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. Blasting, cutting and levelling, building a track to carry heavy trains through mountain passes and along the sides of precipices where even a mountain goat never ventured before, demanded the highest degree of skill, endurance, and dogged defiance of danger. Towering heights and raging torrents, hard rock and dense forest, crumbling gravel and avalanching snow, all were encountered and all were overcome. Besides the mountains and chasms of the Far West, there was the long mountainous stretch north of Lake Superior, where the thrilling grandeur of the scenery may suggest to the admiring passenger some feeble idea of the tremendous toil which alone made possible his enjoyment or indeed his very sight of it. Here 200 miles of railway track cost $12,000,000, of which $2,100,000 was used for dynamite alone. A dynamite factory had to be established on the spot. The bridges, tunnels and galleries along the face of the cliff for three miles at Jackfish Bay cost $1,500,000. A single mile cost $700,000. There was only one town of any size in the whole length of the line, from eastern Ontario to the British Columbian shore; and Winnipeg itself had not 8,000 inhabitants when the work began in 1881. Practically every company and battalion of the great army of railway builders was hundreds of miles from its base of supplies. The fighting line, far longer than all the battle lines on the French, Italian and Russian war fronts put together, stretched for over 2,500 miles through an almost uninhabited and untilled wilderness.