a
via Carleton Place to Pembroke, to extend its line as far as Lake
Nipissing, in order to connect with the proposed eastern terminus of
the Pacific road, and to award a contract (it was afterwards cancelled)
for a branch from this junction point to Georgian Bay. Passing by for
the time the country north of Lake Superior, he next let contracts for
the greater part of the distance between Fort William and Selkirk and
for a road from Selkirk to Emerson, on the Manitoba border. Here
connection was to be made with an American line, the St Paul and
Pacific, of which more will be heard presently.

When Mackenzie left office in 1878 the work of location or construction
was well advanced in all three sections. For two years the new
administration of Sir John Macdonald carried on the same policy of
government construction at a moderate pace. The work in hand was
continued and the gaps in the road {129} between Port Arthur and
Selkirk were put under contract. The line was made to pass through
Winnipeg--instead of striking west from Selkirk, as the engineers had
previously advised, and thus side-tracking the ambitious city growing
up around old Fort Garry. Contracts were let for two hundred miles of
the extension westward from Winnipeg. Two seasons passed before the
new government could make up its mind as to the British Columbia
section. Late in 1879 it decided to adhere to the route chosen under
the Mackenzie administration, through the Yellowhead Pass, down the
Thompson and the Fraser to Port Moody on Burrard Inlet. The difficult
section from Yale, the head of navigation on the Fraser, to Savona's
Ferry, near Kamloops, was shortly afterwards placed under contract.

The ten years' time allotted for the construction of the Canadian
Pacific was nearly gone and there was little completed work to show.
Hard times, depression in the railway world, changes of government and
political upheavals, disputes as to route and terminus, had delayed
construction. The building of the link north of Lake Superior,
necessary for all-rail connection between East and West on Canadian
territory, had been indefinitely postponed. {130} Something had been
done, it is true. Manitoba was being linked up with the East by a road
south to Minnesota and by another line to the head of Lake Superior,
and a start had been made in British Columbia. Some day, under some
administration, the gaps would be filled up and the promise to British
Columbia