It seems to be a chapter of accidents.  Just as this book goes to press we learn of a double fatality which attended the transport of the 1909 outfit of Count von Hammerstein.  This plucky developer of McMurray oilfields, while running Grand Rapids on the Athabasca (the rapids which we had descended in an empty while the other sturgeon-heads were discharging freight at Grand Rapids Island), struck a boulder.  The boat turned turtle and the three men were tossed into the torrent,—­von Hamerstein, V. Volksooky, a young Russian, and a French half-breed, La France.  The Count was washed ashore and escaped, but the others were drowned.  Deaths such as these are the price of Empire.  When the railroad reaches the Athabasca, the running of these dangerous rapids will no longer be necessary.

[Illustration:  Charles M. Hays, President of the Grand Trunk Railway]

In the footprints of Back and Samuel Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie and Sir John Franklin, for six months we have been treading the silent places.  We have thought much of these faith-possessed men who found the roads that others follow.  In faith they wrought.  Canada does well to honour these great of old, and that she appreciates the work of her early explorers is shown in the fact that British Columbia recently granted a pension to the granddaughter of Simon Fraser, the man who in 1808 first sailed down the great river that bears his name.  But the day of our great men is not over; Canada still in her great North and West has Pathfinders of Empire.  The early voyageurs made their quest in the dugout and the birchbark; and the tools of these are rails of steel and iron horses.

[Illustration:  William Mackenzie, President of the Canadian Northern Railway]

We are accustomed to look upon a railroad as a cold thing of dirt and sand and rock, ties and steel,—­a mechanical something associated with gradients and curves.  But the history of railroading in Canada is one long romance; back of each line is its creative wizard.  We are too near these men to get their proper measure; the historian of the future will place their names on Canada’s bead-roll:—­Charles M. Hays, the forceful President of the Grand Trunk Pacific; Mackenzie and Mann; William Whyte of the Canadian Pacific.  Canada owes much to Caledonia.  Nine-tenths of those pioneers of pioneers, the trading adventurers of the H.B.  Company, came from Scotland, that grey land where a judicious mixture of Scripture and Shorter Catechism, oatmeal and austerity, breeds boys of dour determination and pawky wit, boys who, whatever their shortcomings, are not wont to carry their wishbone where their backbone ought to be.  A conspicuous example of the dynamic Scottish Canadian, hale at sixty-six, is William Whyte, Vice-President of the Canadian Pacific Railway.  At an age when most men are content to “drowse them close by a dying fire,” William Whyte finds himself in complete charge of all the affairs of the Canadian