let us know what he thought of the bunch in a general way.” He continued: “At first he had no use for Englishmen or Canadians especially Engineers and told me once ‘if he could only teach a Section Man to run a transit he wouldn’t have a single d–d Engineer about the place.’”
Van Horne’s most important American recruit was Thomas George Shaughnessy, who became the purchasing agent for the entire CPR system in 1882. The job, second only in importance to Van Horne’s, would showcase two of Shaughnessy’s talents: a remarkable ability to get the best value for every dollar spent, and an equally useful talent for staving off creditors during the railway’s construction phase. Hiring Shaughnessy and basing him in Montreal would prove to be one of Van Horne’s first strokes of genius after he joined the CPR.
Within ten days of arriving in Winnipeg, Van Horne, accompanied by James Hill and Major A.B. Rogers, the engineer in charge of the CPR’s mountain division, journeyed east to Montreal to meet the other syndicate members, and then on to Ottawa to talk to the leading politicians in the nation’s capital. At Chicago, where his train stopped while en route to Montreal, Van Horne boldly announced to a newspaper reporter that the CPR intended to construct six hundred and fifty miles of track in 1882. Whether six hundred and fifty or five hundred, the number usually cited in this connection, Van Horne appeared to be promising the impossible.
At the meeting in Montreal, the CPR directors confirmed their choice of a southern route for the railway. This decision meant that the main line would go through Kicking Horse Pass in the Rocky Mountains rather than through the more northerly Yellowhead Pass, which was the choice favoured by Sandford Fleming and other engineers because of its easier grades. In the interests of economy and speed of construction, Van Horne supported the selection of the more steeply graded Kicking Horse Pass and the southern route. He also pitted himself at this meeting against his friend James Hill by arguing forcefully for the immediate construction of the Lake Superior section of the CPR’s main line. For his part, Hill vehemently opposed the idea. As he saw it, the forging of an all-Canadian route across the rugged, lake-strewn Shield country north of the Great Lakes was highly impractical. In his opinion, such a line, “when completed would be of no use to anybody and would be a source of heavy loss to whoever operated it.” Hill thought that the CPR should build from Callander, Ontario, to Sault Sainte Marie, and from there across a bridge to the U.S. town of Superior-Duluth, and then on to Winnipeg via his own railway, the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway.
Van Horne found such an idea abhorrent. The last thing he wanted to see was the CPR become dependent on one of Hill’s railways, even for a short distance. The transfer of people and freight from one train to another at two points on the journey would be cumbersome, but, most important of all, he was convinced that the difficult lake stretch could not only be built but could be operated profitably. Moreover, he was keenly aware that leading politicians of the day such as Sir John A. Macdonald wanted to see the CPR adopt an all-Canadian route. Hill was furious, and he swore to get even with Van Horne, even if he had “to go to Hell for it and shovel coal.” Later, when the decision to build north of Lake Superior was confirmed, Hill formally withdrew from the syndicate. Henceforth he and Van Horne would become bitter railroading rivals. Meanwhile, Van Horne would develop a close friendship with George Stephen, the tall, sartorially elegant president of the CPR.
When Van Horne began his new job early in 1882, the end of track — the site where track was being laid — was at Oak Lake, Manitoba, one hundred and sixty-one miles west of Winnipeg. He intended to build five hundred miles of track that construction season, but that spring it looked as though his plans and his credibility might be torpedoed by dreadful weather conditions. March blizzards were followed by rapidly rising temperatures that quickly thawed the Red River and its tributaries, causing disastrous flood conditions in all their valleys. Large stretches of track were under water, stopping rail traffic for miles around. The resulting massive blockade of traffic choked off the delivery of rail supplies and interfered with the transportation of incoming settlers and their goods. So numerous were the delays that few people believed the CPR could reach its construction goal that season.
The delivery of rail supplies was of particular concern. Before construction of the prairie section began in the late spring, Van Horne had to arrange for the freighting of huge stores of rails and other materials to Winnipeg, the main supply point. The dimensions of this operation were immense. Since the St. Lawrence River would still be frozen when construction began, steel had to be shipped from New York and New Orleans and then hauled to Manitoba via St. Paul. Stone had to be ordered from every available quarry, lumber from Minnesota, railway ties from Lake of the Woods and Rat Portage (now Kenora), and rails from England and the Krupp works in Germany. As general manager, Van Horne had the responsibility for monitoring the whereabouts of these supplies as they made their way from their place of origin to the staging area. He accomplished this overview by arranging for hundreds of checkers to report daily on the arrival and movement of CPR supplies through American cities en route to Winnipeg.
Despite the delay in beginning construction, 1882 saw the completion of four hundred and seventeen miles of main track and twenty-eight more miles of sidings — a truly amazing achievement. By the end of August 1883, the railway stretched all the way from Winnipeg to Keith, ten miles west of Calgary and within sight of the forbidding Rocky Mountains.
To lay the track on the Prairies, a huge construction assembly line extended for a hundred miles or more across the open plains. At its head were CPR engineers and surveyors who located and staked the route that the railway would take. They were followed by grading crews and then the track gangs. To construct the line, the syndicate had hired a company headed by two Minnesota contractors, R.B. Langdon and David Shepard, who in turn parcelled out the work to more than sixty subcontractors.
Determined to speed up operations, Van Horne ordered the track to be advanced at five times the speed that crews had been laying it. During this period of frenzied prairie construction, the general manager seemed to be everywhere. When not doing paperwork in his Winnipeg office, he was out on the Prairies, riding on hand cars or flat cars, in a caboose, or, where the rails had not been laid, in a wagon or a buckboard. Despite his portliness, he moved about continually, “going like a whirlwind wherever he went, stimulating every man he met,” reported Angus Sinclair, one of the contractors. Van Horne had a habit of arriving at work sites unexpectedly and descending on local officials like “a blizzard,” observed an admiring Winnipeg Sun reporter. “He is the terror of Flat Krick. He shakes them up like an earthquake and they are as frightened of him as if he were old Nick himself.” Those who saw him in action were constantly amazed by his stamina, to say nothing of his daring. Watching their boss ignore his weight and march across trestles and ties at dizzying heights left all spectators thunderstruck.
To accomplish his goal, Van Horne would summarily dismiss men who were indifferent to their work or not inclined to obey orders. Collingwood Schreiber, the engineer-in-chief for the federal government, recalled that Van Horne would often say to him, “If you want anything done, name the day when it must be finished. If I order a thing done in a specified time and the man to whom I give the order says it is impossible to carry out, then he must go. Otherwise his subordinates would make no effort to accomplish the work in the time mentioned.” It was a philosophy that served the general manager well.
Van Horne’s somewhat autocratic manner and contempt for “the impossible” is well illustrated by a story retailed by J.H. Secretan:
One day he sent for me to his office in Winnipeg and, rapidly revolving his chair, squinted at me over the top his pince-nez, at the same time unrolling a profile about one hundred miles at a time, saying, “Look here, some damned fool of an engineer has put in a tunnel up there, and I want you to go and take it out!” I asked if I might be permitted to see where the objectionable tunnel was. He kept rolling and unrolling the profile until he came to the fatal spike which showed a mud tunnel about 900 feet long — somewhere on the Bow River at mileage 942. I mildly suggested that the engineer, whoever he was, had not put the tunnel in for fun. He didn’t care what
