Sir John Macdonald’s son, Hugh John, who had joined the Tupper Government in 1896 as Minister of the Interior, and was practising law in Winnipeg, became Premier in January, 1900; passed a prohibition bill, which was disallowed at Ottawa, resigned the premiership to oppose Sifton in Brandon later in the year, and was succeeded by R. P. Roblin, who had left Prince Edward county twenty years before, and was farming near Carman. In 1900 Mr. Mann, as Sir Donald Mann recalls the episode, while passing through St. Paul on the way to Toronto, called upon his old friend Mr. Hill, and incidentally enquired whether the Northern Pacific would sell its Manitoba lines to the Canadian Northern. Incidentally, also, Mr. Hill replied with an axiom of railway practice: “No railway ever sells branch lines to another railway.” But, he remarked, in further incidental conversation, a railway might sell branch lines to a Government. Nothing more was said upon the subject at that time. But next morning, instead of being in Chicago, Mr. Mann was in Winnipeg, enquiring of Premier Roblin whether his Government would consider buying the Northern Pacific lines in Manitoba, and turning them over, later, to the Canadian Northern. There was nothing disagreeable to the successors of the victors at Fort Whyte in the idea of a transaction which promised that the C.P.R. would at last meet real competition from southern, central and northern Manitoba to Lake Superior. But the Roblin Government was young, and required time to think. It was finally decided that if the lines were procured it must be without an undertaking to deliver them to any third party. So it came about that, in the session of 1901 the Manitoba Legislature passed an Act which transmogrified the Northern Pacific Manitoba feeders into Canadian Northern lines. In less than five years from Billy Walker getting his first highball (no connection with whiskey) from Dad Risteen, chief and sole conductor of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company, we were hauling wheat from Swan River and Grand View, and from Brandon and Hartney, over our own lines into our own terminals at Winnipeg, and to Emerson, whence the Northern Pacific carried it to Duluth. We could not deliver wheat to Port Arthur in 1901, but we did take part of that year’s crop over our own lines to that port, for on January 1st, 1902, connection was completed at Bear Pass, a few miles east of Rainy Lake, and Manitoba had a juncture with Eastern Canada independent of the C.P.R. If the C.P.R. could have prevented it, Port Arthur never would have renewed its youth through the advent of the Canadian Northern. A fight was on, which never sacrificed official and personal courtesies, and never relaxed the vigilance of the senior, or restricted the pertinacity of the junior road.