This is the story of Edward Mallandaine, the boy in the picture of the driving of the Last Spike. This photo, perhaps the most famous in Canadian history, marked the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) across Canada. It was taken early on the morning of November 7, 1885, in Craigellachie, British Columbia.
I had the privilege of knowing Edward when he was a very old man and I was a young boy. I have drawn on accounts he left and stories he told me to write this tale of his journey along tote roads and the newly laid tracks of the railway, past “hostess houses” and “Chinese joss houses,” into hotels crowded with rough characters, through mountain passes filled with beautiful scenery, and into the lawlessness of remote towns and railway camps.
Today, we enjoy instant communication by phone and the Internet, and think nothing of accessing music, videos, and pictures online. We are only hours away, by plane, from any other place on earth. It may be hard to imagine what it was like when Edward, just eighteen — and looking even younger — set out on his great adventure.
News travelled slowly in Edward’s day. The big story during his teenage years was the North-West Rebellion. Edward lived in Victoria, B.C., and the accounts he read in his local newspaper, the British Colonist, about the fighting on the prairies were often days old. Right away, he wanted to get in on the action. Accounts from those days tell of how he wanted “to fight the Indians,” as First Nations people were known at that time.
Edward probably had little understanding of the true causes of the North-West Rebellion — of how Louis Riel had struggled to obtain justice for his people, the mixed-blood Métis of the plains, and for Natives who had lost their hunting grounds and were being driven into reserves. But with the enthusiasm of youth, he was determined to join the battle.
As it turned out, Edward was too late. The fighting was over by the time he had slogged his way east by boat, train, horseback, and on foot.
Fate had a different destination for Edward. He talked his way into a contract with the Post Office Department to ride a pony between Eagle Pass Landing and the town of Farwell (now Revelstoke), delivering supplies and newspapers to the workers on the railway, and picking up mail and packages. He spent an adventurous summer until the railway was finished, at the beginning of November 1885.
The night before the driving of the Last Spike, Edward clambered aboard a flatcar loaded with steel rails and clung for his life as the train drove through a blinding blizzard to reach Craigellachie. Sleepless and half-frozen, he was determined to put himself in the soon-to-be famous photograph that marks the occasion when Canada was bound together, coast-to-coast, by the transcontinental railway.
The Last Spike was only the first great adventure of Edward’s life. He went on to do important work for the CPR and helped found the town of Creston, B.C. He served his community as a magistrate and politician, respected throughout British Columbia. After leading the Kootenay Regiment of the Canadian Army Forestry Corps in the First World War, he became a lieutenant colonel in the Canadian Army Reserve. From that day on, he was known as Colonel Mallandaine, the title by which I knew him.
When Edward died, I was close to the age he had been at Craigellachie: Canada’s entire history as a nation has unfolded, from Confederation to the age of terrorism, during the lifetimes of just the two of us. Today’s Canada is held together by forces that have long since replaced the railway. It is time to draw again on the legacy of Craigellachie, and the burning ambition that one young man brought to that time and place — to be in the picture, and to be a leading actor in the building of a boisterous, confident country.
I have meshed storytelling with historical record in writing this tribute to Edward Mallandaine. It is dedicated to all young men and women who yearn for adventure. May they be as determined as he was to find it.
Ray Argyle