With such tremendous energy and enthusiasm was the work pushed on, that in less than half the promised time it was finished. The discovery of a useless North West Passage had taken centuries; the creation of an infinitely useful North West Passage overland had taken only five years. The first sod had been turned on May 2, 1881; the prairie section reached Calgary on August 18, 1883; the last gap north of Lake Superior was closed on May 17, 1885, giving a continuous line of steel from Montreal to the Rocky Mountains; and on the 7th of November in the same year the last spike was driven at Craigellachie, 85 miles west of the Selkirk summit in British Columbia. The first through passenger train, from the head of Atlantic navigation on the St. Lawrence to the head of Pacific navigation on Burrard Inlet, left Montreal on the evening of June 28, 1886, and finished its memorable journey at Port Moody on the morning of July 4. The great city of Vancouver, twelve miles down the Inlet, was then but a clearing in the forest scarcely three months old. It took Port Moody’s place as the Pacific terminus in June, 1887. CHAPTER X Our Fathers and Mothers Come In THE PEOPLE who now streamed in through the open door, who were they? Mostly Eastern Canadians. But who were these Eastern Canadians? We must look back a hundred years to find out. When most of the English colonists to the south broke away from the Empire, many thousands of them considered this violent action wrong; and, without any doubt, if the object to be achieved was self-government, it could and would have been won later on without secession, as other colonists won it. Thousands of “United Empire Loyalists,” sacrificing everything, flocked over the border and made new homes in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario. This inrush from the lost colonies was followed by a considerable immigration from the mother-country, and the human tide flowed more strongly than ever after the end of the war with Napoleon. The United Kingdom contained less than half her present population, yet she was supposed to be overcrowded. Scotland and Ireland especially were drained of their people, because the political economists could find nothing for them to do at home.