Van Horne wasn’t afraid of the emptiness between Lake Nipissing and Thunder Bay. He figured the through traffic would be enough to offset the disadvantage of practically no local business through the wilderness. He saw that, with Hill in the strategical position he had marked out for himself, the C.P.R. couldn’t well be its own master--rather, perhaps, that Van Horne couldn’t be its master. Sir John Macdonald and the Government had always wanted to reach the West over all-Canadian rails. And so it came about that Van Horne’s arrival at Montreal, after the 1882 construction season, for his permanent headquarters, synchronized with the beginning of the Superior Division construction or, rather, with the sending in of supplies during the winter, for the 1883 work. It turned out that three seasons’ construction completed the Lake Superior Division, and the first trains from Montreal to Winnipeg ran in the fall of 1885. The new atmosphere which had begun to affect railway business in Canada can be partially appreciated by those who were not within its influence. A tremendous, and at times terrifying, power had come on to the job of Canadian development. The Grand Trunk bucked it openly in London, and quietly derided it in Canada. In Montreal, though, we were so far from the West--always bear in mind that it wasn’t till late in 1885 that you could travel in the same train across the Province of Ontario--that the tales which came through of what was happening in the North West seemed about as far-fetched as Mark Twain’s yarn of the jumping frog. For instance, it was a matter of knowledge that the C.P.R. charter provided for the line to be built through the Yellowhead Pass, since taken by the Grand Trunk Pacific, and the Canadian Northern, and to end about where Prince Rupert now is. The route had been changed; and instead of going through Battleford, the newly-established capital of the North West Territories, and up the North Saskatchewan Valley, the C.P.R., we were informed, was going to Fort Calgary up the Bow river (which becomes the South Saskatchewan where it is joined by the Red Deer), and was then to get through the mountains, and reach the Pacific ocean--somehow. And, in very truth, it was some somehow.