At an age when most boys are playing marbles in short trousers, young Van Horne, forced by the death of his father to earn his own living, obtained a place as general utility boy at a railroad station in the county in Illinois in which in 1843 he was born. Here he saw and seized his first opportunity; that is, he taught himself telegraphy. With this knowledge and a robust personality as his only assets, he journeyed to Chicago and found a position as telegraph operator in the offices of the Illinois Central Railroad. But he did not long hold this place. The telegraphic keys were too small for him. Before he was twenty-two he had gone over to the Chicago & Alton road and was dispatching trains—work of so responsible a character that no railroad company would think for an instant of entrusting it to the ordinary inexperienced youth. But the chief requisite of the train despatcher is care, and care was only one of young Van Horne’s conspicuous qualities. He had a combination of others that overshadowed it and brought him promotion to the place of superintendent of telegraphy. His work was still too easy for him, so they made him a division superintendent. He was now where the officials of other lines could see him, and the Wabash road took him away from the Chicago & Alton to make him their general manager. He was about thirty years old at this time, but he was already looming so large among the railroad men of the Middle West that when the directors of the Southern Minnesota Railway, which was in the hands of a receiver, bethought themselves to look about for a man who could rehabilitate their road, their eyes fell upon young Van Horne, and they asked him if he thought the line could be made to pay. He replied that he thought so, and gave his reasons. They then asked him to assume the management of the moribund property. He liked then, as he does now, this kind of a job. There were chances in it far above the mere satisfactory performance of routine duty. There were opportunities here to create, to develop, to quicken into new life; and the young man’s instincts were all in this direction. So he took hold with enthusiasm, and put the company on a paying basis with a rapidity that amazed the stockholders who made him president. He went back to the Chicago & Alton in 1878 as general manager. In a lifetime of work very few railroad men achieve as much as this, but Van Horne was still in his thirties and was just beginning. The Canadian Government had been trying for several years to push from the Ottawa Valley a road of steel across its vast domain to the Pacific Ocean, and it had found the task too much for it. Surveys had been made, but there had been comparatively little work of actual construction. Finally, in 1880, it was decided to allow the project to become a private enterprise, and in 1881, under the auspices of Sir Donald Smith, now Lord Strathcona, the Canadian Pacific Railroad Company was organized.