The C.P.R. was not alarmed, but it was very observant. There was a world of difference between being kind to a few branch lines that were as much feeders of the C.P.R. as if they belonged to it, and welcoming a challenge to its supremacy of transportation to and from the head of the Great Lakes. CHAPTER X. _Describing meetings of a traffic manager with Sioux Indians and sudden millionaires._ It is a curious truth that the only considerable railway retreat from Canada by United States interests was made by J. J. Hill, one of the syndicate which brought the C.P.R. to fruition. He was a pioneer in Red River navigation which Eastern Canadians, bound for Fort Garry, used in summer. His association with Donald Smith and George Stephen, future members of the House of Lords, transformed a little Minnesota line from the derelict property of Dutch bondholders into the Great Northern and opened the way to a Canadian farm boy’s control of American railways without parallel before his time. Hill retired from the C.P.R. when it was determined to build the Superior section from Sudbury to Port Arthur, nominally because he feared the ability of the C.P.R. to support itself through so much wilderness, but really because it would prevent his own roads carrying the through traffic between Eastern and Western Canada, from Sault Ste. Marie to Winnipeg, for which connection the C.P.R. line to the Soo, through Sudbury, had been built. The Northern Pacific receivership finally threw that system into Hill’s control. Grain rates to Duluth from Minnesota and North Dakota were still higher than they were from Manitoba to Fort William. The extension of traffic in Canada therefore, would tempt the American farmer to demand, in his own territory, as favourable a treatment as his Canadian competitor received on his own soil. The possibility of the Northern Pacific lines in Manitoba becoming part of a Canadian system was enlarged by a change of Government in Winnipeg. With its best brain, and chief driving force transferred to the Interior Department at Ottawa, the Greenway administration fell into a slough of complacent reliance for continuing power upon what it had done to deprive the C.P.R. of its detested monopoly, and to facilitate settlement of the empty, fertile northwestern quarter of the province. The general election at the end of 1899 destroyed the Greenway Government. On the morning after the polling I happened to meet the Premier on the train. He was frank enough to attribute the defeat to excessive cocksureness. Later, he was sent to Ottawa, where he was a useful, though not a brilliant, commoner alongside his former attorney-general, Mr. Sifton, who was the federal general for the Liberal party all through the West, for the elections of 1896, 1900, 1904 and 1908.