In this particular connection one Donald Alexander Smith (later Lord Strathcona) who had come out from Scotland as a lad to Labrador, in the service of the Company, had risen to be head of that Company in Canada at the time of Confederation, and was a member of the House of Commons for Winnipeg when the project of a transcontinental railway loomed up as an actual possibility. Mr. Smith was a restlessly ambitious man, or he would not have so risen, and there is no doubt in my mind (and I knew him in his later years) that when the discussion arose he began to cherish the hope of being an instrument in linking up the East and West in some way by the much-discussed railway. Since writing this I came across a letter, dated November, 1872, at Stuart Lake, B.C., from the Hudson’s Bay Company factor then in charge there, to the officer in charge at another post. This letter not only shows that the Hudson’s Bay Company, instead of retarding the opening up of the country by rail as some have affirmed, was actively assisting and making possible the work of explorers and surveyors who were beginning to blaze the way for the road. And it also shows that Mr. Donald A. Smith was, even that far back, on his own behalf and on behalf of the ancient fur-trading organization, contributing his quota in that direction. Here is an extract in the letter from one Hudson’s Bay man to another: “The bearer is a botanist belonging to the railway survey who arrived here in company with an engineer, and who is the bearer of a letter from Mr. Donald A. Smith to us men in the service to assist the surveyors as far as possible. He also showed me a letter from Mr. Sandford Fleming, authorizing the engineer who goes down the Skeena to sign any bill of expenses he may have with the Hudson’s Bay Company and it will be good. I have told him that you would forward him to Victoria and push him through as quickly as possible. The engineer’s name is something like Horetzkie.” The writer of that letter had caught the name of the engineer all right. And it shows not only how these Hudson’s Bay posts made the work of these and other explorers possible, but in this particular case it links the name of Donald A. Smith with the new day that was dawning. I do not think that Mr. Smith was by any means the ablest of the men who later formed the Canadian Pacific Railway Company Board. But he was unquestionably the pivot on which the project turned, from its doubtful success as a Government undertaking, to its becoming an accomplished fact as a privately owned and operated concern.