The Manitoba North Western also had come into the hands of Sir Hugh Allan and associates--as to which it can be seen how strong the passion for laying rails and ties is in the human breast where once it has found a lodgment. Sir Hugh Allan’s syndicate, on which Sir John Macdonald’s first Government had foundered, did not build the C.P.R.; but the old steamship man did have a hand in a prairie railway, after all. He did not long survive his advent to the headship of the North Western, and in my time the president was Mr. Andrew Allan, his brother. Like other branch lines which later struggled into existence, only to fall into the big fellow’s hands, our road had more anticipations than way-bills. Indeed, in the West, it was a devout saying, “Faith, Hope and Charity--and the greatest of these is Hope.” The season before I joined the line it had carried a total of 362,952 bushels of grain. In 1886-7 we brought 427,650 bushels to the terminal, and handed them either to the C.P.R. or to the mill. The total grain shipment from the whole line then, was only what became a very common season’s business at station after station on the Canadian Northern, not so many years later. The other exportable freight were cattle. We couldn’t roll in wealth, when the carloads of stock handled for the years 1885-9 averaged fifty for the whole system. Even so we were a goodly portion of the financial backbone of Portage la Prairie. We managed to pay the wages, without which the merchants’ cash takings would have had a very low visibility. We were identified with the life of the community in a way that is not so easily recognized in large cities where railway employees are a small percentage of the population. As the Portage was and is typical of Western Canadian development, a sketch of it as a newcomer learned to become assimilated with it, is probably worth while. During the early history of the West the Portage was on the map; for traders portaged the fifteen miles across the plain from the Assiniboine River to Lake Manitoba. Its modern history began when, in 1851, Archdeacon Cochrane, seeing that the Fort Garry settlement was becoming saturated, as far as the then conditions of population could be judged, founded a mission and settlement near the old post on the Assiniboine, fifty-six miles west of Fort Garry. The land was a little lighter than in the Valley of the Red, and was likely to ripen crops a week or ten days earlier than on the lower level. The supereminence of the Portage Plains as wheat growers was later to justify the noble archdeacon’s foresight.