History
At the beginning of the 20th century, the GTR planned a second Canadian transcontinental rail route with a terminal on the Pacific that would be nearer to Asia than Vancouver. It would follow one of the routes surveyed by Sandford Fleming from Winnipeg to Port Simpson at the end of the Portland Canal which formed part of the boundary between British Columbia and Alaska. In 1903 there was resentment in Canada over the Alaska boundary decision which favoured US interests after a British commissioner sided with them. As a result of the clamour in Canada, US President Theodore Roosevelt threatened to send an occupation force to nearby territory. Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier considered a new location at Prince Rupert would be more easily defended and decided to build the terminal there rather than at Port Simpson.
Turning of the first sod for the construction of the GTPR, took place at an official ceremony, September 11, 1905, at Fort William, Ontario, by Prime Minister Laurier. From there a 190-mile section of track was built by the Grand Trunk Pacific Construction Company, connecting with the NTR, near Sioux Lookout.
Construction began on the Canadian Prairies in 1905, the year that the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan were established. Construction proceeded west to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 1907, Edmonton, Alberta in 1909, and through Jasper, Alberta into Yellowhead Pass crossing the Continental Divide in 1910-1911. The last spike ceremony heralding completion of the rail line across the prairies, and through the Rocky Mountains to the newly constructed seaport at Prince Rupert, British Columbia was held one mile east of Fort Fraser, British Columbia on April 7, 1914.
In 1910, the company also built a dock in Seattle, the Grand Trunk Pacific dock, which was the largest dock on the west coast at the time it was built. On July 30, 1914, the dock was destroyed by fire.
Read more about this topic: Grand Trunk Pacific Railway
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)