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The Man Who Built the Trans-Canada Railway
At last the development that William Cornelius Van Horne has set his sights on has arrived: the driving of the last spike on the Canadian Pacific Railway’s trans-Canada line. It is November 7, 1885, a dull, raw day in Craigellachie in British Columbia’s Eagle Pass, west of Revelstoke in the Rocky Mountains.
The photograph that records this epochal event in Canadian history shows a phalanx of dark fir trees and cedars and in front of it a crowd of men. Workmen, surveyors, construction managers, and curious onlookers, they crane forward to watch a white-bearded figure in a stovepipe hat stoop to pick up his maul and complete the line. The first choice to perform the task was Governor General Lord Lansdowne, the son-in-law of Queen Victoria, but neither he nor George Stephen, the CPR president, can be here. So the honour falls to Donald Smith, a company director who twelve years later will become Lord Strathcona.
Smith swings at the tie held in place by Major A.B. Rogers, the engineer in charge of the CPR’s Mountain Division, but his first blow bends the iron spike so badly that it is quickly replaced with another. On his second attempt Smith succeeds. The audience, overawed, remains silent for a moment, then breaks out with a resounding cheer. Before long, the shrill whistles of the surrounding locomotives join in the hearty applause.
William Van Horne, the CPR vice-president, the man who had managed the building of this ribbon of steel that linked the country east to west, steps forward to make his speech: “All I can say,” he says tersely, “is that the work has been well done in every way.”
He has succeeded in hurling twenty-four hundred miles of railway track across half a continent, much of it in wilderness. Moreover, he has done so in far less time than anyone had predicted. Alexander Mackenzie, Canada’s second prime minster, announced in October 1875 that the road “could not likely be completed in ten years with all the power of men and all the money of the Empire.” The current Canadian government also allowed a decade for the construction of the railway, but Van Horne has managed to complete it in less than half that time — four and a half years.
The superhuman dynamo who pushed through the construction of the Canadian Pacific’s main line was an American. William Cornelius Van Horne, the son of Cornelius and Mary Van Horne, was born on February 3, 1843, in the now abandoned village of Chelsea, just west of the town of Frankfort in Illinois.
He was descended from Jan Cornelissen Van Horne, a true pioneer who left Amsterdam for America in 1635 and helped to found New Amsterdam (now New York City) on Manhattan Island. Van
Perhaps the most famous Canadian photo. It shows Lord Strathcona driving the last spike at Craigellachie. The bearded, corpulent figure on his right is Van Horne.
Courtesy of the Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal, MP-000.25.971.
Horne’s paternal grandfather, Abram, or “the Dominie,” as he was affectionately known, was a highly respected minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. He followed the example of other Van Horne males by marrying into a prominent Dutch-American family, the Covenhoven clan. Although Abram’s ministry covered a large area in New York State and his fees were lamentably small, he was able to maintain himself, his wife, and nine children in comfort thanks to the substantial legacies that both he and his wife had received from their fathers. With this generous assistance, they supported as many as twenty slaves and continued the Van Horne and Covenhoven family traditions of abundant hospitality.
Van Horne’s father was therefore born into a stable and prosperous family. The Dominie hoped that Cornelius would also enter the ministry, but this high-spirited son had other plans. In 1813, when he was only nineteen, he married Elizabeth Vedder and the following year, after graduating from Union College in New York, he embarked on law studies. Cornelius was enjoying the income and prestige from a successful law practice when, in 1832, he suddenly uprooted his family and took them by covered wagon to the distant frontier state of Illinois. Like thousands of other restless Yankees at the time, he turned his back on the sophisticated community in which he had grown up and the relative security that it offered and struck out for the American Midwest. What motivated him, we do not know. It might have been a sense of adventure or a wish to escape the conventions of life on the eastern seaboard. Or it might have been some vague, undefined dissatisfaction and a belief that utopia existed in the wilderness of Illinois, destined to become the fastest-growing territory in the world in the mid-nineteenth century.
In today’s world of paved roads and sleek airplanes and trains, it is hard to imagine the gruelling journey that the young family took. For transportation, they relied on the “prairie schooner,” a heavily laden, covered wagon that bumped along dusty, bone-bruising trails. To reach their destination, the Van Hornes travelled for hundreds of miles along these rutted paths, forded rivers, and braved severe weather conditions. As they did so, they hoped to avoid the many deadly diseases common at the time or confrontations with hostile Indians.
Once arrived in Illinois, the family cleared land and constructed a cabin in New Lenox Township, in the northern part of the state. Two years later, however, they moved to nearby Frankfort, settling about a mile west of the hamlet, where Van Horne was born. Their new home was carved out of the wilderness on land that would be surveyed for the town of Chelsea in 1848–49.
In this sparsely settled part of what would become Will County, Van Horne’s father became a respected community leader. He continued his law practice and also served as the first schoolmaster in the area and as Will County’s first postmaster and justice of the peace. In all these roles, he was respected for his force of character, his shrewdness, and his “bold, outspoken way of giving vent to his honest convictions.” In due course his son William came to be noted for these same characteristics.
Unfortunately, Cornelius’s early years in Illinois were scarred by tragedy. A daughter died in infancy and, in 1838, his wife, Elizabeth, passed away, leaving him with four young children. He sent them to live with relatives or friends. To add to his burden, in the winter of 1839–40 the family home was “consumed by fire.”
After the blaze, which claimed his homestead, barns, books, and other personal effects, Cornelius set about building a new home. In this he was aided by his brother Matthew, a prosperous farmer who had settled nearby with another brother. It was to this log house in 1842 that Cornelius brought his second wife, Mary Minier Richards, the daughter of a Pennsylvanian mother of French origin and an American father of German descent who had immigrated to the colonies as a young man.
William Cornelius Van Horne was the first child of this second marriage and, in less than a decade, he was joined by four siblings: Augustus Charles in 1844, Elizabeth in 1846, Theodore in 1848, and Mary in 1852. Interestingly, both of William’s brothers also took up a railway career, but neither rose to such lofty heights as he did. As the first-born, William soon exhibited many of the characteristics that psychologists associate with the oldest child — natural leadership, reliability, conscientiousness, and a striving for perfection. These same traits would prove indispensable in advancing Van Horne’s career.
For a person whose destiny was to be linked with railways, the 1840s was an exciting period in which to be born in the United States. In the first explosion of railway construction, the amount of track more than tripled, from three to nine thousand miles. In the 1850s, work gangs laid another twenty-one thousand miles of track and provided the country east of the Mississippi River with its basic overland transportation networks. The 1840s also witnessed the perfection of railway construction techniques and the tentative emergence of the railway as the “first modern business.” Such was the enormity of the impact of these developments that we can compare it to the influence of the Internet on present-day North American business and society.
This decade also saw the emergence