However, it remains true also that the collapse of that famous Western real-estate boom, the crash of which affected every place from the Great Lakes to the mountains, made the task of the Canadian Pacific Board and Mr. Van Horne an exceedingly difficult one right at the outset. The sudden deflation in Western land values and the large number of business failures through the recession of the boom wave shook the faith of outsiders in the country’s future and depressed the people within the country at the same time. I have known the West all my life, but I do not recall any period more generally discouraging than that after-the-boom period in the 80’s, during which the Canadian Pacific Railway was begun and carried to an amazingly successful completion. The sudden drop in everything, as well as the rumblings and then the outbreak of the Riel Rebellion on the plains, put, in large measure, a damper on immigration; and railway building through an uninhabited land is not exhilarating work. These were local conditions, but there were other things which sprang up at the very beginning to make the way of the new railway company hard. A few of these things may be indicated for the benefit of the superficial people who think the Canadian Pacific got an easy start. In reality it had from the first to fight every foot of the way against adverse influences. When the Company had to do its financing it found influential forces barring the doors. The Grand Trunk, with its host of big Directors and shareholders in the Old Country, attacked the new transcontinental which would be sure to invade its rich reserves in Eastern Canada; and so the London market was, in large measure, cold to any efforts made by the new Canadian Pacific Board to raise money in the world’s financial centre. Similarly the United States railways which were headed for the Pacific saw the danger of a successful Canadian rival, and did all they could to prevent the Canadian Pacific from securing any money in New York. With hostile forces thus operating in these two famous money centres, any one can understand that the new Canadian venture was in for a bad time. And we have to add to all these barbed-wire fences around the money markets abroad, the regrettable fact of almost constant nagging and criticism in Canada from sources of such wide range as the “will-never-pay-for-axle-grease” politicians, and the men who wished to cut in with the railway lines in productive territory while the Canadian Pacific was struggling to cross leagues of unpeopled rocks and plains, not to mention the people who thought the new road should benevolently carry everything for them at bare cost.