In his book, The Last Spike, Pierre Berton wrote about CPR Vice President and General Manager Cornelius Van Horne’s visit to Port Moody in 1884, ostensibly to discuss the lay-out of the new metropolis.
The people of Port Moody, anticipating that their town was to be the terminus of the trans-national railroad, the Canadian Pacific, imagined a new wharf, station houses, roundhouses and machine shops, theatres, churches and paved streets.
Berton said their hopes were all “tragically premature”.
Because by then, a small syndicate of provincial politicians and businessmen had already made a deal with the CPR to have Granville – later Vancouver – designated as the terminus. The syndicate had been purchasing land in the little milltown of Granville for the previous ten years, gambling that their investments would reap huge profits when the railroad finally arrived.
And while they waited for that time to come, they used their influence to lure the CPR to their way of thinking by offering parts of their land holdings (stolen land – noone said anything about the fact that the First Nations presence and use of the land there upon arrival), in exchange.
Meanwhile, the average person in Port Moody and Vancouver and even New Westminster still believed that the terminus would be Port Moody, and were buying land and moving there, starting businesses, and building houses in anticipation.
At the same time, the editorial columns of the newspapers in New Westminster and Port Moody were sparring, the Port Moody Gazette sniping about lies and idiotic reporting in the Columbian that cast doubts on the Port Moody terminus, even going so far as to say that its editor, John Robson had been played for a sucker.
Yet Robson, along with his other cronies had already made large investments in Vancouver real estate, and had the last laugh on Port Moody when Van Horne announced Vancouver as the railroad terminus, in early 1885.
Despite petitions, protests, and legal challenges launched by the squatters between Port Moody and Vancouver who tried to block the tracks from crossing their property, the dye had been cast and Port Moody immediately went into an economic tailspin and comparative obscurity.
For more on this, see my previous posts
https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/historicalresearch.blog/364
https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/historicalresearch.blog/420
