Canadian Pacific Railway

The building of the Canadian Pacific Railway (C.P.R.) was fundamental in bringing the nation of Canada together. Find out more by watching this Telling Times short documentary.
In 1871 a railway or coach road was conditional to accepting British Columbia into Confederation. Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, worked hard to start building the railroad. He feared that without a railway the land claims in Western Canada would be annexed to the United States. In 1873 Macdonald resigned from office after allegations of a bribery scandal—later called the Pacific Scandal. It was discovered that in exchange for the railway contract, Sir Hugh Allan gave a large sum of money to Macdonald’s election campaign. The scandal slowed progress on the construction of the railway. Liberal Alexander Mackenzie was elected as Prime Minister. The railway was not a priority. British Columbia threatened to secede from Confederation. Sir John A. Macdonald would be re-elected in 1878 but real progress on the railway would not be made on the C.P.R. for three more years. Building the railway was very difficult and done almost entirely by hand. In British Columbia the contractor, Andrew Onderdonk, relied heavily on Chinese labour. The Chinese were often given the most dangerous jobs: handling explosives or working on bridges and in tunnels. The C.P.R. was completed on November 7, 1885. The last spike of the line was driven in Craigelachie British Columbia by Donald Alexander Smith. One railway engineer said, “Our railroad construction is the reverse in this country from what it is in any other. They are built in other countries to take people out. Here we build a railroad so that people may go into the wilderness and settle it up.” "Without railways, there would be and could be no Canada,” wrote one historian.