"Newman, Peter C. - Company of Adventures 03 - Merchant Prince" - читать интересную книгу автора (Newman Peter C)

the FIBC, Smith spent most of three mindnumbing decades as one of the
Company's Labrador fur traders before being anointed last Chief
Commissioner, first Land Commissioner, and, for a tense quarter of a cen-
tury, London-based Governor. The first apprentice -clerk to attain such
exalted rank, Smith turned out to be an indifferent administrator, but he
(lid move the Company away from its genesis in bartering aninial pelts to
real estate, transportation and the beginnings of retailing. He thus
ensured the HB(,,, survival after the Company lost its trading monopoly
when the Dominion of Canada purchased the original land grants in 1870.
Smith was fully as significant a figure in the HBC's history -as that
great Caesar of the Wilderness, Sir George Simpson, who had governed the
operating arm of the Company during four adventurous decades from his
express birchbark canoe.
For forty-two ' years a director of the Bank of IVIontreal,
as well as its second-largest shareholder, and for seventeen
years its president, Smith turned the Bank into Canada's
most profitable and North America's safest financial insti
tution. At the same time, he treated the Montreal as a
private financing instrument for his various ventures
Canadian history's fattest piggy bank.
A director of the CPR and member of its executive coinmittee for
thirty-iwo years, Smith took little interest in its building or operation.
But as anchorman of the road's private- and public-sector financing, Smith
had the fiscal perseverance that allowed completion of the Confedera-
tion-ftilfilling project. Patriotic as it may have -appeared, this effort
did not force Smith to stray too far out of chatacter. As one of the
railway's main shareholders, he benefited mightily from the stock's
extravagant long-term rise. Alembers of' his syndicate purchased CPR
treasury stock for their own accounts at twenty-five cents on the dollar
and grabbed control of the Canada North-West
 6 LABRADOR SMITH

Land Company, which sold 2,200,000 acres of the Crown land granted the
CPR as a construction incentive.
Smith's most successful railroading venture had nothing to do with the
grandeur of the (PR. Along with three partners, he invested a borrowed
$250,000 in the bankrupt St Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway,
which, following a decade of stock manipulation and minimum con-
struction, increased in value to a cool $60 million. Even considering
the guttt,~r ethics of late nineteenth -centu ry railway promotion,
acquisition of the St Paul earned pride of place as the most shameless
of swindles.
Along the way, Smith became founding president of the Royal Trust
Company, now one of Canada's largest trusts. He co-owned a textile mill
at Cornwall, Ontario, and a rolling-stock manufacturing plant in
Montreal; his will documented many other discreet but significant
holdings.
Smith's political influence equalled the impressive impact of his
commercial activities. His crucially timed intervention settled Louis
Riel's Red River Rebeliion; his personal vote defeated Sir John A.