CHAPTER IV

THE ROMANCE OF RAILWAY CONSTRUCTION

Modern Canada, as has been intimated, is the creation of railway enterprise. But for the railway, not only the Prairie Provinces and British Columbia, but the larger portion of the Eastern Provinces must have remained unpopulated and undeveloped. In pre-railway days population followed the banks of the St. Lawrence and the shores of the Great Lakes. There were a few small scattered inland villages kept in communication with the world by different “portages.” What was the use of cultivating the land, felling the timber, and working the minerals when there were no means for their conveyance and marketing? With the coming of the railway, however, a great and glorious future dawned upon Canada. Millions of square miles of “acreage” of what had been considered worthless wilderness were seen to be rich in untold potentialities of corn-raising. The interminable forests presented themselves as sources of inexhaustible wealth. The lakes, other than the Great Lakes, scattered through the Provinces, and the rivers navigable for hundreds of miles, were seen through the eyes of practical imagination as equally sources of wealth to vast populations of the future who should reap the harvest of the fish and use the waters, in conjunction with the railways, as means of transport.

The first railway in Canada was the short local line between Laprairie, Quebec Province, opposite Montreal, and St. John, on the Richelieu River, a distance of just under seventeen and a half miles. This railway was incorporated into the system of the Grand Trunk Railway, which received its Charter in 1852 from the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada. For a long time, however, railway construction hung fire, partly due to the political troubles which came to an end with the reconciliation of the French and English and the creation of the Dominion of Canada by the Act of Confederation. It was the daring enterprise of the Canadian Pacific Company that really inaugurated the development of Canada to which the Dominion owes its present prosperity and its great future.

We are not accustomed in the Old Country to talk affectionately about a railway as a friend of the people and the country, but I had not been long in Canada before I found that everybody talks of the “C.P.R.” as if it were a personal friend. As I travelled westward through the Prairie Provinces to Vancouver, farmers, commercial travellers, business men, politicians, everybody kept bringing up what the Canadian Pacific Railway has done for the Dominion. “The C.P.R. has made Canada,” “The C.P.R. is at the back of Canada,” “Canada owes its future to the C.P.R.,” and such expressions are heard all the while with monotonous reiteration. The C.P.R. appears to fulfil the function in Canada discharged by the weather in England of bridging awkward pauses in conversation. It might be imagined that fairy financiers with no sordid thought of dividends devised the scheme and carried through the construction of the C.P.R. out of sheer benevolent desire to do good. But financiers are not built that way. The fathers of the C.P.R. were just men with vision who had a great dream, and they persuaded investors to back the dream with millions of capital in the face of the pessimistic cawings of a grand army of croakers. “The earnings of the C.P.R.,” it was said, “will not pay for the axle-grease that it will use.”

Forty years ago Canada was practically the Canada of the British conquest of Quebec and the French cession to England. Even to-day the entire population of the Dominion, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is not more than that of Greater London. West of Ontario stretched for nearly 1,500 miles the level prairie land, many hundreds of miles from the United States border northwards to the regions of Hudson’s Bay. The prairie was roamed by buffalo, moose and caribou, who found rich feeding in the abundant grass of the most productive soil of the world. Few besides the Indians and the Hudson’s Bay traders, following certain traditional trails, traversed the prairie. It was regarded as for ever a waste as the sea is a waste. What was the use of cultivating an inland wilderness 1,500 miles from the populated part of Ontario, and cut off by the Rocky Mountains from British Columbia and the Pacific? But the projectors of the C.P.R., in their dream, saw the prairie waving with harvests; they saw cities rising amid the “waste,” and their financial souls rejoiced in visions of phantom trains conveying wheat enough to feed hundreds of millions along the phantom “steel” of the as yet unsubstantial dream of the C.P.R. They convinced the Government that there was “something in it,” and the Government gave every encouragement to them to “go ahead.” To-day it might seem to some that the Government was too generous in the concession of miles of land on either side of the line to be constructed, but then the land had no value at all at the time, and it never would have value till the “steel” was laid, and lots of people who were considered shrewd judges prophesied that even then the line would stretch for thousands of miles through country doomed for ever to be uninhabited and profitless. To-day, for 3,800 miles, the C.P.R. “steel” spans Canada from Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the Atlantic, to Vancouver, on the Pacific. Its sleepers are laid a foot apart. Its sectional construction parties have their wooden houses and workshops at convenient intervals along the route. Thousands of towns and villages have sprung up on either side and several of them are leaping ahead to the size of cities running into hundreds of thousands of population. The C.P.R. literally created four new Provinces of the Dominion, each now with a Government of its own, Prime Minister, Cabinet and Parliament complete—Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. Other railways are striking across Canada—the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk are racing each other to the Pacific, which they expect to reach this year—but the C.P.R. was the prophet pioneer, and on running down by its line from the Rockies into Vancouver I found, thirty to forty miles out of Vancouver, the construction men at work on the double track, which is to duplicate the single line from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The C.P.R. feels that it has got to be “on its mettle,” as well as on its metal. Quite apart from rivalry, which it does not fear, for the new lines will open up new country and get their traffic from the new towns and villages and farming and lumber districts, the present resources of the C.P.R. are heavily overtaxed to meet the growing traffic of the Prairie Provinces, while the opening of the Panama Canal is certain to set in a tremendous flow of traffic towards the Pacific, as well as through the Lakes to the States and westward to the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic.

People tell stories of the ubiquity and omniscience of the C.P.R.; of its grandmotherly benevolence to the farmers, and its liberal treatment of its _employés_. One shrewd settler at Regina told me that the C.P.R. has rather “spoiled” the farmers by doing too much for them. There is the matter of grain elevators, for instance. Grain is stored in these huge tin-plate structures until it can be removed by the freight trains. The farmers, said the critic, ought not to depend on a railway for the storing of their grain. They should combine to provide their own elevators. As it is, scores of millions of bushels have to remain in ear on the prairie waiting to be threshed until the elevators are empty, or the freight trains are available in the sidings. Prompt transit is necessary, or the best of the market may be missed. The C.P.R. has encouraged settlement on its concessions on the easiest terms to suitable men. Just now it is creating “ready-made farms,” with house, etc., all provided, for men with a little capital to enter into possession of at once. Then it has its hotels all along the line. At a pleasure resort in the Rockies a Canadian “drummer” said “the C.P.R. is running up a sixteen-storey two-million dollar hotel at Lake Louise.” It even regulates the time along the route. There is “C.P.R.” time, changing in the central part of Canada to the European-Continental twenty-four hour system. The story is told of a visitor who got tired of having C.P.R. “deepos,” elevators, hotels, and the rest pointed out to him, and when he asked what hour it was, and was told “22.18 C.P.R. time,” he answered, “Good heavens! Does the C.P.R. own the sun and the time, too?”

The piercing of the Rocky Mountains and the construction of the line through 800 miles of mountainous country down to Vancouver was one of the most audacious and successful pieces of railway engineering ever done. British Columbia was worthless before the railway; to-day Vancouver City has a population of 100,000, risen from 5,000 in less than twenty years, and Victoria, the capital, on Vancouver Island, is even larger, and one of the most beautiful cities of the world. It was a wonderful revelation to see freight trains of a hundred wagons laden with the lumber of British Columbia, and equally long trains on the prairie laden with grain. Most of the grain is shipped at Fort William and Port Arthur, the “twin cities” at the north-west angle of Lake Superior. It is carried on ships rising from 12,000 and 15,000 tons through the chain of the Great Lakes to the great distributing centres of the Dominion and the United States.

A journey across Canada by the C.P.R. gives the finest bird’s-eye view of the Dominion. Space fails to tell of experiences in the sleeping-cars, and the dining-cars, which serve first-class hotel menus, with such native specialities as turkey and cranberry sauce, prairie chicken, and trout and white fish of the lakes. But it takes an English visitor, to whom a journey from London to Edinburgh is an adventure, some time to get used to stages of 1,400 miles, 890 miles, and 1,110 miles, which are samples of those we took.

The Grand Trunk Railway was never a financial success until it was taken in hand by Mr. Charles Hays, one of the victims of the _Titanic_ tragedy. Mr. Hays was trained in the United States. It was a fortunate day for the Grand Trunk when, at the period of the reconstruction of the company in 1895, Mr. Hays, then Vice-President and General Manager of the Wabash Railroad, was appointed General Manager with headquarters at Montreal, and given the fullest freedom to go ahead. He began by acquiring various local lines which were incorporated into the Grand Trunk system. Many English capitalists were interested in the Grand Trunk, and it has been very heavily financed with English money. Mr. Hays completely revolutionised the whole system, had the single line doubled, struck out branch lines in all directions, linked the Grand Trunk up with other systems, and induced the company to follow the example of the C.P.R. and strike straight across the continent to the Pacific. By 1908 the Grand Trunk system included 5,192 miles of line. Its Grand Trunk Pacific route lies partly in Canada and partly in the United States, and the Pacific line is fed with passengers and freight from both countries. The Grand Trunk struck into the Prairie Provinces with depots at Fort William, Port Arthur, and many other strategic centres. Mr. Hays had a great idea of the value of bridges. One of his conceptions was a single-span double-track bridge crossing the Niagara Gorge. This was opened in 1897, replacing the suspension bridge opened in 1853. The Gorge Bridge is a splendid piece of engineering, the span of the arch being 550 feet and the width of the railway flooring 32 feet, the lines being 245 feet above water. The Jubilee Bridge across the St. Lawrence River is one of the great bridges of the world. It is 9,144 feet long with twenty-four piers 66 feet in width and 60 feet above the water. Two other famous bridges are the International Bridge across the Niagara between Fort Erie and Buffalo, 2,400 feet in length with ten piers, and the bridge across the St. Lawrence at Coteau Landing, which is 4,025 feet long. The once despised Grand Trunk is now a formidable rival of the C.P.R. Mr. Hays’ ambition to make it a trans-continental railway has been realised, for the “steel” has been carried to the Pacific, opening up a vast stretch of new country for settlement and development. Its terminal on the Pacific coast is Prince Rupert, British Columbia, which is destined to run Vancouver very close as a great western gateway of Canadian trade. The Grand Trunk is developing hundreds of thousands of miles of the most fertile country of the Prairie Provinces, and expects to play a leading part in the development of the British Columbia resources of forestry, fruit farming, mining and manufacturing industries. In Alberta it is looking to take a very large share of the railway profit from the working of the inexhaustible coal supplies and the manufacturing centres that will be consequent on the development of the coal. Central Alberta, from Edmonton to the Rocky Mountains, is likely in the future to be the Canadian “Black Country,” far more extensive and productive than even the original Black Country. It is calculated that the areas known as the Edmonton coal district cover at least 10,000 square miles and contain at least sixty million tons of workable coal. Already branch lines are running to districts where the coal is even now being got, eastward from Winnipeg to Moncton, the capital of New Brunswick. Main lines are being constructed by the Canadian Government for leasing to the Grand Trunk Pacific for a period of fifty years on conditions which ensure alike the Government receiving a fair return for its money and the users of the railway getting the fullest advantage of the lines. Altogether there is every prospect of the Grand Trunk Railway fulfilling the most sanguine dreams of the railway king who perished in the _Titanic_.

The third great Canadian Railway and youngest of the three, the Canadian Northern, is forging ahead at a marvellous rate. The pioneers of the Canadian Pacific struck through 3,000 miles of country practically unpopulated, always with the Pacific as the object of their ambition. The Canadian Northern promoters also had from the first in view the construction of a trans-continental line, but their policy was not quite the same as that of the C.P.R. founders. Their idea was to make their line pay from the first by creating passenger and freightage traffic as they went. This meant that the trans-continental ideal must wait for realisation while the profit producing sections of the line were establishing their earning capacity. The policy of the C.N.R. has steadily justified itself. The main lines have been constructed section by section, with branch lines striking out from them, each branch line opening up productive new country. The Canadian Northern has specialised, so to speak, on the Prairie Provinces, with Winnipeg as its centre of operations, and the development of the West is largely due to the enterprise of the C.N.R. It has linked up the West with the northern part of Ontario, and its lines are ministering alike to the agricultural prosperity of the West and the manufacturing and commercial prosperity of the East. The C.N.R. runs through great forest regions and makes the most of the lumber traffic. At Prince Albert, for instance, in the centre of Saskatchewan, it has opened up an area of forest country into which the widening stream of immigrants is always flowing. Prince Albert—as I know from a Prince Albertian I met on the homeward voyage—believes that it is “It.” Its ambition is to be a great distributing centre for a territory as large as France and at the same time a magnificent residential city on a site beautiful for situation. The mills of the Prince Albert Lumber Company are the largest in Canada, driven by electrical power supplied at an incredibly cheap rate.

The C.N.R. figures largely at Port Arthur, on the western shore of Lake Superior, one of the great twin grain ports where hundreds of thousands of bushels of the prairie crops are annually shipped. Port Arthur owes its great and growing prosperity largely to the C.N.R., which has there an elevator capable of storing 7,250,000 bushels of wheat. A 5,000-ton steamer can lie alongside the elevator and be loaded up within an hour or two and steam through the Great Lakes with its food freight to the most important points in Canada and the United States.

The C.N.R., again, opens up new country in British Columbia, and is certain to capture a very lucrative trade in that most beautiful Province.

Each of these three railways, with continual construction, is founding almost daily towns and cities of the future. Every three or four miles there is a station. Immigrants and traders are encouraged in every possible way to settle along the line. The station, the elevators, facilities to acquire stock and land and to erect houses, are held out as irresistible baits. The baits are eagerly seized by the more enterprising men keen on taking advantage of the opportunities offered by places at their very beginning. It is well recognised in Canada that a man with grit, enterprise, ideas, willing to endure a little temporary hardship, is bound to get on if he is in at the birth of an infant community. He arrives with a few dollars in his pocket or with nothing. Within ten years he may be the proprietor of a big hotel, a flourishing newspaper, or may be mayor of a city with a population of anything between 3,000 to 10,000. The fascination of the new life to a man whose habits have not been crystallised in the environment of a populous city, who likes a free and unconventional life, and who is prepared to devote his attention exclusively to business until he has laid a solid foundation for the future “pile,” is particularly attractive to one who has youth and strength. I heard endless stories of men who in a phenomenally short time had established themselves in such new cities, and are now rich men able to give themselves, if they choose, a summer in Europe or to spend the winter in Toronto or Montreal. Commercial travellers hunting up trade in the new towns springing up along the lines of construction told me many stories of the changes a year or two makes in these new towns. You go to the end of the “steel” in course of construction. You find a few shacks and a rough shanty that calls itself an hotel. You return a year later when the line has advanced another hundred or two hundred miles, and you find a street a third of a mile long of wooden houses. There are several stores very likely; there is an infant newspaper. There is an hotel, still primitive in its simplicity, but tolerable. You can sleep on the beds and you can eat the rough food. You return at the end of another couple of years—the street is a mile long, several of the wooden houses have given place to houses of brick and stone; the newspaper has quite established itself. Its editorials, its “notes” and its “personals” have the breezy audacity and the intimate personal touch which are characteristic of Canadian journalism. There is a municipality which has learnt the art of “boosting,” and the Real Estate man is well in evidence. He has snapped up enticing plots, and in Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal and other centres he is “boosting” the town and its unequalled possibilities for all he is worth. This springing up and rapid growth of new cities is repeating itself hundreds of times a year in all the Provinces of Canada, from Nova Scotia to the Pacific.

There is a fourth railway, the Intercolonial, constructed and owned by the Dominion Government. This runs from Montreal to the Atlantic coast, serving the Provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. It is managed by a department of the Ministry of the Interior at Ottawa. The Intercolonial is considered by Canadians rather slow-going. Nationalisation and State control of railways is not yet a particularly popular proposition in Canada; in fact, throughout all the Provinces, and especially the Prairie Provinces and British Columbia, the idea of State control and management of anything is regarded with increasing suspicion. The Canadian prides himself on his independence and on his ability to manage his own affairs. To the financing of railways by the Dominion Government, and the great inducements held out to the C.P.R., Grand Trunk and the C.N.R. to push on with their construction, the phenomenal railway development has been largely due.

As indicated in my account of the C.P.R., there are dangers to the country through the powers granted to the companies in their early years of constructive enterprise, but I found a very optimistic belief on the part of Canadians that the Canadian people will be strong enough to grapple with the railway companies if they show any signs of seriously abusing their privileges. The competition between the three great companies at present is so strong and so keen that the danger of their uniting for the oppressive exploitation of the people by a trust combining them all seems a possibility of the dim future. It is likely enough that some Napoleon of finance in the United States, Canada, or Great Britain may conceive and try to carry out the idea of such a Dominion Railway Trust. If and when that happens a very interesting situation will be created. He will not only have the public opinion of the Dominion expressing itself and bringing itself to bear upon the Dominion Parliament and Government, but he will have to deal with the public opinion of the several Provinces, and this is a power that will more and more have to be reckoned with. The Provinces are not at all likely to consent to the Dominion Government bartering away their Provincial rights in the use of the railways. It will be a very dangerous thing to the Dominion Government if it provokes a conflict between itself and the Governments of the Provinces. All the probabilities point to the continuance of the independent companies. There is room enough and to spare for a good fifty years to come for each of them to use all the capital it can command in the development of its own spheres of influence, and while that is so there seems no necessity for any big combine that would compromise the interests either of the passengers or the manufacturing and industrial users of the railways.

* * * * *