Of all the departments of railway construction and operation, only one of the C.P.R. was located in Montreal in 1882--the purchasing department. Its chief was a young fellow named Shaughnessy. Except in age, there wasn’t much difference between the purchasing agent of 1882 and the peer who resigned the C.P.R. presidency thirty-six years later. Mr. Shaughnessy had arrived early in the year, from the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, whose general manager, Van Horne, had been given charge of the completion of the C.P.R. The financial chiefs of the young railway, notably George Stephen, had their headquarters in Montreal. But they were generally regarded as having other major interests. Among the Grand Trunk wise men, the enterprise that was poking its nose into the barbarian wilderness was looked upon with an almost amused toleration. In their own estimation, the Grand Trunk offices at Point St. Charles were a sort of Imperial hub. The C.P.R. was very much of a colonial affair, don’t you know--indeed, with a general manager from Milwaukee, rather too Yankee an affair, if the truth must bluntly be uttered. But, even then, there were the symptoms of a somewhat chastened mood in the Grand Trunk. For the year 1882 had produced results which, when they were predictions during the previous winter, were laughed at; but when they were achievements at the end of the year were ominous indeed. The Van Horne regime on the C.P.R. was the most remarkable innovation that had happened to the business life of the Dominion. Its first year had seen the construction of about five times as many miles of railway as the C.P.R. had laid during any previous year; and most of that on the remote prairies. The promise to begin, in 1883, building around the north shore of Lake Superior looked like business--and business it was. I think Van Horne had never been in Montreal when he took over the job of general manager of the Canadian Pacific on January 1, 1882, at Winnipeg. He came east shortly afterwards, and gave Ottawa and Montreal a few tastes of his quality. He did not settle in Montreal until after his first astounding Western season was ended. In midwinter, with little preparation made for the spring opening, Van Horne announced that he would lay five hundred miles of track on the prairies in the season of 1882. His advent at the head of affairs was not welcomed by a staff of Canadians and old countrymen. He was a Yankee. He was astonishingly aggressive. His vocabulary had all the certainty that belongs to the Presbyterian conception of everlasting retribution, without its restraint. He laughed at other men’s impossibilities, and ordered them to be done--a dynamo run by dynamite.