CPR Weston Yards and Shops
Canadian Pacific Railway Station Winnipeg
Canadian Pacific Railway Historical Association
In 1871, a tiny nation, just four years old, it's population well below the 4 million mark, determined that it would build the world's longest railroad across empty country, much of it unexplored. This decision, bold to the point of recklessness, was to change the lives of every man, woman, and child in Canada and alter the shape of the nation. Using primary sources, diaries, letters, unpublished manuscripts, public documents, and newspapers, Pierre Berton has reconstructed the incredible decade of the 1870s, when Canadians of every stripe, contractors, politicians, financiers, surveyors, workingmen, journalists, and entrepreneurs fought for the railway, or against it. The National Dream is above all else the story of people. It is the story of George McMullen, the brash young promoter who tried to blackmail the Prime Minister, of Marcus Smith, the crusty surveyor, so suspicious of authority he thought the Governor General was speculating in railway lands, of Sanford Fleming, the great engineer who invented Standard Time but who couldn't make up his mind about the best route for the railway. All these figures, and dozens more, including the political leaders of the era, come to life with all their human ambitions and failings.
In the four years between 1881 and 1885, Canada was forged into one nation by the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The Last Spike reconstructs the incredible story of how some 2,000 miles of steel crossed the continent in just five years, exactly half the time stipulated in the contract. Pierre Berton recreates the adventures that were part of this vast undertaking, the railway on the brink of bankruptcy, with one hour between it and ruin, the extraordinary land boom of Winnipeg in 1881-1882, and the epic tale of how William Van Horne rushed 3,000 soldiers over a half-finished railway to quell the Riel Rebellion. Dominating the whole saga are the men who made it all possible, a host of astonishing characters, Van Horne, the powerhouse behind the vision of a transcontinental railroad, Rogers, the eccentric surveyor, Onderdonk, the cool New Yorker, Stephen, the most emotional of businessmen, Father Lacombe, the black-robed voyageur, Sam Steele, of the North West Mounted Police, Gabriel Dumont, the Prince of the Prairies, more than 7,000 Chinese workers, toiling and dying in the canyons of the Fraser Valley, and many more, land sharks, construction geniuses, politicians, and entrepreneurs, all of whom played a role in the founding of Canada west of Ontario.
Canadian Pacific Railway Bibliography
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