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

vacillations of the previous year, when the railroad was being built as a public work. The government had originally planned the cheapest of colonization roads across the North West. It let the first hundred-mile contract in August, 1879, to John Ryan, who was unable to finish the job. The government took over his contract, and by the spring of 1880 the flimsy line had been completed for about seventy miles, as far as Portage la Prairie. A second hundred-mile section west of the Red River was let on May 3, 1880, to another contractor. An entire summer passed and nothing was done. That contract was also cancelled.
    This section of the line, which the CPR , under the terms of the contract,purchased from the government, was virtually useless; the company determined to rebuild it entirely to better specifications and relocate most of it. A different mood had settled upon railway construction in Canada. For the first time in the long, tangled history of the Canadian Pacific, the rails were being laid under the supervision of the same men who would eventually operate the road; it would not profit them to cut corners.
    On May 2, 1881, the company was ready to begin. At the end of track, the little community of Portage la Prairie – Manitoba’s oldest town – clattered with activity. Strange men poured off the incoming coaches and elbowed each other in the mire of the streets, picking their way between the invading teams of snorting horses. Great heaps of construction materials transformed the railway yards into labyrinths. An army of ploughs and scrapers stood ready to rip into the unbroken prairie. Like soldiers poised on the start line, the navvies waited until the company’s chief engineer, General Thomas Lafayette Rosser, ceremonially turned the first sod. Then the horses, the men, and the machines moved forward and began to fashion the great brown serpent that would creep steadily west, day after day, towards its rendezvous with the mountains.

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How John Macoun altered the map
    Canada is deceptively vast. The map shows it as the second largest country in the world and probably the greatest in depth, extending through forty degrees of latitude from Ellesmere Island in the high Arctic to Pelee Island in Lake Erie, which is on the same parallel as Rome. It is almost twice as deep as the United States and considerably deeper than either China or the Soviet Union. If the tip of Canada were placed at Murmansk, the country would extend as far south as Cairo; if it were placed on the Manchurian border it would drop all the way down to Bangkok.
    Yet all this is illusory. For practical purposes Canada is almost as slender as Chile. Traditionally half of its people have lived within a hundred miles of the United States border and ninety per cent within two hundred miles. It is a country shaped like a river – or a railway – and for the best of reasons: in the eastern half of the nation, the horizontal hiving of the population is due to the presence of the St. Lawrence, in the western half to that “sublime audacity,” the Canadian Pacific.
    The CPR was the natural extension of the traditional route used by theexplorers and fur traders on their passage to the West. If that natural extension had been continued as was originally planned, Canada might today have a different dimension. But that was not to be. In the spring of 1881 a handful of men, gathered around a cluttered, circular table in an office in St. Paul, Minnesota, altered the shape and condition of the new country west of Winnipeg.
    That decision affected the lives of tens of thousands of Canadians. It ensured the establishment of cities close to the border that otherwise might not have existed for another generation, if ever – Broadview, Regina, Moose Jaw, Swift Current, Medicine Hat, Banff, and Revelstoke. It doomed others – Carlton, Battleford, Eagle Hill, Bethlehem, Grenoble, Baldwin, Humboldt, Nazareth, Nut Hill, and Edmonton – to permanent or temporary