It seems scarcely possible that the electric railway is only thirty years old. The marvel of Chicago, to a visitor less than thirty years ago, was the system of street cars moved by cables running between and beneath the rails. Winnipeg had a single track horse-car system, with passing sidings. It was the enterprise of Albert Austin, in these days president of the Consumers’ Gas Company of Toronto. The city gave a franchise to the Winnipeg Electric Railway Company, the creation of Mr. James Ross, of Montreal, Mr. William Mackenzie, who had recently come into control of the Toronto railway situation, and Mr. D. D. Mann.

There was some confusion as to the Austin franchise’s priority of right. Indeed, Mr. Austin contended that the electric franchise was erroneously given. At all events, the electric cars started to run on the streets before the horse cars were run off the streets. We enjoyed the spectacle of Dobbin competing against the harnessed lightning, and the experience of a cut-rate business in fares, the like of which was never before, and has never since been seen. Rides were three cents each, and fifty tickets were sold for a dollar. Business institutions laid in stores of tickets, against the day when rates would rise. In the end, of course, the more modern method won out. The Winnipeg Electric Railway, which had its own difficulties, due to comparative scarcity of population, has come to earn a yearly revenue of over $3,500,000.

Becoming the first auditor of the company brought me into contact with the president, Mr. Mackenzie, of Toronto, and led to a connection of twenty-six years with the phenomenal expansion of a railway system, which is now the main hope of prosperity for a national property. I had met Mr. Mann almost immediately after arriving at Portage la Prairie, in 1886. As there are some misapprehensions in the public mind about the earlier association of these remarkable men, perhaps it is as well to tell the authentic story.

As a western worker, Sir Donald Mann preceded Sir William Mackenzie by several years. He brought the first locomotive into Winnipeg on Christmas Eve, 1879, having come down the Red River during the previous summer. Sir William Mackenzie’s first essay in Western development was in 1884, when he took contracts on the mountain section of the C.P.R.

It is a mistake to suppose that that was Mackenzie’s first experience in railway construction. He had had a contract on the Victoria Railway, between Port Hope and Orillia, via Blackwater, now called the Midland section of the Canadian National System. That was one of the first great enterprises, outside his beloved insurance, in which the late Senator Cox was heavily concerned as a financier. Mackenzie had taught school, and had done some building. He had also worked in the Lake Simcoe and Muskoka territory when it was furnishing Toronto with most of its lumber and fuel.

When the Mackenzie men, teams, and equipment began work in the region of Banff, where James Ross, the chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific, had charge of a construction then unexampled in Canada, they became known as “The Farmer Outfit”, because their harness and get-up generally were more like the appurtenances of Ontario than the gear of truly Western operators.

Over twenty years afterwards, when a distinguished party was travelling to Edmonton for the inauguration of the province of Alberta, they drove from the end of Canadian Northern steel, several miles east of Vermilion, to the new capital. One of the guides over the unfamiliar trails was bridge builder Weller, who told the stranger he was driving that he was with Mackenzie on his first contract in the mountains. He was still the same Mackenzie, Weller said, though bigger business left him little time to fraternize with his old associates.

“There is no Sunday time to be killed in tents,” he said, “by sitting around the stove on chilly nights and singing Sankey’s hymns. Mr. Mackenzie was quite a singer in those days, but only on Sunday nights.”

Far ahead of “The Farmer Outfit”, in the vanguard of the graders, was another contractor—the same who had brought the engine across the Red River ice, and had been on the job as the C.P.R. was laid through Brandon, Regina and Calgary. Sir Donald Mann’s reminiscences of a hard season’s work include his first seeing of the governor-general, the Marquis of Lansdowne, and his first meeting with Sir William Mackenzie.

The viceroy was coming east from Victoria over the route to be taken by the C.P.R. The contractor met him on the trail that did duty for a road, and recognized him by his photograph. Since the war, dining with the marquis in London, Sir Donald was interested by his recalling that at the time of his trip across the Selkirks and Rockies, there were only 126,000 people between the Lake of the Woods and the Pacific Ocean.

Of the first contact between Mackenzie and Mann, Sir Donald’s recollection is vivid:

“In the summer of 1884,” he says, “we were having some trouble with our supplies at the head of construction. This was partly caused by the wish of those who had such matters in hand to compel us to buy from them. We wanted the advantage of buying direct from wholesalers and manufacturers, and hauling our own stuff from the end of steel to the front of grading. To do this teaming I had my agents farther east buy and ship a carload of mules. When we received word that they had arrived as far as the cars could bring them, I took a foreman named Dan Mahoney and two or three other men, and started out to fetch them. They were at the Summit—close to where the Great Divide is marked now. The mules had been unloaded and were with another carload in a corral.

“Dan Mahoney and I were picking out what we believed to be our animals when a man with a long black beard turned up, and asked us what we were doing with the mules. I said we were getting ours from the lot. He said the mules were his, and we’d better not interfere with them. The argument livened up a good deal, and was getting warm, when Ross came along, and asked what the trouble was. We told him. He laughed and said we were both wrong and both right. A carload had come for each of us, but owing to some misunderstanding, it had been supposed that they belonged to the same party, and they had been turned into the corral together.

“Ross was never at a loss for a way out of a difficulty; and he undertook to settle this one. ‘You’ll pick teams, turn and turn about, and you,’ he said, pointing to Mackenzie, ‘will have first choice, and he,’ pointing to me, ‘will have the next two, and then one each.’ That was perfectly fair, and the first difference of opinion between Mackenzie and me was over.

“While Mackenzie was choosing his first team Dan Mahoney took me aside and said: ‘You let me pick them mules. I know them all, for I worked at the place they have come from. The best in the lot are them roans. This man won’t guess that; but I know it. Don’t take them in your first pick; and he won’t take them for his second. Then we’ll take them; and you’ll see they’ll turn out to be the best of the bunch.’

“Sure enough, Mackenzie didn’t pick the roans for his second choice, so that at least he didn’t figure them as better than the fifth pair. We took them as our third choice; and they proved to be the best team of all, as Mahoney had said. Mackenzie and I have been in a good many arrangements together since then; but I don’t think any of them gave me more genuine satisfaction than the one in which I took Dan Mahoney’s advice.”

Sometimes books of reference err. “Canadian Men and Women of the Time” is nodding when it states that the Mackenzie-Mann partnership began in 1886. The slip is similar to another in connection with Sir Joseph Flavelle, of whom it is said mistakenly, that he was “long in the dry goods business in Lindsay, Ontario, with his brother, John D. Flavelle.” In 1886 Mackenzie was building snow sheds in the Selkirks; and Mann was fulfilling a twenty-five-mile grading contract on the Manitoba North Western. It was while he was busy with this that I first saw him, in the office of my chief, W. A. Baker, at Portage la Prairie. At that time D. D. Mann was thirty-three years old, very big, and a bachelor; and I wondered who the heavy, slow-moving man was.

The Mackenzie-Mann partnership began in 1888, but it was part of a quartet, and not a duet. The other partners were the late James Ross and the present Sir Herbert Holt of Montreal. The firm took contracts on the Coboconk and Credit Valley lines, and undertook the whole of the C.P.R. short line through Maine to St. John. The Regina and Long Lake, the Calgary and Edmonton, and the line from Calgary to Fort MacLeod followed, between 1889 and 1891. Then constructive energy in the West seemed exhausted. The railway contracting of Mackenzie and Mann entered a state of suspended animation.

There is a tradition among his friends that when Mackenzie saw the finish of these contracts in the West he made up his mind to retire on his competence, and devote himself to farming at his native Kirkfield, and to public service in Victoria county. Sir Sam Hughes used to tell, with as much relish as Sir Donald tells of the contest over the mules, how he beat Mackenzie for the Conservative nomination for Victoria and Haliburton in 1891.

But life’s strenuous endeavour was not over for Sir William Mackenzie in his early forties. Unexpectedly he became connected with the modernization of the street railway in Toronto—the beginning of nearly thirty years of achievement such as has not been approached in Canada by any native son. From a commitment to an electric railway in Toronto to a similar enterprise in Winnipeg was a natural development of a genius for courageous initiation, the range of which I do not think he himself recognized at that time.

The ambition to construct and control a transcontinental railway was the result of an evolution in two mentalities, working in a single partnership. Just when it was first consciously entertained perhaps neither Sir William nor Sir Donald was aware. Certainly, nothing of the kind was contemplated when their first venture as railway owners and operators, as distinct from contractors, was undertaken, and I came into it as the first operating officer.

The conditions affecting the nativity of the Canadian Northern were extensive and peculiar. The Sutherland project of a railway from Winnipeg to Hudson Bay had halted at Oak Point, forty miles from Winnipeg, on the east shore of Lake Manitoba. But the idea of laying steel to the Bay was never abandoned; and the Dominion charter of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company gave the right to build to tidewater, via northwestern Manitoba, in 1889. The Manitoba Government was friendly to the scheme from the very practical point of view of providing facilities for farmers who, though they were in fine country, could not profitably market their excellent crops, some for reasons for which they had no responsibility, and some for reasons which, perhaps, they might have avoided. They could not flourish without railway transportation.

The main line of the Canadian Pacific came into Winnipeg from almost due north for twenty miles. Originally, it was to have passed through Selkirk, leaving ambitious Winnipeg as an important station on a branch to the American boundary. The line was built almost to the river, opposite Selkirk, and a round house was erected at Selkirk. Instead of going west through Portage la Prairie, it was projected straight northwestward between Lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba, crossed Lake Manitoba at The Narrows, and continued northwesterly to the Swan River, where it turned southwesterly, till it was a few miles north of Fort Pelly.

Thence it took a due west route to the Elbow of the North Saskatchewan, near to where that river is now crossed by the Canadian Northern main line. Then, instead of crossing the river, the C.P.R. was to skirt the southern bank to Battleford, and strike the Saskatchewan again on its long northwesterly stretch, about twenty miles above Fort Edmonton, which is the Edmonton of to-day. A new Edmonton was to arise on the C.P.R. main line, about seventeen miles south of the present capital of Alberta.

This route was across sections of the prairie country marked on the Government map, printed in Sandford Fleming’s great report of 1880, as having “soil of rich quality and pasture land more or less fertile.” The map is the first in which, to quote from its superscription, “An attempt has been made to distinguish the general physical character of the country, on the routes followed by different explorers and scientific travelers.” The map is one of the most interesting proofs of the wisdom with which the Canadian Northern lines in the West were planned; taking in, as they do, the territory first pre-empted by the Canadian Pacific main line, which was also commonly known as “The Fertile Belt”.

There was a second location of the C.P.R. main line, which was to leave Portage la Prairie eight miles to the south, and was to swing round the Riding Mountains, virtually on the route afterwards taken by the Manitoba North Western, and was to cross the Assiniboine a little below where Kamsack now is, and pick up the original location at Nut Hill, about twelve miles straight north of the present little station of Rama on the Canadian Northern main line, two hundred and forty miles from Winnipeg.

The Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company was chartered to enter this originally selected territory of the Canadian Pacific main line. Nervy farmers, knowing good country when they saw it, went into the district around Lake Dauphin, through which the C.P.R. was to come. Some stuck to their places, even after it seemed that hope of a railway in their time was vain. There were others, known as the judgment-proof settlers. They had fled from conditions which made it impossible for them to profit by their experience, and had come from hard times to harder.

The wonderful fertility of the Dauphin and Gilbert Plains country, and the abundance of wood within reach of everywhere made it an ideal farming territory. One is able to report that J. B. Tyrrell, whose Western surveys for the Dominion Government began in 1883, and have covered the country between the Kootenays and Dawson city, between Edmonton and Chesterfield Inlet, and from Fort Churchill to Winnipeg and included two summers in northwestern Manitoba, says that if he were choosing a farm location he would go to the Dauphin country. Apropos that preference, consider an illustration of how the sober truth of a scientific bluebook can be regarded as the fiction of a romancing propagandist.

Tyrrell’s reports to the Geological Survey of his work in 1889 and 1890 make it clear that Lake Manitoba is the remainder of a much vaster inland sea, which was pretty deep—its shores were high in the present Riding and Duck Mountains. On the high water line are deposits of phosphatic shale, the product of immense accumulations of fish bones, Tyrrell believes. The leaching from these deposits to the plains below has made the farms in the Dauphin and Gilbert Plains districts so remarkably fertile that it was found undesirable to permit the land to lie fallow every third year as in most of the prairie country. Allow a Dauphin field an idle, clean summer and the following years the wheat crops will most likely be hopelessly lodged. It is therefore customary, in order to keep the land clean, to allow the weeds to get a good start in the spring, plow them in at the beginning of June, and take off a crop of barley so as to prevent the following season’s wheat crop from choking itself into unprofitability.

One summer the Canadian Northern superintendent of publicity was taking a party of journalists from Winnipeg to Edmonton, and, as his custom was, he brought aboard the train, at different points, local men who could tell about their district.

The National Editorial Association of the United States after leaving Dauphin were bidden to a testimony meeting in the forward coach of the special train. The publicity superintendent offered a few remarks on the quality of the landscape the party was viewing, and told of the phosphatic shale derived from fishbones deposited in the hills, perhaps five million years ago. He received some attenuated applause for this narration; but was not flattered later to learn that it was bestowed for the most colossal, most imaginative fish story that so seasoned a bunch of newspapermen had ever heard.

The connoisseurs of descriptive narrative were in the mood, though not the condition, of a distinguished visitor at the Quebec Garrison Club several years ago, who, having assiduously sampled the visions that come gaily through the rye, saw, as he was leaving, an enormous stuffed Lake St. John salmon on the wall, at the stair’s foot. He gazed at it for a full minute and remarked:

“That’s a d——d lie!”

Parliaments may authorize, but financiers may refuse to finance. Though the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal charter, land grant and all, had been obtained by the Davis firm of contractors, they could induce nobody to furnish the money to build the line and possess the land. They tried to sell the charter, and in 1892 or 1893 D. D. Mann began negotiations to buy it. He took an option for a thousand dollars, and allowed it to expire. He renewed the option for two thousand dollars, and that also ran out. He figured that, in the end, the rights could be acquired more advantageously by that form of attrition of attractiveness.

After nearly three years’ negotiation, the charter at thirty-eight thousand dollars seemed a good buy, and the prospect of financing construction pretty fair, largely because two factors in the situation were in a different case from what they had been when the idea of laying track into the Dauphin country began to be agreeable. The Manitoba Government was increasingly eager for better settlement in the Dauphin district, and the Northern Pacific had gone into a receivership.

I am not sure that we don’t indirectly owe the National Railways to the incurable impetuosity of Joe Martin. As we have seen, he was attorney-general in the Greenway Government when it inherited the battle against the C.P.R. monopoly in 1888, and was the popular general of the battle of Fort Whyte. But he was not popular with his colleagues—very impetuous men seldom are. He resigned from the board of the Portage Electric Light and Power Company, at the height of an argument, and was surprised when he came to the next directors’ meeting to hear from President Watson that the resignation had been accepted.

One evening he returned from Winnipeg to the Portage after telling Premier Greenway that he was through with his job. When he appeared at the office later to take up the broken threads of business, he found Mr. Attorney-General Sifton working coolly at his desk.

Premier Greenway was a farmer, and not given to verbal rapiering. Otherwise, instead of allowing the fiery Joe to collide with a fait accompli, he might have emulated Lord North, who, when King George had at his request dismissed Charles James Fox not long before the signing of the American declaration of independence, wrote to Fox: “Sir,—His Majesty has thought proper to order a new Commission of the Treasury to be made out, in which I do not see your name.”

Clifford Sifton was the subject of political prophecy from his first appearance in public life. He had come West from Middlesex as a boy of fourteen. His father had been Speaker of the Assembly. He chose Brandon as the first field for his legal talents, and quickly became solicitor of the town. As such he appeared at the private car of the Deputy Minister of the Interior, who was waited upon by the Town Council with a request for some improvement in their relationships with the great Department. The discussion fell naturally into the hands of the youngest man in the party, whom the deputy felt it his duty to snub somewhat obviously.

Some years later the deputy saw this young man hang up his hat in the Minister of the Interior’s room in the Langevin Block. Unwritten history has it that the deputy found it expedient to become a full-fledged minister of the exterior after a reasonable period of meditation had elapsed. On memory’s tablets one does not read his name.

Twenty-seven years old, Clifford Sifton had come to Winnipeg as member for Brandon after the general election of 1888, which followed the Greenway Government’s accession during the preceding winter. Even if he had had to be pushed into the attorney-generalship, he would have been the logical, indeed, the only, successor of the excessively mercurial Martin. It is not critical of the merits of his colleagues to remark that he was by far the ablest man in the Cabinet. As he was the first member of a Dominion Government who made an outstanding success of immigration—it is not difficult to recognize his hand in the Manitoba administration’s efforts to secure immigration for the Dauphin country, out of which the Canadian Northern was evolved.

The retirement of the C.P.R. from Fort Whyte, and the abandonment of its monopolistic privilege, had brought the Northern Pacific into Manitoba, and promised, for a while, to give the province the railway expansion it was believed to need. The Northern Pacific, or its subsidiaries, obtained a charter that allowed it to go almost anywhere. It was understood that it would enter the country west of Lake Manitoba and north of Gladstone, thirty-six miles out from Portage. But the depression culminating in the panic of 1893—which caused six hundred banks in the United States to suspend, and of which a sequel was the march of Coxey’s army of unemployed on Washington from Masillon, Ohio, in April, 1894—threw the Northern Pacific into a receivership; and there was no prospect of it building more lines in Manitoba, even with the Government’s guarantee to pay the interest on its bonds for twenty years. It has always been understood that the inducement of interest guarantees originated within the Government. Some day, the story of its inception may be intimately told.

That, as far as I know, was the introduction to Canada of the practice of Governments guaranteeing bonds of railway enterprises, as distinct from cash and land subsidies and the cession of railways already built, but all-but financially derelict, as had happened in the case of the C.P.R. The arrangement with the Northern Pacific had broken down, but it pointed the way of advance to one shrewd man; and the former contractor of the North Western, the Regina and Long Lake, and the Calgary and Edmonton, saw in the situation enough encouragement to take the stalled Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company off the Davises’ hands.

Mr. Mann went to his bankers for assistance. They told him the job was too big for a lone hand, and counselled that he secure the co-operation of his old associates. It was that advice which brought a new orientation to the relationship between Mackenzie and Mann. There was an idea of asking the Manitoba Government for guarantees of principal and interest up to sixteen thousand dollars a mile; but the bankers preferred that the contractors should obligate themselves.

They said, unanswerably, that Governments change in party and personnel; that the construction of a line in the Dauphin country was not an assuredly profitable undertaking; and that it was better, instead of relying too much on political fortune, that the builders of the line should be vitally concerned in its prosperity.

So, in the end, the guarantee was fixed at eight thousand dollars per mile, for a hundred and twenty-five miles, with freedom from interest liability for the company during two years after the completion of construction.

Under these terms with the Manitoba Government, in the spring of 1896, the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company began construction from Gladstone, on the Manitoba North Western, thirty-six-miles from Portage, to Lake Winnipegosis. I was made the first superintendent of the infant, and on the fifteenth of December, 1896, we began operation, and issued our first time-table on January 1, 1897, a copy of which hangs in my office in the Dominion Bank Building, Toronto. It began for me, indeed, a long avoidance of calm repose.