Pacific Telegraph service.
Knowing that the railway’s economic survival depended on the successful settlement of the Prairies, he spearheaded the establishment of a wide-ranging and effective promotional scheme to attract settlers and tourists alike to the Northwest. The highlight of this campaign was an advertising program that saw the railway’s immigration department distribute vast quantities of publicity material — posters, brochures, pamphlets — in the United States, Great Britain, and northern Europe. The hook to lure immigrants was Canada’s huge agricultural potential. For tourists, the attention-grabber was Canada’s natural wonders, particularly its mountains. A large coloured poster, produced as early as 1883, trumpets “The Grand Transcontinental Highway from the Cities of the East to Winnipeg and Manitoba’s Boundless Wheatfields.” The poster’s bottom left-hand corner shows a clump of fresh produce and a vessel containing sheaves of wheat. Tourism was promoted by an article written by the Marquis of Lorne, Canada’s former governor general, and reprinted as a pamphlet in 1886. Entitled “Our Railway to the Pacific,” it is illustrated by engravings from drawings by the marquis’s wife, Princess Louise. The pamphlet lavishes praise on the men who built the railway, the settlement opportunities it has opened up in the Canadian west, and Canada’s scenic beauties.
Van Horne’s longstanding interest in art meant that he took a special interest in the pictorial side of this project. In 1884, for example, Van Horne commissioned William Notman and Son, a well-known and highly respected Montreal photographic firm, to dispatch a party to the west to photograph the prairies and the construction of the CPR’s line through the Rockies. He provided the photographer’s son, William McFarlane Norman, with an official car for this purpose. Evidently the quality of the work and the grandeur of the photographed landscape met Van Horne’s requirements exactly because a selection of the photos appeared in a pamphlet, The Canadian Pacific: The New Highway to the East. But nothing delighted Van Horne more than having the CPR sponsor artists to serve the cause, usually prominent Canadian landscape painters. His earliest recruit and the only artist actually commissioned by the CPR in these years was the English-born John Fraser. Among his works were black and white sketches used to promote tourism, one being a view of the Banff Springs Hotel. Non-commissioned artists also benefited from the CPR’s largess. These artists were provided with free transportation after they convinced Van Horne that their work would serve the CPR’s interests. Although copies of their paintings were used in promotional material, the originals often ended up in the private collections of Van Horne, George Stephen, and other company officials.
In 1884 Van Horne himself made a long-anticipated trip to British Columbia. He wanted to look over construction in the mountains and to decide on the location of the railway’s Pacific terminus. Although Port Moody had been designated as the CPR’s terminus, Van Horne and Stephen both had serious misgivings about its suitability as a port for the railway. In the spring of that year, for instance, he received news that Port Moody’s harbour was too small for the CPR’s purposes. Twelve miles further west, however, at Coal Harbour and False Creek (an extension of English Bay), there was a superb townsite. When he was finally able to set foot in Port Moody that August, Van Horne’s fears about the location were confirmed. The next day, he travelled to the mouth of Burrard Inlet by boat. Here, just inside the inlet, he decided, would be the site of the new western terminus. After hard bargaining with the provincial government, the CPR agreed to extend the railway from Port Moody to Granville if the government gave the company half the peninsula on which the present city of Vancouver now sits. In addition to negotiating the formal agreement that resulted in 1885, Van Horne also named the townsite. He was always interested in sea captains, especially if they boasted Dutch blood, so he suggested that it be called “Vancouver” — after the island that had taken its name from George Vancouver, the intrepid explorer who had sailed off the B.C. coast in the eighteenth century.
George Stephen and the CPR directors and shareholders were all delighted with Van Horne’s performance. At the annual shareholders’ meeting on May 14, 1884, they elected him to the board of directors. Then, immediately after the meeting, the board elected him vice-president and appointed him to its executive committee. In less than two and a half years, Van Horne had progressed from being general manager of the railway’s construction to a prestigious position and a member of its governing circle. But here he soon faced even greater challenges. The Conservative government of John A. Macdonald thought that the CPR had been generously compensated by the transfer of existing rail lines to it, the land grant, and the tax and customs concessions. However, the extreme difficulties of building across the Canadian Shield and in British Columbia, in addition to the purchase of feeder lines in eastern Canada, soon led to huge cost overruns, and, by the summer of 1882, the company was in deep financial trouble.
To add to its misfortune, the CPR’s enemies made vicious attempts to discredit it, thereby undermining the company’s reputation in British and American financial circles. Foremost among the CPR’s rivals was Van Horne’s bête noire, the Grand Trunk Railway (GTR), a largely British-owned and -directed railway, whose main line ran from Sarnia and Toronto to Montreal. As early as 1873, Grand Trunk management tried to frustrate Sir Hugh Allan’s attempts to generate loans in London, and, in the 1880s, they attacked the CPR on several fronts.
To raise much-needed funds, the CPR agreed to sell a huge chunk of its lands to an Anglo-Canadian consortium, the Northwest Land Company. This company was charged with managing town-site sales in several major western communities.
Still, the CPR edged ever closer to the financial abyss. In the fall of 1883, when the situation was critical, George Stephen decided to petition the federal government for relief. Previously Van Horne had left Stephen to scramble for money, but in November of that year he journeyed to Ottawa with Stephen and other CPR luminaries to make their case for additional funds. After arriving in the nation’s capital, the mendicants went directly to Earnscliffe, the prime minister’s home, to outline the situation to Macdonald and stress the absolute necessity of immediate government assistance.
Initially Macdonald turned them down. But he reversed his position after he heard John Henry Pope, the acting minister of railways and canals, declare, “The day the Canadian Pacific busts, the Conservative Party busts the day after.” In other words, the fate of the Conservative Party was inextricably linked to that of the Canadian Pacific.
To provide the generous assistance demanded by Stephen, the Conservatives had to push a bill through Parliament that would grant the railway relief. For that to happen, however, they first had to examine the CPR’s finances. Following a searching inquiry, the government engineer Collingwood Schreiber and the deputy minister of inland revenue reported that they were completely satisfied with the railway’s accounts and integrity. Van Horne was then summoned to a Cabinet meeting to explain his company’s progress and needs.
Meanwhile, the government took steps to provide immediate assistance to the CPR. Before the House of Commons met in January 1884, the Conservatives supported Stephen’s application for an extension of a current loan from the Bank of Montreal, which had refused to grant one unless it had written assurance from the government that it stood by the Canadian Pacific for repayment of the loan. In addition, Stephen and the government also agreed at this time on the terms of aid sought by the CPR. For the company the stakes were enormous. As security for a huge loan, Stephen agreed to mortgage the entire railway, including land-grant bonds and outstanding stock. At Van Horne’s instigation, Stephen also promised to have the main line completed in half the time stipulated in the original contract.
Late in the winter of 1883–84, Van Horne made another trip to Ottawa, this time to see history in the making. Here he watched the prelude to what would turn out to be one of the longest and most acrimonious debates in the history of the Canadian transcontinental railway. When the relief bill was presented to the House of Commons, it seemed that every agency and individual who opposed the CPR was given the opportunity to unite against it. Despite threatened defections within his own Cabinet and blistering attacks from outside, Macdonald nevertheless managed to push the relief bill through Parliament. He succeeded in doing so, however,
