We do not purpose to take up space with the oft-told story of the
building of the Canadian Pacific, but will offer a few observations chiefly
about early railroading. However we may state that at the beginning
of 1887 the C. P. R. employed 14,551 hands. There were 334 station
agents, 269 operators, other station employees numbered 791; there were
2,563 workshop employees, 375 locomotive engineers, 489 brakemen, 9,496
section men and others on the right of way, 1,147 bridge and building
men, and 1,457 unclassified. This was the stage at which what is now
the greatest transportation organisation in the world, had then arrived.
The C. P. R. held a monopoly from Brandon to Vancouver till about
1904, when the Mackenzie-Mann road invaded the fertile belt country.
Till then the C. P. R. was monarch of all it surveyed; and it was a com-
mon expression "We are all working for the C. P. R." Always was there
talk of railroad extensions and at one time the whole country was blank-
eted with charters granted either to the acknowledged or secret friends
of the C. P. R. The story of that monopoly if told truly and fearlessly
would not make pleasant reading. The position may be brought home to
the reader in a sentence or two. There was no other way out to the
markets of the world. If the C. P. R. should leave a man's wheat in his
barn or in an elevator, it wouldn't lose the freight on it, because
eventually it would have to go out on their road for the simple reason
there was no other way out. And the C. P.R. was all-powerful at Ottawa.
But it was to the C. P. R.'s interest to have branch lines as feeders to its
main line. Two lines were a necessity from the first; one from Regina
to Prince Albert and the other from Calgary to Edmonton. Prince
Albert was an old settlement. Before 1882 the nearest shipping point
from Prince Albert was Winnipeg. When the mainland opened the
nearest point was Troy, afterwards Qu'Appelle station.