Building a Railroad, an artist's conception

Spike by Spike
The Building of the Canadian-Pacific Railway
by Brenda Ross
 

In 1867, John A. McDonald, newly appointed by Queen Victoria as Prime Minister of the new Dominion of Canada, was a man with a dream. He wanted his fledgling nation, like its more populous and wealthier neighbor to the south, to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But he knew that the few hardy individualists in the far-western British Columbia colony, so far removed from Canada's new capital at Ottawa, would need enticements if they were to fall under his national umbrella.

The Dominion of Canada had been formed by the British North America Act.(1) It stipulated that there should be four provinces in the new Dominion at the outset. Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia would the first provinces. Each province was to have its own seat of government, its own lawmaking body, and its own lieutenant governor to represent the Crown.

Macdonald felt that the extension of the existing eastern railway service to the West Coast would assist his government in persuading the central and western colonies to join and become provinces.

The United States with its transcontinental railroad complete was threatening to expand into the Canadian west. On May 28th, 1867, the Americans had purchased Alaska from the Russians for $7.2 million dollars. From their point of view British Columbia would provide a perfect passage between the U.S. and Alaska.

If the United States decided to march north, Canada, with the aid of British troops, might just be able to defend itself. But there was little to stop the Americans if they were determined to push into the vast and almost unoccupied lands of the northwest.

British Columbia was still a British colony. It asked the newly formed provinces for two things before it would consider becoming part of the Dominion: a coach road to link British Columbia with Manitoba and the start of railway construction within three years. Canada so desperately wanted this colony to join the Dominion that they presented British Columbia with a better offer - a railway to begin within two years and to be completed within ten. With this promise, British Columbia became the 6th province in 1871.

Many people in the east had serious doubts about this project. They cited the expected high cost and even queried the need for this railway at all. And indeed the building of such a railway was a tremendous undertaking. This was a nation, after all, with a total population of three and a half million. At that time only twenty three thousand people lived west of Lake Superior.

The government did not have all the capital needed to build the railway promised to British Columbia. Their main focus was to get private funding from both within and outside Canada. The government proposed that the railway be built by a private company with support, in land and money, from the federal government.

Another problem was the route for the proposed railway. The government insisted on an all Canadian route, but within Canada there were two areas especially difficult for railway building: the hard rocks and peat bog called muskeg immediately to the north of Lake Superior, and the mountainous regions of British Columbia. It would require incredible ingenuity and engineering skills to complete the task.

Chief engineer Cornelius William Van Horne

A business group led by Hugh Allan of Montreal obtained the contract. Allan was a successful businessman and Canadian financier and owner of Allan Line steamships. In the 1870's and 1880's, Allan's company was very active in advertising and bringing immigrants to Canada. But in 1873, Allan's American business partners become furious when they learned that he had made a contribution to Macdonald's party in 1872. Allan's partners accused him of buying the railway contract by supporting Macdonald's party and campaign.

These concerns led to a parliamentary inquiry and the debacle became known as the "Great Pacific Scandal."(2) Members of the Opposition charged that there had been an "understanding" between Allan and the government. They alleged that the Conservatives had granted the railway contract to Allan in exchange for contributions to their election funds. The public was horrified. As a consequence, Sir John A. Macdonald and the Conservative Party were forced to resign.

Alexander Mackenzie and the Liberal government came into power. They did attempt to start construction of the transcontinental railway. But it was only with John A. Macdonald's return in 1878 that the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway started in earnest.

George Stephen, President of the Bank of Montreal, and his cousin Donald Smith, a financial tycoon of the Hudson's Bay Company, formed the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, which the Canadian government officially incorporated on February 16, 1881. The company received a grant of twenty-five million dollars and approximately ten million hectares (or twenty-five million acres) of land. The government defrayed the cost of surveying the lands (thirty-seven million dollars). It also exempted the Canadian Pacific Railway Company from property tax for the next twenty years.

The general manager of this new company was a hard-driving and efficient engineer named William Cornelius Van Horne.(3) In 1882 he started construction. It was a formidable task. Workers from the east had to hack through the tough Canadian Shield, suffer through the prairie heat, and fill in large boggy areas of muskeg formed from vegetation in various stages of decay.

Building a railroad - the real thing

At the same time workers in British Columbia blasted through stubborn mountains and steep canyons. They made their way eastwards through the difficult sections of line, up the hazardous Fraser Canyon, and then through Kamloops toward Eagle Pass.

Van Horne's contractor Andrew Onderdonk had brought in thousands of Chinese laborers under a contract labor system, paying their passage from China to the work camps on the Fraser. The Chinese suffered great losses. They were crushed in rockslides and collapsing tunnels. They fell off bridges under construction. They died from disease, and they suffered racially motivated attacks.

Nevertheless the venture was an enormous success and in 1885 at 9.30 a.m. on November 7th, at Craigellachie, British Columbia, Lord Strathcona hammered in the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was true that, as Donald Smith, he had provided much of the vision and finance for the continental railway back in 1872, but many were surprised that he was chosen for this honor.

His relationship with John A. Macdonald had never recovered from his having publicly expressed his lack of confidence in Macdonald during the Pacific Scandal. This betrayal had been partly responsible for the Conservative administration's downfall. By the time the railway was completed, Lord Strathcona's involvement was not public knowledge, despite the fact that he was still very active behind the scenes.

Lord Donald Smith and the last spike

In the crowd of workers and dignitaries waiting to commemorate the occasion was seventeen-year-old Edward Mallandaine, who is shown peeking out from behind Donald Smith, who is holding the hammer.

Fifty years later, he remembered this special day:

"Soon there remained but a single rail to be laid... The spectators, numbering probably fifty outside of the workmen, intently watched each spike as it was driven. Finally, there remained but one more spike to be driven. It was partly driven in and a hammer was given to Sir Donald Smith to drive it home... in a most workmanlike manner... Everybody cheered. The locomotives whistled and shrieked; several short speeches were made; hands were shaken, and Major Rogers, the discoverer of the pass named after him, became so gleeful that he up-ended a huge tie and tried to mark the spot by the side of the track by sticking it in the ground."

-- C.P. Staff Bulletin, Feb. 1939(4)

Three spikes were made for the ceremony, one was made of silver and the other two were made of iron. The silver one was never used. The first iron spike was bent when Lord Strathcona attempted to drive it into the railway tie. The second was driven into the tie but didn't stay in place very long.

The silver spike was mounted on a marble base as a paperweight. It is owned by descendants of the family of Cornelius Van Horne, president of the CPR and general manager of the railway during its construction.

For fear that souvenir hunters would tear up the track, the spike that went into the ground was removed after the dignitaries had left. It was later presented to Edward Beatty, then president of the CPR.

Smith retrieved the bent spike as a souvenir. He had portions of it shaved off and ringed with diamonds as gifts for his wife Bella and the wives of several of the men who attended the ceremony.

Donald Alexander Smith led a very diverse and interesting life as a fur-trader, politician, and financier. Born in Morayshire, Scotland in 1821, he came to Canada as a young man and was hired to work as a clerk at the Hudson Bay Company. Smith had problems with his eyesight. Fearing blindness, he left his post when his superiors refused to give him permission to visit a doctor. The director's punishment was to send him to Labrador, which was considered by company officers as tantamount to a life sentence.

On snowshoes, Smith and two Indian guides set out on the arduous journey to the trading post. It took months to complete, during which they were often reduced to subsisting on moss and one of the guides died on route. Smith remained in Labrador for twenty years until, having risen to the rank of director, he was transferred to the Montreal office of the Hudson's Bay Company. Later he would become resident governor and chief commissioner.(5)

In 1870 he was appointed to the executive council of the Northwest Territories. He burst on the Canadian political scene as an emissary of the federal government and an agent of the company who refused to defuse the crisis of the 1869 Red River resistance during the Riel insurrection.

The Red River colony in Manitoba was the only western settlement of importance east of the Rockies. The population had reached twelve-thousand, and the Metis (the mixed-blood offspring of French fur traders from the North West Company or Scottish and English fur traders from the Hudson's Bay Company and Cree, Ojibway or Saulteaux) formed the majority of these settlers.(6) Their leader, Louis Riel, defied the new governor sent out to take over possession of the territory from the Hudson's Bay Company. Riel seized Fort Garry, set up his own provisional government, and forwarded demands to Ottawa that the civil rights and the land rights of the people be protected.

At this point Riel might easily have won a place in Canadian history as the father of Manitoba, but he committed the grave error of imprisoning some of the Ontario settlers who opposed him and of having one of them, Thomas Scott, executed.

Calmer judgments prevailed when Donald Smith and Bishop Alexandre Tache, the religious leader of the Red River Settlement, went to Ottawa and obtained passage of the Manitoba Act of 1870.

By this act Manitoba was constituted a province, with its seat of government at Fort Garry (later Winnipeg). It was a small province, amounting to little more than the Red River Settlement but the right of the French-speaking inhabitants to their own religion and schools was recognized. Soldiers were sent to Fort Garry to bring law and order on authority from Ottawa. Riel allowed his provisional government to collapse as he fled from the new province.

Donald Smith went on to represent Winnipeg and St. John in the Manitoba assembly from 1871 till January 1874. He resigned, and was elected to the Dominion parliament for Selkirk, Manitoba, in 1871, was re-elected in 1872, 1874, and mid-1878, but the last election was declared void upon petition. He was an unsuccessful candidate in 1880, but was elected for western Montreal in 1887.

In 1880 when he became a director of the Canadian Pacific railway company, he would soon be instrumental in securing the successful completion of the railroad, and in 1886 he was knighted for his services in connection with this undertaking.

He was a governor of McGill University, and gave $120,000 to the university to constitute a special course or college for women. With Sir George Stephen, in 1885 he founded the Montreal scholarship of the Royal College of Music, for residents of Montreal and its neighborhood. Sir Donald had one of the finest private residences in the Dominion at Montreal, a seat at Pictou, Nova Scotia, and another at Silver Heights, near Winnipeg, Manitoba. He possessed a fine collection of paintings.

During the Boer War he personally maintained a regiment of mounted soldiers known as Strathcona's Horse, which are in existence to this day. At age 76 Smith was appointed Canadian High Commissioner in London, a position he held with eloquent speeches, boundless generosity, and extraordinary good health. He was known to work long into the night until his death in 1914 at the age of 94.

Laying track in the central prairies

Although the Trans-Canada Railway from Atlantic to Pacific was completed in 1885 there was still a problem. It was meant to link the country together, but in crossing the mountains the line ran far to the north of the Canada/U.S. border through Kicking Horse Pass. The people of the southern interior of British Columbia had hoped for a more direct rail line to connect them with the coast, but now they found that the only way was a roundabout route by steamship and train that took many days.

But it was not until 1887 that the discovery of silver in the Kootenays initiated another important railway miracle.

In the boom that followed, an influx of Americans poured across the border to stake their claims. It was far easier for the Americans to get to the Kootenays than the Canadians because of the natural geography of mountain ranges and river valleys that ran in a north-south direction. It was also easier to carry away the valuable ore by way of the American railways.

In order to halt American dominance in the southern interior, to bring the material wealth of the area to Canadian ports, and to protect Southern B.C. from the danger of annexation by the U.S., the government decided that the C.P.R. should further extend its operations by building a new route from the Kootenays to the Pacific coast.

It became the Kettle Valley Railway. The man who would oversee the construction of the railway and direct its operations for over twenty years was Andrew McCulloch. Indeed, his name would become synonymous with the Kettle Valley Railway, often called "McCulloch's Wonder".

Probably the most famous feature of the Kettle Valley Railway is the Othello Tunnel near Hope. It was here that the Coquihalla River had cut a sharp horseshoe curve through three-hundred-foot-high sheer cliffs.

In addition to the obvious ruggedness and difficulty of the pass itself, there were also many imposing obstacles on both sides of the approach to the pass. Just a few miles outside of Hope, the Coquihalla River entered a narrow canyon with sheer granite cliffs three-hundred feet high.

The river made an abrupt hairpin inside the canyon, turning back upon itself and making it impossible for the railroad to follow the river through the canyon, even if there were room. Many thought it best to avoid the route altogether, or that blasting a mile long tunnel was the only way through.

McCulloch disagreed. He had himself lowered down the cliff face on ropes to survey the route. He saw that the only way for the railway to go through was to cut four tunnels and build two bridges, all in a perfectly straight alignment. Because of this necessary alignment, the four Othello tunnels also bear the name of the "Quintette Tunnels." The area for the third tunnel was extremely narrow so one side was left open. This provided a spectacular view of the Coquihalla River, but created the illusion of two tunnels. (In the movie "First Blood," it was at this location that Sylvester Stallone hung from the rock wall high above the river before falling.)(7)

McCulloch was a great lover of the works of Shakespeare and by the light of the campfire would recite from memory passages from the Bard's plays for the construction crews. When it came time to choose names for the Kettle Valley Railway stations he naturally picked the names of some of his favorite characters, including Juliet, Romeo, Lear, Iago, and Othello.

As civilization continues its relentless journey progress takes an inevitable toll and the glory days of the railways are over. In January, 1964 the Kettle Valley Railway made its final passenger run. Although freight trains continued to run until 1989, the only remaining track is a section 9.9 miles long found west of Penticton. However people are returning to hike, mountain bike, four by four, and horseback along the rail bed, and in this way the Kettle Valley Railway is making a comeback.

The Quintette Tunnels are now part of Coquihalla Canyon Provincial Park. Although the Canadian Pacific Railway itself continues to haul freight from one side of the country to the other, there are no regular passenger trains. Tour companies do arrange expensive chartered train journeys, but in general the public no longer rides the rails.

References

1. British North America Act - An Act for the Union of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, and the government thereof.(Consolidated with amendments).
2. Pacific Scandal - This event delayed the building of the railway for several years.
3. William Cornelius Van Horne - A brief biography about the man instrumental in overseeing the building of the railway.
4. Edward Mallandaine - The story of a seventeen-year-old young man who witnessed the hammering of the last spike.
5. Donald Smith (Lord Strathcona) - Some important dates in the life of the man who was pivotal in the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway.
6. History of the Metis People - An in depth study that includes the important part that the Metis played in the development of the Canadian nation.
7. Riding on the Coquihalla Canyon Othello-Quintette Tunnels - Some excellent pictures on the tunnels as they exist today.

Copyright © 2003 Brenda Ross
All rights reserved

For Further Reading

• "Lord Strathcona: A Biography of Donald Alexander Smith," Donna Mcdonald, 1997, Dundurn Press, Ltd, Toronto.
• "The Last Spike," 1971, Pierre Berton, Doubleday, Toronto.
• "McCulloch's Wonder," 2003, Barry Sanford, Whitecap Books, Vancouver, B.C.

Images:

• "Spirit of Transportation," Maxfield Parrish, 1920
• Cornelius William Van Horne, courtesy Canadian Pacific Archives
• Penetrating the Canadian Shield, courtesy National Library of Canada
• "The Last Spike," public domain, courtesy National Library of Canada
• Laying track in the prairies, courtesy Canadian Pacific Archives

About the Author

Brenda Ross was born and raised in England. After her marriage she spent 5 years in West Africa before she and her late husband moved to British Columbia, Canada where she worked as a Community Librarian for many years.

Her stories and articles have recently appeared in several print and on-line publications including Cenotaph Pocket Edition, Seven Seas Magazine, Writing World, Tattoo Highway, Rainy Day Corner, Wynterblues Thunder, Doorknobs and Bodypaint, Writer's Crossing, Epiphany Magazine, Riverbabble, The Swamp, and Dead Mule ezines. Her book "On The Other Hand," sub-titled "the inner conflict of an opinionated freelance writer," is published by White Mountain Publications. She recently had her novel 'The Silver Arrow' made into an e-book by Wt~e-books.

More of her work can be found at her two web sites: Shaking the Kaleidosope and Rosie and Me.