Towards the C.P.R. the high and mighty Grand Trunk directors in London had a disdain not unlike what their successors felt for the Canadian Northern when it first stretched its hand towards the London money market. The year that began my service produced two most remarkable developments in the general scheme and the administration of the C.P.R. The first day of 1882 saw the first day’s work of Van Horne as general manager of the C.P.R. The first year’s work of Van Horne saw also the abandonment of the plan of first reaching Winnipeg by rail from Eastern Canada via Sault Ste. Marie, instead of by Port Arthur. To give an idea of the atmosphere that it was sought to develop in the London money market at that time, it is interesting to see a pamphlet that was issued under Grand Trunk auspices, in opposition to the proposal to build the C.P.R. around the north shore of Lake Superior. The territory now traversed by three transcontinental lines was described as “a perfect blank, even on the maps of Canada. All that is known of the region is that it would be impossible to construct this one section for the whole cash subsidy provided by the Canadian Government for the entire scheme.” This view was not a purely Grand Trunk bogey. It coloured the Liberal party’s opposition to the C.P.R. Thomas Robertson, founder of the Toronto candy-making firm, used to tell with much glee how his old friend who became Senator Jaffray, president of “The Globe”, and of the Imperial Bank, was in the habit of declaring that he would not risk his life on a train north of Lake Superior in winter. Grand Trunk understrappers, of whom I was one, had no direct contact with the big fighting that was going on between the old Canadian railway and the new, looking to the future control of transcontinental business. But we could feel temperatures; and we picked up information about the forces that were playing against each other, which, perhaps, the ordinary reader of the newspapers did not gather from what came out of the West. As a matter of fact, not much did come out of the West, where the most extraordinary phase of a most extraordinary phase of modern railway construction was being accomplished. There was no telegraph connection over all-Canadian territory between Montreal and Winnipeg, and the newspaper services were meagre indeed, compared with what they are now.