Impossible Railway - Hardcover

Berton, Pierre

4.18

17 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0844661732 ISBN 13: 9780844661735

Publisher: Peter Smith Pub Inc, 1984

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In 1871, a tiny nation - just four years old, it population well below the 4 million mark - determined that it would build the world's longest and costliest railroad across 2500 miles of empty and forbidding country, much of it unexplored, most of it unpopulated. This decision, bold to the point of recklessness, was to alter the future and the shape of the nation and to change the lives of every Canadian then and for a century to come. For 14 years, from the dispatch of the first survey parties into the wilderness above Lake Superior and high into the unknown peaks of the Canadian Rockies until the driving of the last spike at Craigellachie on the western slope of Glacier National Park in 1885, the struggle to build the Canadian Pacific Railway fascinated, convulsed, consumed, threatened, and finally unified the entire young nation. This tale is crammed with human drama beyond the reach of fiction: financial scandal and double-dealing that threatened the Government in Ottawa and shook the money markets in New York and London, land speculation and swindles, an alcoholic Prime Minister able to dominate an unruly Parliament, armed rebellion in Manitoba, the development of the North West Mounted Police, surveyors wintering in 50-ft. snowdrifts, prostitutes, gamblers, and bootleggers carousing in the construction camps while thousands of Chinese laborers toiled - and often died - to force a right-of-way through the majestic but unyielding country of the North West. Until, ultimately, the almost incredible feat of flinging 2500 miles of steel across a continent in less than five years was accomplished. Pierre Berton's magnificent reconstruction of this heroic saga, based on unpublished manuscripts, diaries, and letters, as well as on public documents, newspapers of the time, and other primary sources, is an important contribution to history as well as a book that will bring to life for every reader a great adventure and the all-too-human figures who lived it.

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