Canadian Pacific Railway Last Spike (1885): Uniting Canada

The last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was driven at Craigellachie, British Columbia, on 7 November 1885, completing a railway from eastern Canada to the Pacific coast. The line had been promised to British Columbia as a condition of joining Confederation, and its completion turned a scattered collection of provinces into a country that could be crossed by train. It is one of the best-known moments in Canadian history.

Background: a promise to British Columbia

When the Dominion of Canada was created in 1867 (see Canadian Confederation), it stretched only from Nova Scotia to Ontario. The vast prairies were acquired from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1870, and British Columbia joined in 1871 on condition that a railway connecting it with the East be started within two years and finished within ten.

The project began badly. In 1873 the Pacific Scandal revealed that Prime Minister John A. Macdonald’s Conservatives had taken large election contributions from the financier Hugh Allan, who was seeking the railway contract. The government fell, and the following Liberal administration built the line only slowly and in pieces. After Macdonald returned to power in 1878, a new syndicate led by George Stephen of the Bank of Montreal and his cousin Donald Smith signed a contract in 1880. The Canadian Pacific Railway Company was incorporated in February 1881.

Building the line

The company received a cash subsidy of 25 million dollars, 25 million acres of land along the route and sections of track already built by the government. In 1882 it hired the American engineer William Cornelius Van Horne as general manager. Under his direction, crews laid track across the prairies at remarkable speed, often several kilometres a day.

The hardest sections lay to the north of Lake Superior, where the line crossed rock and muskeg (boggy ground), and in the mountains of British Columbia. The route crossed the Rockies through the Kicking Horse Pass and the Selkirk Mountains through Rogers Pass, found by the surveyor Major A. B. Rogers in 1881. Steep grades, avalanches and long trestle bridges made this some of the most difficult railway building of its time.

In British Columbia, the government section running east from Port Moody through the Fraser Canyon was built by the contractor Andrew Onderdonk. He relied heavily on Chinese labourers, roughly 15,000 of whom worked on the line. They were paid less than white workers and given the most dangerous tasks; estimates of their deaths from rockfalls, explosions, scurvy and disease commonly run to several hundred or more.

Crisis and the North-West Rebellion

By early 1885 the company was close to bankruptcy, and Parliament was reluctant to lend more money. The North-West Rebellion, an armed rising of Métis and some First Nations in what is now Saskatchewan that spring, changed the mood. Van Horne offered to carry troops west, and despite gaps in the track north of Lake Superior, soldiers reached the region in about ten days rather than the weeks the journey would otherwise have taken. Parliament then approved new financial support, and work continued.

The last spike at Craigellachie

The line from the east and the line from the west met at Eagle Pass in the Monashee Mountains. Stephen had named the spot Craigellachie after a rock in Scotland that served as the rallying point of the Clan Grant, whose motto “Stand fast, Craigellachie” he had once cabled to Smith in a moment of financial crisis.

On the morning of 7 November 1885, a small party of officials, engineers and workers gathered by the track. Donald Smith drove the final spike, an ordinary iron one; his first blow bent it, and it was replaced and driven home. The scene was captured by the photographer Alexander Ross in one of the most famous images in Canadian history. Van Horne, asked for a speech, reportedly said only that the work had been well done in every way. A train then carried the party on to the Pacific coast.

The railway was not yet ready for regular traffic. The first scheduled transcontinental passenger train left Montreal on 28 June 1886 and arrived at Port Moody on 4 July. In 1887 the terminus was moved to the new city of Vancouver.

Consequences

The CPR gave Canada a national transport spine. It carried settlers, many of them immigrants from Britain and continental Europe, onto the prairies, and carried their grain to market. Towns such as Regina, Calgary and Vancouver grew up along or because of the line. The company expanded into hotels, steamships and telegraphs and became one of the country’s largest businesses.

The railway’s costs fell heavily on others. It hastened the settlement of lands where First Nations and Métis peoples lived, often against their interests. Chinese workers, once no longer needed, faced exclusion: in 1885 Parliament introduced a head tax on Chinese immigrants, and in 2006 the Government of Canada formally apologised for it.

The CPR was soon followed by other transcontinental schemes, both in North America, as with the earlier First Transcontinental Railroad in the United States, and in Asia, as with the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Timeline

• 1871, 20 July: British Columbia joins Canada on the promise of a railway.
• 1873, November: The Pacific Scandal brings down Macdonald’s government.
• 1880, 21 October: The government signs a contract with the CPR syndicate.
• 1881, 16 February: The Canadian Pacific Railway Company is incorporated.
• 1882, January: William Van Horne becomes general manager.
• 1885, March–April: Troops travel west on the unfinished line during the North-West Rebellion.
• 1885, 7 November: Donald Smith drives the last spike at Craigellachie.
• 1886, 28 June: The first transcontinental passenger train leaves Montreal.
• 1887, 23 May: The first transcontinental train reaches Vancouver.

Why it matters

The last spike marked the moment Canada became physically linked from coast to coast. The railway kept British Columbia in the dominion, opened the West to mass settlement and became a lasting symbol of national unity, while its history also includes the exploitation of Chinese workers and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples.