For nearly a century after Alexander Mackenzie, the indomitable Stornaway Scot, made the pioneer trail to the West Coast, “from Canada by land in 1793,” a limited trade was carried on laboriously, by trail and canoe and packhorse, in the mountain region. But when Canada was brought into a Confederation by linking together the old Provinces in the East, men of vision saw the vast possibilities of the Western seaboard. In 1851, as already noted, Joseph Howe, in Nova Scotia, had outlined the future in a vivid word-painting and caused others to see the ever expanding destiny of British America. He pictured the day when not only would “the whistle of the locomotive be heard in the heart of the Rocky Mountains,” but when Canadian enterprise would reach out to trade with the teeming millions of the Orient that lay facing the Pacific shore. Nor should we forget that Sir Hugh Allan, the master-trader on the Atlantic out of Montreal, long ago coveted for Canada a business not only trans-Atlantic and trans-continental, but trans-Pacific as well. These visions of trans-Pacific trade and passenger traffic came to swift realization soon after the Canadian Pacific Railway reached tide-water at Port Moody, on the West Coast, on July 4th, 1886. Port Moody, as we have seen, was the legal terminus of the steel trail across Canada. The Company sent a live-wire agent to Port Moody to look after the freight and passenger traffic. This agent was a young man named David E. Brown, who now lives retired in a beautiful home in Vancouver, appropriately named “The Bunkers,” and appropriately situated in the locality called Shaughnessy Heights. Brown was born of Scottish parents in the County of Grey, in Ontario, and still retains, on occasion, the distinctive accent of his people. He learned the way of Western railroading under that soldierly man, Mr. Robert Kerr, a great handler of freight traffic at Winnipeg, and Brown made such a place for himself in the esteem of his chief that he was assigned to the farthest strategic point where the rails struck tide-water at Port Moody. It was a great chance for a young man, and Brown had the will and the ability to make the most of it. Accustomed to handling freight inland, he was now to tackle coast traffic all along British Columbia and up to Alaska, for his line. And, to add to his responsibilities, he was only three weeks at Port Moody when a sailing brig, the _W. B. Flint_, an 800-ton clipper with a “Blue-nose skipper,” tied up at the wharf with a cargo of tea from Yokohama, to be shipped over the new Canadian Pacific Railway to the East. In some places and at some periods in our day the arrival of a brig with 800 tons of cargo would seem a quite insignificant event, but the prow of that particular brig clove open a new doorway to world commerce. She did not belong to the Canadian Pacific Railway, but led the way from the Orient for the Company’s steel-clad coursers which now