and straw, in contractors' sleighs along the
tote-roads from one camp to the next. In four days from leaving
Kingston the first troops landed at Winnipeg; and though the revolt was
not prevented, it was speedily crushed. There was no longer any
question about the value of the north shore link, and the opposition to
the Canadian Pacific fell from that hour. It was even suggested that
the company should build a statue to Louis Riel. As for the
government, it could well claim that its persistence in pushing through
this part of the road nearly offset its red-tape carelessness in
permitting the rebellion to come to a head.

Meanwhile, the government section between Port Arthur, or rather Fort
William, and Winnipeg had been taken over by the company in 1883,
though not entirely completed. Two years later the thousands of
Chinese {166} navvies working on the difficult Kamloops-Port Moody
section finished their task, and the government work was done. The
only gap remaining lay in the Gold Range, and here in the Eagle Pass,
at Craigellachie, on November 7, 1885, the eastward and westward
track-layers met. It was only a year or so before that the Northern
Pacific had celebrated the driving of the last golden spike by an
excursion which cost the company a third of a million, and heralded the
bankruptcy of the road. There was no banquet and no golden spike for
the last rail in the Canadian Pacific. William Van Horne had announced
that 'the last spike would be just as good an iron spike as any on the
road,' and had it not been that Donald A. Smith happened along in time
to drive the spike home, it would have been hammered in by the navvy on
the job. Six months later the first passenger train went through from
Montreal to Vancouver. The longest railway in the world was open from
coast to coast, five years before the end of the time required by the
original contract.

To realize how great a work had been accomplished requires to-day some
effort of the imagination. The Canada the present {167} generation
knows is a united Canada, an optimistic, self-confident Canada, with
rapidly rounding-out industries and occupations which give scope for
the most ambitious of her sons as well as for tens of thousands from
overseas. It is a Canada whose nine provinces stretch almost unbroken
from ocean to ocean. But the Canada of a generation earlier was far
other. On the map it covered half a continent, but in reality it
stopped at