During the first two decades of this century, Sir William Mackenzie was
one of Canada's best known entrepreneurs. He Spearheading some of
the largest and most technologically advanced projects undertaken in
Canada, he built a business empire that stretched from Montreal to
British Columbia and to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in Brazil. It
included gas, electric, telephone and transit utilities, railroads,
hotels, and steamships as well as substantial coal mining, whaling, and
timber interests. But when he died in 1923, his estate was virtually
bankrupt as a result of the dramatic collapse of his Canadian Northern
Railway during the First World War. In a business biography intended as
much for general readers as for a scholarly audience, Fleming offers a
revisionist perspective on Mackenzie. He dispels the simplistic
approach of those historians and journalists who have depicted
Mackenzie and his partner Sir Donald Mann as melodramatic crooks who
could have stepped out of the pages of Huckleberry Finn.
