is
career was only beginning. Coming down from the north {134} each year
by the Red River to St Paul, on his way east, he talked over the
railway situation with Hill and Kittson. The more they talked the
greater grew their faith in the country and the railroad. It was a
faith, however, that few in the moneyed East shared with them. It had
been the smashing of the rival road, the Northern Pacific, in 1873,
that had given the signal for the brief panic and the long depression
of the seventies. The Minnesota road itself had twice become bankrupt.
The legislature would undoubtedly soon declare the land-grant
forfeited, unless the construction promised was completed. To fill the
cup, in the middle seventies Minnesota and the neighbouring lands were
visited by unprecedented swarms of grasshoppers or Rocky Mountain
locusts. Swarming down from the plateau lands of the Rockies in
columns miles high, covering the ground from horizon to horizon, they
swept resistlessly forward, devouring every green thing in their way.
When they had passed, hundreds of deserted shacks stood silent
witnesses to the settlers' despair.

[Illustration: Lord Strathcona. From a photograph by Lafayette, London]

It was in 1876 that the further allies needed came from the East.
Thirty years earlier George Stephen, a younger cousin of Donald Smith,
had left his Highland hills to seek his {135} fortune in London, and
after a short apprenticeship there had gone still farther afield,
joining an uncle in Montreal. He rose rapidly to a foremost place in
the wholesale trade of Montreal; selling led him into manufacturing,
and manufacturing into financial activities. In 1876 he became
president of the Bank of Montreal. Associated with him in the same
bank was still another shrewd, forth-faring Scot, Richard B. Angus, who
had risen steadily in its service until appointed to succeed E. H. King
as general manager in 1869.

A lawsuit in connection with the bank's affairs took both Stephen and
Angus to Chicago in 1876. A week's adjournment left them with unwonted
leisure. A toss of a coin sent them to St Paul rather than to St Louis
to spend the week. Smith had already spoken of the project while in
Montreal, but at that distance caution had prevailed. Now Stephen, who
had never before seen the prairie, was immensely taken with the rich,
deep soil he saw before him. He knew from reading and experience that
grasshopper plagues did not last for ever.