Monthly Archives: March 2026

I picked this book up at the condo as we were leaving Mexico heading for Japan. I thought oh well, I might as well read it now while on our cruise ship trip as opposed to sometime in the future. Glad I did.

Pierre Bertons’s 1971 book about building the Canadian Pacific Railway between 1881 and 1885 is a true masterpiece of Canadian history. Who said Canadian history is boring? Read this book and then see what you think.

Difficult to read at times because it is so jam packed with detailed stories, in the end, the story of the last spike being driven in Craigellachie, BC, occupies only a page or 2 out of the 420 pages. Indeed the book should be called “the 10 million spikes” lol.

In reality, this is a book about leadership and Cornelius Van Horne, General Manager of the project and George Stephen, its President and financier, stand out. Both had an unrelenting drive, the skills and the energy to see the vision of a railway from Ontario to the Pacific through to completion despite countless roadblocks: finance, geography, politics, resources and competition. They literally built the west, Winnipeg, Brandon, Regina, Calgary, Vancouver and countless other communities around the railway.

The American born Van Horne and the Scottish born Stephen created perhaps the greatest business partnership in Canadian history, were fiercely Canadian in their core although Stephen moved to England afterwards due to his dislike of politicians.

Along the way we are treated to many interactions and anecdotes involving Sir John A. MacDonald, Sir Charles Tupper, Donald A. Smith, Sir Sanford Fleming, Louis Riel, Gabriel Dumont, Crowfoot, Fr. Albert Lacombe, OMI, flamboyant engineers, contractors and countless others.

The challenges in particular that had to be overcome:

• the geography of the prairies, northern Ontario, the Selkirk mountains and the Fraser Valley in BC
• constant financial pressure as costs continued to exceed resources requiring increasingly creative financial solutions and government bailouts
• interactions with the Cree, Blackfoot and other indigenous that threatened to block the line
• manpower, thousands and thousands of workers needed to survey the route, grade it, install the rails and stay sober
• the politics and competition were brutal, unrelenting and threatened to derail the project on numerous occasions

In the end, the project came within 1 hour of total collapse as the CPR needed one more loan from the government to make payroll and avoid receivership. Van Horne, Stephen et al. would have been ruined men. Instead they danced on tables and smashed a few things when the loan came through. The rest is history, a nation building project that we take for granted today that was anything but a sure thing at the time. A smashing read!

Pierre Berton in his 1971 book The Last Spike has this to say about Fr. Lacombe:

“The CPR Directors invited Father Lacombe who had saved them so much grief, to be their guest at a luncheon. On a motion by Angus, Lacombe was made president of the CPR for one hour. Taking the chair, the priest immediately voted himself two passes on the railroad for life and, in addition, free transportation of all freight and baggage necessary to the Oblate missions together with free use for life of the CPR’s telegraph system.

The directors were only too happy to grant Lacombe what he asked. He was the man who had the full confidence of the Indians. All the promises that day were honoured by the railway. Moreover, Lacombe’s rather cavalier use of the passes, which he lent out indiscriminately (as he did most of his belongings), was regularly tolerated.”

A strikingly good looking man, he was particularly adept at raising funds and support for the Oblate missions in western Canada. His superiors often had him come to Ottawa and Montreal where he was very well connected to assist them in fundraising and political activities.

Pure speculation on my part but his skill in “secular” activities too often caused him to be pulled away by his superiors from his more holy activities and in the balance, may have outweighed them. No miracles were documented and no major push for canonization was ever launched by the Oblates. Furthermore, his legacy is tied to colonization and residential schools. Consequently he was never proposed for sainthood. A true Canadian hero to be very proud of nevertheless.

We recently visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City commonly called Saigon.

We toured the War Crimes Floor. We saw gruesome photo after photo of Vietnamese people being shot, tortured, burned and mutilated with agent orange, phosphorous and napalm by American forces during the Vietnam War 1965-75. We were appalled by what we saw.

Many of the victims were women and children, hardly a threat to the United States. I guess they could not distinguish who was VietCong and who wasn’t. It reminded me of the the famous quote by Arnold Amharic the Catholic Abbot responsible for ending the Albigensian Heresy in 1209. When asked by his Crusaders how they could distinguish between loyal Catholics and Cathar heretics, he ordered them to “Kill them all, God will know his own.”

Now we see today Venezuela being attacked, Cuba being starved out and in Iran a girls school bombed out and an unarmed Iranian ship being blown to pieces with no attempt to save the survivors. The United States is a killing nation.

Later we visited the former CIA building where the last Americans and allies were rescued by helicopter. Our tour guide encouraged us to take this picture at the exact site.

No more wars!