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. Macdonald. It had nearly led to British Columbia leaving...
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...
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 built along the line of the Canada Pacific Railway. There...
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 in British Columbia as a whole. In the past, I also...
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 was of course labour, and the government of Sir John A...
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, presented a huge challenge for the construction of...
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...
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 shaped by it. Things began to change when fur traders...
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 Railway. Today, I am looking at the second incarnation of the...