ne in the passes of the Rocky Mountains, and to make
the journey from Halifax to the Pacific in five or six days.'
Promoters were not lacking. In 1851 Allan Macdonnell of Toronto sought
a charter and a subsidy for a road to the Pacific, and the Canadian
authorities, in {114} declining, expressed their opinion that the
scheme was not visionary and their hope that some day Great Britain and
the United States might undertake it jointly. Seven years later the
same promoter secured a charter for the Northwest Transportation,
Navigation, and Railway Company, to operate between Lake Superior and
the Fraser river, but could get no backing; four years previously John
Young, A. N. Morin, A. T. Galt, and John A. Poor had petitioned in vain
for a similar charter. Then in 1862, on behalf of the Red River
Settlement, Sandford Fleming prepared an elaborate memorial on the
subject. Edwin Watkin, of the Grand Trunk, negotiated with the
Hudson's Bay Company for right of way and other facilities, but the
project proved too vast for his resources.

[Illustration: Sir Sandford Fleming. From a photograph by Topley]

Two things were needed before dreams on paper could become facts in
steel--national unity and international rivalry. Years before
Confederation, such far-seeing Canadians as William M'Dougall and
George Brown had pressed for the annexation of the British territories
beyond the Lakes. After Confederation, all speed was made to buy out
the sovereign rights of the Hudson's Bay Company. Then came the first
Riel Rebellion, to {115} bring home the need of a western road, as the
_Trent_ affair had brought home the need of the Intercolonial. The
decisive political factor came into play in 1870, when British Columbia
entered the federation. Its less than ten thousand white
inhabitants--deeming themselves citizens of no mean country, and kept
to their demands by the urging of an indefatigable Englishman, Alfred
Waddington--made the construction of an overland railway an
indispensable condition of union, and Sir John Macdonald courageously
accepted their terms.

The other factor, international rivalry, exercised its influence about
the same time. In the United States the railway had rapidly pushed
westward, but had halted before the deserts and the mountains lying
between the Mississippi and the Pacific. The rivalry of pro-slavery
and anti-slavery parties in Congress long brought to deadlock all plans
of public aid to either