Becoming the first auditor of the company brought me into contact with the president, Mr. Mackenzie, of Toronto, and led to a connection of twenty-six years with the phenomenal expansion of a railway system, which is now the main hope of prosperity for a national property. I had met Mr. Mann almost immediately after arriving at Portage la Prairie, in 1886. As there are some misapprehensions in the public mind about the earlier association of these remarkable men, perhaps it is as well to tell the authentic story. As a western worker, Sir Donald Mann preceded Sir William Mackenzie by several years. He brought the first locomotive into Winnipeg on Christmas Eve, 1879, having come down the Red River during the previous summer. Sir William Mackenzie’s first essay in Western development was in 1884, when he took contracts on the mountain section of the C.P.R. It is a mistake to suppose that that was Mackenzie’s first experience in railway construction. He had had a contract on the Victoria Railway, between Port Hope and Orillia, via Blackwater, now called the Midland section of the Canadian National System. That was one of the first great enterprises, outside his beloved insurance, in which the late Senator Cox was heavily concerned as a financier. Mackenzie had taught school, and had done some building. He had also worked in the Lake Simcoe and Muskoka territory when it was furnishing Toronto with most of its lumber and fuel. When the Mackenzie men, teams, and equipment began work in the region of Banff, where James Ross, the chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific, had charge of a construction then unexampled in Canada, they became known as “The Farmer Outfit”, because their harness and get-up generally were more like the appurtenances of Ontario than the gear of truly Western operators. Over twenty years afterwards, when a distinguished party was travelling to Edmonton for the inauguration of the province of Alberta, they drove from the end of Canadian Northern steel, several miles east of Vermilion, to the new capital. One of the guides over the unfamiliar trails was bridge builder Weller, who told the stranger he was driving that he was with Mackenzie on his first contract in the mountains. He was still the same Mackenzie, Weller said, though bigger business left him little time to fraternize with his old associates. “There is no Sunday time to be killed in tents,” he said, “by sitting around the stove on chilly nights and singing Sankey’s hymns. Mr. Mackenzie was quite a singer in those days, but only on Sunday nights.” Far ahead of “The Farmer Outfit”, in the vanguard of the graders, was another contractor--the same who had brought the engine across the Red River ice, and had been on the job as the C.P.R. was laid through Brandon, Regina and Calgary. Sir Donald Mann’s reminiscences of a hard season’s work include his first seeing of the governor-general, the Marquis of Lansdowne, and his first meeting with Sir William Mackenzie.