Canadian history always suprises me. Or maybe it's just the way the Pierre Berton tells the story. After reading The National Dream and The Last Spike, I understand why we have a statue of Sir John A. MacDonald in Gore Park, Hamilton. The man almost killed himself healthwise over a period of about 20 years as he rode the political waves of getting the railway built.
The key to this story is that the railway had to be built entirely on Canadian soil, or else the commerce and flow of people to the expanding West would never have been controllable by the Canadian government. Many investors from the US had ideas about connecting the lines through the northern states, such as Minnesota, Wisconsin, N. Dakota, but due to the vision of the MacDonald government, and tons of political wrangling and controversy, the better plan prevailed. It was the plan that built Canada and knitted it together from Ontario to British Columbia.
The biggest earthly obstacle was the area of what is now Northern Ontario. Apparently, muskegs were so deep that they would swallow an entire causeway in a matter of minutes as the soft bottom gave way. What first looked like a rather simple, shallow landfill operation could ultimately consume weeks and months of engineering, resulting in huge cost overruns. (According to Jon Krakauer, muskeg is "the expanse of spongy, poorly drained, peat like organic matter overlaying a permanently frozen bog". A cousin of permafrost, muskeg raised havoc on ... the route. To avoid the loss of vehicles due to sinking, the engineers developed the use of "corduroy". Thousands of logs were scoured from nearby forests and placed crosswise. The highway was built atop the logs. Thus the weight of heavy vehicles was distributed evenly and the problem of sinking into the bogs was solved.)
Then, the whole matter of surveying a passage through the Rockies. Tons of money was spent sending survey crews into the wilderness, only to have an entirely different route chosen a decade later!
Here's the famous Last Spike photograph. Burn this picture in your heads, people. Canada is written all over it.
"The last spike joining the Canadian Pacific Railway was driven at Craigellachie, west of Revelstoke, on November 7, 1885. Sir Donald Smith is driving the spike, and standing just behind him is a lad by the name of Edward Mallandaine. Mallandaine was 17 years old at the time and had been running a pony express service between Sicamous and Revelstoke. He went on to found the town of Creston, B.C." [present day home of Kokanee brewery!]
