Who built BC's railroads? A Fraser Valley train history Q&A

A train is never far away in the Fraser Valley. 

But what, exactly, is the history of rail in the Fraser Valley? Who built the railways that cut through the canyon, the flood plains, and the farmland? And how did the introduction of those new rail lines impact Indigenous people in the valley?

Several months ago, we asked you for your questions about trains in the valley. Since July, we have answered your queries about freight trains and passenger travel. 

Now, we take a dive into your questions about the history of trains, looking at the impacts on our communities, the people who lost their lives building Canada’s transcontinental connection, and the effect railways had and continue to have on Stó:lō and Nlaka'pamux people.

What is the history of trains here?

This is a short question with a long, involved answer. The introduction of rail was integral to the establishment of settler communities in the Fraser Valley, and local businesses, Indigenous Nations, and other groups continue to feel those impacts today, for better or worse. 

For simplicity, we’ve divided our answer below into three brief histories of the Fraser Valley’s main railways, a short look at other rail companies in the region, and a quick examination of one of the most famous train-related stories in the Fraser Valley.

Canadian Pacific Railway

The Canadian Pacific Railway was Canada’s first transcontinental railway. Its successful construction across British Columbia was a key condition to BC’s agreement to enter confederation in 1867. CP began laying track in BC in 1881 and the last spike was hammered at Craigellachie in November of 1885. CP Rail also played a significant role in shaping the Fraser Valley as we know it today. 

Before construction could begin, surveyors and engineers had to determine where to lay the track itself. Several Fraser Valley residents became surveyors for Canadian Pacific, including former Royal engineers George Turner and John Maclure, who lived in Matsqui. 

Once construction began, labourers began moving through the valley, many of whom were Chinese and would continue to work for the railway after construction was complete; in Agassiz, Donald McRae employed as many as 250 Chinese workers as woodcutters to fuel the CPR’s steam locomotives. Several communities in the Fraser Valley, including Chilliwack and Agassiz, had prominent Chinese neighbourhoods both during construction and after the railway had been completed. 

In the Fraser Valley, the Canadian Pacific Railway was built on the northern side of the Fraser River between Hope and Mission. Railway construction spurred settlement even before the trains were running on the tracks. In 1882, residents built a school beside the railway’s newly established right-of-way near Hatzic Lake; local resident Gabriel Lacroix opened a store at Hatzic when construction started, reducing the need to travel to the store near Sumas Mountain or into Fort Langley. 

St. Mary’s Mission—which in 1882 was already operating as a residential school, although it was not yet mandatory for Indigenous children to attend—had to move its buildings when the CPR requisitioned its land. It moved further uphill to what is now Fraser River Heritage Park. When the railway was finished in 1885, passenger trains would take children from Indigenous communities across the province to St. Mary’s Residential School, where they could not speak their own language and were subjected to abuse. (You can read more about the residential school experience here.) 

The railway’s biggest impact was on Yale, which transformed from a gold rush hub into the main supply centre for all work on the Cascade Subdivision. Roughly 7,000 people were employed in Yale in the 1880s, with many working in machine shops, sawmills, and other related rail industries. Many of those rail workers remain in Yale to this day. As local historian Ian Brown recounted in his book on Yale’s Pioneer Cemetery, dozens of labourers came to the canyon to build the railways, only to be killed during construction in the 1880s. 

The railway was completed in 1885, with the driving of the last spike at Craigellachie. Although originally intending to end at Port Moody, it actually ended its line at Granville (which would later become Vancouver). It saw its first official transcontinental trip in 1886.

The introduction of cross-Canada rail also opened the Fraser Valley to growth and settlement from elsewhere in the country. 

Harrison Mills, a small community at the junction of the Harrison and Fraser Rivers, became the main station for the growing farming community of Chilliwack across the river. As its name suggests, Harrison Mills became a hub for sawmills in the region. Later, in 1906, Thomas and Eliza Kilby opened the Kilby General Store and Hotel, which continues today as the Kilby Historic Site.

In Agassiz, federal scientists William Saunders decided to establish one of Canada’s first experimental farms in the community, citing its temperate climate and its proximity to the new railway. Scientists, politicians, and tourists came to Agassiz on the railway to visit the farm and learn more about the place that was researching some of the most pressing agricultural questions of the day. In 1923, dignitaries and press came to the farm via the railway to celebrate Agassiz Segis May Echo, a cow who produced a world-record-breaking amount of milk in one  year.

Despite the relative growth in the rail-side communities, the Fraser Valley and Canyon continued to look “barren” and “forbidding” to some travellers well into the 20th century. In a letter to his wife, American railway manager William Kinghorn Hallett described his trip from Lytton to Vancouver on the Canadian Pacific line during a 1925 cross-Canada excursion:

Of course, Hallet’s observations reflect the European view of a land he knew little about. Much of the “barren country” Hallet referred to had been occupied, travelled through, and used by people for thousands of years. Hallet’s train had rumbled through Lytton where people have lived and traded for millenia. Hallet is also unlikely to have appreciated the vastness of the country—massive swaths of land and many communities existed out of sight and largely untouched by the new railways.

But when rail arrived, the landscape did begin to change—particularly once a second railway was completed on the other side of the river. Once the Canadian Northern Railway opened in 1915, a battle for freight and passenger supremacy began between the two railways. The federal government put a stop to it in 1933, with the Canadian National-Canadian Pacific Act. (This act forced the railways to work together by not duplicating services.) 

Both railways offered passenger services, but declining use after the Second World War made passenger travel less and less sustainable. In 1978, the federal government established VIA Rail to manage (and subsidize) passenger traffic on CP and CN lines across Canada. 

In 2001, Canadian Pacific divided its company—which included marine, energy, coal, and hotel subsidiaries—into separate companies, and Canadian Pacific Railway became an independent, publicly traded company. In 2021, CP acquired the American railway Kansas City Southern and renamed the merged company CPKC.

You can read more about CP in our freight train mailbag here. You can read more about VIA Rail in our passenger train mailbag here.   

Canadian National Railway

Today, the Canadian National Railway snakes along the southern side of the Fraser River through Langley, Abbotsford, Chilliwack, and beyond. But before CN, there was the Canadian Northern Railway. 

Canadian Northern started as a small Manitoba rail line in 1896, and soon received a federal charter to expand into a new transcontinental railway. Entrepreneurs Donald Mann and William Mackenzie owned the line, having bought out other dying railroads and connected them together. West of Edmonton, there were few such languishing railways, so they had to build the line from scratch. 

Canadian Northern started heading west from Edmonton in 1910, and in 1911 decided Port Mann would become the railway’s western terminus. The decision sparked a small building boom in nearby Port Kells, on the border of Langley and Surrey, before construction even began. However, although the railway built extensive rail yards, warehouses, and some workers' cottages at Port Mann, an urban centre never followed. (Port Mann continues to be a significant rail hub today, although the rail line terminates in Vancouver.) 

In 1912, railway workers in Yale started to strike to protest working conditions. The Industrial Workers of the World union walked out of construction camps on March 27, 1912, and by April 2 more than 8,000 men were on strike. They halted construction on 640km of track through the Fraser Canyon and beyond. The union members, who were called “Wobblies” and were largely immigrant labourers, sought a nine-hour work day, a minimum wage of $3 a day, and enforcement of the Provincial Health Act.

The federal government refused to step in as an arbitrator during the strike, and the provincial government ended up breaking up the protest with violence and arrests. Although the workers gained some concessions, the union eventually collapsed.

A year later, construction through the Fraser Canyon reached Hells Gate. (At the time, that portion of Fraser River was known as the “great canyon.”) Canadian Pacific had built its tracks on the western side of the river, where the mountainside was less steep—although multiple tunnels and significant blasting were still required. Forced onto the eastern side, Canadian Northern needed its workers to blast incredible amounts of rock from the precarious slopes in order to carve a path for its track.

The track was completed through the canyon in 1913, but the following February 100,000 cubic metres of loose granite fell into the river, essentially forming a dam in what was already one of the tightest spots on the Fraser River. The water gushed through a 23-metre channel, forming a nearly impenetrable barrier for the salmon that would be coming later in the year. Although work began in the spring to remove the rock, and Indigenous men were hired to move fish over the slide using nets, it wasn’t enough. That year’s salmon run above the slide was dismal, causing widespread famine upstream. Without their prime source of food, an estimated one-fifth of residents in nearby Indigenous communities starved to death.

(Concrete fishways built in 1945 allowed salmon to get around the slide to their spawning grounds further north. Additional spawning channels were added to the river in the 1980s.)

Despite the strike, the landslide, and the significant financial difficulties that required the federal government to buy out part of the company, the Canadian Northern Railway was completed in January of 1915, with trains running on the rails that November.

In the Fraser Valley, the launch of the Canadian Northern Railway meant the establishment of train stations in Fort Langley, Chilliwack, Hope, and elsewhere. The Fort Langley station is perhaps the most well-preserved of these. Today, it is maintained by the Langley Heritage Society and is open to visitors on weekends in the summer. It was moved 240 metres from its original location in 1983; the gardens are currently maintained much as station master Richard Simpson had them between 1918 and 1929. 

The Hope Station House is another remaining station from CN’s earliest years. Although it is currently in much worse shape than the Langley station, it is the only remaining Canadian Northern station of its kind in Canada. It had seen many Japanese-Canadians come through its doors during the Second World War, when the country sent people of Japanese origin to internment camps by train. It has been moved several times, and has been sitting vacant for years. Recently, it looked as though its future was jeopardy, but the building was acquired by the Tashme Historical Society. In February 2024 was moved to a new location on Water Street. The station currently remains on blocks, although restoration plans are in place. 

The Canadian Northern Railway didn’t keep its name for long. In 1917, with increasing financial difficulties and challenges from the First World War, the feds took over more shares of the company’s capital stock. The following year, the railway was nationalized and became Canadian National Railway, which it is still called today.

As CN, the railway competed heavily with CP until 1933, when the federal government instituted the Canadian National-Canadian Pacific Act. (This was the act that forced the railways to work together by not duplicating services.) Both railways continued to offer passenger services until 1978, when VIA Rail was created. 

In 1995, the Canadian government sold CN, and the company went private. In 1998, the railway brokered an alliance with Kansas City Southern Railway to extend its track to Mexico. (Canadian Pacific acquired Kansas City Southern in December of 2021, in a move that was hotly contested by CN.)

You can read more about CN in our freight train mailbag here. You can read more about VIA Rail in our passenger train mailbag here.

BC Electric Railway

BC Electric Rail was, at its heart, a local railway. Unlike CP and CN—whose histories are largely concerned with lofty, trans-national goals and decisions—the BCER was a rail company focused on getting people, mail, milk, and other goods from one end of the Fraser Valley to the other. 

The BC Electric Railway began in 1897 as an amalgamation of street cars and a single interurban line between Vancouver and New Westminster. Seven years later, the company extended its railway into the Fraser Valley in 1904, when a bridge was built between New Westminster and Surrey.

Once the bridge was constructed, the BCER was able to start laying tracks to the east, from Surrey, through Langley and Abbotsford, to Chilliwack. As the railway would be powered by electricity, rather than steam, construction needed to include the establishment of substations at Cloverdale, Coghlan, Clayburn, Vedder Mountain, and Chilliwack to provide power to the rail line. (We wrote about an pair of murders that occurred at two of these power stations in our first history edition.) Each substation cost around $25,000 to build. Two remain today: one in Coghlan, in rural Langley; the other at the base of Vedder Mountain.

The tracks were completed in 1910—although construction was not without hurdles. In 1909, according to The Story of the BC Electric Railway, Chilliwack settlers chased BCER officials off the railway’s new right-of-way at gunpoint, saying the company had failed to pay them for their land.

The first passenger train trundled down the line in October of that year, featuring three “gaily decorated” coaches, according to the Chilliwack Progress. 

“All along the line as the train passed the residents turned out to cheer and welcome it,” the newspaper reported. “Chilliwack turned out en masse and with a brass band, handkerchief waving and steam whistles shrieking showed their appreciation of being able at last to get out of the woods.”

(Not every moment of that first trip was so glorious: a pole had fallen on the track near Sumas Mountain, destroying electrical communications for the final stage of the journey. So instead of arriving on electric power, the train was pulled in by one of the BCER’s steam engines.)

After the arrival of the interurban, residents throughout the Fraser Valley could make relatively quick trips into the city and back in a day. The railway offered four round-trips between Vancouver and Chilliwack most days, carrying not only passengers, but also mail, freight, and milk.

Before the arrival of the BCER, dairy farmers mostly sold their products locally, with a few farms using the CPR to ship their milk, with mixed results. With the new local railway, the ability of dairy to reach the city in only a few hours caused prices to quickly drop, according to Milk Stories, a history of the BC dairy industry.

The railway was a success. In 1925, it had the third-highest passenger traffic in Canada among electric railways, only behind services in Montreal and Toronto. It also carried the most freight of all Canada’s electric railways, according to The Story of the BC Electric Railway. 

By the 1950s, however, passenger rail across the country was declining and the BCER was no exception. The company aimed to eliminate interurban traffic to Chilliwack by July 1950, offering $40,000 to each community along the route for the maintenance of roads to be used as bus routes. 

Many of the interurban cars were burned after they were decommissioned; some, however, were shipped to museums in the United States. The Fraser Valley Heritage Railway in Surrey has brought several of these interurban cars home to refurbish. They offer trips between Cloverdale and Sullivan in the summer on the old interurbans.

After the end of passenger trains, the line was used for freight transportation. BC Hydro took over the BC Electric Railway in 1961. (You can see some pictures of old BC Hydro engines here.) And in 1988, the line was finally sold to private interests. The Fraser Valley portion of the line between Abbotsford and Chilliwack was sold to Itel Rail Group, which started the Southern Railway of British Columbia. The railway operates short-line freight transfers from the CPKC and CN mainlines to local businesses. A section of track in Langley City was sold to Canadian Pacific, and is currently used as part of the Roberts Bank Corridor, which brings freight to Deltaport. (The fact that the Interurban’s tracks are not owned by a single company is one hurdle to ambitions to revive the route for passenger rail.)

You can read more about the SRY in our freight train mailbag here.

Others

The Fraser Valley’s big three railway companies aren’t the only ones to have run trains in the valley. In 1910, the Western Canada Power Company created what it called North America’s shortest railway to run equipment up from the CP mainline at Ruskin to Stave Falls during the construction of the Stave Falls Dam and Powerhouse and later the Ruskin Dam and Powerhouse. (You can read more about the Powerhouse’s history here.) The line was eventually folded into the BC Hydro Railway, which took over the BCER in the 1960s.

In Chilliwack, the Chilliwack River Valley Railroad operated from the late 19th century into the 1940s. It started to provide services to the Trethewey-Brett Mill near Elk Creek on Annis Road, and its tracks extended from the mill along the foot of Mt. Cheam. It was a narrow gauge railway, meaning the rails were closer together than on standard tracks. Other mills added to the tracks, although it’s unclear if these were run independently or together as a single company. (More details are available in The Fraser Valley Challenge.)

There was also the Vancouver, Victoria, and Eastern Railway, which had a short-lived line between Cloverdale and Sumas, and later extended out to Chilliwack. That railway, a subsidiary of the American Great Northern Railway, closed in the 1920s. (The VV&E track can be seen on this interactive map by the Township.)

Billy Miner and the Great Railway Robbery

No history of rail in the Fraser Valley would be complete without a mention of the infamous Billy Miner and his 1904 train robbery. 

Billy Miner was a well-known American criminal, who had an unfailing knack for charm and politeness. Credited with inventing the phrase “Hands up!,” he was known as the Gentleman Bandit by many.

In 1904, at the age of 56, Miner escaped from the United States after a poorly planned heist in Oregon, and established himself in Princeton under the name of George Edwards. Although he put on the persona of a semi-retired rancher, he did not leave his life of crime behind. Later that year, he began to spend more and more time in Chilliwack, where he planned his next heist. 

On Sept. 10, 1904, Miner and three other robbers boarded a Canadian Pacific Train in Mission, taking control of the locomotive. They ordered the conductor to unhook the passenger cars at Silverdale. The engine, as well as the express and mail cars, were then driven further west to Ruskin. There, Miner and the others plundered the cars, which contained shipments of gold, money, and mail. They hopped back in the locomotive, and ordered the crew to drop them off near the Whonnock dock. 

Miner is quoted as saying “Goodnight boys, sorry to have troubled you,” as he left the train.

Miner and his team returned to Chilliwack, and hung around until October. His involvement in the robbery was not suspected for some time, and it wasn’t until 1906 that he was arrested in relation to another train robbery near Merritt—that one far less successful than his Mission exploit. He tunneled his way out of jail in 1907, and fled to the United States. Miner, though, was recaptured and died in a Georgia jail in 1913.

https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/transportation/ties-that-bind 

A more fulsome telling of Miner’s Mission train robbery can be found here.

I would like to know about the rail line that went to Mill lake and west through Fishtrap Creek park and west of Mt Lehman. Like its former route, usage, longevity etc.

The railway in Abbotsford’s Mill Lake area was, unsurprisingly, a sawmill railway. It was a privately owned rail line used to transport logs from the surrounding area to the mill. Alexander Johnston and James Cook, the owners of the Abbotsford Lumber Company, built the original two-and-a-half miles of line from the mill to the edge of their timber-cutting limit. The mill itself was built in 1907, and the railway was likely built around the same time.

The railway itself, like many other logging railways, used narrow gauge rails, meaning ordinary locomotives couldn’t run on the line. Instead, they used two narrow-gauge Climax locomotives, comically called “dinky loci.” The rail line crossed the lake on a trestle, where workers would push the logs into the water to sort.  

Arthur Trethewey purchased the mill and its rail line in 1909, and developed new spur lines out to the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Great Northern Railway (the American company pushing through Langley to Chilliwack), and the BC Electric Railway. In 1910, with the expansion of his mill and its increased production, he added another seven miles of narrow-gauge track to gather wood from Clearbrook and Huntingdon. 

The mill and its surroundings were an early multi-cultural hub. The mill employed large numbers of Japanese, Chinese, and South Asian workers. And lumber from the area was used to build BC’s first gurdwara, which still stands on South Fraser Way.

The mill, and its associated railway, continued into the 1930s. Piles in Mill Lake itself are remnants of the trestle that crossed the lake to the mill. As the City of Abbotsford considers future improvements in Mill Lake Park, planners are considering whether to reconstruct the historic trestle bridge.

Who were the people who worked on building the railways and what were the interactions with Indigenous people/groups?

This question really digs down to the racist undertones of Canadian railway construction, and the ongoing challenges between rail companies and Indigenous groups. Although the train tracks that made their way across Canada were a boon for white settlers in the late 1800s, it was quite different for Indigenous people and the non-European immigrant workers on the railway.

Because the answer to this question is quite expansive, we’re going to break it down into two parts: Constructing the Canadian Pacific Railway and Impacts on Indigenous People.

Constructing the Canadian Pacific Railway

The construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway—the first route to connect BC to the rest of Canada—employed largely Chinese labour. These men were typically employed on the riskiest sections of track doing the most dangerous jobs. As many as three Chinese workers died for every mile of track laid in the Fraser Canyon, if not more.

In other parts of Canada, the Canadian Pacific Railway used white labourers from Europe, the United States, and Eastern Canada. In British Columbia, however, work was undertaken by contractor Andrew Onderdonk, who was responsible for building the railway between Port Moody and Savona’s Ferry’s on CPR’s behalf. He decided to bring in Chinese workers from California and overseas to do the grueling and dangerous work of building the railroad. 

The decision was mostly mercenary: Chinese workers earned half of what white employees made. Those workers also needed to pay for both food and gear from those wages, which their white coworkers did not have to do. (Chinese workers earned between 75 cents and $1.25 per day.) It BC had few settlers willing to work on the new railroad, as most worked fishing, mining, and logging. A few white employees from San Francisco, who Onderdonk had brought with him initially, abandoned camp after learning how treacherous the work would be. Although outsourcing labour was politically unpopular, and anti-Chinese sentiment was rising in BC, then-Prime Minister John A. Macdonald let Onderdonk bring in Chinese workers to get the railway completed.

Onderdonk used the services of Lian Chang Co. to hire Chinese men to work on the railway. Although the first workers were experienced in building American railways, the company soon began hiring inexperienced labourers directly from China. Between 1881 and 1884, more than 17,000 Chinese men arrived in BC to work on the railway. Roughly 10,000 of them came on ships directly from China.

Like many of the earlier immigrants in search of gold, many of the workers came to Canada to escape poverty. Railway workers would sign a contract with the recruiter, agreeing to pay 2.5% of his earnings to the agent during the contract term. They came over to Canada in three-mast sailing ships that took months, and they slept below decks in closed hatches. 

Wong Hau Hon, a Chinese worker, recorded his memories of railway work in 1926.

“We debarked at Westminster. I set out on foot with about 400 Chinese to join the railroad construction crews at Yale,” he is recorded as saying. “It rained all day. We were wet and cold. Some arrivals, unaccustomed to the Canadian climate, sickened and died, as they rested beneath trees or lay on the ground. When I saw this, I felt miserable and sad.”

With racial tensions high, disputes would break out between Chinese and white men on the railway. In one instance, nine Chinese men were beaten unconscious before their camp was burned. (Two of those men later died.) In another incident near Lytton, a white foreman was killed by Chinese workers after three Chinese employees were fired without cause.

The work was extremely dangerous and the conditions were harsh. Poor living conditions in work camps caused the deaths of many through illness and exposure. (Roughly 200 Chinese men in Port Moody died of scurvy in 1883.) Workplace accidents killed many others. Explosions, collapsing tunnels, and exhaustion were all common causes of death among Chinese labourers.

In the 1880s, a tunnel under construction near the present-day Sq'éwqel (Seabird Island Band) collapsed with Chinese labourers still inside. Attempts to blast through that part of the mountain were dropped. According to Stó:lō historian Sonny McHalsie, a nearby area with the Halq'eméylem name Lexwpopeleqwithi’âm—“always screech owls”—took on a new meaning after the construction of the railway. It became: “always ghosts.”

Such incidents were not uncommon.

“We were ordered to Hope. The work there was very dangerous,” Hau Hon said. “On one occasion, a huge rock had to be removed by blasting. More than 300 barrels of explosives were used. When blasting, the workers usually hid away in a safe place but there was one, Leung, who had gone behind another hill where he thought he would be safe. He lit his pipe while waiting for the blasting to proceed. Unexpectedly, a large boulder thrown up by the blast landed on the hillside where Leung was sitting. It rolled down the slope, hitting him in the back. We heard a piercing shriek. By the time we reached him, Leung was dead.”

Chinese men were not idle while their fellow workers were killed on the job and the rest were grossly underpaid. Many of them organized informal unions, and went on strike for better working conditions. In 1881, hundreds of Chinese workers marched into Yale to attack Onderdonk’s headquarters after he levied a two per cent tax on their already meager wages. But little changed after that—or any other—demonstration.

Onderdonk estimated that 600 Chinese workers died on the job. That number is likely a gross underestimate, with other sources putting the death toll as high as 2,200 people.

After the completion of the railway, many sections built under Onderdonk’s supervision had to be redone. Substantial bridge and masonry renovations occurred throughout BC in the 1890s, only a few short years after the railway had opened. 

Impacts on Indigenous People

The relationship between Indigenous people and the railway was different. Instead of their labour being exploited, it was land. Joseph Trutch, who infamously slashed reserve sizes during his tenure at governor in the 1860s and 1870s, was responsible for overseeing the Canadian Pacific Railway construction starting in 1880. (You can read our story on Trutch’s legacy here.) 

Although both reserve land and settler-owned land could be appropriated for the railway, Indigenous people were generally not compensated for their land, while settlers typically were. The Canadian Pacific Railway, in particular, cut through a number of proposed and existing reserves. 

“I have had some trouble with the C.P.R. They want to take my land—that is, the land I have been living on for some years,” Billy Sigh of Boston Bar said in 1914. “They told me I would have to leave there because it belonged to them. The C.P.R. has moved their fence right up to my house, and they have taken in the principal dwelling part. I am talking about [reserve] No.2. and they say I will have to move away from there.”

Even when the railway wasn’t taking over people’s houses, the use of the canyon’s scarce farmland for rail was especially problematic. The Nlaka'pamux people, like other Indigenous people in BC, were pushed to adopt sedentary agriculture rather than fishing and other traditional practices. But the chipping away of reserve lands by railways made that farming all but impossible.

“I don’t think there is more than five acres that can be cultivated,” Charlie James of Boothroyd said about his reserve in 1914. “The railway came in, and made this strip that could be cultivated very narrow.”

As well as cutting through already tiny reserve lands, railway construction also destroyed parts of the Indigenous culture and tradition. On the north side of the river at Devil’s Lake, a woman stl’áleqem—loosely and crudely translated to a supernatural being—lived in the water and preyed on men, McHalsie said. She disappeared when the CPR built its railway over her lake.

The railway also led to new laws, and new prohibitions. The famine-causing 1914 Hell’s Gate landslide prompted the federal government to curtail, and eventually ban, Indigenous fishing between Hope and Lytton, even as downstream commercial fisheries were allowed to continue to continue. The salmon run wasn’t restored until the 1990s, and even then was only at 80% of its pre-slide volume.

Trains also played an important role in the residential school system, taking children away from their families to residential schools often hundreds of kilometres away from their home communities. One residential school survivor from Manitoba called the train that took him to residential school “the train of tears.”

Indigenous people in Canada still have challenges with the railways today. In the 1990s, CN was concerned that a portion of its line near Yale was at risk of landslides from the rockface above. They blew up a portion of the mountainside in response—including an important Stó:lō transformer rock.

Today, the rock looks like a small nub peeking over the edge of the mountain. But before the blast, it used to look like an index finger, McHalsie said. 

“What it’s supposed to represent is our ancestors watching over us,” he said. “I think it is also a territorial marker … when you’re in our territory, in our fishing ground area, you can see our ancestors waving a finger at us. As soon as you’re out of our territory, you can’t see the finger anymore.”

At the time of the blasting, Stó:lō leader Ernie Crey said it was akin to “going to Stonehenge and blowing up a few columns.”

In December of 2023, CN’s entire Indigenous Advisory Council resigned, saying the company was not following their recommendations for reconciliation and not acknowledging its past wrongs to Indigenous people. The council was established in 2021 and made up of 12 prominent Indigenous leaders, including Mark Podlasly from the Nlaka’pamux Nation in BC. A new advisory council has not been reconvened.

The Chinese men who built the railway and the Indigenous people who lost their land to it have long had shared connections through their experiences. In 2014, the Tyee published a story on the shared history of Indigenous people and Chinese Canadians, quoting one Chinese man who said BC was a province built on “free land, with half-price labour.”