The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (75 page)

Meanwhile, on the far side of the mountains, Andrew Onderdonk’s private car “Eva” came up from Port Moody with Michael Haney aboard, pulling the final load of rails to the damp crevice in the mountains which the general manager, with a fine sense of drama, had decided years before to name Craigellachie. The decision predated Stephen’s memorable telegram to Donald A. Smith. When Van Horne first joined the company the word was in common use because of an incident in 1880, when the Syndicate was being formed out of the original group that had put the St. Paul railway together. One of the members had demurred at the idea of another railway adventure and suggested to Stephen that they might only be courting trouble. Stephen had replied with that one word, a reference to a Scottish poem which began with the phrase: “Not until Craigellachie shall move from his firm base.…” Van Horne, hearing of the incident, decided that if he was still with the
CPR
when the last spike was driven, the spot would be marked by a station called Craigellachie.

It was a dull, murky November morning, the tall mountains sheathed in clouds, the dark firs and cedars dripping in a coverlet of wet snow. Up puffed the quaint engine with its polished brass boiler, its cordwood tender, its diamond-shaped smokestack, and the great square box in front containing the acetylene headlight on whose glass was painted the number 148. The ceremonial party descended and walked through the clearing of stumps and debris to the spot where Major Rogers was standing, holding the tie bar under the final rail. By common consent the honour of driving the connecting spike was assigned to the eldest of the four directors present – to Donald A. Smith, whose hair in five years of railway construction had turned a frosty white. As Fleming noted, the old fur trader represented much more than the
CPR
. His presence recalled that long line of Highlanders – the Mackenzies and McTavishes, Stuarts and McGillivrays, Fräsers, Finlaysons, McLeods, and McLaughlins – who had first penetrated these mountains and set the transcontinental pattern of communication that the railway would continue.

Now that moment had arrived which so many Canadians had believed would never come – a moment that Fleming had been waiting for since 1862, when he placed before the government the first practical outline for a highway to the Pacific. The workmen and the officials crowded around Smith as he was handed the spike hammer. Young Edward Mallandaine was determined to be as close to the old man as possible. He squeezed in directly behind him, right next to Harris, the Boston financier, and directly
in front of Cambie, McTavish, and Egan. As the little hunchbacked photographer, Ross of Winnipeg, raised his camera, Mallandaine craned forward so as to see and be seen. Fifty-nine years later, when all the rest of that great company were in their graves, Colonel Edward Mallandaine, stipendiary magistrate and reeve of the Kootenay town of Crestón, would be on hand when the citizens of Revelstoke, in false beards and borrowed frock-coats, re-enacted the famous photograph on that very spot.

The spike had been hammered half-way home. Smith’s first blow bent it badly. Frank Brothers, the roadmaster, expecting just such an emergency, pulled it out and replaced it with another. Smith posed with the uplifted hammer. The assembly froze. The shutter clicked. Smith lowered the hammer onto the spike. The shutter clicked again. Smith raised the hammer and began to drive the spike home. Save for the blows of the hammer and the sound of a small mountain stream gushing down a few feet away, there was absolute silence. Even after the spike was driven home, the stillness persisted. “It seemed,” Sandford Fleming recalled, “as if the act now performed had worked a spell on all present. Each one appeared absorbed in his own reflections.” The spell was broken by a cheer, “and it was no ordinary cheer. The subdued enthusiasm, the pent-up feelings of men familiar with hard work, now found vent.” More cheers followed, enhanced by the shrill whistle of the locomotives.

All this time, Van Horne had stood impassively beside Fleming, his hands thrust into the side pockets of his overcoat. Though this was his crowning moment, his face remained a mask. In less than four years, through a miracle of organization and drive, he had managed to complete a new North West Passage, as the English press would call it. Did any memories surface in that retentive mind as the echoes of Smith’s hammer blows rang down the corridor of Eagle Pass? Did he think back on the previous year when, half-starved and soaking wet, he had come this way with Reed and Rogers? Did he reflect, with passing triumph, on those early days in Winnipeg when the unfriendly press had attacked him as an idle boaster and discussed his rumoured dismissal? Did he recall those desperate moments in Ottawa and Montreal when the
CPR
seemed about to collapse like a house of cards? Probably not, for Van Horne was not a man to brood or to gloat over the past. It is likelier that his mind was fixed on more immediate problems: the Vancouver terminus, the Pacific postal subsidy, and the Atlantic steamship service. He could not predict the future but he would help to control it, and some of the new symbols of his adopted country would be of his making: the fleet of white Empresses flying the familiar checkered flag, the turreted hotels with their green
château roofs, boldly perched on promontory and lakefront; and the international slogan that would proclaim in Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, and a dozen other languages that the
CPR
spanned the world.

As the cheering died the crowd turned to Van Horne. “Speech! Speech!” they cried. Van Horne was not much of a speechmaker; he was, in fact, a little shy in crowds. What he said was characteristically terse, but it went into the history books: “All I can say is that the work has been done well in every way.”

Major Rogers was more emotional. This was his moment of triumph too, and he was savouring it. In spite of all the taunts of his Canadian colleagues, in spite of the scepticism of the newspapers, in spite of his own gloomy forebodings and the second thoughts of his superiors, his pass had been chosen and the rails ran directly through it to Craigellachie. For once, the stoic Major did not trouble to conceal his feelings. He was “so gleeful,” Edward Mallandaine observed, “that he upended a huge tie and tried to mark the spot by the side of the track by sticking it in the ground.”

There were more cheers, some mutual congratulations, and a rush for souvenirs – chips from the tie, pieces of the sawn rail. Young Arthur Piers, Van Horne’s secretary, spotted the first, twisted spike lying on the track and tried to pocket it. Smith, however, told him to hand it over; he wanted it as a souvenir. Smith had also tossed the sledge aside after the spike was driven but, before he left, one of the track crew, Mike Sullivan, remembered to hand it to him as a keepsake. Then the locomotive whistle sounded again and a voice was heard to cry: “All aboard for the Pacific.” It was the first time that phrase had been used by a conductor from the East, but Fleming noted that it was uttered “in the most prosaic tones, as of constant daily occurrence.” The official party obediently boarded the cars and a few moments later the little train was in motion again, clattering over the newly laid rail and over the last spike and down the long incline of the mountains, off towards the dark canyon of the Fraser, off to the broad meadows beyond, off to the blue Pacific and into history.

*
There are several versions of the legendary incident, differing in detail. All agree, however, on Smith’s key role in Stephen’s subsequent actions,

†
Macdonald’s secretary and no relation to John Henry Pope.

Aftermath

Sir John A Macdonald
finally visited the North West in 1886, when the railway was finished, riding through a portion of the Rockies on the cowcatcher of a
CPR
locomotive, a hazard he did not greatly enjoy. He survived two more elections, in 1887 and in 1891. Three months after the latter victory, at the age of 76, he died of a stroke. He was succeeded by J. J. C. Abbott, the
CPR’S
lawyer, who had once been Sir Hugh Allan’s legal adviser in the days of the Pacific Scandal.

Sir Charles Tupper
served as High Commissioner in London until 1896 (except for a brief period as Minister of Finance). In 1896 he became Secretary of State in the Cabinet of Mackenzie Bowell, then the Prime Minister. When Bowell resigned in April, Tupper became Prime Minister briefly. His party was defeated at the polls in June by the Liberals under Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Tupper was Leader of the Opposition until his retirement in 1900. He died in England in 1915.

George Stephen
was knighted in 1886 for his contribution to the building of the
CPR
. He continued as president until 1888 when he became chairman of the board and moved to England. It was said that one of his reasons for leaving Canada was his disaffection with politicians, who had forced the Onderdonk section on him and caused him to build the uneconomic “Short Line” through Maine to connect Quebec with the Maritime Provinces. In 1891 Stephen was elevated to the peerage and became Baron Mount Stephen. He stepped down from the
CPR
board in 1899 and died in 1921.

James J. Hill
’s real career did not begin until he quit the
CPR
. His great adventure was the extension of the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway westward to Great Falls, Montana (a community he helped found), in 1887 and to Seattle in 1893. By then the line had been consolidated into the Great Northern Railroad Company. Hill’s feat of railroad building – free of bankruptcy, financial scandal, and government assistance – was perhaps the greatest in the history of the United States. He helped reorganize the Northern Pacific after that company again went bankrupt in 1893 and in 1901 won a memorable financial battle against his great rival, E. H. Harriman. Hill, who maintained his friendship with Stephen and Donald A. Smith for all of his life (they both retained their holdings of St. Paul and later Great Northern stock), died in 1916.

Richard B. Angus
remained as a director of the
CPR
for more than forty years. In 1910, when he was seventy-nine, he became president of the Bank of Montreal, which had hired him as a junior clerk in 1857. That same year he refused a knighthood. He died in 1922.

Donald A. Smith
had reached his sixty-fifth birthday at the time the last spike was driven – an age at which most men retire. He had already enjoyed several careers as fur trader, politician, financier, and railway executive. With the railway behind him, he entered on a variety of new ventures. Already vice-president of the Bank of Montreal, he became president in 1887. He was elected chancellor of McGill University in 1889 and founded Royal Victoria College at McGill in 1896. Knighted in 1886 for his services to the
CPR
, he was created Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal in 1897. The unit of mounted rifles which he equipped for the Boer War, Lord Strathcona’s Horse, still survives in Calgary. Smith, who became Canadian High Commissioner to London in 1896, was made Lord Rector of Aberdeen University in 1899 and chancellor in 1903. He died in London in 1914 in his ninety-fourth year.

William Cornelius Van Horne
succeeded Stephen as president of the
CPR
in 1888 and as chairman of the board in 1899. By this time he had become a leading figure in the Canadian financial world – involved in concerns as varied as the Windsor Salt Company and Laurentide Paper. He piloted the company through a turbulent period of financial crisis and expansion which saw him personally write the copy for the
CPR’S
ebullient advertising (“ ‘How High We Live’ said the Duke to the Prince on the Canadian Pacific Railway”). Retirement did not suit the restless nature of this remarkable man. He tried to fill in the time with travel, but this was not enough for him. One day in Rorida he spotted a vessel at the dock and asked its destination. He was told it was bound for Cuba. “All right,” said Van Horne, “give me a ticket.” It was as a result of this incident that Van Horne built another railway – this time across Cuba. Van Horne was knighted in 1894 after his wife overcame what he called her republican tendencies, but he himself, it is said, refused a peerage because of his American birth. When he died in Montreal on September 11, 1915, every wheel in the
CPR’S
vast transportation network stopped turning.

Major A. B. Rogers
went to work for James J. Hill’s railroad after the last spike was driven. In the summer of 1887 in the Coeur d’Alene mountains of Idaho his horse stumbled and fell on a steep trail. Rogers was thrown off onto a stump. He died from the effects of his injury in May, 1889.

Tom Wilson
never left the mountains. He spent his whole life as a packer and guide, making his home at Banff, where he became a fixture. He had expected to meet his friend A1 Rogers in the summer of 1931 to visit the spot near Lake Wapta where, fifty years before, the “vow of the twenty” had been made on the Great Divide, but A1 Rogers died on May 16, 1929. Tom Wilson, who dictated his memoirs to W. E. Round in 1931, died September 22, 1933.

Thomas Shaughnessy
, in his turn, succeeded Van Horne as president and later chairman of the
CPR
. Under his tenure – he was known as the King of the Railway Presidents – the
CPR
became the leading transportation system on the globe, building a chain of great hotels, establishing an Atlantic shipping service to match its Pacific fleet, and acquiring other companies, notably in the mining and smelting field. A staunch Imperialist, who gladly accepted a peerage in 1916, Baron Shaughnessy organized Imperial transport and purchasing for Canada during World War I and put the
CPR’S
credit behind $100 million worth of Allied war loans. He died in 1923, shortly after naming his successor, Edward Beatty, and telling him to “take good care of the Canadian Pacific Railway.”

Andrew Onderdonk
went from British Columbia to Argentina, where in 1886 he built the Entre Rios railway north of Buenos Aires. His later construction work included nine miles of drainage tunnelling in Chicago, the Chicago Northwestern Elevated Railway, a double-track tunnel in Hamilton, part of the Trent Valley Canal system (which included one of the largest rock cuts on the continent), and part of the rebuilding of the Victoria Bridge over the St. Lawrence. He was a partner, at one time, of G. W. Ferris and, it is believed, helped build the famous wheel which was a feature of the World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893. In 1905 he was general manager of the New York Tunnel Company, building a subway tunnel under the east branch of the Hudson River said at the time to be one of the most difficult pieces of work ever undertaken by a contractor. He died on June 21 of that year at Oscawana-on-the-Hudson. He was fifty-six years old. The cause of death was given as “overwork.”