It is a curious truth that the only considerable railway retreat from Canada by United States interests was made by J. J. Hill, one of the syndicate which brought the C.P.R. to fruition. He was a pioneer in Red River navigation which Eastern Canadians, bound for Fort Garry, used in summer. His association with Donald Smith and George Stephen, future members of the House of Lords, transformed a little Minnesota line from the derelict property of Dutch bondholders into the Great Northern and opened the way to a Canadian farm boy’s control of American railways without parallel before his time.

Hill retired from the C.P.R. when it was determined to build the Superior section from Sudbury to Port Arthur, nominally because he feared the ability of the C.P.R. to support itself through so much wilderness, but really because it would prevent his own roads carrying the through traffic between Eastern and Western Canada, from Sault Ste. Marie to Winnipeg, for which connection the C.P.R. line to the Soo, through Sudbury, had been built.

The Northern Pacific receivership finally threw that system into Hill’s control. Grain rates to Duluth from Minnesota and North Dakota were still higher than they were from Manitoba to Fort William. The extension of traffic in Canada therefore, would tempt the American farmer to demand, in his own territory, as favourable a treatment as his Canadian competitor received on his own soil.

The possibility of the Northern Pacific lines in Manitoba becoming part of a Canadian system was enlarged by a change of Government in Winnipeg. With its best brain, and chief driving force transferred to the Interior Department at Ottawa, the Greenway administration fell into a slough of complacent reliance for continuing power upon what it had done to deprive the C.P.R. of its detested monopoly, and to facilitate settlement of the empty, fertile northwestern quarter of the province.

The general election at the end of 1899 destroyed the Greenway Government. On the morning after the polling I happened to meet the Premier on the train. He was frank enough to attribute the defeat to excessive cocksureness. Later, he was sent to Ottawa, where he was a useful, though not a brilliant, commoner alongside his former attorney-general, Mr. Sifton, who was the federal general for the Liberal party all through the West, for the elections of 1896, 1900, 1904 and 1908.

Sir John Macdonald’s son, Hugh John, who had joined the Tupper Government in 1896 as Minister of the Interior, and was practising law in Winnipeg, became Premier in January, 1900; passed a prohibition bill, which was disallowed at Ottawa, resigned the premiership to oppose Sifton in Brandon later in the year, and was succeeded by R. P. Roblin, who had left Prince Edward county twenty years before, and was farming near Carman.

In 1900 Mr. Mann, as Sir Donald Mann recalls the episode, while passing through St. Paul on the way to Toronto, called upon his old friend Mr. Hill, and incidentally enquired whether the Northern Pacific would sell its Manitoba lines to the Canadian Northern. Incidentally, also, Mr. Hill replied with an axiom of railway practice: “No railway ever sells branch lines to another railway.” But, he remarked, in further incidental conversation, a railway might sell branch lines to a Government.

Nothing more was said upon the subject at that time. But next morning, instead of being in Chicago, Mr. Mann was in Winnipeg, enquiring of Premier Roblin whether his Government would consider buying the Northern Pacific lines in Manitoba, and turning them over, later, to the Canadian Northern.

There was nothing disagreeable to the successors of the victors at Fort Whyte in the idea of a transaction which promised that the C.P.R. would at last meet real competition from southern, central and northern Manitoba to Lake Superior. But the Roblin Government was young, and required time to think. It was finally decided that if the lines were procured it must be without an undertaking to deliver them to any third party.

So it came about that, in the session of 1901 the Manitoba Legislature passed an Act which transmogrified the Northern Pacific Manitoba feeders into Canadian Northern lines. In less than five years from Billy Walker getting his first highball (no connection with whiskey) from Dad Risteen, chief and sole conductor of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company, we were hauling wheat from Swan River and Grand View, and from Brandon and Hartney, over our own lines into our own terminals at Winnipeg, and to Emerson, whence the Northern Pacific carried it to Duluth.

We could not deliver wheat to Port Arthur in 1901, but we did take part of that year’s crop over our own lines to that port, for on January 1st, 1902, connection was completed at Bear Pass, a few miles east of Rainy Lake, and Manitoba had a juncture with Eastern Canada independent of the C.P.R. If the C.P.R. could have prevented it, Port Arthur never would have renewed its youth through the advent of the Canadian Northern. A fight was on, which never sacrificed official and personal courtesies, and never relaxed the vigilance of the senior, or restricted the pertinacity of the junior road.

The Canadian Northern, with a thousand miles of track through the best sections of Manitoba, and with immigration beginning to reach the West in a volume not approached since the feverish period of the foolish land boom, had passed almost unobserved by the public, from a local to an interprovincial proposition as to territory; and to an international factor as to finance.

Lloyd George, when he was merely the little Welsh attorney and had been the pro-Boer of the irresistible tongue, and was certain of an unwelcome inclusion in the next Liberal Cabinet, became accustomed to hearing his friends discuss the probabilities of his party leadership, some time. He comes from the Snowdon country, and knows the ascents to that highest peak in England and Wales, particularly the ridge near the summit which over there is called the Saddleback, but on this continent would be named the Razorback. He was not blind to the possibility of eminence which fascinated his friends, but used to say to them, “Oh, I don’t know; I haven’t crossed the Saddleback yet.”

The Canadian Northern Saddleback was the old Dawson route between Rainy River and the Kaministiquia. To cross it was a feat which was all the more dramatic for its having to be performed in the London money market against extraordinary endeavours to make of the feat a fatality.

What the C.P.R. regarded as a too daring invasion of its fiscal domain synchronized with an abstraction from its western force of our first general traffic officer, with duties entirely in the dual revenue department. Additions to mileage were coming like triplets and twins, and there was plenty to keep the superintendent busy in enlarging staff and equipment, and in general management. Somebody with thorough knowledge of traffic conditions and intimate experience of the West was required. We found him in George H. Shaw, assistant general freight agent of the C.P.R. Mr. Shaw and I remained colleagues for seventeen years, when he took his ease on a retiring allowance, the just criticism of which is that it might have been more commensurate with the extreme value of his service.

It has been suggested before in these drafts on memory that things regarded as being entirely matter-of-course appear in their true perspective only when the mellowing hand of age rests upon them. You see men working at their appointed job, and the job seems all there is about them. But in the West, until yesterday, when you met a man up to the ears in prosaic detail, you never knew with what romantic aspect of the pre-historic age he was a living link. My old colleague is one of these; as any, who are lucky enough to go round the Mississauga course with him—for he has played himself into a second coltage—and can start him on a trail of reminiscence, will discover.

George Shaw comes of a political family established in the county of Lanark during the building of the Rideau Canal, as a military expedient against possible unpleasant sequelÆ to the war of 1812. His grandfather sat in the Parliament of the province of Upper Canada, twenty years before Confederation. His father was a keen politician at Smith’s Falls; and would have had his boys maintain the family tradition. He tells a political and a railway story about a farmer at Merrickville, whom we will call McWhilt. Young Shaw was made a scrutineer for an election. In Lanark every vote was as identifiable as its caster, and the scrutineer checked off the lists furnished him as the electors declared their preference—the ballot had not yet been adopted. Shaw senior came in late in the afternoon, looked over the polling record, and found that McWhilt had not voted.

“Send for him,” was the order: “He’s promised to vote for Haggart.”

McWhilt was sent for and voted for Gould, the Liberal.

When Shaw, senior, heard the news he was too astounded to say more than “I’ll make him pay that note to-morrow.”

One snowy night the engineer of a train between Merrickville and Smith’s Falls thought he bumped something at a crossing; but saw nothing to make him stop the train. Arrived at Smith’s Falls he looked around for signs of an accident, and found them. On the cowcatcher was the box of a bobsleigh, with McWhilt fast asleep in it, so much repose may conviviality induce.

At eighteen years of age, with the profession of civil engineer as his objective, George Shaw was appointed to a party that was to survey Indian reserves in Rupert’s Land. Chicago and St. Paul furnished the way in; and the steamer International down the Red, from several miles north of Grand Forks, completed the last stage to Winnipeg.

Shaw was one of a small proportion of first-class passengers. The berth was of child-like dimensions. For washroom in the morning he was directed to the bow, where stood a bowl, stool, with a bucket and rope alongside. The passenger let down his bucket into the river, drew all the turbid water his fastidiousness could use, and made the best of a towel which had once been laundered.

It was a fitting prelude to a Western career which was to have a great traffic-bearing intimacy with the whole of the empty sub-continent which the boy surveyor was to see—an era of transformation unexampled in Britannic history.

The time was eight years after Riel was the President of the Provisional Government of Rupert’s Land, with a Council and Cabinet, and the future Lord Strathcona had helped a Convention to draw up a Bill of Rights for a Government which was heralded by the Fort Garry paper, the New Nation, with an editorial as redolent of revolution as anything that these latter times have produced. As a curiosity in Western political literature it is worth giving:

“The confirmation of Louis Riel as President of the Provisional Government of Rupert’s Land by the Convention was announced mid salvos of artillery from the Fort and cheers from the delegates. The town welcomed the announcement by a grand display of fireworks, and the general and continued discharge of small arms. The firing and cheering were prolonged into the night, every one joining in the general enthusiasm, as the result of the amicable union of all parties on one common platform. A general amnesty to political prisoners will shortly be proclaimed, and the soldiers remanded to their homes to await orders, and everything will be placed on a peace footing. Vive la Republique!”

This phase of the second republic set up in Manitoba within two years was not as remote in men’s memories when Shaw reached Winnipeg as the opening of the Great War is in ours. It was part of a situation in which the Indian was still an uncertain, indeed a threatening ingredient. The surveying of the Indian reserves, hundreds of miles northwest of the Red River, where the posts of a few fur traders had afforded the only semblance of modern law and government, until the arrival of Governor Laird at Battleford, in 1876 to inhabit the quarters built by Hugh Sutherland, was the first long step toward the agriculture which has made Saskatchewan the greatest wheat growing province of the British empire. One of the Saskatchewan farmer organizations owns and operates about three hundred and fifty elevators at as many shipping points, and has increased the capacity of its own elevator at Port Arthur—eight hundred miles from the centre of the province—to seven and a half million bushels, and has acquired the old Canadian Northern elevator, with a capacity of seven million bushels more.

Shaw went to Battleford, the infant capital of the North West Territories, with the party that was in charge of George Simpson. It travelled by Red River train of tireless carts. The surveyors and their camping entourage walked beside their vehicles the whole of the six hundred and fifty miles to Battleford. The route was via Portage la Prairie, Fort Ellice, where the Qu’Appelle joins the Assiniboine; the Touchwood Hills, Humboldt (where a Canadian Northern division point was established within twenty-five years), and Batoche, where the South Saskatchewan was passed at Gabriel Dumont’s Crossing.

Every white man in the country could tell of fights and murders laid to barbarian account. Sixteen years previously fifteen hundred settlers had been butchered in Minnesota by the Sioux. During the spring of 1876—two years before—Custer’s force of eleven hundred men had been wiped out by the Sioux, in Montana. Bands of Sioux had come into the Canadian territory, and had always said they had no quarrel with the children of the Great White Mother. Some had settled near Portage la Prairie, and had behaved very well, on the whole.

When exterminations were so recent, and relatively so near, travellers into the Great Lone Land didn’t feel as safe as if they were in Montreal. There had been one rebellion of Metis at Fort Garry; and Riel and Gabriel Dumont, who ferried the Simpson party across the river a few miles from the present Rosthern, were yet to head a second revolt.

A prophet would have been called a fool if, as the surveyors trailed across the site of the present Rosthern, and the land where the world’s champion wheat has been grown by Segar Wheeler, he had said the elevators there would supply the youngest member of the party with waybills representing over a million bushels of wheat exported in a single season.

During the surveying of Red Pheasant’s reserve, south of Battleford, which is now crossed by the Grand Trunk Pacific branch from Naseby to the old town of Battleford, Shaw was out alone when he saw an Indian on a hill, and flashes of sunlight proceeding from his hand. After a while the Indian was joined by thirteen others, mounted, who brought his horse with them. They were the advance guard of a remarkable company of Sioux, who were visiting as far north from their own Montana, to estimate the prospects of continued happiness in the ancient, unfrontiered hunting grounds. They were not looking for buffalo, for not many were then left on the Canadian prairies, partly because of the reckless slaughter that had gone on everywhere, and partly because Sitting Bull was herding survivors below parallel forty-nine.

The touring Sioux were of the ten thousand who had destroyed Custer’s army two years before, and were using their share of the plunder. The scout’s flash was from a heliograph, and was no doubt informing those who later came up that a lone Paleface was on the rolling plain. The couple of hundred Sioux—who presently camped near Red Pheasant—had United States army wagons, tents, rifles, ammunition—everything that civilization could usefully furnish for such a country. They were a much finer race, physically, than the Crees who were about to be allocated to reserves.

The Sioux visitation had some influence on a situation which carried much anxiety to Governor Laird, as well as a very real danger to all the whites in that part of the country, and also to the whole future of Western Canada.

The half dozen reserves around Battleford having been delimited, the Simpson party started for Edmonton, by way of Frog Lake and Fort Pitt—Frog Lake where nine people were massacred during the second Riel rebellion, still seven years in the future; and Fort Pitt, which, at that perilous time, was precipitately evacuated by Inspector Dickens, son of the novelist. At Fort Pitt the party was ordered back to Battleford. On September 17th a general election had put Sir John Macdonald again in power, and some wise person in Ottawa assumed that favour depended on halting a company of chainmen two thousand miles from the nearest Canadian railway station.

With the rest of the party Shaw spent the winter of 1878-9 at Battleford. It was a winter free from dull care—cold but gay; simple in its furnishings, but abounding in social diversions. Reports came in, though, that it was a winter of want for the Indians, and that trouble might be looked for in the spring, unless a miracle happened to their food supply.

From time immemorial the Indian had been accustomed to an abundance of buffalo meat, limited only by his ability to slaughter it. Sitting Bull’s herding of the buffalo in Montana brought great privation to the Crees and Blackfeet. In the spring of 1879 they assembled at Battleford, demanding assistance from the Canadian Government.

Shaw saw five thousand of these tented seekers after charity camped around the tiny capital. The barracks were on the narrow tongue of land just above where the Battle empties into the mighty Saskatchewan. The town was on the south side of the smaller river—a poor little collection of buildings which the Indians could have destroyed with no more trouble than is involved in firing dry wooden structures anywhere.

Governor Laird, the tall thin Prince Edward Islander, who had come from Charlottetown journalism into politics, was a negotiator for the entry of the island into Confederation, became the Minister of the Interior in the Mackenzie Government, and had received the first governorship of the North West Territories in the same year that Laurier was first appointed a Minister of the Crown, was very well fitted for a post requiring many diplomatic qualities.

Next to his extreme height his most memorable physical characteristic was his long hair; the fashion of which he had abbreviated long before his last special tour of the West, when he was a venerable and honoured sharer in the celebration of the creation of the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan at the beginning of September, 1905.

The feeding of five thousand Indians was an imperative duty of Governor Laird as long as there was anything to feed them with. He had no authority to commandeer provisions from the Hudson’s Bay Company, on Indian account. But the Company had heavy stores of pemmican in their warehouse, and Laird drew upon them, while he was trying to secure the necessary powers from Ottawa. The Indians demanded treaty guarantees against their extinction by starvation.

Their attitude was discomforting. They knew what had been done to Custer only three years before. They had seen, and knew the source of the rich equipment of the Sioux, who had visited them the previous summer. For many years there had been an obviously increasing threat of the submergence of their own autonomy and self-respect by white men whose far-distant friends, they had been told, drove iron horses that breathed out fire and smoke. The reserves recently staked out were too suggestive of imprisonment. Now, it was mooted, the time had come to put an end to this threat. If the young braves had been uncontrolled there might easily have been a repetition of the Custer massacre, with little chance of serious resistance from the handful of whites planted upon the Battle and the Saskatchewan.

As part of the inauguration of government in the Territories a telegraph wire had been strung from Fort Garry to Prince Albert, via Qu’Appelle and Humboldt, and to Edmonton, via Battleford. Part of the line the passengers on the Canadian Northern west of Humboldt can still see from the train for many miles. The service was liable to interruption without notice. On the fringe of the wooded country a moose might rub down a slender poplar pole, and ground the wire. The wind in a naked country might do a similar disfavour to civilization. Repair gangs were neither numerous nor swift of movement. It was truly a Canadian National Telegraph, but its appropriate name was the Canadian Now and Then.

Laird wired to Ottawa for special authority to deal with the whole situation as he deemed best. For many days, no answer came to repeated requests to the Department. At last he appealed direct to Sir John Macdonald, the Prime Minister. Sir John’s conviviality was for long a feature of the political landscape. Governor Laird, it was believed, caught a glimpse of it in the telegram that eventually did arrive from Ottawa: It said. “Get your hair cut.” Not another word was received from the outside world for three weeks, thanks to one of the interruptions of transmission already mentioned.

Before the end of the 1879 season Shaw found that sleeping on the ground filled him with rheumatism; and he returned home convinced that civil engineering was not his mission in life. But he had seen the West in what has since become its most glamorous guise; and, having imbibed the waters of the Saskatchewan, he was to fulfil the saying that those who have once so tasted are fated to return to the scene of so much fortune. You would never think that the dapper foremaster who skips around his eighteen holes on the Mississauga course had been through the peril of annihilation by scalping knife and tomahawk with Governor Laird forty-five years ago; but it is the truth—and one of the truths that very often indeed, are stranger than fiction.

Once more in Montreal, Shaw studied law; but law was ever a dry-as-dust affair; and by 1880 he accepted advice to seek a railway career, via the unfailing portal of Pitman’s shorthand. The practitioner who so advised him moved to Milwaukee, and in 1881 sent word that a job was open in the offices of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway, that city. Shaw got his job and its inducement to become an American citizen.

In the following summer—1882—not liking Milwaukee too well, he saw the former general manager of the road in the office—Van Horne, who had gone to Winnipeg the previous winter to build and run the C.P.R. He asked Van Horne about prospects of a job in the Winnipeg office.

“Sure,” said Van Horne; “here’s a pass from the border into Winnipeg”—and he wrote one in pencil.

Once more Shaw was headed for the Canadian prairies, and did not leave them for Toronto and Mississauga until the Canadian Northern had become a transcontinental system. He was with us from the taking over of the Manitoba Northern Pacific by the Canadian Northern, till the taking over of the Canadian Northern by the Canadian Government. The changes he shared in are those which should furnish the real substance of this story. Others which he closely observed were peculiar to his personal association with the C.P.R. One of two which must be set down, whatever else is left out, relegates the ballad of the Miller of the Dee to the dreary commonplaces.

Thirty years ago the Ogilvie Milling Company was the big business in grain buying and flour making in the West. Its many elevators along the C.P.R. and the Manitoba North Western, were as prominent as the Saskatchewan farmers’ own grain houses are to-day. The Company’s accountant was Fred Thompson who came from Montreal to Winnipeg in the same year that Shaw returned from Montreal to Winnipeg. He had been in the Exchange Bank, and in six years rose to the Ogilvie’s managership.

The ten years that followed saw various mutations in the milling business that have a romance of their own. As a whole, the country was poor enough, but where so many natural resources are being developed over so much of a continent, great enterprises will grow, here and there, men will become rich, and financiers will evolve from clerks and lumberjacks. Within the C.P.R. sphere of influence, its superintendent of telegraphs, Charles Hosmer, developed from a key tapper to a capitalist, first on the side, and then all the way. His responsibilities have included the Presidency of the Ogilvie Flour Mills Co., millers to the King.

In 1898, the president, William Ogilvie, died. One very cold day, during the winter ensuing, George Shaw was in Montreal on C.P.R. business. Returning to the Windsor he was spoken to by Fred Thompson, who was more obviously agitated than managing millers of eminent sobriety and unimpeachable Anglican integrity are wont to be.

“Come up to my room,” said Thompson, “I want to tell you something.”

Shaw pleaded a dinner engagement, but his old friend would not be denied. “Come up, anyway,” he pleaded, “I won’t keep you long.”

Arrived in the room, Thompson put off his coat, threw himself on the bed and lay there in much distress.

“Don’t talk for a little while,” he begged. Shaw read the paper for a quarter of an hour, and then rose. Thompson begged for more time, and again Shaw tried to read the news, and to divine Thompson’s malady.

At last Thompson said:

“Shaw, I’ve made a million dollars to-day, and I can’t get over it.”

Shaw thought the malady needed an alienist, and expressed his disbelief.

“Oh, yes, I have,” Thompson persisted. “I’ve bought the Ogilvie Milling Company, and the deal’s worth a million dollars to me.” He explained how Hosmer and the Allans had found the money; and the direction of the Merchants’ Bank was involved in the transaction. The agitation superinduced by an avalanche of wealth subsided in due course; and Fred Thompson developed a remarkably cool imperturbability in presence of oodles of cash.

Next evening Shaw was again in the Windsor rotunda when whom should he see but George Lane, the famous rancher of Calgary. George Lane is a character in candour as well as a Croesus in cattle. The embodiment of geniality, he doesn’t expect the milk of human kindness to flow through or about a business transaction. He says:

“If after chewing the rag for a day or two I make a deal, and the other fellow says ‘Come and have a drink,’ I say to myself ‘George, you’re beat.’ If he offers me a second drink, I say, ‘George, you’re beat to death’.”

Shaw was surprised to see George Lane at Montreal in midwinter.

“What are you doing so far from home?” he asked the great cattle man. “I thought you’d be preventing your steers from freezing to death on the ranges.”

“I’ve been down to Quebec,” Lane replied.

“Quebec? But there are no cattle shipments at this time of year to take you to Quebec.”

“It’s been about cattle all the same,” said Lane. “Come up to my room. I’ve got to tell somebody something or bust, and it won’t do to tell it here, with so many people around. Come on up, quick.”

George Lane, cattleman, didn’t throw himself on the bed, but quickly announced,

“I’ve made half a million dollars to-day.”

Remembering the previous evening Shaw did not suppose this was a case for an alienist, and opened his ears for the facts.

“I’ve bought the Allans’ ranch in the Foothills,” said Lane. “They were in such a hurry to sell that they don’t know to a few thousand how many head are on the property, but I do. The outfit’s worth half a million more than they asked me for it. I only just found out why they were so darned anxious to sell. They’ve gone into the Merchants’ Bank and the Ogilvie Milling Company, and want ready money. I don’t carry half a million in my jeans, but I know where to get it. I had to tell somebody the d—— news, and you’re the first friend I saw in the hotel.”

One all-in-the-day episode from Shaw, and we must leave him to his golf. In the spring of 1883 he was sent to Port Arthur to receive the first steamer load of passengers that was to enter Winnipeg direct from an Ontario port. The boat was the City of Owen Sound, from Owen Sound, which the C.P.R. had made its Lake Huron terminus, failing to arrange for Collingwood. There was practically no landing accommodation—the hour for porters on Thunder Bay had not yet struck. Three hundred and fifty passengers disembarked and their baggage was handled by the C.P.R. officers, of whom Shaw was one. Among them was a young engineer who, from having been a chainman on the Credit Valley line was on the way to a job on the Superior section of the C.P.R. His name was MacLeod. He was to become chief engineer and general manager of the Canadian Northern Railway, and build more miles of railway in the prairie country than any other man.