The Romance of the Canadian Pacific Railway

The fascination for studying the genesis of things that exist seems to be universal. Men have an instinctive and urgent desire to find out how objects that are seen actually originated. Scientists and savages alike, for instance, are still hammering out theories as to the process by which the world was made, though to most of us the most ancient account is adequate. Once I knew an Indian boy on the prairie who was so curious to discover how the figure of a dog appeared at the centre of a large glass “marble” we were playing with, that when I had turned away for a moment, he broke it open with the back of a tomahawk. Similarly, we have known exploring scientists who spent laborious lives in the endeavour to find the sources of a great river.

To be indifferent to the beginnings of things which have become part of our lives, betokens either the calamitous absence of a thinking mind or that horrible satisfaction with present possession which ignores the toil and the tears and the sacrifices of past generations. To persons of such vacant or selfish natures all the explorers and the pioneers—the men whose souls yearned beyond the sky-line of their immediate surroundings—are of no particular account. The untrodden ways which daring pathfinders opened up with adventurous feet are of no consequence to the unthinking who settle comfortably on lands pre-empted by the blood-marked footsteps of the trailmakers.

It is because we are not of the number who are sodden with crass materialism and seared by the branding iron of greed, that we desire to learn the history of the things which minister to our continued existence and comfort in this great new day, the far-off vision of which made glad the brave seers and workers of earlier times.

These thoughts come to me now just as I am riding westward on the public observation car of a Canadian Pacific Railway train, through the great mountains that are piled up on the sunset verge of the Dominion of Canada. The traditional weariness of travel is practically banished by these wheeled palaces, which that living, breathing, throbbing locomotive, under the skilful direction of her driver, draws through passes and tunnels and glorious river canyons down to the Western sea. And I thought of how, in times gone by, that Western Sea had been in the dreams of gallant men who hoped to reach its shores some day. I recalled how noble sea-rovers, like Henry Hudson and Sir John Franklin, had thrown away their lives in the attempt to find a North-west Passage by water across the North American continent, from the Atlantic. And I remembered, too, how Alexander MacKenzie, the fur-trader, starting by trail from near the old Peace River Crossing, had gone over the mountains on foot, and how he wrote on a rock by the Pacific the amazing inscription, “Alexander MacKenzie, from Canada, by land, July 22nd, 1793.” We call that inscription amazing because behind it and flashing through it is the story of an invincible will in heroic action and the record of physical daring unsurpassed in the palmiest days of the athletes and gladiators in Greece and Rome.