The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 Read Free

elusive as ever. He has sent, in his place, his reckless Irish superintendent, Michael Haney, who can be seen craning his neck over Van Horne’s great bulk, his handlebar moustache giving him the look of a Tammany politician. Not far away is another of Onderdonk’s men, Henry Cambie, the engineer who hung by ropes to plot the railway’s location along the walls of that same black canyon. He is standing a row or two behind the small boy, his long beard already whitening, a bowler tilted forward over his eyes. On his left, also bearded and bowler ed, is one of the men chiefly responsible for the crazy-quilt pattern of Regina, John McTavish, the CPR’S land commissioner; on McTavish’s left, wearing a floppy hat, is the railway’s western superintendent, John Egan, perhaps the only man ever to see Van Horne shed a tear .
    Directly across from Donald Smith, hands plunged into the pockets of his short coat, eyes twinkling, is the stocky, black-bearded figure of James Ross, the man in charge of the CPR ’ s mountain construction. He looks no different from the other roughly dressed labourers around him, but he will shortly become one of the richest and most powerful capitalists in Canada – a coal and steel baron, a utilities magnate, a financial wizard .
    There are others present, though not all can be seen. Sam Steele of the Mounted Police, fresh from his pursuit of Big Bear, the rebellious Cree chieftain, is present but not in the picture. Young Tom Wilson, the packer who discovered Lake Louise, is just identifiable at the very rear in his broad-brimmed cowboy hat. And that most unconventional of all surveyors, the peripatetic Major Rogers, holds the tie bar as Smith strikes the spike. In a less familiar photograph, taken a moment before, the Major can be seen quite clearly, white mutton chops, black string tie, gold watch-chain and all; but in most school books only his boot is showing. He does not need the immortality of this picture; his name is already enshrined on the long-sought pass in the Selkirks .
    Do they realize, as the shutter closes, that this is destined to be the most famous photograph ever taken in Canada? Perhaps they do, for Canada, with their help, has just accomplished the impossible. In 1875, Alexander Mackenzie, then Prime Minister, declared that such a task could not be completed in ten years “with all the power of men and all the money in the empire.” Now it is 1885 and the job has been done with precious little help from the empire at all through a remarkable blend of financial acumen, stubborn perseverance, political lobbying, brilliant organization, reckless gambling, plain good fortune, and the hard toil of a legion of ordinary workmen .
    It is these nameless navvies who really dominate the Great Canadian Photograph. Few of them have ever been identified and perhaps that is fitting. They have become symbolic figures, these unknown soldiers in Van Horne’s army, standing as representatives for the thirty thousand sweating labourers – French and English, Scots and Irish, Italians and Slavs, Swedes and Yankees, Canadians and Chinese – who, in just four years and six months, managed to complete the great railway and join the nation from sea to sea .

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The end and the beginning
    The bitterest and longest parliamentary wrangle in the history of the young Canadian nation ended on February 15, 1881, when the contract to build the Canadian Pacific Railway finally received royal assent. The debate had occupied almost two months, consumed its major participants, and left the capital dazed and exhausted. It must have seemed to those who emerged bone weary but victorious, after those midnight sessions on the Hill, that the ten-year dream of a national highway tying the new Canada to the old had finally come true – that the in-fighting was at an end, along with the despairs, the heartaches, the scandals, and the rancours that had marked that first decade. Now it was simply a matter of driving