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Benchmarks of Historical Thinking: Historical Perspective; Evidence; Continuity and Change
On 7 November 1885 the Last Spike was driven at Craigellachie, Eagle Pass, British Columbia. The driving of the Last Spike marked the realization of the dream of a national railway that had been promised to British Columbia in 1871.
Prior to Confederation the only people who had seen vast parts of Canada were the native people who lived there and the fur trappers who traded with them. With Confederation came the need for a more efficient way to cross the country than by foot and canoe. The obvious choice was a railway.
The people of British Columbia wanted the railway so that they could feel like they were really part of Canada. Sir John A. Macdonald wanted the railway because he knew it would help unite the country by making the transportation of goods and settlers into the West easier.
While everybody wanted a railway, nobody was really sure that it could be built. So a team of surveyors was sent out to see if the railway was a physical possibility. It took ten years but the surveyors did find a route through the swamps and rock of northern Ontario, across the prairies, and through the mountains of British Columbia.
Finding the route was one problem, finding the money to pay for the railroad was another. Competition to build the railway was severe and would lead to a scandal that affected the plans for the railway. In 1873 a story emerged that one of the contractors, Sir Hugh Allan, had donated money to the Conservative Party in return for a promise of CPR contracts. Because of this scandal Sir John A. Macdonald was forced to resign. He was replaced by Alexander Mackenzie and the Liberals.
The new Liberal government supported the CPR. In 1875, it ordered for the construction of the railroad to begin at Fort William in northwestern Ontario.
While construction had finally begun, it was proving to be both slow and costly. When the Conservatives were re-elected in 1878 they promised to complete the railway. In 1880 Macdonald decided to turn the railroad over to a private syndicate headed by Sir Donald Smith and George Stephen. In 1882, the now privately owned company hired a new manager, William Cornelius Van Horne. Van Horne promised that the railroad would be completed quickly and efficiently. At the same time the CPR hired another experienced railway man, Andrew Onderdonk, to lead the BC part of the project.
Van Horne quickly took control. He knew a major problem was that his men had to cut down hills, fill in swamps, blast tunnels through the granite of the Canadian Shield, and build bridges across steep gorges and mighty rivers. As part of his plan, Van Horne divided the railway into three sections and sent teams of workers to start construction in each region. The first section was from northern Ontario to Winnipeg. The next section was from Winnipeg to the Rocky Mountains. The final section was from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean.
With Van Horne's vision and determination to guide them, 30,000 workers began building the CPR in 1882. In three short years and many backbreaking hours of labour they completed construction of the railway.
All in all the CPR took 14 years to survey and build. When it was completed it was over 3,200 kilometres long and had cost $150 million.
- View the photograph of the Last Spike.
- Divide your class into pairs to represent each character in the photo.
- Each person should have a speaking or directing role. Everybody needs to do some research about their person. Your students will find most of the information they need by clicking on the highlighted people in the photo. In many cases we have discovered the identity of the person and provide actual information that we believe to be true according to our sources. There are lots of other good sources in the Bibliography.
- When the students complete their research, have them write a script for a conversation their character might have had with other people in the photograph. They need to be conscious of who is standing near to t