Craigellachie Station and the legendary last spike

On February 16, 1881, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company was incorporated to link Canada’s populated centers with the vast potential of the relatively undeveloped west. On a bitterly cold day, November 7, 1885, Sir Donald Alexander Smith (Lord Strathcona), a director of the company, raised his hammer and struck the final blow to the last, plain iron spike in the country’s first transcontinental railway. That simple blow was the greatest symbolic act of Canada’s first century –- marking the end of one era in Canada’s history and the beginning of another.

Nearly 3,000 miles of steel now stretched across endless flat prairies, twisted through dangerous mountain passes, wound through deep canyons and spanned a thousand rivers and streams. An incredible feat in itself, the building of the railway was actually completed six years ahead of schedule. What a celebration that must have been!

The resting place of the last spike was named Craigellachie Station after a prominent crag in a village on the River Spey in Morayshire, Scotland, the ancestral home of Sir George Stephen, first president of the CPR.

Craigellachie is located alongside the Trans-Canada Highway in the Columbia-Shuswap Regional District of British Columbia. It lies between the drainage basins of the Columbia and Fraser Rivers, two of Canada’s largest, mightiest and most spectacular waterways. Fifty-three kilometers east of Salmon Arm, 48 kilometers west of Revelstoke in the Eagle Pass, the tiny settlement nestles in the Gold Range of the Monashee Mountains. The exact spot is marked by a plaque and display on the south side of the highway.

Up until the railway was completed, the Shuswap region had been fairly virgin territory, inhabited mostly by nomadic indigenous peoples. After the last spike was driven and the railroad was finally completed ‘from sea to shining sea’, settlers started to seriously move into the area.