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financial charges. In the next few years he diversified the company’s operations by acquiring grain elevators, flour mills, express and telegraph operations, port facilities, maritime fleets, agricultural and timber lands, and numerous tourist services, including hotels. In terms of actual rail operations, he not only continued the policy of acquiring a network of rail lines in the settled industrial regions of eastern Canada, but he also strove to develop rail links to established markets in New England and the American Midwest.

      In the grand vision entertained by Van Horne and George Stephen, the CPR was more than just the first pan-Canadian corporation — it was part of an integrated transportation network that would girdle the globe. “Canada is doing business on a back street,” Van Horne once observed. “We must put her on a thoroughfare.”

      To put the CPR on a thoroughfare, he arranged for the company to operate steamships on both the Pacific and the Atlantic coasts. In 1886 the company presented a formal tender to the British government to provide a first-class, subsidized mail service between Hong Kong and Vancouver: it would charter steamships for the following year and use its own ships in 1888. After long and complicated negotiations between the CPR and the British and Canadian governments, the company finally won a formal contract for the mail service. No sooner was this done than the CPR ordered three liners in 1889 to maintain the monthly service — the Empress of India, Empress of Japan, and Empress of China. Van Horne named all three vessels, choosing the designation “Empress” to reflect the ships’ superiority over all anticipated competition. He also designed the red and white checker-board house flag that was flown on all Canadian Pacific ships for the next eighty years. Efficient to operate, mechanically sound, aesthetically pleasing, and well upholstered, these vessels earned a reputation that other lines found difficult to equal.

      Van Horne swelled with pride on April 28, 1891, when the graceful, clipper-bowed Empress of India docked in Vancouver. The first of the majestic Empress liners to be completed, she had sailed from Liverpool for the Pacific by way of the Suez Canal. More than a hundred first-class passengers had booked passage for what would be the closest thing to a world cruise that had yet been offered. When the liner docked at Vancouver, Van Horne and some of the company directors were on hand to welcome her. As part of the welcoming ceremonies, a grand banquet and ball were staged at the Hotel Vancouver. However, since Van Horne disliked large, formal functions, he departed for Montreal that very afternoon.

      In these same years, Van Horne hired New York society architect Bruce Price, who had designed Montreal’s Windsor Station, to design the Banff Springs Hotel and Quebec City’s Château Frontenac. The CPR’s vice-president also immersed himself in immigration schemes, continued to sponsor artists and photographers to capture CPR landmarks, and invented numerous catchy slogans to lure tourists to Canada. The picturesque mountain hotels designed by Price and Thomas Sorby were all part of Van Horne’s grand scheme to generate traffic for the railway and to make the line’s costly mountain section pay for itself. “Since we can’t export the scenery, we’ll have to import the tourists,” he reportedly said as he contemplated the stunning mountain views. He advertised the Rockies as “1001 Switzerlands Rolled into One.” And, to attract tourists to this part of the world, he set out to provide first-class travellers with excellent ship and train service and superior hotels that commanded the choicest mountain views.

      Banff Springs Hotel, the most celebrated of the CPR’s mountain hostelries, owed its construction indirectly to the discovery of several natural hot springs on the flanks of Sulphur Mountain. Van Horne visited the springs early in 1885 and immediately sized up their tourist potential: “These springs,” he said, “are worth a million dollars.” He decided to build a top-notch hotel near the springs, at the confluence of the Bow and Spray Rivers, and instructed Bruce Price to draw up the plans. But the construction met with one conspicuous mishap. When Van Horne visited the building site in the summer of 1887, he was outraged to see that the contractor had oriented the hotel backwards, thereby providing the kitchens with the best view of the mountain ranges and the valley below. One colleague observed: “Van Horne was one of the most considerate and even-tempered of men, but when an explosion came it was magnificent.” Fortunately, the solution was simple: Van Horne called for a sheet of paper, sketched a rotunda pavilion on the spot, and directed that it be situated to provide hotel guests with a magnificent view.

      When the hotel was completed in the spring of 1888, Van Horne boasted that it was the “Finest Hotel on the North American Continent.” Soon it welcomed the first of the thousands of tourists who would visit it each year. But the Banff Springs Hotel also performed another, more significant role: it initiated the “chateau style” that came to characterize many of the hotels erected by the CPR and other railways, as well as railway stations and apartment complexes. Even several large government buildings in Ottawa adopted this style.

      It is impossible to know how much Van Horne contributed to the design of the Banff Springs Hotel and Windsor Station, the CPR’s principal terminal and administrative headquarters, but he did make a considerable contribution to Quebec City’s Château Frontenac. Van Horne watched over every stage of this hotel’s design, and he even took Bruce Price out in a small boat on the St. Lawrence River one day to make sure that the elevation of the building’s imposing round tower was “sufficiently majestic.”

      Van Horne’s architectural flair was also put to good use designing the prototype for the quaint CPR log stations that soon became famous in the mountains of British Columbia. When CPR officials could not decide what should replace the boxcar that had been serving as a primitive station at Banff, Van Horne discussed the problems with officials at the site. Then he grabbed a sheet of paper, sketched a log chalet, and, gesturing in the direction of the mountain slopes, announced: “Lots of good logs there. Cut them, peel them, and build your station.”

      Van Horne also commissioned artists to produce paintings to hang in company hotels and in the private collections of CPR directors. In an unusual promotional scheme, he offered artists free transportation and accommodation to paint the magnificent scenery along the CPR line that pierced the Rockies and the Selkirk Mountains. In the summer of 1889 he dispatched the well-known American painter Albert Bierstadt and several other artists to the West, instructing them to paint large oil canvases of designated landmarks. On behalf of his colleague George Stephen, he asked Bierstadt to produce a large painting of Mount Baker — and told him the precise vantage point from which to paint it. He then judged the final product, even though Bierstadt was one of the most respected of all Rocky Mountain landscape painters, and Stephen was a connoisseur and patron of fine art.

      Another artist recruited by Van Horne was John Hammond, who journeyed west to Asia to promote the newly inaugurated connections that enabled CPR steamships from Vancouver to meet P & O liners from the Orient. By this means, English and European tourists could travel around the world, with the CPR furnishing the needed link. Hammond toured the Japanese countryside, sketching scenes for paintings that were designed to entice tourists to the Far East.

      Not surprisingly, Van Horne threw himself into the CPR’s wide-ranging promotional campaign to attract settlers to the Prairie West. At the time, Maritimers and Quebecers were still pouring into the New England states in search of jobs, and Van Horne set out to persuade them to settle instead in Canada’s Northwest Territory. He even appointed priests as colonizing agents to encourage the recruitment of French Canadians who were already toiling in factories across the border. He loved to compose catchy slogans to capture people’s attention. When the company’s passenger service was inaugurated, people in Montreal, Toronto, and other large centres were puzzled and astonished one morning to see billboards featuring the word “Parisien Politeness on the CPR,” “Wise Men of the East Go West on the CPR,” and other such jingles.

      The Canada Northwest Land Company was established earlier as part of the land-settlement campaign, and Van Horne served for years as its president. He had his own pronounced views on land settlement. Central to his thinking was the belief that homesteaders should be grouped in settlements and not be separated from each other by large, unoccupied spaces. “You have no doubt observed,” he wrote his friend Rudyard Kipling, who had probably met Van Horne on one of his trips to England, “that the largest buildings in the new western states and in western Canada are usually large insane asylums.” Isolation, he told

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