Incidentally, it was as a result of his observation before he came to Canada at all, that he insisted on the Canadian Pacific keeping such auxiliary utilities as the telegraph, express and sleeping car departments. These also in their several ways would be feeders to the main treasury account. They were not the big tent, as Van Horne said, using a circus illustration; but the side-shows, as he called them, went a long way to increase the receipts. It had been the custom in other places to let other organizations have these franchises, but Van Horne said they took the cream of several kinds of business and “left the skim milk to the railway.” Van Horne wanted the cream, as the road would need the money; and so the Dominion Express and the Canadian Pacific Telegraphs and the Railway’s own sleeping cars, got into business for the big Company from the start. And these, like the dining car department and others of the same type, are marvels of service and efficiency, as every one now knows. To speak about the creation of traffic is to use a somewhat peculiar, but well-founded, expression, because, in this case, it applies to traffic which had practically no existence before. Nothing escaped Van Horne’s notice. In the evening hours when he would be in camp on the prairie during construction time, he took delight in planning sports of various kinds for the men. “A change is as good as a rest,” is an old saying with a lot of truth in it. I have seen men apparently fagged out with a day’s march become lithesome as kittens over a game of baseball in the evening on the plain. Mr. Van Horne, who was a true artist, became interested in the bleached bones of buffaloes amongst the construction tents. And many a great buffalo head with its wide white frontal bone did the big railroader adorn with sketches made in coal or pencil, to the delight of the onlookers. And at the same time he was thinking of traffic in these buffalo bones. In my boyhood I have ridden through acres and miles of prairie where the white bones of the buffalo “lay thick as the autumnal leaves in Vallambrosa.” These acres of skeletons were an indictment against the selfish and greedy buffalo-hunting sporting men who had rounded up the herds, killed them by thousands, and took nothing but the tongue and the hide. Van Horne saw in these vast surface cemeteries how the slaughtered buffalo could still be of value. And so he had men gather up the bones and pile them in great heaps along stations and sidings, to be shipped by trainloads to Eastern factories that were glad to get them. Thus the railroader, who got the material for the cost of gathering, made good profits for the Railway, and at the same time cleared the land of an encumbrance. The man who could think of such things was not likely to fail in creating traffic.