ing pushed westward from Detroit toward Chicago. A road
through Canada would provide a shorter link than one south of Lake
Erie, and the Great Western was designed to fill this gap.

{47}

With all the possibilities of through and local traffic, and of
comparatively good grades and few curves, the road was long in
starting. An eminent American engineer, Charles B. Stuart, reported
glowingly on the prospects. Two citizens of Hamilton, Allan MacNab,
fiery politician and calculating lobbyist, and Isaac Buchanan, untiring
advocate of railways, protection, and paper money, threw themselves
into the campaign. Samuel Zimmermann, the best known contractor of the
period, a Pennsylvanian who had come to Canada to take a Welland Canal
contract, and stayed to be the power behind the scenes in the
provincial legislature, was prepared to build the road. Hudson gave
the scheme his approval. All to no immediate purpose. The contracts
were let, ground was broken at London in 1843, but the money to build
was not forthcoming. In consequence the Great Western also turned to
parliament for aid.

The Toronto, Simcoe and Huron Union Railroad Company--later known as
the Northern--the first road in Upper Canada on which steam locomotives
were used, was still slower in emerging from the promotion stage. The
idea of building a great portage road between Lake Huron and Lake
Ontario was an obvious {48} one, and proposals for its construction
were frequent. It was not until the scheme was taken up by Frederick
Chase Capreol, a sanguine and ingenious Englishman many years resident
in Toronto, that any real progress was made. Capreol conceived the
brilliant idea of combining the lure of a lottery and the increment of
land values to finance a road from Toronto to Georgian Bay. His
proposal was to raise funds by a lottery for the purchase of 100,000
acres of land along the route of the railroad, and to pay for the road
out of the increase in the value of the land. Objections moral and
financial were urged, and Capreol modified his scheme. In 1849 an Act
was passed granting a charter and permitting the raising of money
either by subscription or by lottery, but it was reserved by the
governor-general for royal assent, on account of the lottery clause.
Capreol, nothing daunted, sailed for England, and in seven weeks was
back with royal assent assured. The lottery, for all its alluring
promises, fell flat. Then the Northern, too, clamoure