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The Ryerson Canadian History Readers

Lorne Pierce, Editor

Are designed to meet a real need of the schoolroom. Every wide-awake teacher has long recognized the value of supplementary readers, simple and interesting enough to be placed in the hands of the pupils.

Up to the present most of the available books of this kind have been foreign in sentiment and manufacture. The present series has been prepared by Canadians of outstanding ability, on Canadian themes, for Canadian boys and girls.

Each reader contains a wealth of historical information, and completely covers the history of our country through its great characters and events. These books are written in a charming and vivid manner, and will be valued, not only as history readers, but also as lessons in literary appreciation, for the teaching of history and literature ought to go hand in hand.

“This little paper-covered book is designed to supplement the history in the lower forms and grades, and is to be used as a reader. Biography, simple and lively, is for the young pupil, the easy and natural approach to history. The life of a great man, presented with even small degree of narrative facility, will be read eagerly by a pupil who will find the account of the same period of years dull and difficult. Wide margins, clear, handsome print and two sketches by C. W. Jefferys make this unpretentious book very attractive. Teachers who have seen or used any one of the four will look forward to the others.”—Teachers’ Magazine.

“Children will really know and learn to love Canadian History when it is introduced by such charming booklets. They meet the real need of the schoolroom.”—The Canadian Teacher.

Copyright, Canada, 1928, by

The Ryerson Press, Toronto.

Three princes, in an ancient fairy tale, rode off in turn to cross a wild untrodden land and win a splendid prize. The eldest, after long travel, saw a huge wall rising high across his path, and turned back, out of heart, reporting that the barrier could not be passed. The second brother, pressing farther on to the foot of the barrier, heard a voice telling him that if he dashed himself against the wall he would reach the other side; but, not daring to risk his bones, he decided the price was too high, and came back empty-handed. The youngest brother, undismayed, put his horse to the gallop and bravely charged the towering wall—which opened at the touch of his spear and let him through, though not unscratched, to win a prize beyond his wildest dreams.

The thrilling story of the Canadian Pacific Railway, in real life, is like that fairy tale. Our grandfathers dreamed of such a road from sea to sea, but took no steps to discover whether that was possible. Our fathers went so far as to examine the Rocky Mountain wall, and found it could be pierced by a railway line, but thought the cost would be too great for the attempt. Their younger brothers decided that the thing must be done at any cost, and done it was.

Why?

You remember the old question,—“Why did the chicken cross the road?” “To get to the other side,” of course. The chicken had no use for the road—that was only an uninteresting strip of land which it meant to leave behind as fast as possible. The great object of all the early explorers who sailed up the St. Lawrence River or Hudson Strait was to sail right on through America and out at the other side. It was the rich trade of Asia they sought. At first they hoped America was only a chain of islands, like those Columbus had found, so that they could sail through easily. Long after they had found, to their bitter disappointment, that North America was really a wide continent, they kept on searching for a water-way through it, or round the top of it, to the Western Sea. Even when hundreds of white men had settled in Canada, it was valued only for the fur-bearing animals that could be trapped here. Great explorers like La Salle and the Vérendryes continued to press on in search of a way to the Pacific, until Mackenzie in 1793 won through at last,—the first white man to cross this continent.

Courtesy C.P.R.

THE C.P.R. ARE SHOWN LAYING A NEW LINE INTO THE RICH GRAIN DISTRICT OF SOUTHERN SASKATCHEWAN. A SINGLE MOUNTED POLICE DOES DUTY IN CONTRAST WITH THE HEAVY GUARD REQUIRED WHEN THE RAILROAD FIRST WENT THROUGH THE WEST. THE R.N.W.M.P. HAVE GIVEN UP THE “SARDINE TIN” FOR THE FAMILIAR BROAD-BRIMMED AND SMART-LOOKING FELT HAT.

By Mackenzie’s time, of course, Canada was known to be worth something on its own account, not merely as a possible stepping-stone to Asia. Thousands of exiles had flocked in from the revolutionary States to find new homes in the eastern provinces under the good old British flag. Thousands more, sailing over from the mother country, began to come in and make their homes in the same eastern regions.

Most people still imagined that the West, separated from Canada by a vast wilderness of forest and lake, was good for nothing but the fur trade. But the fur-traders knew well enough, from the amazing fertility of the gardens around their forts, that the land was rich and easy to cultivate; and, as Captain Martin tells in his story of Lord Selkirk, in 1811 some hundreds of Britons came in through Hudson Bay to start farming in earnest on the banks of the Red River.

A hardy Canadian artist, Paul Kane, who visited that pioneer settlement in 1846, found many Scottish folk there, living “in great plenty so far as mere food and clothing are concerned”; but luxuries were “almost unattainable,” with no market nearer than St. Paul on the Mississippi River, hundreds of miles to the south. Manitoba was not only hard to get into, but almost impossible to send produce out of.

Without a railway, at any rate to the head of navigation on Lake Superior, the western plains could never become the home of a great white population. Here was a new reason why our people in Britain and Canada wanted a quick way across the continent—not only to “get to the other side” for the sake of communication with Asia, but to open up and populate the middle.

Suddenly the old reason, too, became most pressing. In 1857 the terrible mutiny broke out in India, and not long afterwards Britain and France became involved in a war with China. A railway across Canada, giving the shortest possible route from the mother country to the Pacific, and a route to India not liable to interference from European countries, would have been a vast advantage then, and might in some future struggle mean all the difference between national safety and disaster.

On the heels of the Asiatic troubles in 1858 came the outbreak of gold fever in British North America itself, at the western end of the territory then ruled by the Hudson’s Bay Company. Over 30,000 men rushed in, that year, deserting the Californian goldfields for the scene of the latest discoveries. To keep that wild horde in order was evidently beyond the power of the fur-traders’ corporation. The Imperial Government had to step in and establish the pax Britannica, the peace of firm law and incorruptible justice. This it did with its usual success, to the astonished admiration of Americans, used only to a reign of disorder in their own far west.

The territory from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean was organized as a colony, and christened “British Columbia” by Queen Victoria. But the authority of the colonial government, in a country with few settled citizens and a crowd of mixed nomads from all nations, could not have been supported in any emergency except by ships from Britain halfway round the world.

Here was a fresh reason for a railway across from the Atlantic. And even before the gold rush to the Pacific slope the Imperial Government had sent an expedition of surveyors out to explore the West and report whether such a line could be built. That exploration, carried on for four years, added much to men’s knowledge of the Hudson’s Bay territory. For one thing, it revealed a pass over the Rockies, far south of the fur-traders’ route. Dr. Hector, whose party discovered this cleft in the mountains, got a nasty kick from a horse there, and “Kicking Horse Pass” it is called to this day.

While the mother country’s surveyors were exploring the Far West, other parties sent by Canada—then consisting only of the southern districts of our Ontario and Quebec—were exploring in Manitoba and Saskatchewan to decide whether the prairies were fit for agricultural settlement on any large scale. The Hudson’s Bay Company had discouraged this idea, preferring to keep the country as a great game preserve, for the sake of the fur trade. But the Canadian investigators proved up to the hilt that the prairie only lacked a population of farmers to make it one of the finest farming countries in the world. The natural wealth of the soil was found to be enormous; and one of the chief men in this expedition did not hesitate to describe the Red River country as “a paradise of fertility.” Even without going very far west, the explorers could see that many millions of acres were arable land of the highest quality.

The Imperial authorities, too, had in mind both of the objects which a trans-Canadian railway would achieve—to open a short and safe route to the Pacific through British territory and to enable settlers to make their homes on the plains of the interior. A Speech from the Throne to the Imperial Parliament in 1858 expressed an earnest hope that the establishment of the new colony on the far western coast would be but one step in a steady progress by which the British realms in North America would be “cultivated and peopled in an unbroken chain, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, by a loyal and industrious population.”

Courtesy C.P.R.

THE C.P.R., UNTIL 1916, CROSSED THE SELKIRKS BY A MOST SPECTACULAR ROUTE. THE SCENERY THROUGH ROGERS PASS, AND ALONG THE ILLECILLEWAET RIVER BEING MAGNIFICENT. BUT THE GRADES WERE STEEP, THE CURVES SHARP, AND THE COST OF MAINTAINING SNOWSHEDS VERY GREAT. SO THE CONNAUGHT TUNNEL WAS BUILT UNDER MOUNT MACDONALD. FIVE MILES LONG, AND NAMED IN HONOUR OF THE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF CANADA.

Sir Edward Watkin, a high railway authority, quoting this in 1861, declared that a railroad from ocean to ocean, “along which the travel and traffic of the western and eastern worlds can pass without interruption,” would become the great highway between Europe and Japan, China and Australia. Whatever nation possessed that highway, he added, would hold the commercial sceptre of the world.

In spite of these great hopes, Captain Palliser, at the head of the Imperial Government’s explorers, came to the conclusion that the advantages to be gained by a railway through the Rockies would not justify its tremendous cost. That cost, or most of it, would have to be paid by the Mother Country, for Canada then could not afford any large share. As the Mother Country had passed through the Asiatic storm, and no great danger threatened at the time, the railway scheme was dropped and the Rocky Mountains were allowed to sleep on in silence.

The poor Red River settlers, however, could not keep silent. Marooned, as it were, on one remote islet of civilization at the heart of a wilderness ocean-wide, they petitioned the rulers of the Empire for help. If a railway right across the continent was not to be had, could they not at least get a line connecting the prairie with Eastern Canada?—No, they could not!

The greater vision, however, of an all-British line from sea to sea, was only clouded over for a time. Men of enlightened imagination saw it clearly still, as they had for many years. To such men we owe everything, even when they seem able to do nothing. Joseph Howe, the Nova Scotian statesman, speaking as far back as 1851, had confidently predicted, “I believe that many in this room will live to hear the whistle of the steam-engine in the passes of the Rocky Mountains, and to make the journey from Halifax to the Pacific in five or six days.”

When he said that, the men destined to make his dream come true were preparing for the tremendous task without knowing it. George Stephen, a young shop assistant or store clerk, had just landed in Montreal from Scotland. His elder cousin, Donald Smith, the fur-trader, after years of obscurity in the wilds of Labrador, was climbing up through the ranks of the Hudson’s Bay service, which he had entered in his youth. William Van Horne, who was actually to build the line under their inspiration, was an eight-year-old child in Illinois, of Dutch, French and German descent.

The first bright ray of hope broke through the clouds in 1867 when Ontario and Quebec united with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to form a “Dominion of Canada.” The new Federal Government took over all the territory ruled by the Hudson’s Bay Company. British Columbia joined up in 1871, and when Prince Edward Island came in, two years later, the Dominion was complete from Atlantic to Pacific.

That is, it looked complete on the map, where each part seemed to touch the next. But the Dominion really consisted of four inhabited districts, separated by three great vacant gaps; they hung so loosely together, a powerful jar might shake them apart. The “silken tie” of loyalty to the political agreement joining them in a federation had to be strengthened by a chain of good stout iron rails.

The Maritime Provinces, indeed, had only joined the federation on condition that a railway should be built connecting them with Canada. The “Intercolonial” was the result—a Canadian Government line of 700 miles from Halifax to Quebec, built with the backing of the Imperial Government, which guaranteed the interest on a loan of $15,000,000.

British Columbia, following this example, only joined the Dominion when promised a railway from the Pacific Coast to Eastern Canada, to be begun within two years and finished in ten.

“You might as well promise them the moon,” a doubting Thomas said,—and many thought like him. “The thing could not be done.” But it had got to be done, for Canada’s own safety, even if she had never promised it to the British Columbians. See what might have happened, and probably would, if the Canadian Pacific had not been built. See what was then happening “south of line 49,” and you will understand.

In 1869 the United States had just got its first transcontinental line finished. The flood tide of population, which had already reached the Missouri at Omaha, 1,400 miles from New York, and St. Paul, up in Minnesota, now spread fast over the north-western plains. There was plenty of room for all, south of the frontier; but many covetous folk, giving way to swollen ambition, looked forward to wiping out that frontier and annexing our empty “paradise” to their own country. If a flood of their own people could have occupied this fertile land of ours before we could do it ourselves, these intriguing politicians would have seized the excuse to carry out their plan. At that time, and for a long while after that, anti-British fanatics grudged us the liberty we enjoyed of making and managing our own system of government without breaking up the brotherhood, a true “league of nations” now, the British Empire. Unscrupulous and narrow-minded men were constantly trying, as some do still, to stir up against us an ignorant and obsolete prejudice surviving from the revolutionary war in the darkness of the eighteenth century.

If our prairies had passed into the control of an alien power, Canada would for ever have been prevented from expanding naturally westward, just as the American colonies, while still British, found their own westward expansion blocked by the French occupying the Mississippi Valley. On that occasion, it is worth remembering, the American colonists were only enabled to break down the obstacle by the naval and military power of their British motherland.

To hold our own central plains, then, an all-Canadian railway was necessary, so that our own people from Eastern Canada and the British Isles, and any other honest home-makers ready to live with us in loyal brotherhood, might come in and build up genuinely Canadian communities under our own system of free self-government.

To secure our only possible western gateway on the Pacific Ocean, too, it was necessary both to hold the central plains and to build through them and British Columbia an all-Canadian line. Such a line alone would preserve freedom of trade between those two great regions and our eastern provinces, and also give Canada a chance to share in the great and growing trade between North America and Asia.

British Columbia herself, with a white population of only 8,500, but enormously rich in minerals, timber, fish and other natural resources, would have found it hard to maintain an independent existence if cut off from her sister communities in the east. The United States, you may remember, had tried to get possession only twenty years before the formation of our Dominion—claiming the whole west coast of this continent, in fact.

The future greatness of Canada, therefore—indeed our very existence, as a broad Dominion worthy of the name,—depended on the prompt connection of all its parts by a national highway of steel.

Your question “Why?” is answered, but you may well ask “How?”

How could the thing be done? This was a question to spur the brains and strain the energies of the most ingenious and most energetic of men. We had plenty of brains and energy. Unfortunately this was an enterprise so big that it demanded great sums of money, and Canadians were a poor people, numbering only three and a half million. The United States had nearly ten times that number, including many rich men, before it ventured on its much smaller enterprise of this sort; the distance to San Francisco from Omaha was only 1,850 miles—the distance to Vancouver from the settled parts of Ontario was about 2,500 miles.

We had one big government railway-building enterprise on our hands already, and did not want the burden of another. As a matter of fact, the Intercolonial took nine years to build, though it was only 700 miles long and ran through a country where the engineers had no great natural barriers to overcome and where materials could easily be got along the St. Lawrence gulf and river close by. At that rate, a line of 2,500 miles from the existing railways in Ontario, through a region far from all sources of supply, and over range after range of most difficult mountains, would have taken at least forty years.

We got it done in less than five!

The men forming the first Government of the young Dominion, Sir John A. Macdonald being Prime Minister, decided that the railway should be built by a company, with Sir Hugh Allan at its head. The company was to be given $30,000,000 and 50,000,000 acres of public land. Unfortunately, at the General Election of 1872 the Government accepted large sums of money from Sir Hugh and his partners for “election expenses.” This was discovered, and denounced as bribery. The people threw out Macdonald’s party, and a new Government, with Alexander Mackenzie as Prime Minister, decided that a line right through by land was more than the country could then afford. Certain sections of railways were put in hand, including one from Fort William, at the head of Lake Superior, towards Winnipeg,—this was begun in 1875,—but from Fort William eastward the traffic would have to be carried by water.

The indignation of British Columbians may be imagined. In the heat of their anger they even threatened to get out of the Dominion if it did not keep the promise which had brought them in.

One of the first things Sir John Macdonald set himself to find, when the people made him Prime Minister again in 1878, was the best way of fulfilling that promise. It happened that two or three Canadians had just made a fortune. They had bought up cheap a bankrupt, unfinished railway in Minnesota, with its rights to a large grant of land when the line was built. They went on building it, settlers flocked on to the land, and the line became a great success, putting millions in their pockets. At Sir John Macdonald’s suggestion, they resolved to put the money into the building of the long-desired Canadian Pacific Railway and joined together in a group or “syndicate” which offered to do the work. The Government promised to help with a grant of $25,000,000, besides 25,000,000 acres of prairie land, and the 713 miles of line already arranged for—of which about 300 miles had been constructed. The Company’s western property was to pay no taxes for twenty years; and no other railway competing with theirs was to be allowed within 15 miles of the international boundary.

There was a great fight, the Opposition party claiming that the Government had promised too much; but early in 1881 Parliament decided in favour of the scheme and the present Canadian Pacific Railway Company was formed to carry it out,—for the Syndicate’s money and the Government grant put together would only pay a fraction of the cost. To make the national character of the company quite clear, Parliament ordered that the President and the majority of the directors must always be British citizens. As a fact, for many years not one director has been anything else; and the large majority have always been not only British but Canadian.

It was a great and heroic campaign that opened on the 2nd of May, 1881, when the first sod was turned for the railway across Canada. Again and again it seemed on the verge of defeat. The two great enemies were—first, the mountains, muskegs and ravines, the raging torrent and the roaring avalanche, for the engineers to conquer; and, second, the difficulty of getting money,—for even British investors, however sympathetic they might be to Canada, were shy of putting money into a railway which a high Canadian authority declared would not even pay the cost of its axle-grease.

The leaders in this campaign were George Stephen, who had risen to be President of the Bank of Montreal, and Donald Alexander Smith, of the Hudson’s Bay Company, with William Van Horne as their commander in the field, their General Manager, and Thomas G. Shaughnessy as adjutant-general or chief purchasing agent. Every one of them was a genius in his way. Stephen and Smith, full of the faith that “removes mountains,” had to raise the money when that was nearly as hard as squeezing blood out of a stone. Van Horne had to make one man do the work of two, himself setting the example, and Shaughnessy had to make every dollar look like ten.

Armies of men, led by resourceful engineers, were set to work at different points, and began cutting lanes through dense forest, tearing up prairie, bridging the rivers and blasting the rocks.

Pioneering ahead of them pressed the scientific scouts, the surveyors with their instruments. When the line was begun, there were large districts where the route it should finally take was still a problem unsolved.

To cross the mountains, Government surveyors had planned to use the Yellowhead Pass, the old fur-traders’ route. That, however, would have meant a great bend northward across the prairie, and then another great bend southward to reach the present terminus on the coast. A much shorter route was wanted. Parliament allowed the company to discard the Yellowhead for some other pass not less than 100 miles from the international boundary. Such a pass through the Rockies had already been discovered,—Dr. Hector’s “Kicking Horse.” That would take the line safely down to the Columbia River. But beyond the Rockies another high barrier had to be climbed, the Selkirk Range, and no way over it had yet been found. At last Major Rogers, after much exploration, discovered the pass which bears his name. It is said that when the directors sent him a reward of $5,000 for his discovery he would not cash the cheque but had it framed and hung up like a picture—a sort of victory memorial.

The highest speed in railway building, naturally, was achieved on the prairie, which was tackled first. Yet our inland west is no billiard table, as some people imagine. There are level stretches, but the prairie as a whole is not flat, and often its ups and downs make it more like the rolling sea after a storm. Even on the flattest plains, the tracks had to be raised high enough to avoid the risk of drifting snow.

The Indians, too,—would they make no trouble? The fact is, they had almost been forgotten. Yet they had been used to roaming freely over the plains after the buffalo, and considered the whole prairie to be their own. They had been persuaded to acknowledge the Canadian Government as master of the territory; they had signed treaties, agreeing to be content with slices of the land, marked out for them as Reserves for their own use alone. But they were not contented, for their buffalo hunting had suddenly stopped in 1878 with the disappearance of the herds, and the roving red-skinned hunters could not be expected all at once to settle down happily as farmers.

Chief Piapot, for one, made up his mind to stop the invasion of railway-makers. Pitching his camp on the right-of-way which surveyors had marked out, as King Canute in the story sat down to stop the flowing tide, he refused to budge when the railway men came up. His braves galloped round and round them, wildly yelling and firing guns.

A messenger was sent back, many miles, to the nearest post of the Mounted Police. The only two men there, a sergeant and one constable, rode off promptly to the scene of trouble. Piapot laughed at their warnings. “I’ll give you ten minutes to move,” said the sergeant, and took out his watch. The yelling and firing went on until the time was up, when the sergeant dismounted, walked into Piapot’s tent, and pulled it down. He demolished the head-men’s tents in the same way. The Indians were struck dumb with amazement. Piapot, like Canute, quietly drew off his forces and the tide of steel flowed on.

More trouble awaited the track-layers farther west. As soon as they started laying rails on the Blackfoot Reserve, the track was torn up by angry men of the great Chief Crowfoot’s warlike tribe. The Government meant to compensate the Indians for any land taken for the railway, but had neglected to tell them so. It was only when Father Lacombe, a missionary whom all the Indians knew as their devoted friend, rode hotfoot from Calgary and gave his word of honour that the right-of-way would be paid for with other land, that the Blackfoot council allowed track-laying to go on.

The “head of steel” reached Calgary on the 18th of August, 1883. In fifteen months, despite the winter’s interruption, 725 miles of track had been laid and about 10,000,000 tons of material moved—“a feat,” as Van Horne said, “unequalled in the history of railway construction.”

Far greater “labours of Hercules,” however, had yet to be performed.

Cutting a way along the north shore of Lake Superior, where not even adventurous fur-traders had ever blazed a trail, was a most painful and expensive operation. Here 200 miles of railway cost $12,000,000, of which over $2,000,000 was paid for dynamite alone. The tunnels, galleries, and bridges along the face of the cliff for three miles at Jackfish Bay cost $1,500,000. A single mile cost $700,000.

The smooth but treacherous muskegs, too, proved heart-breaking to engineers who had to make a solid road-bed through them. One of these voracious swamps appeared to be bottomless. Five times an embankment was laid from one side to the other, and every time it was swallowed up, till at last the monstrous appetite of the morass was satisfied.

The difficulties among the mountains were endless. Blasting, cutting, levelling and bridging, building a firm track through gorges and along the sides of precipices where even a mountain goat had never ventured, demanded the highest skill and generalship among the engineers, with nerve, endurance, and dogged defiance of danger among all. Avalanches of snow, of rock, of crumbling gravel, swept down on the hardy invaders, and still they carried on till they forced their way through.

The mere feeding of the armies of workers, not to speak of their accommodation and medical provision against accidents—this was in itself a most difficult task. Practically every detachment of that great force was hundreds of miles away from its base of supplies. There was only one town of any size along the whole 2,500 miles; and this town, Winnipeg, had not 8,000 inhabitants when the work began.

The line had to be first-rate in quality, too, from the beginning. No slipshod work was allowed, no shoddy material accepted, to save the shareholders’ money.

Yet money was desperately hard to get. Thrice the Government had to be asked for loans. The second loan was only given on the company’s promise to finish the line by May, 1886, instead of 1891 as first agreed. The company also had to pledge with the Government, as security, the whole of its property. This made it all the harder to raise money elsewhere. Its $100 shares, when offered to the public, fetched less than $40. Its fertile land, however valuable that might one day become, was despised when offered as security for cash.

The leaders, Smith and Stephen, raised every dollar they could on their personal security, pledging nearly everything they had. The General Manager and his staff gave up one-fifth of their salaries, “and,” as he said, “willingly worked, not overtime but double time.” Shaughnessy staved off the company’s creditors with trifling instalments, and persuaded them to keep on supplying material in the hope of more orders and better times to come. Van Horne, with the treasury empty and no means of filling it in sight, did not hesitate to send 5,000 more men west, trusting Providence to find their wages.

The third time the Government was asked for a loan, it positively refused, and the company was face to face with bankruptcy. Then the Riel Rebellion broke out. The Company’s brilliant success in rushing troops to the West over its unfinished line, saving thousands of imperilled lives and averting a long and expensive campaign, was such a striking proof of the railway’s immense value to the country that the loan was finally granted.

The supreme crisis of the Company’s life had passed. Within a year the whole debt to the Government was repaid, in cash and by the return of land at the rate of $1.50 an acre. Two years after that, the Company gave up its legal right to prevent the construction of other lines between its own and the frontier, the Government in compensation guaranteeing three and one-half per cent. interest on bonds which the Company had to issue; but the Government was never called on to make that promise good.

The last gap north of Lake Superior was closed on May 17, 1885, giving a continuous line of steel from the head of Atlantic navigation to the foot of the Rockies. On the 7th of November in the same year the last spike was driven by Donald Smith at Craigellachie, eighty-five miles west of the Selkirk Range summit, and the line from ocean to ocean was complete. It was formally opened in 1886 by a train which left Montreal on the evening of June 28, and reached Port Moody on the morning of July 4. Vancouver, then little more than a clearing in the forest twelve miles farther down Burrard Inlet, took Port Moody’s place as the Pacific terminus one year later.

Many a hard row the Company had yet to hoe before it reaped any great financial success. From the beginning, however, it set itself to improve and develop its line and the country it served—transforming its wooden trestles into steel bridges or solid embankments, tunnelling mountains, reducing grades, straightening curves, throwing out branches, irrigating dry regions, bringing in settlers and establishing them on the land, stimulating profitable agriculture and fostering all sorts of other home industries, till it stands to-day the heaviest buyer and taxpayer in the Dominion, and, with its 20,000 miles of rail and its scores of steamers crossing both Atlantic and Pacific, the most famous of Canadian institutions and one of the greatest transportation systems in the world.

But that is another story.

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

A cover which is placed in the public domain was created for this ebook.

[The end of Origin of the Canadian Pacific Railway, by Howard Angus Kennedy]