ty--The Canadian Northern

The first quarter-century of Confederation failed to redeem the glowing
promises and high hopes of the founders of the new nation. Much had
been done: the half-continent from ocean to ocean had been brought into
the fold of one union; national consciousness was slowly growing; great
efforts had been spent in linking the scattered parts by railways and
waterways. But still political unity and economic prosperity both
lagged. The country was torn by racial and religious bickerings. In
the East, the exodus to the United States bled the country white; in
the West, drought, frost, and the low prices of grain kept settlers
away. Canadian Pacific stock, selling in the middle nineties at 35,
registered the market's estimate of the future of the Canadian West.

Then, slowly at first, and soon with cumulative momentum, came a
transformation. {182} World-wide causes worked with local factors to
change the whole face of affairs. New discoveries of gold and rising
prices gave everywhere a fillip to trade. In the United States the
disappearance of free land set its farmers looking elsewhere. In
Canada change of methods, or the favourable turn of a climatic cycle,
enabled the lands of the North-West to prove their abounding fertility.
The discovery of gold in the Klondike afforded good advertising for
Canada if little more of permanence. In the government and in the
financial, the railway and the industrial worlds there were men who
rose to the opportunity: no longer was Canada's light hid under a
bushel. The most was made of the alluring gifts she had to offer to
men the world over who strove to better themselves, and the flood of
immigration began.

The first result of the swarming of thousands to the West was a demand
for new railways, to open up plain and prairie and mineral range, and
to make connection with East and West. The building of the railways in
its turn gave a stimulus to every industry. As in the early fifties
and early eighties, this period of rapid railway expansion--much
longer, however, than previous periods--was {183} an era of optimistic
planning and feverish speculation.

First to seize the golden opportunities were the group of men who built
the Canadian Northern. Railway history offers no more remarkable
record than the achievement of these few men, who, beginning in 1895
with a charter for a railway one hundred miles long in Manitoba,
leading nowhere in particula