The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 by Pierre Berton Page B

forget,” he told Macdonald, “that its adoption means the completion of the road in 5 years.” The Prime Minister, by mid-November, 1881, had become a convert.
    Though he thought the new route along the lake ought to be most acceptable to Ontario, Stephen had no illusions about the attitude of the Globe , which he believed was “conspiring with the Northern Pacific to strangle Canada’s national road.” The Globe could be depended upon to blackball the idea and “perhaps declare that we do not mean to build the Lake Superior section at all.”
    It was “simply disgusting” to have to swallow the “lying charges” of such newspapers. The best answer was “to take care to avoid anything that even looks like a breach, or even an evasion, of the terms of the contract. It will be the duty as well as the interest of the Company to ask nothing of the Government savoring of a favoritism not provided for in the contract, and you may be sure, that so far as I know, I will be guided by this principle. Acting in this way and pushing our work with the utmost energy and especially that part of the contract which the Globe still insists we mean to shirk”
    Few railroad executives in North America had ever talked this way before, but then Stephen was not cast in the traditional mould of the railway entrepreneur. Among his own colleagues he was unique. Certainly Jim Hill had no intention of blasting a railroad out of the black scarps that frowned down on the slate waters of the great lake. Hill pinned his hopes on the branch line that Stephen had announced would be built to Sault Ste Marie to link up with Hill’s road from St. Paul. Like Villard of the Northern Pacific, Hill saw Canadian freight being diverted south of the lake and up through the underbelly of Manitoba. One of his chief reasons for joining the CPR Syndicate was that his St. Paul road would get all the construction traffic for the line being built west of Winnipeg. The line across the Shield, he was convinced, “would be of no use to anybody and would be the source of heavy loss to whoever operated it.”
    In the fall of 1881, Hill picked the best railwayman he could find to look over the Precambrian country to the north and west of Lake Superior. According to William Pearce of the Dominion land department – a man privy to a good deal of CPR gossip – Hill’s plan was to have the visitor damn the all-Canadian route as impractical. He chose for this task the dynamic young general manager of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad; though no one yet realized it, his influence on the future of the young nation was to be enormous. His name was William Cornelius Van Horne.

5
Enter Van Horne
    The new man was being considered for something more permanent than a mere report on the Lake Superior route. The CPR badly needed a new general manager. Stickney had managed to build only one hundred and thirty miles of railway that season; moreover, he was under a cloud because of his land speculations. At the end of August, the Globe , always ready to report dissension in the ranks of the company, published a rumour of “serious trouble between the Syndicate and Superintendent Stickney on account of the latter having obtained the title to lands including the town plot of Brandon, ostensibly for the Syndicate but really on his private account.” The Globe added: “It is said the Syndicate make the condition that the lands and proceeds of sales be given up to them or Mr. Stickney is to quit their service.… There are also reports that General Rosser has largely improved the chances, which the early knowledge of the location of the line gave him, in speculation.” The friendlier Manitoba Free Press denied the story flatly, but it was about this time that the company began looking for a general manager.
    As usual George Stephen turned to Hill, who had done the major share of the hiring for the top echelons of the company that year and whose preference for American