The Railroad That Made Canada Possible

On the morning of November 7, 1885, a man named Donald Smith drove a small iron spike into a railway tie at a place called Craigellachie, in the mountains of British Columbia. It was not a ceremonial golden spike — just a plain iron one — but the act completed something that many had considered impossible: a continuous ribbon of steel linking eastern Canada to the Pacific coast. The Canadian Pacific Railway had been built, and with it, in the eyes of its architects, so had Canada itself.

A Promise That Had to Be Kept

The CPR did not begin as a business proposition. It began as a political debt. When British Columbia agreed to join the Canadian Confederation in 1871, it extracted a promise from the federal government: a transport link to the east. Without that railway, the vast, sparsely populated western territory might drift toward the United States. This was not an idle fear. As early as 1867, American Secretary of State William H. Seward had mused openly that the entire North American continent would eventually fall “within the magic circle of the American Union.” For Prime Minister John A. Macdonald and the Conservative government, the railway was therefore more than infrastructure — it was the physical assertion of Canadian sovereignty across a continent.

Yet the project was nearly strangled at birth. In 1873, Macdonald was caught granting railway contracts in exchange for political financing, a scandal so damaging it became known simply as the Pacific Scandal. The Conservatives fell from power, and the incoming Liberal government of Alexander Mackenzie took a more cautious approach, placing construction under the Department of Public Works. Enabled by the CPR Act of 1874, work began in 1875 on the Lake Superior to Manitoba section, marked by a sod-turning ceremony at Westfort on June 1 of that year, attended by upwards of five hundred people on the banks of the Kaministiquia River. Progress, however, was slow.

Building at a Furious Pace

When Macdonald returned to power in 1878, the pace changed. By October 1880, a new private consortium had signed a contract with his government: in exchange for building the railway, they would receive $25 million in credit, 25 million acres of land, government-paid surveying costs, and a twenty-year exemption from property taxes. It was an extraordinary subsidy, reflecting just how desperately the government wanted the line built.

The man brought in to drive construction forward was William Cornelius Van Horne, a renowned American railway executive hired in 1882. Van Horne announced he would lay 800 kilometres of main line that year alone. Floods hampered the early season, but his crews still managed more than 672 kilometres of main line, along with sidings and branch lines. By August 1883, construction had reached Calgary. By the end of that same year, the tracks had arrived at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. The chosen route — crossing the arid southern plains through Palliser’s Triangle rather than the more obviously fertile North Saskatchewan Valley, and threading through Kicking Horse Pass rather than the gentler Yellowhead Pass — was a bold, contested decision that shaped the geography of western settlement for generations.

The Human Cost: Labour, Danger, and Death

The railway was built by many thousands of men, and their stories are as varied as they are unequal. European immigrants formed much of the workforce across the prairies. The Stoney Nakoda people assisted with track-laying and construction work in the Kicking Horse Pass region. But it was in British Columbia where the human toll was most severe, and where the most glaring injustice of the entire enterprise was written into the rock.

Government contractors eventually hired 17,000 workers from China to build the most difficult sections of the line through British Columbia. They were paid between 75 cents and $1.25 a day — wages paid in rice mats, with expenses deducted, leaving barely anything to send home. After two and a half months of hard labour, a worker might net as little as $16. They were assigned the most dangerous work: drilling and blasting through mountains, handling explosives to clear tunnels through solid rock. Historians estimate that between 600 and 800 Chinese workers died during construction, though the exact number remains unknown.

The contrast with their employers and supervisors could hardly have been starker. The CPR’s directors celebrated the last spike in the mountains; the workers who drove most of the spikes in those mountains received poverty wages, faced lethal hazards daily, and left almost no documentary record of their names.

Money, Politics, and a Rebellion That Saved the Railway

Even as the tracks pushed westward, the CPR was perpetually on the edge of financial ruin. By 1883, the company was running out of funds. On January 31, 1884, the government passed the Railway Relief Bill, injecting a further $22.5 million in loans. It was not enough to quiet the crisis entirely.

The railway’s salvation came, improbably, from an Indigenous uprising. In March 1885, the North-West Rebellion broke out in the District of Saskatchewan. Van Horne, who happened to be in Ottawa at the time, made the government an offer: the CPR could transport troops to the region in ten days. Some sections of track were unfinished or untested, but the trip to Winnipeg was made in nine days, and the rebellion was swiftly suppressed. The government, grateful and now acutely aware of the railway’s strategic value, reorganized the CPR’s debt and provided a further $5 million loan — money the company desperately needed to survive until completion. Even so, the process was not smooth. Macdonald pressured CPR leaders for additional benefits even while the company was waiting for the funds.

The last spike was driven at Craigellachie on November 7, 1885, more than four years after the original 1881 completion deadline — but, notably, more than five years ahead of the revised deadline of 1891 that Macdonald had given in parliament.

What Came After the Last Spike

The CPR wasted little time proving its value. The first transcontinental passenger train departed Montreal’s Dalhousie Station on the evening of June 28, 1886, and arrived at Port Moody on July 4th — a journey that would previously have taken weeks by any other means. Within a year, the western terminus had shifted to a small settlement that was promptly renamed Vancouver. The CPR repaid all of its federal loans well ahead of schedule. By 1889, it had extended its network to Saint John, New Brunswick, making it the first truly transcontinental railway company in Canada — a connection that allowed trans-Atlantic shipping to continue through winter months when ice closed the port of Montreal.

For decades, the CPR remained the only practical way to travel long distances across most of Canada. It was instrumental in the colonization and development of the west, carrying Manitoba’s first wheat shipment to Lake Superior as early as 1883. It became one of the largest and most powerful companies in the country, a position it held as late as 1975.

What We Still Don’t Know

The Wikipedia sources underlying this article are candid about several genuine gaps in the historical record. The exact number of Chinese workers who died during construction is unknown; historians estimate between 600 and 800, but no comprehensive accounting was ever made. The full number of Stoney Nakoda who contributed labour in the Kicking Horse Pass region is similarly unrecorded. The broader human experience of the Chinese workforce — their names, their communities, the lives they led or lost — remains poorly documented, a reflection of how thoroughly the historical record was shaped by those who held power rather than those who swung the hammers.

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Sources

– This article is a synthesis of the Wikipedia article on Canadian Pacific Railway (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Pacific_Railway), which itself cites the underlying scholarship. Readers wanting primary sources should follow that article’s reference list.