as chairman of the board of directors.