irritants poisoning the relationship between the two countries. It was the tariff question, however, that directly involved Van Horne in his new role. After introducing the two-tiered Fielding tariff in 1897, the government asked him to find out whether the American government would institute reprisals or admit Canadian goods at a rate equivalent to the minimum Canadian tariff. His mission completed, Van Horne informed Ottawa that the United States would certainly not accept any reciprocity proposals.
Van Horne’s services were also enlisted in the potentially dangerous Alaska boundary dispute, a dispute between Canada and the United States over the boundary of the Alaskan panhandle running south off British Columbia’s coast. The dispute smouldered for decades before coming to a head in 1897, when the Klondike Gold Rush was under way and both the Canadians and the Americans sought control of the trade it produced. After the storm signals went up, Van Horne made another trip to Washington and, in his report, alerted the government to potentially dangerous conditions in the Klondike mining community. In a letter to the leader of the Opposition, he warned that even a trivial ill-advised move by Ottawa could trigger another Boston Tea Party, only this time in the Yukon.
In the 1890s, discerning friends and colleagues realized that Van Horne’s enthusiasm for his job was waning. His loss of interest was due to several setbacks, such as his failure to establish a fast Atlantic steamship service — a fallout from the financial panic of 1893 — and the mortifying surrender of the Duluth and Winnipeg Railroad to James Hill. There was also his deteriorating health, brought on by years of overwork, smoking, and self-indulgence in food. More than anything else, though, it was probably the lack of scope for his creativity that robbed Van Horne of his enthusiasm for the presidency. He was essentially a “constructor,” a man who loved building for its own sake. Once the CPR was nearing completion, he began to lose interest in it and to find management details more and more distasteful.
In the final years of his presidency, Van Horne talked increasingly of retiring, only to be thwarted by Shaughnessy, who was “anxious to see our affairs in fairly good shape during his Presidency.” By 1899, when the CPR was paying substantial dividends, Van Horne believed that condition had been met. Before resigning, however, he decided to take an extended vacation trip. Japan was one possible destination. He had many friends there and the inauguration of the Pacific steamship service had earned him the gratitude of the emperor and government officials alike in Japan. Van Horne, however, had qualms about being on the receiving end of lavish attention and hospitality. He disliked ostentation of any kind and cringed at the thought of the ceremonial observances that would mark a visit to that country. He therefore decided to postpone a trip to that far-distant land and to travel instead to southern California, hoping that the heat there would “burn out” his chronic bronchitis.
With a party of friends, he set off in the Saskatchewan, his private rail car, in April 1899 for San Francisco. There, John Mackay, the Dublin-born head of the Commercial Cable Company, booked the best rooms for them in the luxurious Palace Hotel, stocked them with the finest cigars, and refused to allow anybody to pay for anything. After a week of festivities in the city, Van Horne’s friends returned to the East, and Van Horne, along with Mackay and the manager of the Southern Pacific Railroad, took the train to Monterey, stopping first at Palo Alto. While in Monterey, Van Horne decided he had been away long enough. He immediately telephoned for his car to be hitched to the next train and, in a few days, he was back in Montreal.
After he had returned home, Van Horne took the bold step he had been contemplating for months: he resigned from the CPR presidency. Many outside observers had been expecting it for some time. Their suspicions had earlier been confirmed when a newspaper reporter, acting in response to rumours, had inveigled an admission from Van Horne that he intended to resign. No date had been provided, but the published account of the interview precipitated a selloff of Canadian Pacific stock. In both London and New York, the price of the company’s shares dropped several points. Confidence in the CPR was only restored when its officers issued a denial of the newspaper story. On June 12, however, Van Horne presented his formal resignation at the company’s regular board meeting. The directors chose Thomas Shaughnessy to replace him, but Van Horne was kept on as a director and was immediately appointed to the newly created office of board chairman. As chairman, he was an ex officio member of the CPR executive committee, so he continued to play a significant role in deciding company policy.
Van Horne could regard the legacy he had turned over to Shaughnessy with justifiable pride and satisfaction. In spite of the prolonged depression that had gripped Canada during most of his term as president, he had managed to improve and expand the system significantly. In fact, by the end of 1899, the extent of the railway’s lines totalled seven thousand miles. If the American lines the company owned were included, the increase in the eleven years of his presidency after 1888 exceeded thirty-five hundred miles, or 65 percent. Despite competing interests and his deteriorating health, Van Horne had succeeded admirably in making the CPR a powerful force in the Canadian economy.
8
The Family at Home
Over the years, Van Horne and his family had moved often, following the rapid progress of his railway career in the American Midwest. It must have been a relief when, in 1883, he seemed settled with the Canadian Pacific Railway and the family finally joined him in Montreal.
The stage for this move was set in the autumn of 1882. That fall, the steadily escalating pressure of railway business weighed heavily on Van Horne, both in his office in Winnipeg and in Montreal, the location of the CPR headquarters. It was particularly heavy during his visits to Montreal, when his schedule was chockablock with consultations and interviews. Whether he was in the office or at his hotel, there was always somebody waiting to see him. He put in exceedingly long days and rarely got to bed before midnight. As the construction of the railway forged ahead across the prairies and through the most challenging sections — the Rockies and the north shore of Lake Superior — the CPR management decided that Van Horne should transfer his own headquarters from Winnipeg to Montreal as soon as possible. Consequently, in November 1882, he took up residence in the venerable Windsor Hotel in downtown Montreal.
At winter’s end, in April 1883, the family left Milwaukee and joined him in Montreal. Little Addie was delighted to have her father close by again. During the long absence she had written him often, but always with regret: “The weather is very pleasant and all the roses are in bloom,” she wrote in one of her letters. “Those red roses you planted when you came here are one mass of bloom and are the admiration of everyone…. Papa, I wish you would come home, just think! It has been almost 4 months since you was [here] last, we all long to see your dear face again.”
Once again, Van Horne had found a suitable home for the family. Like most prosperous businessmen at the time, he chose to live in “the Square Mile,” an area on the southern flank of Mount Royal near McGill University where many prosperous English-speaking residents built stately mansions in the last half of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth. He bought the eastern wing of an imposing semi-detached stone residence that later became known as the Shaughnessy House — after Thomas Shaughnessy, who, in late 1882, was the CPR’s purchasing agent. Located at the western end of Dorchester Street, it had been built by CPR director Duncan McInyre, who still lived in its west wing, and timber merchant Robert Brown, who previously occupied the wing that Van Horne purchased. A century later the Shaughnessy House would be integrated into the Canadian Centre for Architecture, but for Van Horne, the location was ideal: the house was close to Donald Smith’s ostentatious residence — where the Van Hornes would attend many functions — and it was also within a short distance of the CPR headquarters on Place d’Armes, in the heart of Montreal’s financial and commercial district.
The
