However, after waiting two years more without seeing any railway construction begun on either the mainland of British Columbia or Vancouver Island, Premier George A. Walkem, in the Legislature at Victoria, moved the famous resolution to the effect that unless the Dominion started railway construction by May of 1879, the Province of British Columbia should withdraw from the Confederation and even ask damages from Canada for delay in carrying out their railway promises to the Province. This extraordinary motion was carried by fourteen to nine, with the probable intention of waking up both the Imperial and Canadian Governments to the discontent on the Western Coast. The resolution reached Ottawa in October, 1878, just after the Mackenzie Government had been defeated, and owing to the confusion caused by the change it was put into some pidgeonhole for a rest, and did not reach London till March, 1879. By that time Sir John A. Macdonald, who had come back to power with his aggressive and indomitable Railway Minister, Sir Charles Tupper, was getting down to a new programme of railway building, and British Columbia, in consequence, was becoming more contented and hopeful. So no one asked any questions when the famous secession resolution of the British Columbia legislature found oblivion in the files of Downing Street. All this does not mean that Mr. Mackenzie was inactive in the matter of the transcontinental railway. Considering the facts we have mentioned already, namely, that many of his chief supporters were lukewarm in regard to the whole project, which they considered premature, and the further fact that there was a cycle of lean years, he strove to get things moving, but the chariot wheels dragged. There was no popular enthusiasm over the undertaking, because the times were hard and there was general failure on the part of the people to get a vision of the illimitable possibilities that lay to westward. But some progress was made. Extensive surveys were carried forward. And several contracts were let for the easier portions of the route. The hard places, like the North Shore of Lake Superior, and the mountains in British Columbia, were not attempted. Lord and Lady Dufferin, at Emerson, Manitoba, in 1877, drove the first two spikes in the portion which started at the international boundary-line, where the railways linked up with an American line. This was later called the Emerson Branch, and ran from the boundary east of the Red River through St. Boniface, across from Winnipeg, to East Selkirk. From Selkirk a portion of the railway to Thunder Bay, on Lake Superior, was begun. It was the plan of the Mackenzie Government to cross the Red River at Selkirk, and strike westward over the prairies, side-tracking Winnipeg, which was then becoming a considerable centre of population. I recall a locomotive round-house at East Selkirk built in Mackenzie’s time, but later abandoned when the line was changed to run through Winnipeg. Budding