Programs Offered Aboard

This second lesson is the pivotal one in the set of three. The first is required prep for this one and may be taken at other locations including in the visiting schools before their visit to our Classroom.  The third is optional but recommended follow-up in visitor’s home classrooms.

Crowfoot, Piapot and Louis Riel (pictured below), the three Indigenous leaders chosen for their different stances to the coming of the railway—negotiation, passive and armed resistance—are not profiled in detail here. That presentation will only be made live by an authorized CCOR representative in our Classroom car or by special request at other locations outside The Chinook Centre’s catchment area.

These three leaders share three traits in common:

• All three have mixed parentage or mixed upbringing (multicultural, migrants).
• All three crossed the Canada-US border, and two visited Montreal, one on the CPR. the other, via the US south of the Great Lakes, in West-East dealings (travellers).
• Each of the three had a parallel in non-Indigenous folklore: Ruth, Moses and Gandhi.

These traits suggest that wide experience and diversity is good grounding for leadership. We’ll see if this applies equally to Non-Indigenous leaders in the Canadian constellation.

We’ll also look at each of their legacies as seen at the ends of their lives and as it stands today.

CLICK HERE for a CCOR video and song on Piapot.

This is resource material for a further-study third lesson that can be undertaken by teachers, students and homeschoolers on their own after the other two lessons have been completed.

Indigenous peoples have been adept at mastering rail and related technologies to meet their own needs and contribute to a larger economy. Two regional railways, one in Québec and Labrador, the other in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, are owned and operated by First Nations. Another two, a Vancouver Island line abandoned in 2011 but with the tracks still in place and a proposed international northern railway now in receivership, are in a project stage with First Nations consulted and as major players.

CLICK HERE to access additional information on Shopping the Train further study.

Is a video song that needs to be moved to in order to set its message in body and brain, and shows how the gathering place we now call Edmonton began as a trading post where different first nations came together canoeing, wading or fording the River on horseback. The first fixed crossing were iron and steel bridges built for the ‘‘iron horses’’ and three of these still stand as well as wooden trestles in the Mill Creek Ravine. Only one of these now carries regular trains. A second one, the High Level, has a street car on its upper deck in the summer months, and it was this Bridge, built by Canadian Pacific, that led to Strathcona and Edmonton becoming one city.

Once students learn to dance to this song in a group, they can download the video on their devices, then follow up by finding traces of the former rail lines that used to crisscross the city.

Listen now to Edmonton Crossings 

A song video and learning package that brings together stories of a region’s past and present.

Edmonton’s High Level Bridge is not as long or high as Lethbridge’s but packs together a lot of symbolism and history that precedes Contact with Europeans. The North “Saskatchewan” (Cree for “swift-flowing”) River the Bridge spans became a boundary between Siksika (Blackfoot) and Nehiyah (Cree) territory and the Hudson’s Bay Company built Fort Edmonton as a trading post on the north bank on land that’s now the lawn bowling greens below the Legislature Building.

Traders from the two confederacies came to the post, setting up camps outside its walls. When visitor volume was high, the southern First Nations camped on the south bank or the heights above, fording the river depending on season. The Blackfoot, whose territory extended south into Montana, became masters of the horse trade. Though the Cree acquired horses later their centred around the river that, despite its name, was not as fast, or potentially deadly to swimmers, as the narrower Bow and Oldman that join to form the South Saskatchewan.

Surveyors initially proposed the North Saskatchewan as the route for the first transcontinental railway following the French and Scottish voyageur waterways of the past three centuries. But when political pressures, including American incursion from farther south on the plains, led to the political pressure for a southern route across the plains. This choice turned the younger Fort Calgary, a North West Mounted Police post, into a rail divisional point that grew into a city.

Settlers and speculators brought west by Canadian Pacific branched to the North Saskatchewan River valley in search of fertile farmland and founded the Village, Town and City of Strathcona, (named after the man who drove CP’s Last Spike in the Rockies) on the height above the River’s south bank. Private interests eventually built the Calgary and Edmonton Railway that paralleled the route of the earlier E & E train and stagecoach, with its terminus on the edge of the riverbank at what’s now End of Steel Park. John Walter’s ferry provided a dependable link to the north side Edmonton. The district of Alberta was still part of the Northwest Territories.

Rail branch lines were springing up in the way northern bush pilots would later start airlines. With the plans of a second and third transcontinental railways (the Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk Pacific that would later merge in CN) a group of local entrepreneurs incorporated the Edmonton, Yukon and Pacific Railway (EYP). Though it never reached Yukon—it got as far northwest as Stoney Plain—it was not a failure. Its real goal was to be an artery between rail traffic on the two sides of the River, funded by fees from the interchange of freight cars. With federal funding EYP built the Lower Level Bridge in 1900 the first surviving link across the River.

An EYP trip to Edmonton began near the Molson Brewery on Gateway Boulevard, ran straight east to Mill Creek and down its ravine, over the Low Level Bridge and west along the River’s north bank, providing coal to the Rossdale Generating plant, climbing the Valley above Victoria Golf Course, turning into Groat Ravine, and surfacing on the flats above and turning east to join with Grand Trunk Pacific year the Brewery and 122 Street and 104 Avenue. 

With the two northern, north side Edmonton transcontinental railways building branch lines southward, CP decided to secure its place as the main link between Alberta’s two major cities. It bought out the C & Edmonton Railway and planned to build into downtown Edmonton. It was not going to use the EYP route down the Mill Creek Ravine and up the Groat Ravine, deciding to build its own direct, “high level” crossing between the flats above the river valley on both sides.

From 1910-13, it began building the High Level Bridge while the Legislature building was under construction and Fort Edmonton was still standing below. A grant from the federal government enabled the building of a lower deck on the bridge for cars and pedestrians, while Edmonton Transit (then called Edmonton Radial Railway) laid lighter tracks on outsides of the upper deck with the CP mainline running in the middle between them.

Talk of merger between the cities of Edmonton and Strathcona had been going on for some time but it was the building of the High Level Bridge that brought opinion strongly in favour. A train from Calgary, stopping at Strathcona station, would then cross Whyte Avenue and arrive on Jasper Avenue in eight minutes. Streetcars took longer, but either way, travel between the two sides became so easy that identities began to merge.

Though Edmonton’s north side Jasper Avenue now appears much larger and more developed, the joining of the two cities was not a one-sided takeover. Strathcona (now South Edmonton) got to keep the University of Alberta, and CP promised to leave its marshalling yards and shops (roundhouse) on the south side rather than rebuilding new facilities in North Edmonton.     

This song brings the story together from First Nations to present. Moving while singing—this fits naturally in the chorus—helps set the content in memory as body and brain work together. The remains of the Edmonton Yukon and Pacific and CP Railways offer possibilities for follow up by students individually or in groups. CP’s Jasper Avenue/109 Street Station is gone and the turntable pit at Grant MacEwan was covered over when residence construction was complete.

But there are still the rail (now hiking) trestles in Mill Creek Ravine, and the Strathcona High Level Street car uses the CP tracks between Whyte and Jasper Avenues. Most basic, the three iron bridges mentioned and shown in the song—Low Level, High Level and Clover Bar—show the role of the railways, particularly CP, with its “Spans the World” logo, in building urban Edmonton. Yes, First Nations were here first and crossed the river, but it was the iron age, represented by still wheels on steel rails, that solidified the connection, as in the last line:

To the fabric of a trading post First Nations came all weather

South-North iron sinews riverbanks together.

This program takes this message a step farther. The Railway that joined the cities on north and south and south banks of the North Saskatchewan River was the overland Northwest Passage that linked Europe and Asia in 21 days: a five-day portage between nine days on the Pacific and six on the Atlantic aboard Canadian Pacific Steamships: the fastest way to go before air travel. The first Europeans who came to Turtle Island were not coming to settle but in search of a route to the Far East. When Sir John A. Macdonald congratulated Sir George Stephen, President of CP, on the driving of the Last Spike in 1885, Stephen told him, `’You must remember, Canadian Pacific will not be finished until we’ve reached Shanghai (China).’’ Six years later, CP’s steamship, the Empress of India, arrived in Vancouver and the job was done. 

Though the Railway has been largely identified with settlement of the West—a by-product—it could not have been financed internationally without the larger goal of its slogan, ‘’Canadian Pacific Spans the World.’’ Post-Contact story of Canada is the story of the Northwest Passage: (1) European explorers sought it by sea; (2) The Saint Lawrence based voyageurs, aided by First Nations guides found it: ‘’Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, 1993;’’ (3) Canadian Pacific built it along those waterways 90 years later; (4) Canada became a Northwest Passage as labourers imported from China, Europe and the US laid the foundations for a multicultural society.

Though there have been mistakes of overreach and exploitation, both of First Nations and Fourth nations (imported labour), these were not an inevitable part of seeking a passage, but of lack of due diligence in finding and building it.

This is an advanced program, lasting several weeks, taught out of the Chinook Centre and with follow online. It will be offered on request when numbers of students, aged 16 and up, warrant.