The Railway Canada Couldn't Afford and Built Anyway

On the morning of November 7, 1885, a sixty-five-year-old Scotsman with a white beard picked up a hammer at a place in the British Columbia mountains called Craigellachie. His name was Donald Smith. He swung, and the spike bent.

Somebody pulled it out and set a fresh one. Smith tried again and drove it home, and the Canadian Pacific Railway was one line of iron from Montreal to the Pacific.

The spike was plain iron. The general manager, William Van Horne, had refused a gold one. Anybody who wanted to see the last spike, he'd said, would have to pay full fare like everyone else. Then he was asked for a speech, and gave one of the shortest in the history of ribbon-cuttings: "All I can say is that the work has been well done in every way."

That's the whole story in one moment. A bent spike, a plain spike, and a man who didn't feel like talking because the job was done. Getting there nearly broke the country.

A promise nobody could keep

In 1871, British Columbia agreed to join the young Dominion of Canada on one condition. Ottawa would start a railway to the Pacific within two years and finish it within ten.

It was an absurd promise. Canada was four years old. Between the settled East and the Pacific coast sat the granite and muskeg north of Lake Superior, more than a thousand miles of prairie with almost no settlers, and then the Rockies and the Selkirks, which had no surveyed railway pass at all. The United States had finished its own transcontinental line in 1869, with a far bigger population and treasury behind it.

Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald made the promise anyway, because without it, British Columbia might drift south. A country that couldn't reach its own coast wasn't going to stay a country for long.

Then Macdonald nearly sank the whole thing himself. In 1873 it came out that his Conservatives had taken large campaign contributions from Sir Hugh Allan, the shipping magnate who was bidding for the railway contract. The Pacific Scandal brought down the government that November. The Liberals under Alexander Mackenzie built cautiously, in pieces, with public money. By the time Macdonald returned to power in 1878, the ten-year deadline was a joke in Victoria.

The lesson there's old and still true. A good cause doesn't excuse dirty money, and the dirty money nearly killed the good cause.

The syndicate and the American

In 1881 the government handed the job to a private syndicate led by George Stephen, president of the Bank of Montreal, and his cousin Donald Smith of the Hudson's Bay Company. The terms were enormous: $25 million in cash, 25 million acres of land, the sections already built with public money, and a twenty-year monopoly on traffic south of the main line.

Stephen needed a builder. He hired an American.

William Cornelius Van Horne was born in Illinois, left school young after his father died, and started as a telegraph operator. By 1882 he was a big, cigar-smoking railroad executive who could out-work, out-eat and out-play poker with anyone on the line. He's credited with the line "Nothing is too small to know, and nothing too big to attempt," and he ran the job like he meant it.

His first season on the prairie, the crews laid track at a pace that had observers in disbelief. Hundreds of miles in a single year. Supply trains ran up to the end of steel, rails went down, and the camp moved west behind them like a town on wheels.

The company also gambled on the route. The original survey ran north through the Yellowhead Pass. The syndicate swung it south, closer to the American border, through the Kicking Horse Pass in the Rockies. That left the Selkirks, where nobody had found a way through. An American surveyor named Major A.B. Rogers was promised a $5,000 check and his name on the map if he found one. In 1881 he did. The story goes that he framed the check instead of cashing it, until Van Horne told him to go spend the money.

Rogers Pass carried the line. It also buried it. Avalanches tore through that pass every winter, and the snowsheds never fully won. In March 1910, years after the opening, a slide there killed 58 men clearing an earlier one.

Broke, twice over

The money ran out before the rock did.

North of Lake Superior, the line went through some of the hardest ground on the continent. The company built its own dynamite factories on site because shipping explosives in was too slow. In the mountains, the "Big Hill" down the Kicking Horse was built at a grade of about 4.5 percent, more than twice what was considered safe, as a temporary fix. Runaway trains followed. The Spiral Tunnels that finally tamed it didn't open until 1909.

By 1884 the company was bleeding cash faster than it could borrow. Stephen and Smith pledged their own fortunes. When it looked hopeless, Stephen sent Smith a three-word cable taken from the war cry of their clan back in Scotland: "Stand fast, Craigellachie." The name of a rock near the home they'd both left as poor boys.

Smith stood fast. That's why the last spike was driven at a place called Craigellachie.

Rescue came from a direction nobody wanted. In March 1885, Métis and some Cree took up arms on the prairies in what became the North-West Rebellion, led by Louis Riel. Ottawa needed soldiers out west immediately. Fifteen years earlier, the Red River expedition had needed about three months to reach Manitoba. Van Horne promised to move troops in days, gaps in the line or not.

Soldiers rode flatcars in the snow, marched across frozen stretches of Lake Superior where no track existed yet, and climbed back onto trains on the other side. They got there in roughly a week. Parliament, having watched the railway do in days what it had once taken a season to do, voted the company the financial relief it needed that summer.

The honest part

A railway that cost this much in sweat didn't cost everyone the same.

The hardest section on the Pacific end, through the Fraser Canyon, was built under contractor Andrew Onderdonk with thousands of Chinese laborers, many recruited from Guangdong and from California. They were paid less than white workers, covered much of their own food and gear, and were given the most dangerous blasting and rock work. Hundreds died, by most historians' estimates. Nobody kept a proper count, which says enough on its own.

And the same year the railway was finished, Parliament imposed a $50 head tax on Chinese immigrants. It was later raised to $500, and in 1923 Chinese immigration was all but shut off. In 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper stood in the House of Commons and apologized for it. That apology was right. Men who blasted a country's road through a canyon deserved better than a toll at the door when the job was done.

The prairie peoples paid too. The railway arrived as the buffalo vanished, and settlement followed the steel. The Blackfoot chief Crowfoot let the line cross his people's land peacefully, after a missionary named Father Albert Lacombe mediated between them. Riel was hanged in Regina on November 16, 1885, nine days after the last spike. Those two dates belong in the same paragraph.

You can honor what the builders did and still say plainly where the country fell short. Real history does both. So does a real man looking at his own record.

The first train

On June 28, 1886, the first scheduled passenger train left Montreal for the Pacific. It arrived at Port Moody, British Columbia, on July 4.

The contract had allowed until 1891. They'd finished in about four and a half years, five years ahead of the deadline, through a scandal, a near-bankruptcy, a rebellion and two mountain ranges.

If you've read about the men who built your ordinary Tuesday, you know the type. Van Horne didn't make the promise. Macdonald did, and fumbled it. Van Horne just showed up and kept it, the same stubborn way the Wright brothers ignored the people who said it couldn't be done.

That's the part worth taking home. Somebody else may make the promise. Somebody else may break it first. Your job, if it lands on you, is to finish it anyway, with a plain iron spike and as few words as possible.

Then let the train run.