Though planned in the East, where statesmen and financiers were facing the problems of the New Dominion, it was in the wide West-land that the need of this transcontinental railway was most manifest, and it was in the West that the road first appeared. Hence we must study enough of the history of the West to see the stage set for the entry of the steel trail. Or, to put this in another way, we should find how the West had developed so as to successfully challenge the attention of Eastern statesmen and effectively call for a large Federal expenditure, in order that it might become linked up with the already developed East for the welfare of the whole Dominion. With this in view we shall, in the next chapter, meet those who, before the coming of the railway, began to make for the West a place on the map of history. CHAPTER II The Approach to a Big Task Salvaged from a “Highland Clearance” in the North of Scotland, and brought out to the Red River country in 1812, a colony of Scottish crofters settling midway across British America became the corner-stone of the stately edifice now known as Western Canada. These people were brought out after a harsh landlordism had displaced them from their tenant farms and replaced them by sheep, as more remunerative occupants of the strath. The plight of these evicted tenants, whose humble homes were burned to bar their return, excited the compassionate attention of that gentle, but heroic, nobleman, the Earl of Selkirk, and he, obtaining a controlling interest in the Hudson’s Bay Company, brought them to the Red River and placed them on land there. Lord Selkirk’s name liveth for evermore, not only because his friend, Sir Walter Scott, wrote that he never knew a man more fitted for high-souled undertakings, but because the colony he then planted was destined to prove to the world that the West was a land worth possessing as an illimitable area which would some day be the granary of the Empire. Moreover, those early settlers laid foundations for the future in religion and education. They builded churches and they erected schools. They were of that strong creed which believed that without moral sanctions and intelligence no country’s business future could be secure. With these elements in a community, prosperity will be fostered and of such a country great hopes will be entertained.— “It dreads no sceptic’s puny hands While near the school the church-spire stands; Nor fears the blinded bigot’s rule While near the church-spire stands the school.”