After Sir Donald had found the immense amount of money that was required, his greatest care was to find a man to take charge of the construction, much of it through unknown wildernesses, of the longest railway that had ever been projected. The length of the proposed line and the nature of the country through which it was to pass, made this the most stupendous railway undertaking the world had seen. It was necessary to procure a man fitted for a Herculean task. Sir Donald took stock with the railroad men of the New World and decided that the most promising of them all was William C. Van Horne. The latter went into the work like a football player bucking the line on a university team. An army of men was hired. At an average speed of three miles a day for many months the steel rails were pushed into the vast forests and the trackless prairies of the Northwest. At last the workmen, urged incessantly by the directing mind of General Manager Van Horne, attacked the Rocky Mountains, and under the charges of picks and powder the mountains made way. At the end of the third year the summit of the Rockies had been reached, and before another twelve months had gone by the forbidding passes in the Selkirks were thundering and trembling from the assaults of dynamite. The last rail of the main line was laid in November, 1885. In the meantime the company had been acquiring branch connections, and before the end of the year was in possession of nearly forty-five hundred miles of track. Before another six months had passed a great system was fully equipped and Canada had her railway from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The contract had called for the completion of the road in ten years. Van Horne and his men had finished it in five. Since then the system has been extended until now it embraces nearly ten thousand miles of track, and steamship lines cross the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. One may travel eighteen thousand miles on the route and property of the Canadian Pacific. Cities and towns, many thousands of farms and factories, have sprung up along the way. A new commonwealth in the Northwest has been developed. And it has been done under the general direction of Sir William C. Van Horne. This is why Canadians, when asked to name living men who have done most to develop the Dominion, couple his name with that of Lord Strathcona. The latter, then Sir Donald Smith, had the courage to assume a burden of railway construction that had proved too heavy for the Government. He thus made possible Canada’s only transcontinental railway. Lord Strathcona financed the road, but Sir William Van Horne built it. The latter was its president from 1888 until 1899, when, the creative work being done, the chief difficulties surmounted, he resigned the presidency in favor of Sir Thomas Shaughnessy, and assumed work of less detail as chairman of the board of directors.