Building a railway that would span coast to coast was, in the words of historian Pierre Berton, Canada's "national dream." In actual fact, it was more often an engineering and political nightmare.

In February 1881, the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), formed by a group of financiers from the Bank of Montreal, was granted generous terms in return for building the CPR. The Canadian government offered the company $25 million plus 25 million acres, and agreed to a monopoly clause whereby no competing line could be built south of the CPR until 1900. The generous terms awarded the CPR aroused one of the most bitter and longest debates in Canadian parliamentary history  -  amounting to well over a million words, more than the Old and New Testaments combined.

In January 1882, the CPR hired William Cornelius Van Horne, a robust and impetuous American engineer, as the General Manager to oversee the construction. Laying track across the Prairies happened at an amazingly quick pace. At one point, workers were laying 600 feet of track (180 metres) in less than five minutes, a record for hand-laid track which stands to this day. The hardest part of the construction, however, lay in the Rocky Mountains. In late summer of 1882, Major A.B. Rogers, an experienced railway surveyor, discovered the pass through the Selkirk range that allowed the CPR to cross the mountains at that point. The pass was named Rogers Pass, on his insistence. Still, there were the difficulties of laying track along the side of mountains, blasting tunnels through rock, and bridging swift mountain rivers. This all took time, money, and too often the lives of the thousands of Chinese labourers.

By the end of 1884, the company had plunged towards bankruptcy. Coincidentally, it was the North West Rebellion that helped to bring it back into solvency. The same day that news of the uprising reached Ottawa (March 27, 1885), Parliament voted to use the railway to send troops against Riel and the Métis. But the railway needed to be completed first, so the government also introduced a bill to finish the remaining portions in the mountains. Eight months later, the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway, Canada's national dream, was a reality.