Canada’s Yankee Railroad Czar

A new biography reveals Van Horne’s private tragedies as well as his public accomplishments.

From Telegrapher to Titan: The Life of William C. Van Horne
Valerie Knowles

The Dundurn Group
501 pages, hardcover
ISBN 1550024884

he photograph is a memorable one—probably among the most celebrated in Canadian history. It shows a white-bearded Lord Strathcona, flanked by a crowd of onlookers, driving the last spike in the Canadian Pacific Railway. Beside him, a portly figure in homburg hat and dark suit catches the eye. William Van Horne, the managerial mastermind behind the CPR’s construction, is a dominating presence even when on the sidelines. This impression is no photographic fluke, as amply proven in Valerie Knowles’s full-length biography. At the narrative’s heart is a career trajectory of Horatio Alger proportions: a business genius rising from modest beginnings to the pinnacle of success, thanks to pluck and indefatigable energy, although his story is laced with setbacks and unexpected plot twists as well.

Born in frontier Illinois in 1843 , Van Horne traced his paternal roots back to some of New York City’s earliest Dutch settlers. His immediate family experienced more than its share of economic setbacks—especially after his father’s death from cholera when William was just eleven. His mother was left with “a lot of accounts payable and some bad accounts receivable,” as Van Horne later described her predicament. As the eldest son, he was expected to earn an income by making store deliveries after school. Soon he was delivering telegraph messages as well, initiating a lifelong interest in this new technology that was just beginning to transform everyday life in North America. By the age of 14 , he was working full-time as a telegrapher at a local train station. This job launched his other lifelong interest—an enthusiasm for the railway industry that would define his entire career. Self-confident and talented, the adolescent Van Horne quickly acquainted himself with various aspects of both the railway business and telegraphy. Within a few years, he was expert in the operations of dispatch offices and shop yards, his proficiency as a telegrapher perfected to the point where he could decipher messages on the fly simply by listening to an operating telegraph. Such stellar accomplishments were infused by an overarching ambition that, according to his own later account, coalesced when he was 18 . During a station visit by the general superintendent of the railway he was working for, Van Horne took the chance to steal into the man’s private railway car parked on the tracks. “I found myself wondering if even I might not somehow become a General Superintendent and travel in a private car,” he remembered years after­ward in describing this glimpsed sanctum. “The glories of it, the pride of it, the salary pertaining to it, and all that moved me deeply, and I made up my mind then and there that I would reach it.”

Dreams of commercial glory were temporarily forgotten at the start of the Civil War, when in a fit of patriotism the young Van Horne attempted to enlist in the Union Army. So indispensable were his skills as a telegrapher, however, that his bosses at the Chicago and Alton Railway immediately rescinded his rash act. Soon he was performing the duties of train dispatcher, an important position in wartime given the need to move troops and supplies quickly. To distance himself from the hardships of his own fatherless adolescence, he was also intent to start a family. After marrying an elegant woman, Addie Hurd, he took on the role of beneficent pater familias in a household that included his new wife and her mother, as well as his own mother and sister.

The financial demands of this domestic arrangement were eased by his rapid advance through the Chicago and Alton’s executive ranks. After a period as manager of the railway’s telegraph system, he moved to company headquarters in Chicago. His ambition to become a general superintendent was met at the callow age of 29 , when the Chicago and Alton asked him to manage one of its smaller roads. The next decade saw him head a succession of rail systems in the American Midwest. He gained a reputation for turning around financially fragile railroads through an enthusiastic but hard-driving management style. In the process, he acquired a knack for political lobbying—an important skill given the rail industry’s continuing dependence on governments.

By 1881 , he had become a well-known figure in the railway business. At this juncture, the newly formed CPR offered him a job unlike any other: the chance to manage the most monumental railway construction project ever attempted. The company had already begun hiring contractors to lay segments of track along the vast distance between Ontario’s Lake Nipissing and the Pacific coast. But the bulk of the prospective line was yet to be built—most notably 650 miles over northern Ontario’s Canadian Shield, 850 miles across Canada’s virtually empty prairie, and 500 miles through the mountainous terrain of British Columbia. After journeying north to see the CPR’s operations for himself, Van Horne took on this new task, doubtless sensing that, as Knowles puts it, “his acceptance would mark a turning point in his career and his life.”

Within months he was planning a sprint of construction from Winnipeg toward the Rockies. During his first year at the CPR, more than 500 miles of track were laid. Meanwhile, he set a daunting agenda to fulfill Sir J.A. Macdonald’s wish for an all-Canadian route north of Superior. This determination elicited much chagrin from some of Van Horne’s fellow CPR executives, who believed that pushing through with the politically expedient but expensive northern route could endanger their entire enterprise.

Over the next three years, successive financial crises almost confirmed this argument. Time and again, the prospect of imminent bankruptcy led Van Horne and the CPR’s president, financier George Stephen, to seek out Macdonald and his cabinet for infusions of stop-gap funds. Mean­while, Van Horne was forced at times to stint on the quality of construction to achieve badly needed cost savings, especially as it became clear just how exorbitant some of the line was proving to be. Parts of the track in the rocky vastness north of Superior were costing upward of half a million dollars per mile—an astronomical sum given original estimates for the entire transcontinental project of under $50 million. Segments of the British Columbia portion of the line were turning out to be almost as costly.

Thanks in large part to Van Horne’s energy and fearlessness, the company managed to survive these years of precarious finances and frantic construction.

In 1885 , a military crisis hastened the completion of the last leg of unfinished track. Van Horne was keenly aware of the Northwest Rebellion’s potential benefits to his company. He went to inordinate lengths to help the Macdonald government transport more than 3 , 000 soldiers as well as their equipment to quell Louis Riel’s uprising, thereby amply proving the railway’s strategic worth.

By the next summer, the first passenger trains were in operation between Montreal and Van­cou­ver. For Van Horne, it was time to move on to other creative projects for his company. Promoted to president after Stephen’s departure, he instigated the design and construction of the Banff Springs and Château Frontenac hotels—two memorable edifices that serve as continuing reminders of the grandeur of his business strategy.

Given his own integral role in helping fashion a sense of Canadian national identity, it is no surprise that Van Horne fully identified with his adopted home. He was even willing to engage in that most Canadian of pastimes—the anti-American jibe. “We are a great deal too quiet in Canada,” he remarked at one point to a British visitor. “We don’t puff ourselves enough or make enough of our advantages and our doings … Why, we live next door to fifty millions of liars and we must brag or we shall be talked out.”

In the meantime, once the transcontinental line was complete, his commitment to the CPR gradually waned, while his personal hobbies, which now also included collecting art and ceramics, took up increasing amounts of energy. In the early years of the 20 th century, for example, he was the foremost patron of Canadian painting and he amassed a large European art collection as well.

Van Horne had bought an imposing mansion on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal—within that city’s fabled Golden Square Mile. Renovated in what was then the latest art nouveau style, the Montreal house was home to a family that included a son, Bennie, and a daughter named Addie. As he drew closer to retirement from the CPR in 1899 , and then became involved in a pet project to build a railway in Cuba, he lavished attention on his son. But Bennie was to be a source of unease—not least because of his failure to escape from under his father’s smothering shadow.

With no need for a career other than his involvement in his father’s business interests, Bennie showed a marked propensity for both drink and gambling. An unhappy attempt at marriage provided Van Horne with a grandson, William—whom he ostentatiously spoiled. But after Van Horne’s death in 1915 , according to Knowles, Bennie proceeded to spend much of his time in Cuba and New York, “where his chauffeur, Sammy Taylor, became his friend and companion.” Both Bennie and his son died of alcoholism.

In some ways, Van Horne’s daughter had an equally problematic existence. Addie’s childhood letters to her father show the extent to which she chaffed at Van Horne’s obvious focus on her younger brother. But she remained a doting daughter. In adulthood, she became a reclusive figure, living on in the Sherbrooke Street mansion long after the other family members had died. Her main vocation was maintaining her father’s voluminous collections of ceramics and art. “So encyclopedic was her knowledge,” says Knowles, “that even when she was almost blind she could locate every exhibit and, if questioned, describe the features of every piece.”

The fate of his two children suggests that, despite his remarkable business successes, Van Horne had to bear many personal regrets. Knowles states the case well: “Partly because of his deprived youth, Van Horne focused nearly all of what little private life he had on his family. The tragedy is that although it usually provided badly needed solace for his sensitive but restless soul it also provided him with the deepest disappointment of his life.” What he failed to realize, even in later years, was “that he couldn’t micromanage people’s lives the way he could a railway.”

Nor could he ensure that the family legacy he had created would endure. In the 1960 s, several decades after Addie’s death, the Sherbrooke Street mansion was sold and its collections dispersed. In 1973 , despite a vocal campaign to save it, the house was demolished. If there is an appropriate epitaph for Van Horne’s private life, it is arguably a set of 26 postcards that he sent to his grandson William while the latter was a young boy. Each card, which Van Horne painted on hotel stationery, depicts an elephant in anthropomorphic pose—carrying a framed painting, smoking a cigar on an ocean liner deck, taking dance lessons. In 2001 , the set was assembled and published as a book by Canadian author Barbara Nichol. Somehow these tiny canvasses capture the whimsical enthusiasms and unresolved disappointments of Van Horne’s private life just as fittingly as the boundless energy of his business career is memorialized in the continent-spanning railroad he did so much to fashion.

Mark Lovewell