Nothing in North American transportation quite equals the rise and fall of the Canadian Northern. Those who were intimately associated with its twenty-six years’ history scarcely realized the extent to which Mackenzie and Mann were unique among the roadmakers of all the continents. For the accumulation of wealth, and also for the domination of railway systems of huge mileage, James J. Hill was in a class by himself. He died worth sixty million dollars--without a will. He obtained vast riches through the iron ore deposits of the Mesaba range, in the Minnesota hinterland of Lake Superior--there was nothing like it in Canada. His railways connected Chicago with the cities and plains of the United States northwest, even to the Pacific Ocean. His ships sailed to Nippon and far Cathay. Sir William Mackenzie and Sir Donald Mann made no enormous fortunes out of the railway they built from Atlantic to Pacific tidewaters. But they performed a feat which no American combination ever achieved. Their enterprise was more original than anything which Hill carried to profitable result; for they began beyond where Hill, and even the Canadian Pacific, had left off. Indeed, Hill pulled out of Canadian railway building rather than share responsibility for the first line on Superior’s northern shore. Mackenzie and Mann’s original railway carried settlement a hundred miles north of the line beyond which implement manufacturers had refrained from extending their credit. They went, not only where railway obligations had not gone, but where, aforetime, railway obligation was afraid to venture. They looked ultimately to great fortune for themselves--there has never been any pretense to the contrary. But they had in them infinitely more than a lust for pelf. The first justice that is done to these two men is a frank recognition of the pioneering, constructive passion which made of them great Canadians. Ambition that was all self-sacrifice never braced a continent with steel. The money changers do not open the purse of Fortunatus to Simon Pure altruists. Railways must be carried to completion on the financial engines that are available to mundane men. The Canadian Northern was brought into being because the time had come when more than the C.P.R. was needed in Western Canada. It is not good for a railway to be alone in so broad a land. The combination that had grown out of a contest over the ownership of a corral-full of mules away up in the Selkirks was the ordained instrument to prove that an impossible piece of work could be done. Sir William Mackenzie, in his favourite car, the Atikokan--which was bought while it was being used by Admiral Dewey on his triumphal tour--was discussing with a guest one night in 1905 the prospects of the Canadian Northern, which had not yet reached Edmonton. His inveterate optimism then believed that Hudson Bay would be reached within three years. Asked if he had ever been to the Bay he answered: