The Canadian Pacific Railway achieved the dream of a transcontinental Canada in 1885. Chugging up and down the ragged pre-Cambrian shield of Northern Ontario, slipping across 1,500 kilometres of Canada’s western plains, and piercing British Columbia’s rugged Cordillera, it linked the settled eastern cities with the Pacific.

The story of this world-famous line began earlier, in 1871, when British Columbia joined Canadian Confederation on the promise of a Pacific railway within ten years. Such a railway was chartered by Parliament at Ottawa in 1872. The next year, however, the “Pacific Scandal” revealed that the group that was granted the charter had supplied election funds to the then Conservative government of Sir John A. Macdonald. The company collapsed and Macdonald was driven from office. Thereafter the Liberals under Alexander Mackenzie, facing a world depression, tried to build the line as a public project but made scant headway, much to the discontent of British Columbia.

In 1878 Macdonald regained power and again espoused the Pacific railway this time as a private enterprise with public assistance. By 1881 a new syndicate had received the charter along with a grant of 25 million dollars and 25 million acres of land in addition to other benefits such as the 900 miles of track already built chiefly between the Lakehead and the prairies. This new CPR company was headed by George Stephen, president of the Bank of Montreal, and Donald Smith, financial tycoon of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Its general manager was the hard-driving and efficient William Cornelius Van Horne, who in 1882 took on the enormous task of construction. At Callander, outside North Bay, Ontario, tracks came up from Ottawa and Montreal, and soon from Toronto as well. The workers blasted, hacked, and bridged the ancient rock north of Lake Superior, filling in deep muskeg, too. Costs rose steadily. On the prairies, track-laying from Winnipeg to Regina and Calgary leapt ahead. By 1884 the railroad was literally climbing the Rockies. At the same time, in Western British Columbia still other crews composed mainly of Chinese workers were thrusting east, building through steep canyons, tunnelling stubborn mountains, and sometimes being caught in murderous rock slides.

1. Donald A. Smith, First Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal, financed much of the construction of the CPR. He was given the honour of driving “The Last Spike” at Craigellachie, British Columbia, November 7,1885 [Irma Coucill] 2. When not blasting rock or shaping mountain inclines or building rock beds for railway ties, engineers were spanning canyons and river valleys with trestle bridges spanning the Selkirks, east of Craigellachie in western British Columbia. [HBC]

At last, in November 1885, work crews from east and west met in the Gold Range of the B.C. interior. Here at Craigellachie, in Eagle Pass, Donald Smith, now Lord Strathcona, drove in “the last spike” as Van Horne, Chief Engineer Sandford Fleming, and all the construction gangs looked on. By mid-1886, regular trains were running through to the Pacific shores, thereby enabling Vancouver to emerge as the new West Coast terminus.

In years to follow, the CPR carried settlers and supplies into the west and far west Plains, took their products out to market, and prospered both on its land sales and mounting western traffic. In sum, this engineering triumph, with no rivals in all of North America, opened one of the most rewarding pathways in Canada’s history.