The very existence of Canada, then, as a complete Dominion worthy of the two great enterprising races which had laid its foundations, and worthy of the civilizing British brotherhood in which it had achieved self-governing membership, depended on the prompt connection of all its parts by a national railway line.
The puzzle was, how to do it? The line would have to be built through an almost uninhabited wilderness, and the cost of construction was bound to be enormous.
The Canadian people, though rich in faith, in courage, and resources, were not rich in money. With the strong right arm and heroic heart they had tamed the wild East, but was their arm strong enough and long enough to reach out and tame the wild West? At first it seemed not. The building of the railway, by the agreement with British Columbia, should have commenced by 1873. It was 1875 before construction began, on a line from the head of Lake Superior towards the West; and even then the Federal authorities could only make up their minds to an instalment plan, giving contracts for the building of sections here and there, and trusting to navigation on the Great Lakes and Lake of the Woods to complete a chain of mixed land and water communication between East and West. No provision was made for the necessary land line north of the Lakes.
In 1880, when nine of the ten years had gone by and less than 700 miles of track had been laid, the scheme of a Government railway was given up as hopeless. A little group of men was found to guarantee the building of a line by private enterprise and finish it within ten years. Most of these men were Canadians of Scottish birth, of the same class that had already done so much for the exploration of the West and the carrying on of its ancient fur trade. In fact, the moving spirits in the enterprise were Donald Smith, the head of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who had spent most of his life in the northern and western wilds, and his cousin George Stephen. Though it was not to be officially a Government line, it was built to provide the great national highway which the country required, and Parliament decreed that a majority of the directors must always be British citizens.
It was a great adventure and a costly one, the building of that line; so costly, indeed, that again and again the Company was nearly ruined before its task was done, even with a large grant of money and western land from the Government. The prophecy that it would never pay for its axle grease sounds absurd now that the railway has proved itself perhaps the most conspicuously successful enterprise ever undertaken in Canada, and one of the most famous in the world. In its early years, however, the capitalists, outside the group of resolute men who had launched the scheme, could hardly be persuaded to put any money in it, they thought its chances of success so small.