The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (17 page)

Chapter Three

1
The new broom

2
Five hundred miles of steel

3
End of Track

4
Edgar Dewdney’s new capital

5
The Grand Trunk declares war

1
The new broom

Van Horne arrived in Winnipeg that January with a considerable reputation among railwaymen. The previous year, the
Railway Journal
had called him “a man of wonderful power and shrewdness.” He was known, too, as a railway iconoclast, “an idol-smashing heathen” who had no respect for the rigid dogmas of a tradition-ridden business. It was said that he could make eight hundred freight cars do the work of a thousand by his ingenious methods of loading. In Chicago he had astonished his contemporaries by the amount of trackage he had managed to work into a limited area in the yards. He used locomotives to their fullest capacity over the protests of engineers who wanted to treat them like horses and let them rest quietly in the shops. He had a reputation for doctoring sick railroads until they were made to pay. He was also known as a fighter: he had fought the grasshoppers, he had fought the labour unions, he had fought the encroachment of other railroads, and always he had won.

He seemed to know a terrifying amount about railroading. He knew all about yards and repair shops. He understood the mysteries of accounting. He could work out a complicated system of scheduling in his head while others sweated laboriously with pins and charts. He could comprehend the chatter of the fastest telegraph key. He could operate any locomotive built. He had even redesigned, with considerable grace and taste, that ugliest example of nineteenth-century American architecture, the railroad station.

He was a true Renaissance man, the most engaging and versatile immigrant that Canada ever enticed across its borders and one of the few larger-than-life figures in the Canadian story. It is interesting to speculate on what he might have been in another era: a prince of the Church in the Middle Ages? the ruler of a dukedom in the sixteenth century? a Roman conqueror? In any age Van Horne would have fitted his times exactly. In a century when railways were venerated above all else – when a private railway car had equal status with a yacht, when entire magazines were devoted to news and opinions about railways, when railway financiers were numbered among the real rulers of the land – it was ordained that Van Horne would become a railway man. He was probably the greatest that the continent ever produced.

There are a great many adjectives that apply to him: buoyant, capable, ingenious, temperamental, blunt, forceful, boyish, self-reliant, imaginative, hard-working, puckish, courageous; but the word that best sums him
up, and the one that his contemporaries used more than once, is “positive.” He exuded confidence. J. H. E. Secretan, who worked for him as a surveyor, recorded that “the word ‘cannot’ did not exist in his dictionary.” Was he ever bedevilled by doubts of his own or haunted by fears of private failure? If he was he hid his emotions well behind the grave mask of his face and those unrevealing eyes of penetrating blue. Even when the mask slipped a little to reveal the sensitive man behind it, the approach was characteristically blunt. Once, in Milwaukee, when he had been given a job that seemed to be far beyond his years, he sensed hostility all around him. He went straight to one of the clerks and asked him, point-blank: “Why are you prejudiced against me?” Startled, the man replied that he was not prejudiced, “and, now that I come to think of it, I have no reason to be against you at all.”

Van Horne believed in coming to the point swiftly, with an economy of words. It was the same with railway lines. The best-run railways were the ones that achieved their destinations with an economy of mileage. One of Van Horne’s first tasks was to ensure that the
CPR
would reach Pacific tidewater by the shortest possible route.

He had not yet met George Stephen, but he had encountered Major A. B. Rogers, “the Railway Pathfinder,” a gnarled little whipper-snapper of a man, notorious for the length of his white Dundreary whiskers, the astonishing profanity of his speech, and his apparent ability to exist for days on little more than hard-tack. After a summer in the mountains, Rogers (though he harboured some secret doubts) had decided to announce that the Kicking Horse Pass in the Rockies was feasible. In the second week in January, 1882, he and Van Horne went to Montreal to meet Stephen, McIntyre, and Angus to discuss the matter.

The meeting took place on January 13 and resulted in two major decisions. The first was communicated to the press by Van Horne himself, with characteristic bluntness.

“We have changed the point,” he said, “at which the road will enter the Rockies.” The Kicking Horse Pass, still unsurveyed, had officially been chosen, confirming the tentative decision of the previous year. Although, as the
Globe
pointed out, only the Dominion government could “change the point,” it had in fact been changed almost without that authority. “There is nothing surprising in the General Manager’s assurance,” the
Globe
declared, “for the House that ratified the monstrous bargain at the bidding of a Government dictated to by the Syndicate is not likely to refuse new concessions demanded by the same Ministry under the same dictation.”

The second decision was that there would be a change of route between Lake Nipissing, the official start of the railway, and Fort William, to allow the line to hug the shore of Lake Superior, something Stephen had suggested to Macdonald months before. In addition, a branch line contemplated from Lake Nipissing to Sault Ste Marie would be greatly shortened, placing the Sault virtually on the main line, a change that caused some lengthening of the road.

This announcement was a significant one for it underlined the company’s intention of proceeding with the Lake Superior section. Up to that point, several of the directors – certainly James J. Hill and his friend John S. Kennedy, the New York banker – had not contemplated building the line across the Precambrian Shield. Their plan was to divert it from Callander Junction, on Lake Nipissing, by way of the Sault, to join up with a branch of Hill’s road, the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba, in which Stephen, Donald Smith, Angus, and Kennedy were all leading shareholders.

From a business point of view, the plan made great sense. Had it been adopted, it is conceivable that the
CPR
might have become part of the railway empire that the ambitious Hill was constructing – a Canadian feeder line for the Great Northern, which was to grow out of the original St. Paul railway.

It is probable that Stephen himself felt originally that the Sault branch would for many years carry Canadian passengers and freight south of the Shield through American territory into Manitoba and thence west before any all-Canadian line could be successfully undertaken. By 1881, Stephen, who wanted the Monopoly Clause tied down tightly, had changed his mind. He now had an ally in Van Horne, who helped to swing the issue in Montreal. The new general manager became that year the most trenchant advocate the Lake Superior line had. His railway sense rebelled against a connection with another railroad. He wanted a through line, independent of local traffic; and there is little doubt that he saw more clearly than the others the consequences to the
CPR
of linking up with Hill’s road. The railway would become Hill’s railway and there was no room, in one company, for two practical railwaymen as ambitious and as strong-minded as Jim Hill and W. C. Van Horne. It was the start of a memorable antagonism. When Hill heard of Van Horne’s opposition to his plan he burst out that he would get even with him “if I have to go to hell for it and shovel coal.”

No doubt Hill ruefully recalled his advice to Stephen that Van Horne would take all the authority he could. The new general manager was a man of towering ambition whose love of power had its roots in his childhood and youth. At the age of eighteen, he had breathlessly watched the
arrival of the general superintendent of the Michigan Central – an awesome figure to a young telegraph operator – coming forward to meet his assistants with, as he later put it, “that bearing of dignity and importance which consciously or unconsciously attends the great majority of men who have long been accustomed to command.” When the “mighty man,” as Van Horne called him, moved away, the youth walked around the official car and gazed on it with awe. He found himself wondering if he might not some day attain the same rank and travel about in a private car of his own. “The glories of it, the pride of it, the salary pertaining to it, all that moved me deeply,” he told his grandson many years later, “and I made up my mind then and there that I would reach it.” He did, in just ten years; at the age of twenty-eight he became the youngest railway superintendent in the world.

To achieve that end he had “avoided every path however attractive that did not lead in its direction.” Now, with a new railway in his grasp – the longest in the world and potentially one of the mightiest – he had no intention of sharing his power with any man.

He could get along quite easily with George Stephen, for Stephen was a financier, not a railroad man. Stephen had been persuaded to head the
CPR
on the condition that he was to have nothing to do with the actual building of the line. That “was to be done at St. Paul by Hill and Angus, and I to hear nothing about it.” But with the advent of Van Horne, Hill’s influence began to fade. Van Horne would build the road; Stephen would look after the money.

The two men hit it off from the beginning, though their backgrounds were dissimilar. The slender Stephen was a Highland Scot with a mathematician’s brain, single-minded in his interests, passionate in his loyalties and hatreds. The stocky Van Horne was a mixture of Dutch, French, and German; in his drive and hustle he was the epitome of the American businessman – Macdonald’s “sharp Yankee” – so despised by Canadian merchants and politicians. He had already rubbed his subordinates in Winnipeg the wrong way. On the very day he arrived in Montreal, the
Globe
published a rumour that he did not like his new position and that the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul was holding his old post open for him. His cronies, hearing of the chill in Winnipeg, urged him to leave his crusty colleagues to “build their own road and come back here to your friends.”

But Van Horne was not a man to quit something he had scarcely tackled. There was a quality of enthusiasm about him that Stephen must have admired, for Stephen had it too. When Stephen threw himself into a
project he went all the way; so did Van Horne. Once he became general manager of the
CPR
, he was a Canadian railwayman through and through. The difference was that Stephen, in his own phrase, was “born utterly without the faculty of doing more than one thing at a time.” His only passion outside of the
CPR
was the very Scottish pastime of salmon fishing. Van Horne, on the other hand, seemed able to switch from one pursuit to another and make himself master of all of them.

He threw himself into half a dozen hobbies. As a gardener he thought nothing of travelling for miles to seek out and dig his own leaf-mould for roses. He studied fertilizers and soil mixes and bred new varieties – a triple trumpet flower, for example, and a perfect hyacinth. As an amateur geologist he was not content to pore over the works of Louis Agassiz; he must meet the great man himself and correspond with him; he must discover and name new trilobites and brachiopods. Old railwaymen working in quarries along any line of road with which Van Horne was connected knew that he was a sure market for fossils; the slightest hint of a discovery would send him speeding towards the source with his geologist’s hammer and his sample box. He carried his rock collection about with him as other men carried a dispatch case.

Like Stephen, Van Horne had been raised in poverty, born literally in an Illinois log cabin. Like Stephen, he revered his mother, “a noble woman, courageous and resourceful,” he called her. (Stephen’s was “one of the best mothers that ever lived.”) His father had died when he was eleven; at fourteen he had been forced to forsake his education to support his family. Again like Stephen, who had risen from draper’s clerk to bank president in a remarkably short period, he had worked hard all his life to achieve his ambitions. In his ten-year drive to the top he had never known a holiday or even an evening or a Sunday off. When others sought respite, the young Van Horne cheerfully assumed the burden of their tasks; that was how he learned so much about railways, haunting the repair shops, mastering the use of every tool, watching the engineers building bridges, learning line repairs from roadmen and section hands, studying accounting and figures.

As a train dispatcher in Alton, Van Horne’s official work day was twelve hours, but when it was over he did not go home; instead, he lurked about the yards, shops, and offices, soaking up the railway business. He was convinced that “an object can usually be attained through persistence and steadiness of aim” and in all his activities – from track-laying to poker – he held fast to that credo.