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This exercise presents an historic photograph for your students to recreate, or step into. The photo of The Last Spike shows many of the key people involved with building the Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR), some unidentified people, and a young boy who is poking his head through the crowd. This photograph was taken on the dreary morning of 7 November 1885 at Craigellachie, British Columbia at the western entrance to Eagle Pass.
In this lesson, students will become actors in the historical event and, based on the amount of background information derived by research, will attempt to bring a character to life, and will reflect the attitudes, thoughts and feelings of the people of that time. By studying a picture, students will look for evidence to gain an understanding of the historical context of people’s behaviour. By role-playing the different perspectives of individuals involved, students should gain a more thorough understanding of the event.
This lesson can be applied to other historical photos as well.
Prescribed Learning Outcomes
• apply critical thinking skills, including questioning, comparing, inferring, imagining, verifying, identifying relationships and drawing conclusions, to a range of problems and issues (all inclusive)
• gather and organize a body of information from primary and secondary print and non-print sources, including electronic sources
• defend a position on a selected topic
• demonstrate skills and attitudes of active citizenship, including ethical behaviour, open-mindedness, respect for diversity and collaboration
• identify factors that influenced growth and development of industry
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 1