The delivery of rail supplies was of particular concern. Before construction of the prairie section began in the late spring, Van Horne had to arrange for the freighting of huge stores of rails and other materials to Winnipeg, the main supply point. The dimensions of this operation were immense. Since the St. Lawrence River would still be frozen when construction began, steel had to be shipped from New York and New Orleans and then hauled to Manitoba via St. Paul. Stone had to be ordered from every available quarry, lumber from Minnesota, railway ties from Lake of the Woods and Rat Portage (now Kenora), and rails from England and the Krupp works in Germany. As general manager, Van Horne had the responsibility for monitoring the whereabouts of these supplies as they made their way from their place of origin to the staging area. He accomplished this overview by arranging for hundreds of checkers to report daily on the arrival and movement of CPR supplies through American cities en route to Winnipeg.
Despite the delay in beginning construction, 1882 saw the completion of four hundred and seventeen miles of main track and twenty-eight more miles of sidings — a truly amazing achievement. By the end of August 1883, the railway stretched all the way from Winnipeg to Keith, ten miles west of Calgary and within sight of the forbidding Rocky Mountains.
To lay the track on the Prairies, a huge construction assembly line extended for a hundred miles or more across the open plains. At its head were CPR engineers and surveyors who located and staked the route that the railway would take. They were followed by grading crews and then the track gangs. To construct the line, the syndicate had hired a company headed by two Minnesota contractors, R.B. Langdon and David Shepard, who in turn parcelled out the work to more than sixty subcontractors.
Determined to speed up operations, Van Horne ordered the track to be advanced at five times the speed that crews had been laying it. During this period of frenzied prairie construction, the general manager seemed to be everywhere. When not doing paperwork in his Winnipeg office, he was out on the Prairies, riding on hand cars or flat cars, in a caboose, or, where the rails had not been laid, in a wagon or a buckboard. Despite his portliness, he moved about continually, “going like a whirlwind wherever he went, stimulating every man he met,” reported Angus Sinclair, one of the contractors. Van Horne had a habit of arriving at work sites unexpectedly and descending on local officials like “a blizzard,” observed an admiring Winnipeg Sun reporter. “He is the terror of Flat Krick. He shakes them up like an earthquake and they are as frightened of him as if he were old Nick himself.” Those who saw him in action were constantly amazed by his stamina, to say nothing of his daring. Watching their boss ignore his weight and march across trestles and ties at dizzying heights left all spectators thunderstruck.
To accomplish his goal, Van Horne would summarily dismiss men who were indifferent to their work or not inclined to obey orders. Collingwood Schreiber, the engineer-in-chief for the federal government, recalled that Van Horne would often say to him, “If you want anything done, name the day when it must be finished. If I order a thing done in a specified time and the man to whom I give the order says it is impossible to carry out, then he must go. Otherwise his subordinates would make no effort to accomplish the work in the time mentioned.” It was a philosophy that served the general manager well.
Van Horne’s somewhat autocratic manner and contempt for “the impossible” is well illustrated by a story retailed by J.H. Secretan:
One day he sent for me to his office in Winnipeg and, rapidly revolving his chair, squinted at me over the top his pince-nez, at the same time unrolling a profile about one hundred miles at a time, saying, “Look here, some damned fool of an engineer has put in a tunnel up there, and I want you to go and take it out!” I asked if I might be permitted to see where the objectionable tunnel was. He kept rolling and unrolling the profile until he came to the fatal spike which showed a mud tunnel about 900 feet long — somewhere on the Bow River at mileage 942. I mildly suggested that the engineer, whoever he was, had not put the tunnel in for fun. He didn’t care what the engineer did it for, but they were not going to build it and delay the rest of the work. “How long do you think it would take to build the cursed thing?” he asked. I guessed about twelve or fourteen months. That settled it. He was not there to build fool tunnels to please a lot of engineers. So, perfectly satisfied that the matter was settled and done with, he whirled around to his desk and went on with something else, simply remarking, “Mind you go up there yourself and a take that d–d tunnel out. Don’t send anybody else.”
I asked for the profile, and when I reached the door, paused for a minute and said, “While I’m up there hadn’t I better move some of the mountains back as I think they are too close to the river.” The “old man” looked up for a second, said nothing, but I could see the generous proportions of his corporation shaking like a jelly. He was convulsed with laughter.
The prairie section of the CPR was not, as is so often thought, built across only flat plains. Its route also included low rolling hills that presented many obstacles to laying a well-graded railway line. These challenges, though, were nothing compared to those that had to be met laying track through the mountains of British Columbia and across the Canadian Shield. Van Horne’s mettle and managerial genius were tested as never before in 1884 and 1885, the years in which the railway was pushed further in both these areas, to the west and the east.
Construction in mountainous British Columbia was especially challenging, for it was here that the most difficult terrain and weather along the entire CPR route were encountered. The seven-hundred-mile prairie section that lay between the Assiniboine River at Brandon, Manitoba, and the Elbow River at Calgary had required only one major structure — the South Saskatchewan Bridge at Medicine Hat. By contrast, the mountain line required many bridges, tunnels, and snow sheds, usually on the flanks of steep granite mountains pierced by deep canyons. Before construction in the mountains could be completed, miles of track had to be cut through solid rock and countless rivers had to be crossed, some by iron bridges more than a thousand feet in length and one by a wooden bridge two hundred and eighty-six feet above the water below — the highest bridge in North America. Moreover, fourteen streams had to be diverted from their natural beds by tunnelling them through solid rock.
Describing Van Horne’s intervention in a Rocky Mountain canyon, an unidentified spectator, H.R. Lewis, wrote:
There were men felling trees & men drafting great logs, men building trestles & braces & wooden bulwarks, men laboring to the utmost of their physical powers & men directing their labors, & one man there was, sturdy, plainly dressed & calm of bearing, who directed the directors. He seemed to be everywhere, giving his personal attention to each detail of the work. He found the spots claiming immediate attention & measured accurately with his eyes the speed of the rising waters.
He superintended the unloading of rock brought by puffing engines & assisted with his own hands in placing the heavy blocks of stone. He told the carpenters how to secure the huge wooden braces, the smiths where to fasten their iron clamps & with it all never lost for one moment his cool, authoritative demeanor.
The horrendous construction problems posed by the mountain section frequently led even qualified engineers to disagree among themselves on how certain portions of the line should be built. On these occasions, Van Horne had to act as the final arbitrator on these “grave engineering questions.” The fate of many workers rested on his decisions. Much of this difficult and dangerous toil was done by fifteen thousand Chinese labourers who were brought to British Columbia between 1880 and 1885 to work on the railway. Hundreds of them met their death as they built the line between Vancouver and Calgary, often from exposure in the harsh weather conditions or from being crushed by falling rock or killed by dynamite blasts.