Heading the parade were schemes initiated by his young protégé Percival Farquhar, who constantly sought new ways to make money — organizing a new railway, installing an electrified trolley line, or establishing an electrical power distribution system. An avid risk-taker, he shuttled restlessly around the Atlantic in his quest for new money-making projects. Frequently he found them in undeveloped Latin America, where gullible politicians were hungry for modern development. Whenever his search turned up a promising-looking project, he would assemble a syndicate made of bankers, investment dealers, and well-heeled capitalists to invest in the enterprise.
Invariably, Van Horne was sucked one way or another into Farquhar’s schemes, sometimes to his great regret. Such was the case with a railway project in Guatemala. Initially Van Horne spurned the idea of becoming involved, feeling weighed down by his many responsibilities and the steady demands being made on his pocketbook. But then he capitulated, no doubt because of his friendship with Farquhar and his gratitude for his services to the Cuba Company. The difficult terrain across which the new line had to be constructed, coupled with political strife and open warfare, unleashed a host of problems. During Guatemala’s war with Honduras, Salvador, and Costa Rica, all outside funding for railway construction was cut off. As a result, syndicate members had to dig into their own pockets to find the necessary finances to complete the line. Van Horne found himself pressed for funds — probably because he had invested more than he had intended to in Cuba — and he was forced to sell some of his investments in Mexico. He even had to sell part of his interest in the Guatemala Railroad to Farquhar and other parties. In short, by his own admission, he “suffered severely” from his involvement in the railway. To assume his share of the financial burden, he made sacrifices in both money and time.
Van Horne’s association with the Guatemala Railroad, and then with the Brazil Railway, served only to increase his apprehension about the way Farquhar operated — particularly his lack of attention. Although Farquhar was expected to spend most of his time supervising the Guatemala Railroad’s progress, he was, instead, chasing opportunities in Brazil, Colorado, and Alaska. “Success is only possible in taking up one thing and sticking to it exclusively, until it is worked to a conclusion,” Van Horne wrote indignantly to his friend. “I regard failure as certain in every one of those enterprises which depend largely on you.”
So disturbed was Van Horne about Farquhar’s way of operating that he tried to resign from the Brazil Railway Company as soon as possible. However, although he insisted that his name be removed from all the company’s publicity material, it continued to appear among the list of directors for several years. Eventually the railway collapsed, confirming his worst suspicions.
Problems of a different sort confronted Van Horne in his association with two enterprises in the Maritimes: the Dominion Coal Company and the Dominion Iron and Steel Company, both of which were initially headed by Van Horne’s friend Henry Whitney, a Boston industrialist. In 1901 Whitney and his associates sold majority control of the two operations to a syndicate led by James Ross, a prominent Canadian financier and railway contractor, who in 1903 sold the steel company to another financier, J.H.
Plummer. As a director of the two companies, Van Horne became closely involved in a long and bitter contract dispute between them. At issue was a formal contract that the coal company signed in 1899 with the Dominion Iron and Steel Company to furnish high-grade coal. The dispute degenerated into a protracted battle that first played out in Nova Scotia’s Supreme Court. There, Van Horne served as a witness for the steel company, having resigned earlier from the coal company’s board. Initially he lamented the litigation and tried desperately to avert it, but once involved, he revelled in detecting and defeating his adversary’s moves — just as he had years before in his old railway battles. Eventually the case went all the way to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London (then Canada’s highest court of appeal), which upheld the Dominion Iron and Steel Company’s case.
Van Horne demonstrated his national vision by investing in British Columbia, where he became a late subscriber in the British Columbia Lumber Company. Another B.C. venture in which he took an interest began during one of his annual western inspection trips. When his train was delayed for some hours at Yale, Van Horne and his party tried their hand at panning the river soil for gold. Soon after, they all invested in a hydraulic mining plant, which developed into the Horsefly and Hydraulic mining companies. They struggled along for several years in the province conducting placer mining operations, but eventually the companies were wound up after much more than the original investment had been lost.
The fortunes of another company in which Van Horne had an interest, the New York–based Equitable Life Assurance Society, attracted a lot of adverse attention thanks to the shenanigans of its principals. The unwelcome publicity did not occur, however, until several years after Van Horne joined the company’s board, which boasted several leading American financiers he knew well. Confident that the company was in good shape and meeting its obligations, Van Horne attended board meetings only occasionally, and then only in a perfunctory way. Great was his shock, then, when the society, along with the other two big insurance companies, became the subject of screaming newspaper headlines and eventually an investigation by the New York State Legislature. A series of magazine articles had charged the three firms with systematically bribing regulators and politicians and investing policy-holders’ money in risky ventures instead of “safe” government bonds. In 1905, the New York state investigative committee began to take evidence about the scandals. When that investigation revealed serious mismanagement and irregularities, a similar body, the Royal Commission on Insurance, was appointed in Canada in 1906.
Van Horne was shocked by the revelations of misconduct on the part of the North American insurance industry. He was so mortified personally that he began to question the propriety of retaining directorships in companies in which he exercised no control. In 1907, therefore, he began to retire as gracefully as he could from many of them. He still retained an interest, however, in many firms. Several of these firms involved transportation in one form or another, notably street railways and traditional railways. Like other railway tycoons of this era, Van Horne invested in electric street railways, which began replacing horse-drawn trams as a mode of public transit in the late 1880s. Among the urban tramway systems in which he invested were the Toronto Railway Company and the Winnipeg Street Railway, whose reorganization was spearheaded by the wily and crafty William Mackenzie, one of Canada’s best-known entrepreneurs in the first two decades of the twentieth century and a leader in the reorganization and electrification of street railways. In Saint John, New Brunswick, Van Horne and James Ross, an aggressive utility entrepreneur, purchased the property of the Consolidated Electric Company and became actively involved in the modernization of the street railway there.
Abroad, Van Horne invested heavily in Latin America. There, his many investments included the Demerara Electric Company in Georgetown, British Guiana, and the Mexican Light and Power Company, whose head office moved from Halifax to Montreal. In Brazil — a vast, undeveloped country brimming with promise — Van Horne became associated with various enterprises blazed by the well-known promoter and engineer, Fred Pearson. One of these undertakings was a holding company formed in 1912: Brazilian Traction, Light and Power Company, headed by William Mackenzie as chairman and Fred Pearson as president. They appointed Van Horne as a director on its first board. He took great satisfaction in knowing that the company, Brazil’s largest utility company, was making a substantial contribution to the economic development of southeastern Brazil’s industrial heartland.
Launching new companies in an era of unregulated and unscrupulous financial systems and scraping funds together to keep some of them going would have been enough to tax the energies of most men of