You can support Canadian History Ehx with a donation at What began in 1871 when British Columbia joined Confederation had taken 14 years to reach its conclusion. The process had gone through a scandal that brought down the government of Sir John A...
We have almost come to the end of the series but before we reach that last spike, I wanted to look at the lives of the workers who spent their time on the railroad to see what it was like for them. Obviously, depending on where a person worked their...
While the construction of the railroad through British Columbia and the Canadian Shield was extremely difficult, the portion in between those two segments was a completely different story. The prairie portion of the railroad was a cake walk compared...
You can support Canadian History Ehx with a donation at We are going to jump ahead a bit before I continue on with the story of the construction of the transcontinental railway. Today, I’m going to look at the grand railway hotels that would be...
You can support Canadian History Ehx with a donation at Over the past two episodes, I have looked at the Chinese workers in British Columbia and the building of the Kicking Horse Pass portion of the railroad, but now I am going to look at building...
You can support Canadian History Ehx with a donation at When the plan was put in place for the construction of the transcontinental railway, the sheer cost of the venture had many worrying if it would bankrupt the country. One of the biggest costs...
You can donate to Canadian History Ehx at It is one of, if not the most difficult portion of the Canadian Pacific Railway construction. The Kicking Horse Pass, which as we saw last episode, was chosen because it was closer to the US border...
The route through the prairies for the Canadian Pacific Railway may seem as though it’s a natural path to take, along the southern part of the country, close to the United States border but that was not the original plan. When plans were first put...
You can support Canadian History Ehx with a donation at The Canadian West was an open landscape with few settlements, but the Canadian government wanted to change that. The Indigenous had occupied the landscape for millennia, shaping it and being...
You can support Canadian History Ehx with a donation at A few episodes back I talked about the Pacific Scandal, an incident which effectively delayed the railroad for at least five years and ended the first incarnation of the Canadian Pacific...