springs,” he said, “are worth a million dollars.” He decided to build a top-notch hotel near the springs, at the confluence of the Bow and Spray Rivers, and instructed Bruce Price to draw up the plans. But the construction met with one conspicuous mishap. When Van Horne visited the building site in the summer of 1887, he was outraged to see that the contractor had oriented the hotel backwards, thereby providing the kitchens with the best view of the mountain ranges and the valley below. One colleague observed: “Van Horne was one of the most considerate and even-tempered of men, but when an explosion came it was magnificent.” Fortunately, the solution was simple: Van Horne called for a sheet of paper, sketched a rotunda pavilion on the spot, and directed that it be situated to provide hotel guests with a magnificent view.
When the hotel was completed in the spring of 1888, Van Horne boasted that it was the “Finest Hotel on the North American Continent.” Soon it welcomed the first of the thousands of tourists who would visit it each year. But the Banff Springs Hotel also performed another, more significant role: it initiated the “chateau style” that came to characterize many of the hotels erected by the CPR and other railways, as well as railway stations and apartment complexes. Even several large government buildings in Ottawa adopted this style.
It is impossible to know how much Van Horne contributed to the design of the Banff Springs Hotel and Windsor Station, the CPR’s principal terminal and administrative headquarters, but he did make a considerable contribution to Quebec City’s Château Frontenac. Van Horne watched over every stage of this hotel’s design, and he even took Bruce Price out in a small boat on the St. Lawrence River one day to make sure that the elevation of the building’s imposing round tower was “sufficiently majestic.”
Van Horne’s architectural flair was also put to good use designing the prototype for the quaint CPR log stations that soon became famous in the mountains of British Columbia. When CPR officials could not decide what should replace the boxcar that had been serving as a primitive station at Banff, Van Horne discussed the problems with officials at the site. Then he grabbed a sheet of paper, sketched a log chalet, and, gesturing in the direction of the mountain slopes, announced: “Lots of good logs there. Cut them, peel them, and build your station.”
Van Horne also commissioned artists to produce paintings to hang in company hotels and in the private collections of CPR directors. In an unusual promotional scheme, he offered artists free transportation and accommodation to paint the magnificent scenery along the CPR line that pierced the Rockies and the Selkirk Mountains. In the summer of 1889 he dispatched the well-known American painter Albert Bierstadt and several other artists to the West, instructing them to paint large oil canvases of designated landmarks. On behalf of his colleague George Stephen, he asked Bierstadt to produce a large painting of Mount Baker — and told him the precise vantage point from which to paint it. He then judged the final product, even though Bierstadt was one of the most respected of all Rocky Mountain landscape painters, and Stephen was a connoisseur and patron of fine art.
Another artist recruited by Van Horne was John Hammond, who journeyed west to Asia to promote the newly inaugurated connections that enabled CPR steamships from Vancouver to meet P & O liners from the Orient. By this means, English and European tourists could travel around the world, with the CPR furnishing the needed link. Hammond toured the Japanese countryside, sketching scenes for paintings that were designed to entice tourists to the Far East.
Not surprisingly, Van Horne threw himself into the CPR’s wide-ranging promotional campaign to attract settlers to the Prairie West. At the time, Maritimers and Quebecers were still pouring into the New England states in search of jobs, and Van Horne set out to persuade them to settle instead in Canada’s Northwest Territory. He even appointed priests as colonizing agents to encourage the recruitment of French Canadians who were already toiling in factories across the border. He loved to compose catchy slogans to capture people’s attention. When the company’s passenger service was inaugurated, people in Montreal, Toronto, and other large centres were puzzled and astonished one morning to see billboards featuring the word “Parisien Politeness on the CPR,” “Wise Men of the East Go West on the CPR,” and other such jingles.
The Canada Northwest Land Company was established earlier as part of the land-settlement campaign, and Van Horne served for years as its president. He had his own pronounced views on land settlement. Central to his thinking was the belief that homesteaders should be grouped in settlements and not be separated from each other by large, unoccupied spaces. “You have no doubt observed,” he wrote his friend Rudyard Kipling, who had probably met Van Horne on one of his trips to England, “that the largest buildings in the new western states and in western Canada are usually large insane asylums.” Isolation, he told the famous writer and Imperialist, had contributed more than any other factor to filling these buildings. For the man who was “out all day busy with his work,” isolation did not present a major problem, but it did to “the woman who eats out her soul in loneliness.” He urged the Canadian government to change its surveying system in the Northwest. Rather than the block pattern it favoured, the government, he said, should provide for triangular farms that radiated out from small centres of settlement. These centres, in turn, should be clustered around a larger village and be connected by roads. The government, however, rejected his farsighted suggestion.
In addition to all his other responsibilities, Van Horne was also involved in litigation relating to the section of the railway, built for the government by Andrew Onderdonk, which extended from Port Moody through the Fraser Canyon to Savona’s Ferry at the western end of Lake Kamloops. Neither George Stephen nor Van Horne believed that this part of the line had been soundly constructed. After inspecting the section in 1886, they concluded that only extensive and hugely expensive reworking would bring the line up to standard.
But who would be liable for this repair, estimated to be as high as $12 million? Opposing this view was John Henry Pope, the minister of railways and canals when this particular stretch was constructed. Pope was convinced that the work had been well done and, when he stood his ground, the stage was set for a protracted feud between him and Van Horne. Relations between the men became especially bitter in 1887, when the CPR launched a multimillion dollar claim against the government. In its claim, the company contended that the disputed section did not measure up to the required standards outlined in the Act of 1881. But the hard-working, conscientious Pope was convinced that he was right, and he dismissed the Canadian Pacific’s claim. It was, he said, merely a scheme on the part of Van Horne and his associates to extort even more money from the government.
Eventually both parties agreed to arbitration, and, although the arbitrators began their sittings in February 1888, they did not get an agreement for more than three years. During that investigation, arbitration counsel and witnesses spent weeks at a time along the disputed portion of the line. Van Horne was the chief witness and, in late June 1888, he journeyed west to Vancouver, where the court’s sessions continued day after day in the Hotel Vancouver. There he was subject to searching cross-examination by the leading legal figures of the day. As he delivered his opinion of the contested work he was characteristically blunt, if not reckless. His assessment led one of the arbitrators to remark out of court that, if one-half of what Van Horne said was true, the company ought to stop operating the line immediately. Collingwood Schreiber, the engineer-in-chief to the federal government, went so far as to tell Pope that, by trashing the government construction and claiming that the section was dangerous, Van Horne had placed himself in an untenable position. Given that he had not taken a single precaution against accidents, “should an accident occur, he would find it difficult to keep outside the walls of the Penitentiary.”
However, the greatest demand on Van Horne’s attention in these years was the agitation in Manitoba for “free-for-all” railway construction. At the root of this discontent was the monopoly clause in the CPR’s charter: it forbade other federally chartered companies from building south of the CPR’s main line, except in a southwest direction, and even then no competing line was to come within fifteen miles of the international border. Manitobans protested vigorously against this clause, goaded by their fear of monopolies and high
