[1867 - 1914] Dominion of Canada and Westward Expansion

In the year 1867, a new country flickered into existence. It was called the Dominion of Canada, a narrow band of four provinces clinging to the eastern half of North America, a fragile experiment overshadowed by the sprawling, ambitious United States to the south. Its capital, Ottawa, was a rough-hewn lumber town. Its people were separated by language, religion, and vast, unmapped distances. At its head stood a man with a vision as immense as the land itself: Sir John A. Macdonald, the first Prime Minister. He knew that for this fledgling nation to survive, it had to grow. It had to push west, across the rock and muskeg of the Canadian Shield, over the sea of grass that was the prairies, and through the granite teeth of the Rocky Mountains, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. His great national dream was not merely one of politics, but of steel and steam. He promised a railway, an iron ribbon that would stitch the continent together and hold the Dominion against the magnetic pull of its southern neighbour. It was a promise that seemed, to many, like madness.

The sheer scale of the task was staggering. The Canadian Pacific Railway was the largest construction project the world had yet seen. Engineers and surveyors plotted a course through a wilderness that had been traversed only by Indigenous peoples, fur traders, and explorers. The first great obstacle was the Canadian Shield, a billion-year-old expanse of Precambrian rock and swamp north of Lake Superior that swallowed money, track, and men's lives. Dynamite blasts echoed through the granite, and for every mile of track laid, it was said, a man died. The project became a creature of political turmoil. In 1873, the Pacific Scandal, a tempest of kickbacks and corruption linking the railway contract to Macdonald’s campaign funds, toppled his government. The dream seemed dead. But Macdonald was a shrewd and resilient politician. He swept back into power in 1878 on a platform called the National Policy, a three-pronged strategy of protective tariffs, western settlement, and, at its heart, the completion of the railway. The work resumed with a ferocious, desperate new energy.

This energy was fueled by the sweat and blood of an army of labourers, or ‘navvies,’ from across the world. Among the most vital, and the most exploited, were the more than 15,000 workers recruited from China. They were assigned the most dangerous tasks, blasting tunnels through the mountains of British Columbia for a fraction of the pay of their white counterparts—often as little as $1 a day. They lived in squalid camps, their diets poor, their letters from home infrequent. It is estimated that at least 600 Chinese labourers died, though the true number is likely far higher, their bodies buried in unmarked graves along the track. On November 7, 1885, at a remote spot in the mountains called Craigellachie, the company’s chief financier, Donald Smith, drove the Last Spike. The photographs of the moment are famous, showing a crowd of stern, bearded men in Victorian coats and top hats. Not a single Chinese face is visible. The railway was complete, a marvel of engineering and a testament to a national will, but it was built on a foundation of hardship and racial injustice.

The railway did not cross an empty land. For millennia, the great plains had been home to First Nations like the Cree, the Blackfoot, and the Saulteaux. Their world was centred on the bison, an animal that provided food, shelter, clothing, and spiritual sustenance. By the 1870s, the herds, once numbering in the tens of millions, were gone, hunted to near extinction by an industrial slaughter from the south and actively discouraged by Canadian officials who saw the bison’s existence as an obstacle to settlement. Starvation became a grim reality. Into this crisis came government agents, promising aid and a new way of life in exchange for land. Through a series of Numbered Treaties, vast territories were surrendered. From the perspective of the Crown, these were simple real estate transactions. For the Indigenous signatories, they were sacred covenants, promises of mutual support and shared existence that were almost immediately misunderstood and broken by their new partners.

Desperation festered. For the Métis people—a unique culture born of French and Scottish fur traders and Indigenous women—the arrival of government surveyors on their established river-lot farms in the Saskatchewan valley felt like a second dispossession, a repeat of the conflict that had created the province of Manitoba fifteen years earlier. They sent for their visionary leader, Louis Riel, then in exile in Montana. Riel, a devout, charismatic, and ultimately tragic figure, returned to lead a movement for rights and recognition. In the spring of 1885, this movement erupted into the North-West Resistance. Joined by Cree allies under chiefs like Poundmaker and Big Bear, the Métis fought a brief, desperate war. The new railway, the great unifier, now played a different role: it transported thousands of militia from eastern Canada to the prairies in under ten days, a journey that would have taken months just a year before. At the Battle of Batoche, the Métis were overwhelmed. The resistance was crushed. Riel surrendered, was tried for treason in a trial that remains controversial to this day, and was hanged on November 16, 1885. His death sent a shockwave through the country, creating a deep and lasting wound between French and English Canada and cementing the subjugation of the peoples of the West.

With the resistance broken, the West was now truly open for business. The government, in partnership with the CPR, launched one of the most aggressive advertising campaigns in history. Posters in the towns of Ukraine, Germany, Scandinavia, and Britain promised “The Last Best West,” offering 160 acres of free land to anyone willing to brave the journey and break the sod. And they came, by the hundreds of thousands. They arrived in crowded colonist cars on the new railway, spilling out onto dusty platforms in places like Winnipeg, the booming “Gateway to the West.” Their new life was one of incredible toil. They built their first homes from the very earth itself, thick bricks of prairie sod stacked to create small, dark houses known as “soddies.” They faced biblical plagues of locusts, prairie fires, hail, and winters of soul-crushing cold and isolation, the wind howling relentlessly across a landscape that seemed to have no end. Yet, they endured. They built communities, raised churches with onion domes and Lutheran steeples on the prairie skyline, and slowly, painstakingly, transformed that sea of grass into one of the world’s great breadbaskets.

As the 20th century dawned, the myth of the West took on a new, glittering form. In 1896, gold was discovered on a tributary of the Klondike River in the far northwestern territory of the Yukon. The news sparked a hysterical global stampede. Over 100,000 prospectors, known as “stampeders,” sold everything they owned to chase the dream of fortune. Their ordeal was immense, particularly the ascent of the icy, treacherous Chilkoot Pass, where men had to haul a literal ton of goods up a 45-degree slope in an endless, frozen line. But unlike the lawless rushes in the American West, the Klondike was policed by the disciplined red coats of the North-West Mounted Police, who enforced order, collected customs, and ensured the chaos never devolved into anarchy. Few struck it rich, but the gold rush cemented the image of Canada’s north in the global imagination.

Back east, and in the new cities of the west, a different transformation was underway. This was the age of industry. Factories churning out textiles, farm equipment, and processed foods sprouted in Toronto and Montreal. With them came electric lights that pushed back the night, telephones that marvelously carried a human voice across miles of wire, and the clatter of streetcars on city streets. Life was changing at a dizzying pace. A new class of wealthy industrialists built grand Victorian mansions of brick and stone, while their employees crowded into tenements, working twelve-hour days for meagre wages. The promise of the new Canada, articulated by Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier who famously declared that the twentieth century would belong to Canada, felt real. The nation had been forged. It had stretched from sea to sea, bound by steel and ambition. But it was a nation built on conquest and displacement, with deep fissures of identity and memory. As 1914 approached, the country stood, confident and prosperous on the surface, unaware that the roar of its own creation would soon be drowned out by the guns of a world war.