Natively, Mr. Ashdown was a Londoner. He came to Canada in 1853, at nine years of age. He learned tinsmithing at Hespeler, in Ontario, under the old apprenticeship system, which inculcated obedience and frugality, until its subject was long past the period at which, in these times, young hopefuls are post-graduates of the School of Bringing Up Father. The Ashdown apprenticeship was decided on after finding a sixpence on the road he walked over from Guelph to Hespeler. That lucky sixpence brought these payments: board, lodge and laundry, twenty-five dollars the first year, thirty dollars the second year, and thirty-five dollars the concluding year. The apprenticeship over, he ventured to Chicago and Kansas before sallying north. To reach Fort Garry he walked nineteen days from St. Cloud. Fort Garry, in 1868 furnished a fair livelihood to an expert metal worker, and illimitable outlook to a seer. Ashdown was both, and would go a long way to advance his business or broaden his grasp of the future. For a pioneering story this is as good as any that even the apocryphers have produced:-- A neighbouring hardware merchant becoming tired of his prospects offered to sell his stock, store and goodwill to Ashdown for a thousand dollars. Ashdown said he hadn’t the money, but asked for a little time to turn the proposition over in his mind. It was Friday afternoon. Monday morning the hardwareman met Ashdown, who said he couldn’t buy the business. He had walked to Portage la Prairie, hoping to raise the thousand dollars, and had been turned down. The return trip, Winnipeg to Portage la Prairie, meant a tramp of 112 miles. Against the background which the personalities of these typical men faithfully represent, one always thinks of modern Winnipeg in terms of historical glamour. Its business was always substantial and always anxious, the future being very tantalizing. There was an almost continuous procession through the papers of plans for great Western development. Railway schemes were the most intriguing and impressive. They were divisible into two main streams of endeavour--to defeat the monopolistic entrenchments of the C.P.R., and to build and magnify branches from the main artery of traffic, under independent control. First, something about the anti-monopoly fight, in which the battle of Fort Whyte has a place all its own in economic and political warfare; and then a few recalls from the long and wearisome trail of lateral development, up to the point where an insignificant line was built, which was not destined to fall into the capacious hands of the Canadian Pacific, but was the beginning of the longest, though not yet the most prosperous, system in the world--the Canadian National Railways.