Last spike (Canadian Pacific Railway)

[2] However, successive governments mismanaged the project and by the original deadline of 1881 little of the railway had been completed, resulting in threats of secession by some BC politicians.

[citation needed] The work was then assigned to a newly incorporated CPR company, which was allowed an additional ten years to complete the line, and they did it in five.

[6] The silver spike remained with the Van Horne family until 2012, when they donated it, along with other artifacts, to the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec.

[7] The symbolic iron spike driven by Donald Smith, Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal, was badly bent as he pounded it into the railway tie.

[8] The second last spike, which Smith successfully drove into the tie, was removed from the track shortly after the ceremony to prevent theft by souvenir hunters.

[10][page needed][11] The most notable accounts of the construction and completion of the CPR are Pierre Berton's twin volumes The National Dream and The Last Spike,[10][page needed] which together are depicted in the Canadian television docudrama miniseries The National Dream, an eight-part series that premiered in 1974, whose rated audience of three million within Canada set a record for CBC in terms of dramatic programming.

[12] A previous version (prior to 2023) of the Canadian passport features the last spike (French: le dernier crampon) on pages 10 and 11, along with the Ross photograph of Smith.