72nd Seaforth Highlanders of Canada - Electric Scotland

INTRODUCTION
npHERE is much that is interesting in the origin of the
A military organization to the history of which these
pages are devoted.
That a Highland regiment should be formed in Vancouver,
British Columbia, is in itself a somewhat remarkable fact
when the attendant circumstances are considered.
At the time when the project was first broached, the mem
ories of the early days of the city had not yet faded.
Oldtimers
still spoke reminiscently of the great fire which, a
little more than a score of years before, had swept the infant
town out of existence. In the year 1887 the first locomotive
of the Canadian Pacific Railway had steamed in to the
chosen terminal of the line.
Its heralded approach had al
ready been the stimulus for vigorous building operations.
From this time onward the evolution of the City of Van
couver had proceeded at a rapid rate.
Edifices costing mil
lions of dollars had been erected, and upwards of forty miles
of streets had been graded and paved. A steady stream of
settlers had set in, till the population neared the 100,000
mark.
But this far western objective of the virile and the enter
prising was a comparatively new city when the idea of a
Highland regiment was first mooted in 1909. The glamour
of Vancouver s novelty, its rapid growth and its up-to-date
public utilities had not departed. A certain romance hung
about this ultima Thule of the Pacific Coast that was thou
sands of miles away from the older-settled parts of Canada.
No wonder that it attracted large numbers of young men
animated by that pioneering spirit which has done so much
to expand the limits of the British Empire.
Nor is it surprising that prominent among these new
comers there were many of Scottish ancestry. Eastern Canxix
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