The red locomotive cut through the long green grass, rustled by the wind, heading toward high snow-capped peaks framed by a brilliant blue sky. I was in the middle of a Canadian heritage moment.
Travelling east along the Trans-Canada Highway from Salmon Arm, B.C., toward Revelstoke you’ll come across Craigellachie, the site that saw the last spike hammered in the railway that linked a brand-new Canada from east to west. It’s a lovely little rest stop in kinda the middle of nowhere along a stretch of highway that links the country like the railway once did.
Canadian Pacific Railway incorporated in 1881 to construct a railway linking Eastern Canada to the West, across the Prairies and through the Rocky Mountains. Construction occurred prior and simultaneously across the country, connecting places like Thunder Bay, Ont., and Winnipeg; Calgary and Medicine Hat, Alta.; Port Moody and Yale, B.C.
Thousands of men* laid thousands of kilometres of track across the Canadian Shield, Prairies and mountain ranges. As an example, from spring to summer in 1882, 5,000 workers and 1,700 teams of horses laid 772 kilometres of track across the Prairies. By the end of the construction season that year, 52,000 tonnes of steel rail, 1.5 million crossties, and 3.4 million board feet of timber were used.
But it was here, in early November 1885, in the valley of the Monashee Mountains that the last iron spike was driven into the wood, connecting nearly 5,000 kilometres of steel rail from coast to coast.
At the rest stop, you’ll find remnants of the railway with concrete culverts dating from 1909. You’ll also find a convenience store with ice cream and little knickknacks of Canadiana to buy.
The railway still zooms by, nearly a century and a half later.
*We no longer can talk about the railroad – or any other foundational aspect of Canada – without acknowledging the contribution of non-white peoples. Particularly in the trans-continental railway story is the contribution of Chinese workers. They were paid less and given the most dangerous jobs, in keeping with British Columbia’s long history of racism toward people of Asian descent. For more about the history of Chinese workers on the railway, check out this UBC series: www.library.ubc.ca/chineseinbc/railways.html
