TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been placed at the end of the book.

The spacing between initial letters of railway names has been removed, for example any instances of C. P. R. have been changed to C.P.R. for consistency.

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

Some minor changes to the text are noted at the [end of the book.]

Trains of Recollection

D. B. HANNA

Trains of Recollection

Drawn from

Fifty Years of Railway Service

in Scotland and Canada, and told to Arthur Hawkes

BY

D. B. HANNA

First President of the Canadian National Railways

TORONTO: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF
CANADA LTD., AT ST. MARTIN’S HOUSE
MCMXXIV

Copyright, Canada, 1924.
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED.

PRINTED IN CANADA

To the multitude of Fellow-Workers who, during twenty-six years, loyally served the Canadian Northern and Canadian National Railways, this book is appreciatively inscribed.

THE CHAPTERS

THE PORTRAITS

INTRODUCTION

This book is published because readers have said they obtained from the chapters that were written for The Toronto Star Weekly sufficient knowledge about railway conditions in Canada, during forty years, to cause them to ask for the material in permanent form.

The third era of Canadian railway expansion, beginning with the unnoticed construction of a hundred and twenty-five miles of line in Manitoba, and issuing in the largest national system in the world, will sometime have its due place in the historical literature of the period. Though this was always apparent, it never seemed that one’s contact with the changes of a quarter of a century would ever reach the public except through the inarticulate narrative that is interned in annual reports and arid statistics.

What appears here is due to the ability of my old friend and colleague to take scanty and seemingly disconnected material, and fashion it into a story such as one scarcely supposed to be discoverable.

This book could only have been written by an author with an inside experience of railway administration; and an intimate knowledge of Western Canada. Mr. Hawkes was for several years the Superintendent of Publicity for the Canadian Northern Railway System. From the railway point of view, therefore, he was familiar with most phases of what I had to tell. His knowledge of the West is extensive and peculiar. He was going through the mill of homestead farming in the North West Territories before I ever saw Manitoba. His intimacy with pioneer conditions, is repeatedly reflected here, in a manner which it is a pleasure to acknowledge.

This much of explanation was necessary, to make it clear that an old railwayman is merely offering, through the only available channel, what little material a hardworking life affords for, perhaps, a friendlier appreciation of the railways’ part in developing Canada than is easily obtainable from official publications.

“Trains of Recollection” may be my story; but it is my friend’s book.

D. B. HANNA.

Toronto, May, 1924.

Trains of Recollection

CHAPTER I.

Suggesting a typically Presbyterian background of Scottish migration to Canada.

It seemed that one’s ability to identify a joke was being tested when one was asked to set down something of what one had seen of the development of Canada during forty years of railway experience. The work I have been doing since coming to Canada in 1882 is the same kind of service that has been well rendered by thousands of men. How could there be anything of public interest in a career that has had only an average share of incident and romance, and more than an average of exacting toil?

But it has been said that the commonplace is the greatest romance of all; and that it often requires the lapse of years for an apparently ordinary event to acquire its true perspective in the things which impart the liveliest interest to life. After all, one was very closely associated with the growth of a great railway system from a feeble and unpromising beginning; and one saw the most extraordinary change from private enterprise to Government ownership that has taken place in the history of transportation. Nine millions of Canadian people are financially interested in the effects of that transformation, and it may help some of them to appreciate the significance of their unexpected proprietorship if one tries to throw a little light upon the evolution of Canada, as it has been affected by four decades of rapidly changing transportation conditions—forty years in which every sensation of success and disappointment has been known to the most fascinating country in the world.

One must find the romance of the commonplace in harking back—it cannot be done by looking forward. There is no joy in the anticipation of a certainty. No surer way of discounting pleasures has ever been invented than to describe them in advance. Everybody knows the bore who ruins any good story he proffers by his assurance that it is very funny indeed. Turnings in our personal roads which have no special interest when they are taken, years afterwards disclose themselves as the most fateful passages in our lives. Sometimes when we have wanted to turn aside from a beaten path, and have been foiled, we have not known how much was bound up with keeping awhile longer the even tenor of what was then a commonplace way indeed.

Perhaps I am alone in viewing, without regret, a turn which was missed in my teens, and which would have taken me to Asia, far indeed from the rigours of Manitoba winters, and from politicians who would assist railway management on lines that have grown hoary with age, and disgraceful in their inefficiency. While working at Stobcross station in Glasgow I answered an advertisement for a clerk on a plantation in Ceylon. No reply to the application reached me, though I anxiously watched for it. Years afterwards, just before coming to Canada, it was told me that an answer to the application did arrive from the Glasgow firm who had the business in hand. The family knew of the matter, and one of them intercepted a letter which was addressed to me, and asked me to come to Glasgow, as it was thought I might be the most suitable applicant for the situation. The letter was concealed, I believe, with the connivance of my excellent mother; otherwise, I might now be curing tea for Sir Thomas Lipton. About that time, by the way, the first of the Lipton shops was opened in Glasgow, and the astounding sight was witnessed of a provision retailer advertising his bacon by weekly cartoons of Irish pigs on the hoardings—for bacon, and not tea, was the early Lipton specialty.

One often envies the Canadian-born—even one’s own children—their fortune in being natives of this land. But occasionally one meets Canadians whose envies are of the reverse order. They say that it must be fine to have spent a youth amidst the historical treasures of the Old Lands; and fine also to have had the experience of finding in Canada an entirely New Land—to have chosen it for oneself, and to have had so much direct control over one’s own destiny; and the destinies of one’s offspring, to remote generations. Immigration is a romance of the commonplace, perhaps; though there isn’t much glamour in the outlook of a poor wight who has left all his kindred, is facing an unknown country, and is finding the ocean a bottomless woe, on which nothing stays where it is put.

“What made you come to Canada?” is a frequent question, to which the answer usually is, “To better my condition.” It is my own story, though oddly enough, I came to Montreal to work for the Grand Trunk at a smaller salary than I was getting in Glasgow as a clerk on the Caledonian. Was that Scottish-like—was it wise or otherwise? If an answer be desired, it can perhaps be found in a sketch of the Scotland I came from—the Scotland of an average industrious family that owed everything to labour and nothing to fortune—the sort of family that has been supplying Canada with people ever since immigration hither ceased to be a purely French process.

One speaks about one’s early years primarily because it affords an opportunity to say a word for upbuilders of Canada who never saw Canada, but who gave to Canada what she has most needed and still needs—people, sound of body and of mind, and grounded in a faith that may be stern, but has at least been steadfast, and has given its followers the vitalities of character and success.

A friend has a habit of saying that his mother is one of the greatest Canadians, though she has never lived for a single month ten miles from her birthplace in the south of England. On the day this is written he tells me she is keeping her ninety-eighth birthday, and that, to date, she has given sixty-five children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren to Canada. For fifty-five years she has been writing letters to, and getting letters from, Canada. Her stake in the country has been infinitely more precious than that of the millionaire who dies without seed.

Most theatre-goers have seen “Bunty Pulls the Strings”, Moffatt’s verra Scotch play. The piece is developed around Bunty, the managing daughter of a typically Presbyterian house. It is really a depiction of life near Glasgow—some people think, of an extinct species of existence. Its religious aspects are incomprehensible to a generation that knows not its Shorter Catechism, as they are serious to the participants, and homelike to many people in Canada scarcely past middle life.

One of the characters speaks of going to Thornliebank. The father of the playwright was William Moffatt, well known as an elocutionist in Scotland fifty years ago, who used to give readings from the “Reciter” of his own compilation. He was a frequent visitor to Thornliebank. For nearly twenty-four years I never lived anywhere else.

“Bunty” is a transcript from southern Scottish life, as I knew it, within an hour’s walk of Glasgow. The church scenes, including the presence of the collie among the worshippers and the deposits of copper on the collection plate outside the door, before the spiritual food has been dispensed, are as true to fact as a Canadian winter is true to Jack Frost.

The Thornliebank folk as I knew them, and as I was one of them, are reproduced in “Bunty” with a fidelity that shows how dramatic the commonplace can be. Thornliebank was and is a village almost entirely of one industry. The Crum Print Works employed several hundred people. The Crums were among the first manufacturers to recognize that they owed to their employes more than the smallest wages that they would consent to work for. The influence of Robert Owen, the socialistic employer of New Lanark, had spread to our locality. The Crums furnished certain institutional services for the village. They were circumscribed enough, in comparison with what has been done by the Cadburys at Bournville and the Levers at Port Sunlight, but were considerable advances on the average standard of industrial amenities in the mid-nineteenth century. They were the heralds and examples which, in due time, produced the Bournvilles and Port Sunlights, the Garden Cities and the town planners.

Roundabout, Thornliebank was known as the model village, because of the Crums’ commonsense philanthropies. There was a commodious village club, the facilities of which, and especially the library, were greater than the membership fees. Sport was not the feature of country life that it has since become everywhere—perhaps because that was still the era when Shanks’s pony was the steed on which people put their odds. It was also the era of mutual improvement expressed in musical and literary endeavour. In the Literary Society my sphere was humble enough, though I recall the labour with which I set forth the fruit of researches on such subjects as the history of railways.

The Thornliebank Choral Union was nothing extraordinary, of course, except perhaps that its daring members constituted me their treasurer, and managed to renew their courage when the annual meeting recurred. But Thornliebank’s chief musical fame was derived from its brass band, into the glories of which I was never initiated. It had (speaking from memory) twenty-four pieces; and was in much demand for excursions and celebrations over a pretty wide territory. The pay for a long day’s activity wouldn’t be more than twenty-five or thirty dollars—think of that, ye who inhibit musicians from playing with a Pageant Chorus, because of a union punctilio.

A long day’s activity? Many a Saturday morning have I been wakened at five o’clock by the band playing itself through the village on the way to Glasgow, there, at seven, to lead its employing multitude to a boat for a journey down the Clyde. The band walked the five miles to Glasgow, and played most of the way. Practice in daylight maybe saved the cost of candle-light.

Some little time before I left Scotland there came to Thornliebank a designer for the Crum Mills, who had a very fine tenor voice. He was a little unlike some of our native singers, such as John Semple, whose bass was one of the most sonorous I have ever heard; who gave to his solo work a genius of interpretation I have never known excelled, but who couldn’t read a note, and relied entirely on his unfailing, memorial ear.

Our tenor was a technician, with a passion for the science of melody, and a determination to excel in the professional world—which he has since done in two continents. He is George Neil, conductor of the Toronto Scottish Chorus, one of the sweetest lyric tenors you could wish to hear, and a relentless worker in the cause of perpetuating Scottish songs.

Discussing, the other evening, the musical associations of the region we both knew so well, George and I agreed that the Pageant Chorus, which has opened a new chapter in the great story of the Canadian National Exhibition, is a measurable, modernized, Canadianized expansion of the Tannahill concerts on Gleniffer Braes, to which, with myriads more, Thornliebank used to flock on a summer Saturday afternoon, to hear anywhere up to a thousand voices, drawn from city and country choirs, commemorate a Scottish poet who thus received a tribute unequalled, I think, by anything that has annually been dedicated to his master Burns.

Tannahill was the son of a Paisley handloom weaver. He was put to the shuttle as a boy, but studied the poetry of Burns, Fergusson and Ramsay till he developed an intense ambition to emulate them. He fused his muse with the music of his loom, and tuned his metres with his shuttle. At thirty-three he took the advice of those who noted the local popularity of his poetry and published a volume of 175 songs and lyrics that enabled him to bank twenty pounds. But at thirty-six, when Constable refused to publish a corrected edition, his heart broke and he was found drowned.

One of his best pieces is “The Braes of Gleniffer”; and it was in a natural amphitheatre, on the braes of Gleniffer, visible from Thornliebank, that the yearly commemorative concert was held. The braes were five miles from home; but nothing was thought of walking the distance. The Tannahill concerts were known all over the south of Scotland; and for several decades it was a distinction to be a singer in them.

My father was a foreman in the Crum mills, and did his bit in religious and social service. He was a highly Calvinistic Presbyterian, of a sect which has no perpetuation in Canada. My mother, a Blair of Barrhead, was also of his kirk—the kirk of Original Seceders it was formally called, after a certain process of union had been consummated.

There was no church of the Original Seceders at Thornliebank, so we worshipped at Pollokshaws, the town that lay between Thornliebank and Glasgow, and is now incorporated with the great city. My father was the precentor for the Original Seceders, who would as soon think of having a box of whistles to lead the praise in God’s house as they would of praying to the accompaniment of fife and drum. Old associates of his son in Portage la Prairie might not have been astonished at the accountant of the Manitoba and North Western Railway venturing on the perilous seas of choir-leading at the Presbyterian church, had they seen Precentor Hanna at the Original Seceders in Pollokshaws, standing up when the psalm was called, striking his tuning fork, bending his ear to it, sounding the note in harmony, and then leading off with “Duke Street” or “Martyrdom”.

The Original Seceders are a survival and a combination of several schisms in the Presbyterian church in Scotland. The rigid qualities of the Covenanters caused some of them to resist all innovations, and to keep themselves separate from such as yielded to new-fangled fashions in worship and belief. The settlement of William and Mary, as sovereigns of Scotland as well as of the rest of the British Isles, imposed an oath on ministers which some refused to take, so that there was a secession of Burghers, as they were called. These, in their turn, had a split of their own, resulting in churches of Anti-Burghers. In opposition to the advancing tide of more liberal ideas and less severe practices, the Auld Lichts also set up a new identity among the folds of Christ’s Presbyterian flock.

To any of these divisions of the church militant may be ascribed the overworked story of the good soul who, lamenting the decay of faith, as indicated by the true kirk of the truly faithful having dwindled to the minister and herself, said: “And I’m no’ so sure of the meenister.”

At all events, the Anti-Burghers, the Auld Lichts and the Covenanters gathered themselves together in the Original Seceders, of whom there were not more than a baker’s dozen of churches in all Scotland. Our family belonged to the church at Pollokshaws, where we walked every Sunday, rain, snow or shine, and where father led the psalmody. We were never taught, in so many words, that it was impossible to praise God in any other metres or melodies, than the versions of the psalms that belong to the period of the Westminster Confession, and the tunes which were venerably associated with various of them. The idea of a predestinated psalmody which was of the essence of our Sabbath meat and drink was as much a part of our religious make-up as the day of judgment itself. Hymns were taboo. Somehow, they didn’t fit in with the true doctrine of the survival of the fittest; not even such dournesses as

“Great God! what do I see and hear?

The end of things created,

The judge of all men doth appear

On clouds of glory seated.”

At Pollokshaws certain tunes were so associated with certain psalms that when my father attempted the innovation of singing “I waited for the Lord my God” to some other tune than “Balerma”[1] there was almost a godly riot, and his religious experience was critically sounded for the graver symptoms of heresy. The sentiment engendered by my father’s endeavour to vary a tune has had no parallel in my experience, I think, except in the astonishment with which some politicians in the maritime provinces regarded the amazing doctrine that the job of a section man should not be dependent upon his vote at the last general election.

The outward form of much of the Presbyterianism of Scotland in the sixties and seventies was hard, bare, unlovely to the modern eye. It grates upon our present sense of spiritual contentment. But it developed a fibre in the people who revelled in theological exactitude, for which we, their descendants, are seldom sufficiently grateful. It will be true of multitudes of other Canadians besides myself, who were brought up in the moral rigours of a most positive Puritanism, that their retrospect combines a little resentment against the overclouding of their youth by unnecessary prohibitions, with much thanksgiving for the immovable foundations on which character was built. We are none too worthy citizens of the state, as things are. Heaven alone knows what we might have been if we had not been told, with stern, but kindly repetition, “This is the way, walk ye in it.” Our grudge to our Presbyterian upbringing is infinitesimal. Our debt is infinite.

Sometimes one hears what sounds like ungrateful criticism of the thoroughness with which a theology that was sometimes confounded with religion was drilled into the children of the nineteenth century. A better attitude, surely, even for those who would not hold their children’s noses closely to the Calvinistic grindstone, is to appreciate the excellences which were so relentlessly pressed upon us. It may be well that, for us, the old days have gone for ever. But for family discipline, and the homage that was paid to the unseen, could anything be better than the attendance at church of the whole family every Sunday, at Pollokshaws, for services that lasted from eleven till a quarter to four, with an hour’s intermission for lunch; then Sunday school at five o’clock?

After a quiet evening there was the second family worship of the day, beginning at ten o’clock, when whoever happened to be in the house was not allowed to depart without sharing in the exercises—expounding of the Word and a somewhat lengthy prayer by father, and psalmody by all present. Religious duty was imperious duty—in private as well as in public. Except the precentor, in church we sat to sing, and we stood while the preacher prayed. The long prayer of an ordained Original Seceder would often continue for half an hour.

It is not of an Original Seceder, but of another branch of the Presbyterian church, that the story is told of a young probationer who was being heard with a view to an overture, and who, having been told that his prospective congregation very much liked very long supplications, thought to help himself out, when he was gravelled for matter, by saying to Deity: “And now, Lord, we will tell thee a little anecdote.”

Last summer I had the pleasure of taking a Toronto friend, Mr. A. J. Mitchell, a manager of Old St. Andrew’s, to the Original Seceders’ Church at Pollokshaws. We deemed it inadvisable to bring the taxi to the church door. As far as possible, we conformed ourselves to the prevailing spirit of the congregation and the service. To each of us the associations of the worship were different, indeed.

The interior, with its uncushioned pews, the precentor’s box and the pulpit, was what it had been fifty years ago. When the precentor pitched high the opening note of psalm or paraphrase, I was thinking of my father, long since gone. While the preacher was discoursing with all the old certainty, on the wrath to come, to me it was a voice remote, but oh, so near. Outside one met warm-hearted people who knew one’s name, and the family’s connection with the church, but were personal strangers. One could only establish contact with the living by recalling the dead. There is a sadness about returning to an old home after decades of absence that in some ways is more poignant than the feeling with which a youth leaves the roof that has sheltered him all his days, for a land across the sea.

But for a pillar of a Toronto Presbyterian church to find himself for the first time in the rarefied atmosphere of the Original Seceders; to join in praise that is entirely vocal; to see the solemn devotion that pervades a service singularly void of what to him hitherto has been appealing in worship, is something new; and, if one is not mistaken, something awful.

My friend comes of a family where the rigid practices of a fading Puritanism were rigidly honoured—no such desecrations, for instance, as cleaning shoes, or reading newspapers on the Sabbath day. He adorns a church where the music is fine, and the congregational singing notably hearty, where, indeed, the organist, Mr. Tattersall, is the son of a Thornliebank girl. He is of those who invited a Congregationalist to Presbyterian Old St. Andrew’s. He has delighted in the magnificence of the cathedral and the grandeur of the ritual at St. Giles’. He would not choose the severe and unornamented concentration of the old Seceders before the catholicity that he sees in the pending union. But—and this is what one would fain impress upon the kindly mind—my friend came from Pollokshaws with a deepened reverence for the wealth of character with which the old Puritanism has endowed the world. A sorry day, indeed, will it be, whereon we forget from whom and whence we came, even when we are most conscious of the liberalizing changes which time and fortune have wrought.

CHAPTER II.

Sketching early years of service at country and city stations near the Clyde.

The proportion of our immigrated people who visit their native lands is growing, despite the rise in steamer rates. There are multitudes to whom the Old Land still appears as it did when it was the only country they knew. For what it is worth, then, one who has several times trodden the old familiar ground, may say that you have to go back to the Old Land really to see it; and to appreciate what Canada has done for you.

I am sure that is unanimously so with all who have had the experience. The fields you think of as big; the village street you remember as wide; the kirk you recall as imposing—they are all there; but they have diminished in extent, or you have grown in stature. The people, noble as they are, abide where they always abode. Somehow, in the old segment of the world, they have not imbibed the air of the newer, more optimistic world that is on this side the sea. And distances have been transformed, and the way you look at distances.

Those who have always been accustomed to the magnificent distances of Canada frequently marvel at the small acquaintance many British people have with their native country. What may seem a phenomenal ignorance is oftener only a proof of an ancient fiscal limitation. In Thornliebank we knew about Loch Lomond, the Trossachs, and the glories of the more northern hills and glens. But to go to Loch Lomond, for instance, was a financial adventure, as well as a serious railway journey, to be followed by costly coaching along the shore. Ben Lomond, the three-thousand-feet mountain which stands like a sentinel over the twenty-two miles of islanded water, is forty miles from Glasgow—the distance of Hamilton from Toronto. Last summer we motored from Glasgow to the hotel at the foot of the mountain, and back again, in four hours. Besides the scenery so often mentioned but so seldom described, we saw the proofs of the disappearance of the former age, which, admirable as it is from the point of view of the popularization of what used to be the joy of a few, still seems rather flippantly to challenge the majesty of the prospect—I mean the abundance of travel by motor char-a-banc.

Gasoline has indeed done wonders for travel; but a big bus, rolling along at twenty miles an hour, with as many passengers as the first steamer that plied on the Clyde—the “Comet” in 1812—is not the picturesque sight that a tally-ho, with horses four, and an echoing horn used to be. Naturally, an old railroader is all for better transportation, and the multiplication of fares; but, the old ways had their good features, and, somehow, one has a lingering feeling that it were better for the older-fashioned picturesqueness, which the multitude could not see, to remain than that everything in life should be subdued to gas—and perhaps, in time, to jazz.

On the whole, the men who gave most of their time to the kirk also served the community most consistently in other spheres. Fifty and sixty years ago the larger duties of citizenship were not commonly open to men who worked for wages. My father was past fifty before the ten-pound householder had a Parliamentary vote. The teaching of men like Robert Owen, and the rise of trade unionism, synchronized with intellectual, social and economic advances among working people who didn’t cease to read when they left school. Mechanics’ Institutes abounded. Co-operative societies sprang up in almost every industrial community in the Lowlands of Scotland and the north of England. There was one in Thornliebank, of which William Hanna was the treasurer.

The organization of a local co-operative business was very simple—its methods also. A society was formed, goods bought for the co-operative store, and the members paid cash for them. At each buying they were given metal tokens representing the amount of their purchases—it was a coinage which obviated the necessity for the intricate labors of bookkeeping. At the end of three months the committee took stock of the store, compared the value of the goods with the standing at the last quarter day, counted the cash in hand, figured up the expenses, and were ready to declare a dividend. The shareholder brought his tokens—his chips, if you like—to the counter, and on the dividendial basis was given cash, or credit for more goods.

With ten children, eight of whom lived to maturity, the voluntary treasurership of a village co-operative store, with the quarterly dividends added to the weekly wages at the Crum works, didn’t furnish many luxuries to the Hanna family, beyond the unsearchable riches that came to us from the Sabbath journeys to Pollokshaws. As the next to the youngest, I did not know personally of the harder struggle which beset the heads of artisan families when all their children were small. But, even in the sixties, life was a constant experiment in frugality. At the Thornliebank school we were all average scholars, I think, and in my thirteenth year my father obtained for me the job of office boy at the headquarters of the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society, in Madeira Court, Glasgow.

Call it the coincidence of the commonplace, the accident of association, if you like; but several years ago, while certain negotiations were proceeding for the purchase of land and the erection of grain elevators in the West by the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society, one could not help contrasting the change in that commercial enterprise, since his first acquaintance with it; and noticing also the difference there was between running messages from Madeira Court, and looking after the interests of a railway that connected tidewater on the St. Lawrence with tidewater on the Pacific, and had fifty thousand shareholders in the British Isles.

In those far-off days finance was a simple art, though it involved some fine adjustments. The pay in Madeira Court was four shillings a week. Out of that, return railway fare over four miles, and a midday meal, had to be provided. Transportation took about a third of the income—a trifle more, when one remembers that there was a mile walk to and from the Kennishead station, Thornliebank not being on any railway. Shanks’s pony cost something for shoes. At midday there was resort to Jenkins’s Cooking Depot, on Jamaica Street—a place where a bowl of soup, a slice of bread and a halfpenny cup of coffee offered some justification for the unchallenged boasting about free trade and cheap living which was a part of British electioneering for nearly sixty years.

The Scottish Wholesale is an enormous business in these days, with a turnover of a hundred million dollars a year. When I was on its payroll, and very proud of my job, the office force, I think, was ten. Of course, there were no telephones or typewriters. The treasurer was a machinist at Thompson’s, on Finneston street. It was part of my duty to carry the check book to him, to get batches of checks signed.

My first responsibility for observing a time-table schedule was impressed upon me rather interestingly by the Wholesale Co-operative’s first manager, Mr. James Borrowman.

“Noo, laddie,” he said, as I was off to the treasurer with cheques to be signed, “Hoo soon d’ye think ye can be back wi’ the signatures?”

I gave a close estimate, kept within it—and later discerned that my astute chief had made me set my own speed, below which it was quite inexpedient to fall.

The office work was light enough to permit of a few observations on the methods of what was then very high commerce indeed. Tea-tasting, I remember, was a subject of absorbing interest—perhaps it had something to do with the application for a clerkship on a Ceylon plantation.

There was almost sacramental gravity about old George’s preparations for testing the tasting and blending qualities of Oolong and Souchong. No home brew of these fantastic days is elaborated more carefully than the liquid bouquets in Madeira Court were compounded. With great respect to competent housewives, one may be allowed to remark that heating the pot before infusing the tea is not enough to bring to the human senses all the aromatic marvels of an artistic cup of tea. There is a delicate science of perfumery in the perfect production of the most cheering beverage. To induce a truly exquisite bouquet the cup must be heated before the tea is poured into it—and then, indeed, you have a liquid meet for the gods.

Less than a dollar a week, with railway and restaurant expenses to be paid out of it, though the hours were only from nine to six, could not long satisfy the son of the Thornliebank co-operative treasurer. After about nine months at Madeira Court the post of junior assistant to the Kennishead stationmaster fell vacant, and I was the successful applicant for the position. “Junior assistant to the stationmaster” is as big-sounding a title as one can think of for that post, after many years’ diplomatic strain in trying to find titles for railway officials whose deserts, occasionally, were in inverse ratio to their appraisals of them.

There may be more magnificent sensations than those of an Original Seceder five months short of his fourteenth birthday, selling tickets to Glasgow through a little wicket door; but if so, I know them not. The danger of giving too much change was not serious. We were only a short line, without through connections. As with other small systems, we made the most of our name. Something over thirty miles of route were called the Glasgow, Barrhead and Kilmarnock Railway. Most of the passenger traffic was to Glasgow, third-class fare, fourpence. Saturday was the busy day. The operatives used to leave the mills at five on Saturday afternoons, instead of the customary six o’clock. Jock and his wife, and sometimes a bairn or two, would go to the city for an evening’s shopping, and free gazes at the places they did not enter. To go to Glasgow and not get a drink of whiskey, fifty years ago, was like going to Niagara and shunning the Falls.

Business hours at Kennishead station were from before the first train in the morning till after the last train had come in from Glasgow at night, for which six shillings a week was the reward. Saturday nights one sometimes overtook groups walking home from their evening’s outing. Often one could hear Jock trying to walk straight, and Mary chiding him, sometimes under, and sometimes very much over, her breath. But, however uncertain the gait on Saturday night, there were dignity and poise in the approach to church next day—proof indeed of the difference between spirituous and spiritual walk and conversation.

The standard story which illustrates the commingling of the spiritual and the spirituous belongs to a locality near ours. The Scotsman who drank scientifically exhibited three stages of spirituous possession. The first was when, having first exalted his horn, he was in a meditative mood. The second stage saw him determined to discuss politics. When the saturation point was reached nothing but a religious argument would content his soaring mind.

When the United Presbyterian Church and the Free Church were fused, those who rejected the union were called the Wee Frees. In a town further up the line the controversy between the Wee Frees and the U.P.’s painfully persisted. One night a believer in the union, who had been to Glasgow, was wiggling a waggly way homeward when he saw the manse. He rang the bell, and insisted that the maid take him to the minister, to whom he said he wanted to discuss the trouble with the Wee Frees, and to propound a settlement. The minister, seeing his condition, urged that as the hour was getting late, and his caller had to be up early in the morning, he had better come next evening, when they would fully discuss the great question.

“To-morra’ nicht—to-morra’?” quoth the spirituous caller. “To-morra’ nicht I shan’t care a d——n aboot it.”

Eighteen months at Kennishead brought promotion to the ticket office at Pollokshaws, a mile and a half nearer Glasgow. Ten shillings a week, and a twice-a-day walk across the long side of the triangle of which Thornliebank, Kennishead and Pollokshaws were the vertices, were the main changes involved in this advance; although Pollokshaws, being a town of about eight thousand people, the ticket sales were larger than at Kennishead. Another change was not so pleasant. The walk home perforce was alongside the churchyard wall, which afforded too many inducements to contemplate humanity’s latter end, to be pleasant to an undeveloped youth who liked company, but had no curiosity about epitaphs when the midnight stroke was nigh.

From Pollokshaws I was transferred to Barrhead, the station farther out from Glasgow than Kennishead. One of its leading productions nowadays is the Shanks bath and toilet equipments, which are famous the world over. The business was then in its struggling infancy. Many a ticket have I sold to the original Shanks on his way to Glasgow, carrying with him samples of his wares.

Barrhead was interesting to me because it was the birthplace of my mother, as I was reminded soon after beginning duty there. As a sweet faced old lady asked for a ticket to Glasgie, I noticed she was eyeing me closely. Receiving the cardboard, she said:

“They tell me ye’re Janet Blair’s son?”

I said that was so.

“Ay,” she went on, “I knew your mither weel, lang before ye were born. She was a grand girl, and a fine-looking woman. My, but ye’re no’ a bit like her.”

Barrhead saw the end of my service of the G.B. and K., for in 1875 I obtained a clerkship at the Caledonian freight station at Buchanan Street, Glasgow. The first thing I learned there was that Presbyterian strictness was nothing compared to one brand of railway rigidity. The office was six miles from home, and a few minutes’ walk from the South Side passenger station. The first morning train arrived there at nine o’clock. Wishing still to live at home, I asked my immediate superior to excuse me from beginning work until shortly after nine, if I made up the time at noon, or in the evening. He refused: and so, for a year I walked the six miles from Thornliebank six mornings a week.[2]

Discipline can be fearfully and wonderfully enforced. Probably no chief of a big organization ever entirely escaped criticism from his subordinates for being at times more exacting than they thought circumstances warranted. But it is likely that subordinates receive more consideration than they are aware of because their chief has not forgotten that his own early subordinations were not all lavender.

From Buchanan Street occurred my last move in Scottish railway service, in 1877. With one of the best men I have ever known for my chief, Mr. R. M. F. Watson, I helped to open Stobcross station, which the Caledonian established through an arrangement for using the North British right of way. I was Mr. Watson’s only clerk. In a week or two after the opening we needed more help; and so for the first time I ranked a little ahead of a colleague. Here I stayed five years, advancing in pay from twenty-two to forty shillings a week—and two pounds was quite a salary on a Scottish railway forty-five years ago. Stobcross to-day does an enormous business. One can wish for the younger men that they have as fine a superior officer as we had in Mr. Watson.

The Caledonian was a large railway, as railways ranked in a country the extremest length of which is only as far as Sudbury is from Toronto, which could be tucked into Lake Superior, and no spot in which is fifty miles from salt water. There were, of course many promotions in the Caledonian service; but it didn’t take very long for a young fellow who was looking a little farther ahead than Saturday night to learn that a clerk outside the head office stood mighty little chance of developing from a weekly wage-earner into a salaried official. Perhaps, if I had remained in Glasgow I might have become station master at Stobcross, and been regarded as quite a fortunate officer.

Because a country youth working in the city went home every night and was, in the main, devoted to his native heath, it must not be supposed that he gave no heed to city affairs. Democracy had a mighty hold on Scottish young manhood in the seventies and eighties. The ten-pound householder was a Liberal, and though I wasn’t a ten-pound householder, I was a Liberal too, and took enough interest in statesmanship to help the party in the 1880 election, and to help myself to as much of the first-class oratory as was available before the polling.

The Reform Act of 1867 gave Glasgow three members, all representing the same constituency. But, by one of the machinations devised by old-fashioned politicians, who loved not democracy, the elector could only vote for two. In a way, I suppose, this was a device for obtaining proportional representation; by very good luck it might win the minority something more. The party which believed itself to be the stronger—in those days anything more than two parties would have seemed an absurdity, if not a crime—would run three candidates, hoping to elect all. The weaker would run only two, hoping to elect at least one.

In 1880 the Glasgow Liberals were in a great majority, and put up three candidates: Dr. Charles Cameron, proprietor of the “Glasgow Daily Mail”; Mr. Charles Middleton, of Caldwell & Middleton, and Mr. George Anderson. All three were big men physically, and were collectively dubbed “Eighteen feet of Liberalism”. The Conservatives nominated two candidates. It was the Liberals’ business to distribute their votes scientifically. This could only be done by an efficient ward organization, which would know all the Liberal voters, and instruct them to vote in the right proportions for Cameron and Middleton, for Cameron and Anderson, and for Middleton and Anderson.

There was no rule against Caledonian Railway employees working according to their political consciences, in their own time; so that evenings found me, as the election approached, helping to work out the tally. The Liberal three were elected with very few votes separating each of them, and did their bit in enabling Lord Rosebery to win his bets—that he could count the Tory members among the Scottish sixty on one hand, and that they would all be able to drive into Palace Yard in the same cab.

Lord Rosebery, then a young, but rapidly rising peer, was on the platform at the meeting which Gladstone addressed in the old City Hall as an accompaniment to his most wonderful Midlothian campaign. I cannot add anything to the stock of public knowledge about a very great man, but may perhaps furnish an illustration of the proverbial attention of Mrs. Gladstone to her husband, and of a forgetfulness which kept him on the level of other spectacle-using persons.

Mrs. Gladstone who almost invariably accompanied her husband to his political meetings, sat next him while he was speaking with magnificent eloquence and vigour to a delighted audience, who were all standing, and were prevented from swaying dangerously by being roped off in squares, on the iniquitous support given by the Beaconsfield Government to the unspeakable Turk who had slaughtered offenseless Bulgarians, and should be cleared out of Europe, bag and baggage. The old gentleman—he was already seventy years of age—wished to read a quotation, and felt in an upper vest pocket for his spectacles. They weren’t there. He patted each vest pocket vigorously—no spectacles. Then he hunted for them, until Mrs. Gladstone quietly arose, and pulled them down from his forehead to his nose—and all was joy.

To how great an extent one may seem to belong, in the eyes of a generation which is losing the use of its legs on the King’s highway, to a period almost as remote as the Flood, may be judged from the fact that, as a matter of course, after the meeting, I walked the six miles to Thornliebank, the last train having gone before the meeting was over.

Ambition being neither extinguished nor satisfied in the agreeable associations of Stobcross, and Asia, as far as I knew, having yielded a blank, it was natural that one’s outlook should turn to the Western continent, where railways were then being built, we often heard, at a tremendous rate.

I wasn’t reckless enough to throw away a certainty for a chance of having my railroading confined to hitting the ties, and I never felt the imperious call to get back to the land. So, in the late summer of 1882, I answered an advertisement for clerks on the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada. The Grand Trunk, it became known to us later, was in one of those difficult situations from which it was scarcely ever free. Circumstances had compelled it to extend its territory by taking over other lines; but it scarcely appreciated the significance of the advent of a tremendous child among the giants—the Canadian Pacific Railway.

This strange circumscription of outlook seemed to be inherent in the management of the railway from London, which proceeded as though the railway business could support a Downing Street of its own, which gave to “colonial” enterprises, by a species of absent treatment, the superior direction of men who never saw what they fancied they were managing; and who imagined that the appearance in their chosen field of young, ambitious and capable rivals was an impertinent incompetence.

The C.P.R. in 1882 had reached Winnipeg, though the road round the north shore of Lake Superior did not connect with Port Arthur till 1885. Steel was laid beyond Regina. The general manager, Van Horne, had a unique genius for railway pioneering, and a driving power to which his employers had the sagacity to give a free hand. Somewhat similarly to what happened when the construction of the Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk Pacific were in full swing, there was a great demand for all kinds of men who knew something of the railway business.

Van Horne immediately drew heavily on the Grand Trunk—in fact he drained it of a great deal of material that was in line for promotion. In those days an increase of five dollars a month was a powerful temptation to an aspiring subordinate in a freight or passenger department. The offer of an additional ten was an irresistible bait. The Grand Trunk general manager was Mr. Hickson; his assistant was William Wainwright. The general auditor was T. B. Hawson. The era of vice-presidents in charge of departments had not yet arrived. The Grand Trunk was not only directed from London, but its chief officers were sent direct from English railways. The three just named were from the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway.

As its name indicated, this was a purely provincial line. It has since developed into the Great Central, with its own fine terminal in London—Marylebone Station. Fifty years ago an officer on, say, the London and North Western, or the Great Northern, would have felt it beneath his dignity to accept a post on a “colonial” railway.

In England, at that time, the solemn importance that was attached by railway operators to their work could be gauged by the interminable extracts from Acts of Parliament about tolls, printed in big type, which adorned the walls of country stations, but which even those who had missed one train and were waiting for another never had the courage to read. Manifestations like this were possibly due to the necessity for fighting for recognition as an entirely respectable section of the business world which distinguished the earlier years of steam locomotion. Landowners regarded it as beneath their duty to their ancestry and posterity to ride in a vehicle which anybody might use for a financial consideration. When they deigned to use the railway they had their own coaches strapped to flat cars, and believed they were riding in state.

One alludes to the non-Canadian management of the old Grand Trunk, not as a criticism, but as a fact, which has had agreeable results for oneself. If, when the C.P.R. had carried its policy of abstracting men from the senior road, replacers had been sought from the bright Canadian youths who were then flocking to the United States, this tale might never have been told. But the old country management looked to the old countries for clerks, as they did for directors.

The Great Western, serving a considerable portion of Ontario beyond Hamilton, was taken over by the Grand Trunk in August, 1882. The acquisition extended the demand for clerical assistance, for the accounts of the two elements in the amalgamation were kept separately for longer than now seems to have been necessary. The audit department therefore required considerable augmentation.

Perhaps because my father was a treasurer, accounts had never been uncongenial to me. I could enjoy straightening out the mess that some unlucky book-keeper had made. I gravitated to the auditors’ brigade, and, on November 2, 1882, after a voyage on the Phoenician, which convinced me that marine transportation was not my long suit, I reported at the Grand Trunk head office, at Point St. Charles, Montreal, and began forty years of railroading such as can never be repeated in Canada. Then there was much land to be possessed. Now, there are certain deficits to be dissipated.

CHAPTER III.

Recalling Van Horne and the Canadian Pacific challenge to the Grand Trunk.

At sixty, one cannot realize how long he has lived until he sits down and counts up the revolutions he has seen since he arrived at man’s estate.

Of course, one does not mean political revolutions, merely; although they are becoming too numerous to mention. I left Scotland before the man who produced the crops from which the rent rolls of the House of Lords were paid could vote for a member of the Parliament which might send his sons to the wars. When I came to Canada in 1882, the St. Lawrence, below Montreal, flowed through a country that was about as clear of forests as it is to-day. But Ontario forty years ago, was half bush. Toronto was warmed with more wood than coal in winter. My friend Noel Marshall was called the wood king of this city. His trainloads of cordwood arrived almost daily from the territory around and beyond Lake Simcoe.

The locomotive with the big funnel-top out of which came wood sparks and smoke was still common on the railways. There wasn’t an air brake on a train. The electric light was just beginning to take its place among the marvels of the age; but the electric street car was only the dream of foolish persons who imagined that harness could be put upon the lightning. The telegraph was everywhere with the steam locomotive. But, though men had talked to each other from almost incredible distances, and prophecies were made by daring spirits about what would some day be accomplished by the human voice over an electrified wire; if you wanted to speak to a man in his office across the street, you crossed the street.

One of the surest things in human existence, to most shrewd people’s way of thinking, was the impossibility that men should ever fly. Anybody who would have predicted that in his lifetime it would be possible to send his voice out into the atmosphere in the form of a silent wave of ether, have it picked up by a piece of wire a thousand miles away and turned again into his voice so that one or one thousand people standing in a park could hear it as plainly as if the living person shouted into their ears—why, for such a prophet the only appropriate abiding place would have been where brains had ceased from troubling, and wisdom was at rest. As for the motor car, although the horseless vehicle was a subject of prophecy, the wildest visionary never proposed anything like the present speeds and dangers of the streets.

The advances that have been made in moral and social standards are, in their spheres, as remarkable as those just suggested are in the mechanical helps of life. But before we come to them, and their relation to one or two of the more remarkable variations from the way of conducting railways forty years ago, suppose we take a look at the railway situation from the constructional point of view, as it was in Canada when my service began with the Grand Trunk.

Towards the C.P.R. the high and mighty Grand Trunk directors in London had a disdain not unlike what their successors felt for the Canadian Northern when it first stretched its hand towards the London money market. The year that began my service produced two most remarkable developments in the general scheme and the administration of the C.P.R. The first day of 1882 saw the first day’s work of Van Horne as general manager of the C.P.R. The first year’s work of Van Horne saw also the abandonment of the plan of first reaching Winnipeg by rail from Eastern Canada via Sault Ste. Marie, instead of by Port Arthur. To give an idea of the atmosphere that it was sought to develop in the London money market at that time, it is interesting to see a pamphlet that was issued under Grand Trunk auspices, in opposition to the proposal to build the C.P.R. around the north shore of Lake Superior.

The territory now traversed by three transcontinental lines was described as “a perfect blank, even on the maps of Canada. All that is known of the region is that it would be impossible to construct this one section for the whole cash subsidy provided by the Canadian Government for the entire scheme.”

This view was not a purely Grand Trunk bogey. It coloured the Liberal party’s opposition to the C.P.R. Thomas Robertson, founder of the Toronto candy-making firm, used to tell with much glee how his old friend who became Senator Jaffray, president of “The Globe”, and of the Imperial Bank, was in the habit of declaring that he would not risk his life on a train north of Lake Superior in winter.

Grand Trunk understrappers, of whom I was one, had no direct contact with the big fighting that was going on between the old Canadian railway and the new, looking to the future control of transcontinental business. But we could feel temperatures; and we picked up information about the forces that were playing against each other, which, perhaps, the ordinary reader of the newspapers did not gather from what came out of the West. As a matter of fact, not much did come out of the West, where the most extraordinary phase of a most extraordinary phase of modern railway construction was being accomplished. There was no telegraph connection over all-Canadian territory between Montreal and Winnipeg, and the newspaper services were meagre indeed, compared with what they are now.

Of all the departments of railway construction and operation, only one of the C.P.R. was located in Montreal in 1882—the purchasing department. Its chief was a young fellow named Shaughnessy. Except in age, there wasn’t much difference between the purchasing agent of 1882 and the peer who resigned the C.P.R. presidency thirty-six years later. Mr. Shaughnessy had arrived early in the year, from the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, whose general manager, Van Horne, had been given charge of the completion of the C.P.R. The financial chiefs of the young railway, notably George Stephen, had their headquarters in Montreal. But they were generally regarded as having other major interests.

Among the Grand Trunk wise men, the enterprise that was poking its nose into the barbarian wilderness was looked upon with an almost amused toleration. In their own estimation, the Grand Trunk offices at Point St. Charles were a sort of Imperial hub. The C.P.R. was very much of a colonial affair, don’t you know—indeed, with a general manager from Milwaukee, rather too Yankee an affair, if the truth must bluntly be uttered.

But, even then, there were the symptoms of a somewhat chastened mood in the Grand Trunk. For the year 1882 had produced results which, when they were predictions during the previous winter, were laughed at; but when they were achievements at the end of the year were ominous indeed. The Van Horne regime on the C.P.R. was the most remarkable innovation that had happened to the business life of the Dominion. Its first year had seen the construction of about five times as many miles of railway as the C.P.R. had laid during any previous year; and most of that on the remote prairies. The promise to begin, in 1883, building around the north shore of Lake Superior looked like business—and business it was.

I think Van Horne had never been in Montreal when he took over the job of general manager of the Canadian Pacific on January 1, 1882, at Winnipeg. He came east shortly afterwards, and gave Ottawa and Montreal a few tastes of his quality. He did not settle in Montreal until after his first astounding Western season was ended. In midwinter, with little preparation made for the spring opening, Van Horne announced that he would lay five hundred miles of track on the prairies in the season of 1882. His advent at the head of affairs was not welcomed by a staff of Canadians and old countrymen. He was a Yankee. He was astonishingly aggressive. His vocabulary had all the certainty that belongs to the Presbyterian conception of everlasting retribution, without its restraint. He laughed at other men’s impossibilities, and ordered them to be done—a dynamo run by dynamite.

The only way to get construction material to Winnipeg and the West in time for the spring opening was from the south. Van Horne bought rails in England and Germany, had them shipped to New Orleans, and hauled in trainloads up the Mississippi Valley. He made a contract with a St. Paul firm for the grading, up to the point of actually laying ties and steel, from Oak Lake, west of Brandon, to Calgary. The day after the contract was signed they advertised for three thousand men and four thousand horses.

Van Horne organized his own gangs of tracklayers and kept them right on the heels of the graders. There was delay in starting work, because the Red River Valley above Winnipeg was abnormally flooded. Then the contractors didn’t work fast enough. On threat of cancelling the whole thing Van Horne speeded up the construction. Working furiously into the freeze-up, finished only 417 miles on the prairie section. But the work done elsewhere did complete over five hundred miles of construction that year; and it was plain that the new driving force would get even greater results another season.

The next year saw steel laid right to Calgary and immense progress made between Lake Nipissing and Thunder Bay. This piece of work caused J. J. Hill to drop out of the C.P.R., and to become a business enemy of Van Horne’s. Hill, an Ontario farm boy, had induced Donald Smith (afterwards Lord Strathcona) and his cousin George Stephen (Lord Mountstephen) to join him in getting hold of a Minnesota railroad that had been financed by Dutch bondholders. This road developed into the Great Northern, out of which Smith and Stephen made, it has been stated, more money than they did out of the C.P.R. These associates created the syndicate which obtained the C.P.R. charter, and began construction. Things were dragging, and it seemed likely that the ten years stipulated for with the Canadian Government would be needed to complete the road to the Coast, when Hill recommended that Van Horne be made general manager, with large powers. The appointment was made, but before long, Hill and Van Horne clashed, as strong men often do.

When Van Horne took hold, a railway was under construction from Callender (just east of North Bay) to Sault Ste. Marie, where it was to tie in with the Hill road and its Winnipeg connections. The line from Port Arthur to Winnipeg was well advanced; and the utmost use was to be made of the possibilities of lakes navigation for communications with Eastern Canada under all-Canadian auspices. But it was figured that the line around Superior would be too costly and too unremunerative an undertaking for many years. All the traffic during non-navigation months would go over the Hill line—and that was one of several reasons for Hill’s going into the C.P.R.

Van Horne wasn’t afraid of the emptiness between Lake Nipissing and Thunder Bay. He figured the through traffic would be enough to offset the disadvantage of practically no local business through the wilderness. He saw that, with Hill in the strategical position he had marked out for himself, the C.P.R. couldn’t well be its own master—rather, perhaps, that Van Horne couldn’t be its master. Sir John Macdonald and the Government had always wanted to reach the West over all-Canadian rails. And so it came about that Van Horne’s arrival at Montreal, after the 1882 construction season, for his permanent headquarters, synchronized with the beginning of the Superior Division construction or, rather, with the sending in of supplies during the winter, for the 1883 work. It turned out that three seasons’ construction completed the Lake Superior Division, and the first trains from Montreal to Winnipeg ran in the fall of 1885.

The new atmosphere which had begun to affect railway business in Canada can be partially appreciated by those who were not within its influence. A tremendous, and at times terrifying, power had come on to the job of Canadian development. The Grand Trunk bucked it openly in London, and quietly derided it in Canada. In Montreal, though, we were so far from the West—always bear in mind that it wasn’t till late in 1885 that you could travel in the same train across the Province of Ontario—that the tales which came through of what was happening in the North West seemed about as far-fetched as Mark Twain’s yarn of the jumping frog.

For instance, it was a matter of knowledge that the C.P.R. charter provided for the line to be built through the Yellowhead Pass, since taken by the Grand Trunk Pacific, and the Canadian Northern, and to end about where Prince Rupert now is. The route had been changed; and instead of going through Battleford, the newly-established capital of the North West Territories, and up the North Saskatchewan Valley, the C.P.R., we were informed, was going to Fort Calgary up the Bow river (which becomes the South Saskatchewan where it is joined by the Red Deer), and was then to get through the mountains, and reach the Pacific ocean—somehow. And, in very truth, it was some somehow.

First of all there were doubts as to whether a railway could be put through the Kicking Horse Pass. Then, once over the Great Divide, the Fraser Valley must be reached either by crossing the mighty Selkirk range, or by going hundreds of miles round the big bend of the Columbia. No pass through the Selkirks was known. Few men believed one could be found. But Van Horne headed his road for the foothills, taking chances on making a fairly economical approach to the Pacific ocean, to obtain which he sent explorers into the appalling waste of mountains. At last, after incredible hardships, Major Rogers and a companion named Carrol found the Pass that is forever associated with the major’s name; and the C.P.R. went through, as all the world knows.

I shall come to a very pleasant duty presently, when something is to be said about railway location, and some of the locators I have known and worked with. It will be seen that they are all of the Rogers spirit, though, happily for themselves, they are not all of the Rogers attitude towards their own financial interests. Rogers was a Yale graduate of high standing, but a lover and liver of the wild, if ever there was such a creature. His discovery of the Pass, made during days of semi-starvation, and dreadful peril to man and beast, was acknowledged by the C.P.R. with a check for five thousand dollars. Van Horne, meeting Rogers in Winnipeg a year later, reminded the major that he hadn’t cashed the check.

“What!” roared Rogers. “Cash that check? I wouldn’t take a hundred thousand dollars for it. It is framed and hangs in my brother’s house in Waterville, Minnesota, where my nephews and nieces can see it. I’m not in this game for money.”

To indicate the general temper of those early construction days in the prairie country one can take room for only two sidelights on the Van Horne regime, which became traditional with all the surviving old-timers who were lucky enough to behold it. Van Horne wasn’t an engineer, but he had all the natural aptitudes of one, and a Napoleonic hatred of “can’t”. One day he sent for a locating engineer, threw a profile to him and said:

“Look at that. Some infernal idiot has put a tunnel in there. I want you to go up and take it out.”

“But this is on the Bow River—a troublesome section. There may be no other way.”

“Make another way.”

The engineer stood, irresolute. Then, Van Horne:

“This is a mud tunnel, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“How long would it take to build it?”

“A year or eighteen months.”

Van Horne thumped his desk and shouted: “What are they thinking about? Are we going to hold up this railway for a year and a half while they build their damned tunnel? Take it out.”

The engineer started off with the plan; but turned at the door.

“Mr. Van Horne,” he said, “these mountains are in the way, and the rivers don’t run right for us. While we’re at it we might fix them up, too.”

Whereat the big chief exploded with laughter. But there’s no tunnel on the Bow, and the line wasn’t held up eighteen months.

Those who knew Van Horne in his later years are familiar with his habit of keeping a cigar in his mouth, often unlit. He was, though, a great smoker; and when, during his last illness but one, the doctor reduced him to three cigars a day, he had some made over a foot long. Just before he finished his first whirlwind year at Winnipeg, he threw an unextinguished cigar stub into the waste basket, and the building—the Bank of Montreal, in the upper storey of which the C.P.R. had its headquarters—was burnt to the ground. Bank and railway moved to Knox Church, and Van Horne had his office in the pastor’s vestry; and Ogden, the auditor, presided in the Sunday school room.

In view of Van Horne’s vocabularian range, it seemed an incongruous association; but it may have had something to do with a remark made thirty years afterwards by Van Horne to one of his astonished friends:

“All my religion,” he said, “is summed up in the golden rule; and I practise it; and I think I am the only man in business who does. What are you laughing at?”

Perhaps the best picture of the Van Horne who put zip into the C.P.R. was written in the Winnipeg Sun:

“Van Horne is calm and harmless-looking. So is a she-mule; and so is a buzz-saw. You don’t know their true inwardness until you go up and feel them. To see Van Horne get out of the car and go softly up the platform you would think he was an evangelist on his way West to preach temperance to the Mounted Police. But you are soon undeceived. If you are within hearing distance you will have more fun than you have ever had in your life.”

So much for the temper that was in the Canadian railway situation forty years ago. West of old Ontario there wasn’t much else but land, water and temper. When Van Horne went to Winnipeg between the Lake of the Woods and the Great Divide, and from the United States boundary to the Arctic ocean, red and white people combined were only sixty thousand. British Columbia, which had come into Confederation on promise of railway connection with the East, contained fifty thousand people, of whom half were Indians.

Allowing for the low traffic value of the Indians, it is a liberal computation that from the American boundary to the Arctic Circle there weren’t forty people per mile to create the business between the Ontario frontier and the Pacific Ocean. Van Horne’s faith was force and his force was faith. Never was there a greater combination for a greater adventure. Literally, according to its faith, it has been to the C.P.R.

CHAPTER IV.

Reviewing vanished practices, including ticket scalping and fast freight lines.

When the Canadian Pacific Railway was built across the prairies there was no railway for a hundred miles south of parallel forty-nine. Red River carts, canoes and dog-sleds furnished all the transportation between it and the North Pole. Van Horne earned his first freight revenue from the Saskatchewan plains by shipping buffalo bones to Eastern fertilizer manufacturers. When he stopped at construction camps he would draw pictures on buffalo skulls for the men’s amusement in the evening. To build a railway across empty plains and over mountain ranges was regarded as unmitigable folly by many people who believed themselves to be far-seeing.

While it was being done the state of Eastern Canada was not very encouraging. Half of the settled farm land of Ontario was uncleared bush. Farmers received little or nothing for their produce. The cities were small. Manufacturing was in a sickly, uncertain infancy. In average years the country was importing something more than a hundred million dollars’ worth of goods and exporting something less. The interest on borrowed money, therefore, was being paid with more borrowed money. The revenue of the Dominion was about thirty million dollars. You could get good board in Montreal or Toronto for four dollars a week, and very good for six. Everybody was poor.

There isn’t the same sort of plenty in Canada that there was forty years ago—I mean as to eats and drinks, the cost of fuel, and the simplicities of fun. But, on the whole, things are vastly better than they were. Those who discover a moral declension in the people are sorely mistaken.

But I am concerned with railway affairs, and am not delivering lectures on the history of Canadian morals. The railroad ethics of to-day are very much ahead of the railway ethics of forty years ago. That is true whether you compare railway standards with railway standards, or look cursorily over the field of commercial and social relationships. One wouldn’t say that saintliness distinguishes the railway business more than it does any other. Indeed, it is commonly supposed that there is more freedom of speech, running into license, among knights of the rail than there is in any other walk of life.

It is still supposed by many otherwise excellent people that, of all corporations, a railway corporation most assuredly has neither body to be kicked, nor soul to be damned. Railwaymen are not a perfectionist crowd. They never set themselves up for paragons. But take them by and large, railwaymen are as worthy a segment of society as any other. In the last forty years there has been at least as notable a progression in the standards of railway behaviour as in other fields of human activity, including the Christian ministry.

Heaven knows there was room for improvement—not in the men, but in the standards which were considered appropriate to a business that was always weirdly competitive, was sometimes wonderfully prosperous, and at other times was woefully depressed. There is a changing orthodoxy in commerce as there is in religion and politics. The railway business is no exception to this rule. The change has been steadily for the better. Of this it will be easy to convince the elder, as I hope it will not be impossible to inform, the younger readers of these remarks.

How far we have travelled, how large have been the revolutions in commercial morality within the memory of people now living, can be indicated by a few facts. I have mentioned a lady now in England who has given sixty-five descendants to Canada. She was eight years old when slavery became illegal in the British dominions. She was sixteen years old when, under the Ashburton treaty which gave to the United States territory that ought to have been part of Canada, the United States and Britain agreed to maintain squadrons off the coast of Africa to prevent further shipment of slaves to the New World. Scores of thousands of the present citizens of the United States were born as slaves. When I came to Montreal the American Civil War which freed the slaves wasn’t as far back as the Boer War is now.

The old lady of whom I have spoken was six years old when the Reform Bill put an end to the system of rotten boroughs in the British Isles, which we still regard as having in all past centuries been in the forefront of moral and political progress. The political corruption of those times, so nauseating when we read about it, was regarded as a matter of course by men and women who were godliest among the good. Nowadays, when we are shocked by stories of buying votes in elections, we sometimes forget the recency of the society from which that form of bribery descends. Financial customs which are reprehensible to-day were respectable not so long ago—in all walks of life.

One mentions these things in a railway retrospect, so that when a few facts as to old-time methods have been given it will not be supposed that in their practices of several decades ago some railway administrations were sinners above all other sinners. They practised the orthodoxies of their times, and were neither better nor worse than the practitioners of orthodoxy in a hundred ranges of human activity.

It may seem a queer question to young people—What would you think, supposing you wanted to go to Chicago on the Canadian National Railways—and, instead of going into the railway office at King and Yonge, and paying, say, sixteen dollars for the ticket, you slipped into a private ticket office up street, and bought your ticket for ten dollars? Or, supposing you were going to San Francisco, instead of buying a through ticket to your destination at the Canadian National or Canadian Pacific office downtown, or at the Union Station, you bought a ticket only for Chicago, at the little office up the street, and then, at Chicago, bought another for the rest of the journey from another privately-conducted office, and saved perhaps twenty-five dollars by doing that, instead of buying your ticket at the railway office in Chicago?

In 1924 it sounds very odd to mention such possibilities to men and women of thirty years of age, who suppose they really know something of the world’s ways. But to older people the suggestion has all the familiarity of reminiscence—it recalls the age of scalping in passenger travel, and of the so-called fast freight lines in the other branch of railway business, which were in full blast when I began to audit accounts in the Grand Trunk head office at Point St. Charles.

What is now told about our railways is not to their discredit, except so far as it would be to the discredit, for instance, of the Christian churches of to-day to remind them that it was not they who directly raised the tone of political morality, or abolished slavery. Canadian railway practice was like the railway practice of other countries—mainly the United States. The Grand Trunk, with its English management and English ideas, had some peculiarities of its own; but, in the main, its relation to scalping and fast freight lines was forced upon it by the prevailing conditions on this continent. Those conditions could only be finally improved by the intervention of public authority, such as the Dominion Board of Railway Commissioners, or the Inter-State Commerce Commission, both of which bodies may be only stages in the evolution towards the public ownership of all railways, which, theoretically at least (though practically it is not so easy of accomplishment), is as sound as the public ownership of the postoffice, the navy, or the geodetic survey.

In the old days, railways competed fiercely against one another, and were virtually a law unto themselves. Tariffs were filed with Governments; but they were as often honoured in the breach as in the observance. The principle of the member of Parliament franking letters for himself, his family, and his friends, which has been a hoary accompaniment of the honesties of parliamentary government, was in full operation in the railway field. Because you were next a railway, you could get special privileges as naturally as you could get special privileges in the mails if you were of a Parliamentarian’s family. In politics you got a place with much pay and little work if you were closely related to a minister. In business you got better rates than your competitor if you were more happily related to the management than he.

It would be too devious a chase just now to ascertain exactly how the practice of scalping railway tickets came into vogue. At all events it was in vogue in Montreal and Toronto in the early eighties—as it was in the United States, its natural home. It was customary for railways to sell to scalpers quantities of tickets over their own systems at a reduced rate. There was always a bargain-counter for the scalper. The scalpers sold tickets to customers at a profit, which often depended on how the scalper sized up the customer when he came to buy.

The scalper also bought tickets from individuals—mostly the unused portions of return tickets. Return tickets were not as long-dated as they now are. You came to Toronto from Chicago with a return ticket; and found you could not go back within the time limit. You sold that half of the ticket to the scalper for, say, two or three dollars, and he took his chance of selling it, for, say, ten, to somebody who wanted a single.

Telling this to an astonished friend the other day, he at once asked how so singular a method of doing business affected the audit offices. Well, as I wasn’t in a very responsible position at the Grand Trunk, during the two and a half years I remained in Montreal; (whence I moved to New York, in the spring of 1885) I do not profess to speak of how things were straightened out in Montreal; but, from knowledge gained, it can be said that there was a practice in many railways on this continent of putting aside earnings reserves when business was good, and using them when business was not so good. In a way, it was as if a storekeeper neglected to count the accumulations in his till, and then reckoned his count for the day when it was made.

The scalping practice made this manner of reporting receipts inevitable. For example, a big block of tickets was sold outright to a scalper—it might be at fifty, sixty or seventy per cent. of the rate charged at the railway’s own counter. He paid for them. When they came back to head office there was nothing to differentiate the tickets sold to the scalpers and the tickets sold to the public. The conductor couldn’t tell when he lifted a ticket that had been bought from a scalper. He had to turn it in as part of his report.

Say there were a thousand tickets from Montreal to Chicago, and the regular rate was thirty dollars, a total of thirty thousand dollars. But the railway’s cash receipts were only twenty thousand dollars, because of the scalping. The proportion of scalped revenue, obviously, would vary from month to month. Adjustment was necessary; and in making adjustments it is equally obvious that it would be a convenience to even up from a reserve in hand, or to put part of an exceptionally good run of receipts into the reserve.

For the benefit of the juvenile generation it may be added that scalping became so large and pervasive an adjunct to transportation that its interests developed an organization of their own. If you wanted a through ticket to San Francisco, instead of taking chances of making a good bargain at a scalper’s, between trains at Chicago, the scalper in Toronto would do all the needful business for you. He regarded himself as a broker, and to some he was a very present help in time of trouble. That he was not necessary—assuming proper relations between the railways and the public—is proved by his elimination as soon as public control of railways arrived.

The anomaly of the fast freight line was another and more wonderful manifestation of the vicious principle which was behind the scalping. It also had its relation to two other transportation services which still exist, though they are not as liable to the same abuses that were inseparable from the fast freight lines—I mean the express service and the Pullman car. The express business to California was being done by ponies, for instance, before there was railway communication across the mountains. When railways were built the express companies brought their business to them, using cars, and paying the railways a percentage of receipts for the entire service.

The Pullman car service was entirely a product of the railways. When trains did not afford the luxury of sleeping between sheets, Mr. Pullman came along, offered to furnish cars, collect tolls, and pay the railways for hauling them. This method is just about as old as the Canadian Confederation. One of the most curious sidelights on the origin of what is regarded as an entirely American innovation is furnished by the story of the Prince of Wales’ tour in Canada in 1860. The first car to carry sleeping accommodation was built at Brantford for the Prince of Wales. From it Pullman got the ideas which he evolved into the Pullman system.

Pullman built his cars, charged the railways a rental for them, and himself took the special revenue earned by the sleeping accommodation. He obtained practically a monopoly on this continent, and the Grand Trunk remained like other roads, after the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian Northern owned and operated their own sleeping cars.

The practice of farming out certain services was the fruit of conditions. It is virtually the same as was followed by Lord Northcliffe in many of his secondary publications in London. He farmed their advertising out to advertising agents. The railways farmed out to express companies the swifter-than-freight carriage of goods; and to the Pullman Company the night comfort of passengers. But the fast freight line game was in a different category from these present-day services. It was regarded as legitimate business then; if a revival of it were attempted now it would be given another name.

It grew from the hoary notion that it was all right to give private favours at the public expense. If a concern brought a large amount of traffic, it got a better rate than its smaller competitor. That notion of the proprieties opened the door to the fast freight line, which wasn’t a railway at all, but an inside track which had no honest business to be there.

A group of men who happened to be high-up railway officials organized a company called, say, the Minnehaha Fast Freight Line. The company got preferential rates on all the freight it turned in. The company labeled its cars and went out after business. It charged the shipper the same rates as the railways did, but promised him more rapid delivery. The railways gave preference to the so-called fast freight, though they got less revenue from it, pound for pound, than they received from the freight they pushed aside for it.

The complications that arose from this favouring of fast freight companies were many and were often amusing. On the Grand Trunk I was soon told off for special auditing, and in 1884 was sent to Detroit, with W. B. Pollock, of the New York, West Shore and Buffalo Railway, to audit the books of an agent of a fast freight line who had received more money than he accounted for, because of the system of collecting payment from shippers. Incidentally, straightening out the tangle led to my going into railway service across the line, and almost made me an American.

On this continent there was so much distrust of railways by railways that when a great business corporation sent, say, a trainload of sugar from New York by a fast freight line, to be distributed to different points in what was still regarded as the west—Ohio, for instance—the money for the whole service would be paid to some central agent of the fast freight line, who, in due time, paid their proportions to the railways which received parts of the traffic. Unraveling bookkeeping tangles was always a revel to me. Pollock and I discovered that the fast freight line agent at Detroit was a good many thousand dollars astray in his reckoning.

That piece of work procured for me the offer of a clerkship on the West Shore line, which runs down the western side of the Hudson river, and this involved a removal to New York.

After a year and a half, the West Shore was taken over by the New York Central group, and the office force was transferred from the old Stewart Building near Cortland street to the head office of the bigger system in the Grand Central Station at Forty-second Street, to make the necessary accounting adjustments. When this was finished salaries were reduced. I thought the offer to me was beneath my merits; and, having a promise that in pending changes on the Jersey Central I would be sure of a position, I returned to Montreal to await developments. They were much delayed, and, not loving idleness, I did some special work for Mr. Hawson.

At last the offer from the Jersey Central came. It was a good offer, which would probably have led to rapid promotion, for the man who was to have been my chief soon after died, and according to all custom I should have succeeded him as assistant auditor of freight receipts. Of my colleagues in New York a considerable proportion won high promotion—my fellow auditor of the Detroit fast freight agent’s accounts, W. B. Pollock, is now the head of the whole marine department of the New York Central lines.

When the offer did come I had just arrived at Portage la Prairie, and had not begun work. I might have gone East again, had not Horace Greeley’s advice been earnestly repeated to me, with results one sees no reason seriously to regret. Anyway, it is no use speculating on what would have become of my family if, instead of finding them through a Portage la Prairie merchant’s house—my father-in-law had the leading retail and wholesale store in the town—I had turned again east, before the wide streets of the Manitoba town had become familiar.

My sister had kindly kept from me a letter which would probably have resulted in a life spent in producing Ceylon tea. Mr. Baker, my first chief in the West, induced me to answer unfavourably a telegram which almost certainly had within it the makings of an American citizen. So, it would seem, does Providence sometimes steer our barque.

CHAPTER V.

Portraying scantily the lives of a poor prairie line and a beloved prairie town.

On the way to the office one morning I heard that Mr. Baker, general manager of a railway in Manitoba, was looking for an accountant. A first effort to meet Mr. Baker failed, and, hearing that he had gone to Ottawa, I found him there. He offered me the post, at a salary of $150 a month, which was little more than I had received in New York. But the prospects in the newest section of a new country seemed better than elsewhere; and so I became the accountant of the Manitoba and North Western Railway, at the headquarters in Portage la Prairie.

The summer of 1886 was the first during which there was direct train service between Montreal and Winnipeg. Leaving Montreal Monday morning, the train reached Winnipeg on Thursday morning, and Portage la Prairie in the afternoon. Through the wilderness around the lakes the C.P.R. had innumerable wooden trestles, since filled in. Some of the engines still burned wood. With a new and unsettled roadbed, it was impossible to make very fast speed.

Port Arthur was still the C.P.R. port at the lakehead. The change to Fort William, because Van Horne and the town couldn’t agree about taxes, was one of those civic tragedies the effects of which time only partially obliterates. Van Horne said he would make grass grow in Port Arthur streets. The prophecy was fulfilled. For years after the removal to Fort William, it was said, all Port Arthur’s local debts were paid by the circulation of the only twenty-dollar bill preserved to the town. Port Arthur began to amount to something when the Canadian Northern came through from the West, and the seven-million-bushel elevator arose, like a temple of prosperity, on the waterfront, at the beginning of this century. Up to that time the C.P.R. had been everything in the West, and, as a natural process, had gobbled up everything in the way of feeders and rivals, including the Manitoba and North Western. An end was to come to this unchallenged supremacy, but nothing could deprive the C.P.R. of its primacy in the West and East—a primacy which has been used, broadly, for the advancement of the country. Every sane Canadian is proud of the C.P.R.

Mr. Baker, my new chief, was originally a railway man. He was an Englishman and had been private secretary to Lord Dufferin, the governor-general. He was on Van Horne’s staff in Winnipeg when the meteor was upsetting many precedents, four years before. The Manitoba and North Western was projected in 1880, as the Portage, Westbourne and North Western. The line was to start somewhere near Portage, and was to reach the northwestern boundary of the province. The town gave the railway a bonus, and so secured the terminals. The line was the first feeder of the C.P.R. in the prairie country. Its constructing engineer was Major Rogers, who discovered the Rogers Pass through the Selkirks, and refused to cash his gift cheque for $5,000.

Those were the days of the first western real estate boom—in some respects the fiercest financial cyclone that ever struck Canada. In a way, the accountant of the Manitoba North Western fell heir to a few of its lugubrious legacies; so that some things about its course in Portage la Prairie will be in order—it goes into the background of the more solid development of the wheaten empire of the plains.

The C.P.R. enjoyed a monopoly in the West. The promoters of the North Western wanted connection, in the future, with some American line at the boundary. They located their terminus at the extreme east of the town, and south of the C.P.R., and, they thought, pre-empted a crossing of the C.P.R. They bought 340 acres for $70,000, nearly two miles from where the terminals were finally established, and built a roundhouse for two engines. It wasn’t then clear which way the town would grow—there was for many years a rivalry between the west and east ends. For an ambitious railway to buy 340 acres, and build a home for two locomotives was regarded as a pretty good insurance of the town developing eastward, and it was confidently expected lots of money could be made out of the sale of the land.

The 340 acres were christened the Great Eastern Estate. Dr. Bain was sent to England to put it on the market. His expenses for two months totaled nearly $12,000—in which he was a true ante-type of some modern foes of frugalism. He induced a syndicate to buy the property for $1,250,000. Some of this was paid; and, owing to the course of events, most of it wasn’t. About ten years afterwards a competent valuator said the land was worth at the outside $20 per acre. The roundhouse that cost $5,000 was blown down before it had been up a year. Finally, the timber was bought by a farmer for $50. The land reverted to its original owners, along with the cash payments that had been made upon it. The North Western’s dream of riches through the sale of lots was over.

The bubble was all out of the western boom long before I landed in Portage la Prairie. Many of the town’s fifty real estate operators had gladly worked on North Western construction. The effects of inflation were all around. The morning after a real estate orgy is apt to last till very late in the afternoon. For practically the whole of my ten years’ connection with the Manitoba and North Western it was very much financial afternoon for the good town of Portage la Prairie.

We had about a hundred railway employees in Portage, including machine shop men, train crews, and the office staff, of which I was the head, and coincidentally with which a variety of other functions seemed to gravitate my way. The railway, when I came to it, was running to Birtle, 138 miles, and had a branch to Rapid City, of less than 20 miles. In 1883 it had obtained a Dominion charter, with authority to build to Prince Albert—an objective which was not reached by a direct line passing through Portage, until 1905, when the Canadian Northern arrived by way of Dauphin, Swan River and Melfort. Of course, in 1886 the Canadian Northern was no more dreamed of than the radio was. The famous partnership of Mackenzie and Mann had not begun.

The Manitoba North Western also had come into the hands of Sir Hugh Allan and associates—as to which it can be seen how strong the passion for laying rails and ties is in the human breast where once it has found a lodgment. Sir Hugh Allan’s syndicate, on which Sir John Macdonald’s first Government had foundered, did not build the C.P.R.; but the old steamship man did have a hand in a prairie railway, after all. He did not long survive his advent to the headship of the North Western, and in my time the president was Mr. Andrew Allan, his brother.

Like other branch lines which later struggled into existence, only to fall into the big fellow’s hands, our road had more anticipations than way-bills. Indeed, in the West, it was a devout saying, “Faith, Hope and Charity—and the greatest of these is Hope.” The season before I joined the line it had carried a total of 362,952 bushels of grain. In 1886-7 we brought 427,650 bushels to the terminal, and handed them either to the C.P.R. or to the mill. The total grain shipment from the whole line then, was only what became a very common season’s business at station after station on the Canadian Northern, not so many years later. The other exportable freight were cattle. We couldn’t roll in wealth, when the carloads of stock handled for the years 1885-9 averaged fifty for the whole system.

Even so we were a goodly portion of the financial backbone of Portage la Prairie. We managed to pay the wages, without which the merchants’ cash takings would have had a very low visibility. We were identified with the life of the community in a way that is not so easily recognized in large cities where railway employees are a small percentage of the population. As the Portage was and is typical of Western Canadian development, a sketch of it as a newcomer learned to become assimilated with it, is probably worth while.

During the early history of the West the Portage was on the map; for traders portaged the fifteen miles across the plain from the Assiniboine River to Lake Manitoba. Its modern history began when, in 1851, Archdeacon Cochrane, seeing that the Fort Garry settlement was becoming saturated, as far as the then conditions of population could be judged, founded a mission and settlement near the old post on the Assiniboine, fifty-six miles west of Fort Garry. The land was a little lighter than in the Valley of the Red, and was likely to ripen crops a week or ten days earlier than on the lower level. The supereminence of the Portage Plains as wheat growers was later to justify the noble archdeacon’s foresight.

The population was mainly of Metis and Indians. The white farmers who came in were few indeed. John McLean, the first, was a good deal like Nehemiah, for, so to say, he cut his hay with one hand and held his rifle with the other, on account of the somewhat summary quality of Indian manners. In the seventies, after Riel’s rebellion had ended, and the province of Manitoba was set up within the Canadian Confederation, there was a fairly steady influx of farmers, largely from Ontario. Until 1869 the whole country belonged to the Hudson’s Bay Company which, under the charter of Charles the Second, exercised sovereign rights over the people. “The Company” built its Portage store at the extreme west of the settlement, and refused, as commerce developed, to sell land any distance east to other traders. The east and west rivalry that was long a feature of the town life thus began; but the company was defeated by events, and later had to move east.

A prominent man in the town when I arrived there was an Englishman, E. H. G. G. Hay, familiarly known as Alphabetical Hay. He ran a machine shop at the east end of the town. He had been the leader of the Opposition in the infant Legislature of Manitoba and had shared in presenting to the world Portage la Prairie’s unique contribution to the evolution of constitutional government under the British crown. He was one of the participants in the loyal republic of Manitoba, from which the province of Manitoba takes its name.

There had come to Fort Garry in 1866 a Mr. Spence, who called himself a land surveyor, and said he had been an officer in the British army. He was a born disturber of the political peace. In a little while he called a meeting at the Court House to consider the future of the settlement. With four others he held the meeting an hour before the appointed time, and passed resolutions in favour of joining the Canadian Confederation, then about to be consummated. An hour later a very indignant meeting rescinded these proceedings, but they were, after all, the real beginning of the annexation of Rupert’s Land to Canada.

The next year—1867—Spence moved to Portage. Fort Garry was in the district of Assiniboia, which was administered by a governor and council, whose jurisdiction did not extend to the Portage. The place and the very sparsely settled country round about had no administration of the law locally, because there was no law to be administered. Spence procured co-operators, who formally constituted the Republic of Caledonia with very indefinite boundaries. Afterwards the name was changed to Manitoba.

A council was set up with Spence as President. The first need was a court house and jail. To get the money for a building the council imposed a customs tariff; but the Hudson’s Bay Company factor refused to pay taxes to the new republic-within-a-monarchy—for Spence and his coadjutors avowed their loyalty to the British Empire, and denied the common allegation that their ultimate object was incorporation with the United States.

SIR DONALD MANN

([P. 248])

SIR WILLIAM MACKENZIE

([P. 241])

At High Bluff was a shoemaker named McPherson. He started the story that the customs collected for the temple of justice were being spent on beer and whiskey. Refusing to recant his charges he was arrested and tried, with President Spence as accuser and judge. Farmer John McLean interfered, in his broad dialect, and turned the trial into a farce. The republic died a natural death, Spence having vainly appealed for recognition to the Colonial Secretary, the Duke of Buckingham.

This republican episode is mentioned partly because it will be news to many people, and partly because it indicates that more than a mere spice of originality went into the infancy of communities like Portage la Prairie, and coloured their maturer years.

Our public meetings were always well attended, and almost invariably produced their own rows. They were our only movies and were strictly home-made. The town nerve was on edge for many years, due, to a considerable extent, to the financial embarrassments that were legacies of the boom. In the year after I came whole blocks of land were sold for a dollar. Anywhere else the lots I bought at tax sales would have created a land baron. They merely impoverished me.

The town’s debentures were of so precarious a value that a Government Commission was created to suggest how the civic liabilities should be met. In the midst of these economic difficulties the place was smitten by an epidemic of fires, beginning with the destruction of the fire hall itself, and the disabling of the engine. In the end a firebug was run down, when it turned out that he had been incited to and paid for arson by a prominent hotelkeeper. The incendiary went to jail for five years. The inciter was let off on the ground that he only gave coal oil to the other man when he was drunk. He accepted an invitation to depart.

Railroading may seem to have been a humdrum business in the midst of excursions and alarms like these during a period when provincial politics were furiously on the boil, with the one time republican Portage the centre of many a blistering splash. How could it be otherwise when our most prominent lawyer was the redoubtable Joe Martin, who died last year, after having been in turn attorney-general of Manitoba, M.P., at Ottawa, Premier of British Columbia and member of the British House of Commons—the only man in history, I believe, who sat in four British Legislatures.

The Martin firm, even after its head became attorney-general, was very keen in fighting for its own hand in local affairs. The east-and-west bitterness lasted right into the post-firebug period, as I very well know. The civic government became demoralized. Something like a fresh start was imperative. The Manitoba and North Western accountant, auditor and man-of-all-work generally, was persuaded to become one of the Town Council of six. A new fire hall was needed. We proposed to put it in the centre of the town, where it now stands. There was a demand that it be placed in the east end. Smith Curtis of the Martin firm was active to that end. He called an indignation meeting to protest against what the council was expected to do. The council met early the same night.

The council used to meet where the fire engine was installed, and sometimes the citizen spectators of our doings would be seated on the engine. As the protest meeting was going on the council filed in, and there were calls for the chairman of the finance committee, who happened to be the accountant aforesaid. He rose and said only that the contract for the new fire hall had been signed half an hour ago. Hubbub.

If municipal experts are looking for something novel in fire protection they may find it, possibly, in a phase of Alphabetical Hay’s civic patriotism. After we lost our first fire hall and engine, he got an idea that the engine could be made to work again. The town had lent him money. He was to be forgiven the debt if he could restore the engine. He restored the engine, but owing, to temperamental difficulties, didn’t hand it to the town for a year, during which time several fire-bug conflagrations were extinguished by the town’s engine, through courtesy of Mr. Hay.

Take two illustrations of how the force of a small railway headquartered in a small town can be more of a community factor than is possible in a large centre. Mr. Baker, the North Western manager, was a public-spirited citizen, and, like many Englishmen, a strong supporter of sports. He fostered cricket and other games. A summer picnic to Lake Manitoba, originated by himself, became a very popular institution. During the agonies of the incendiary period, the lack of a suitable bell that would sufficiently alarm the neighbourhood was keenly felt. Money was too scarce for a bell and belfry to be thought of. The railway came to the public’s aid.

This was the period, young people may be reminded, when the towers in the Toronto fire stations contained bells that were rung, two-four, five-seven and other strokes, announcing the locality of the fire, in accord with the chart that hung in every house. Mr. Baker had a monster triangle made out of a steel rail. It was hung on a frame, thirty feet high. When the alarm was given it was a noble duty for the proper official to strike the leviathan lyre—and it could be some lyre. It hadn’t been up very long before a mighty wind blew down its unbraced frame. Afterwards a bell was bought and put into a tower of its own. It also blew over, cracking the bell. Whereupon the bell was hung in the town hall, where the only dangerous winds blew from inside, and there it never failed to raise its cracked but effective voice at the appropriate moment.

About the time I went to Portage la Prairie electric lighting was coming into vogue in ambitious, progressive cities. The first joint stock enterprise in which I was a shareholder was the Central Electric Light Company, organized with eight shareholders and a capital of forty thousand dollars, and of which I was a director and secretary-treasurer. The president was Bob Watson, M.P. for Marquette, the only Liberal member west of the Great Lakes, and now senator. One of the directors was Joe Martin. The manner of his ceasing to be a director is a diverting story of how a resignation offered in haste can be accepted at leisure. The pranks which the meters of those times played would enable another tale to be unfolded—when the unfolding is good.

We rather fancied ourselves as the first electric lighting company between Winnipeg and the Pacific ocean. Despite the dumps that had followed the boom, many of our leading citizens still believed that the Portage was destined to be a vast emporium of western commerce. I doubt, though, whether these hopes were cherished by three such typical men, all happily living, as Judge Ryan, Michael Blake and Bob Watson. Of these probably the present senator was the most typical of the steady-going qualities which, after all, have transformed the empty Rupert’s Land into the three populous provinces of this period.

Bob Watson was a mechanic. He was sent in 1876 by the Goldie, McCullough Company of Galt, to install the machinery in the first mill erected at the Portage. He also put up a mill at Stonewall, and started in business for himself. He was in the town, and of the town. The fire brigade had no more vigorous member. His machine shop was a place of popular resort. The farmers knew no more consistent, more lenient friend. Largely because of his popularity he was sent to Ottawa in 1882 as M.P. for Marquette. A partnership with his brother was formed in 1886. After ten years at Ottawa he joined the Greenway Government in 1892, as a conscientious, hard-working Minister of Public Works; and stayed with it till its end in 1900, when the Senate claimed him.

Everybody calls him Bob, and everybody will agree that though there have been more brilliant Portage men—a former premier of British Columbia and a former premier of Canada, Mr. Meighen, both graduated into statesmanship from their modest offices on Saskatchewan Avenue—there have been none more admirable than the senator.

Red Fife was not as popular a wheat as it afterwards became, thanks largely to the experiments of a much-abused railway. The still earlier Marquis had not been evolved by Dr. Saunders. On the Portage Plains, where frozen wheat is now a rarity, it was then too common a drug on the market—I could tell of a man bringing a load into town that he could not sell at any price.

The danger of frost is when the milk is in the ear. In those days it was thought that a smoke over the land would prevent the freezing temperature reaching the ground, and that smoke and its accompanying warmth would keep a current of air moving over the fields of grain and thus save it from damage. The farmers cut weeds, and put them and straw in windrows round their fields, ready to be fired at the critical hour, which was usually about four or five o’clock on August mornings. We installed a big light on a staff at the top of the highest building, the Farmers’ Elevator. We kept in touch with the meteorological office at Winnipeg, and if we were advised that frost seemed to be imminent, about midnight the big arc lamp was set going, and in the dark hours before the dawn the protective fires would be seen flickering across the plains.

It cannot be told precisely whether this procedure really saved anything to the farmers. But it is true that, not only was it to our interest to do what we could to assure good crops to the farmers, on which the town’s prosperity depended, but the element of public service entered actively into this revival, for agriculture’s sake, of the beacon method of warning against fleshlier invaders than Jack Frost.

The rural telephone was not a possibility of those times. Life may have been more meagre then than it is now; though, looking back, it does not seem that it lacked any of the best elements of happiness. The town of five thousand people has distinct advantages over the city of five hundred thousand. Everybody may know more of everybody else’s business than is always good for anybody; but there is a greater neighbourliness in the smaller community. On the whole despite poverty, firebugs and politics, the Portage of the late eighties was a goodly place to dwell in.

The winters were severe—nobody ever succeeded in reducing forty below zero to a poetic phantasy. But there was a snowshoeing club; there was plenty of social intercourse; the choir would give concerts at Burnside or High Bluff, under the leadership of one who had heard his father’s pitch pipe in the Original Seceders’ kirk at Pollokshaws. From that choir, by the way, there went out into a great career on the concert platform Edith Miller, whose father was postmaster, and whose husband is heir to a baronetcy.

In some of the churches the ultra-strictness of the Puritan faith and practice rigidly obtained—or rather among some of the church people. There was old Hugh Macdonald, for instance, who wouldna’ drive his horses the twa miles to church on Sabbath. He warned me against being entangled with “sae mony wimmins” who, to their shame, sang without their hats on, alongside the idolatrous box of whustles that degraded the pulpit in the hoose o’ God.

The Baptist minister was also a Macdonald. He was once announced to preach on a week-night in Gaelic, and Hugh and his freen Grant repaired to the church to consume choice spiritual fare. They walked solemnly in, deposited their tam o’ shanters beneath the seats, and awaited the meenister. But the harmoniumist appeared while yet the preacher tarried in the vestry. There she sat, the bold thing, trilling her fingers over the keys—a voluntary they called it. That was no way to precede a sermon in Gaelic, and Hugh and his freen forsook the place more solemnly than they had entered it.

By the way, the land for the Presbyterian church in which we worshipped was given by Michael Blake, a Roman Catholic. Peace be to him.

Perhaps the next misdemeanour to making too joyful a noise before the Lord in the sanctuary was promoting appreciation of music in secular circles. One’s reluctance to claim any sort of literary credit is well-founded on experience. For years I contributed a musical column to “The Portage la Prairie Review”, signed “Baton”. The harmonious intent of these effusions was as sincere as the occasional attempts to flavour the column with a little cheerful humour were unappreciated, where they might have been heartily welcomed. I remember giving a local application to the story of Sir Michael Costa, who, annoyed by conversation in the audience while his orchestra was in its most classical throes, suddenly commanded silence, above which was heard a lady’s voice, “We fry ours in butter.” As a literary fun-provider the sequel to this venture indicated that accountancy and musical journalism were not a charming combination.

A trifling outgrowth of the Minnesota massacres by Sioux Indians is said to have led to one of those allusions to Canadian life in the British Press which from time to time enrich “colonial” observations. Billy Smith was a prosperous farmer and miller, in whose scrupulosity about weights, those who sold him wheat had not unlimited confidence. Billy lent out a great many grain sacks on which “W. M. Smith” was printed. He lost track of several score of these sacks, and for some time suspected that they had been taken by certain critical customers.

Among the Indians near Portage la Prairie was a band who had come in from Minnesota after the frightful massacres of the early sixties. They received no treaty money from the Dominion Government, and were locally called Bungay Indians, for a reason of which we were ignorant. Soon after Billy Smith missed his sacks, Indian bucks, squaws and papooses began to appear in town, breeched in trunks primitively adapted from what the miller intended to carry only two bushels of wheat; with “W. M. SMITH” appearing where the easy-going man, though a fool and poorly educated, could not fail to read.

The Indians got their clothes and the town got its fun, at Billy Smith’s expense. The fun lasted longer than the breeches, for news came that a writing tourist, seeing some of the Smith-tailored Indians on the station platform, wrote in a widely circulated English periodical that the most striking evidence he had seen of the transformation of, and good order among the Indians of the Far West, was at Portage la Prairie, where the aborigines had not only assumed the good old English patronymic of Smith, but carried it conspicuously on their attire, which was approximating, though somewhat crudely, to European models.

But it will not do to become more garrulous about a Manitoba town of nearly forty years ago. In 1893 the North Western was handed over to a receiver, the present Sir Augustus Nanton. The accountant and auditor was transferred to Winnipeg, whence the salvage operations were more effectively directed by the future knight, whose railway experience frequently made him certain that it is sometimes more blessed to give than to receive.

CHAPTER VI.

Remembering when farming in the West was misunderstood, and land could not be sold.

In some respects, the Winnipeg of thirty years ago was a truer reflection of the conditions in the country from which it drew its sustenance than it has been during the last two decades. The boom had broken so disastrously that people asked whether the prairie region could ever be a country. Immigration fell to almost nothing. Beyond Manitoba, for several years, there were more abandoned than occupied homesteads. We said: “The greatest of these is Hope,” but we didn’t say “Hope” with capital letters during most of the ten years I was with the Manitoba North Western, the last three of which were spent in Winnipeg.

The census of 1891, in the midst of that period, gave only 152,000 people for all Manitoba, and 98,000 for the Northwest Territories. This quarter of a million, from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains, and from the American boundary to the Arctic ocean, included about forty-five thousand Indians and Eskimos. From 1881 to 1891, the natural increase among the whites, and immigration to the present provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta—leaving out of this the present North West Territories—increased the population by only forty-two thousand.

Winnipeg, then, was the only city for about three-quarters of a million habitable square miles. When the first locomotive entered the city on Christmas Eve, in 1879, on rails laid over double-length ties across the Red River ice, under the supervision of Mr. D. D. Mann, about six thousand people were within it. At the height of the boom, in 1882, the population was estimated at 33,000. When I first saw it in 1886 the people were said to number 20,000, of whom probably 2,000 were creditable to Hope. By 1891 the total had crept to 25,000. The growth was puny until later than the twentieth century came in, for in 1901, five years after the Canadian Northern was begun, the enumerators found only 42,000 people in Winnipeg.

The explanation, of course, is that prairie agriculture had not developed as rapidly as the prophets of Hope had foretold. The abandoned homestead told an eloquent story, but not the whole story. The conditions governing crop production on the plains were imperfectly understood. The conditions underlying permanent settlement were not appreciated by the Governments or by the business people who were largely interested in colonization.

The prairie farmer’s two prime foes are frost and drought. To defeat frost, early-ripening varieties of wheat are necessary; for, if possible, the entire process from seeder to binder should be completed within 110 days. The evolution of Red Fife and later of Marquis wheat largely solved the frost problem, though it is still true, despite the issuance of much literature, that the nearer you approach the North Pole the chillier the nights are prone to be.

There is no denying that over a considerable proportion of the treeless prairies the climate tends to scarcity rather than abundance of rain. Through the late eighties it was commonly said that while wheat might possibly be grown around Regina, the ultima thule of wheat farming was Moose Jaw, forty miles west. The Government’s maps of the pre-railroad era showed Battleford, the capital of the North West Territories, at the junction of the Battle and North Saskatchewan rivers, 300 miles north of the international boundary, as the northern apex of the great American desert. The flora of the country was of drought-resisting species, like that of the middle northwestern states.