Donald Alexander Smith, 1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal

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Donald Smith preparing to drive the last spike in the Canadian Pacific transcontinental line, Craigellachie, British Columbia, Canada, November 7, 1885.

CP Rail Corporate Archives

Donald Alexander Smith, 1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royalwas a Canadian fur trader, financier, railway promoter, and statesman.

Smith was apprenticed to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1838 and worked for many years at the fur trade in Labrador. He served as chief commissioner for the company in Canada from 1870 to 1874, and, after becoming the principal shareholder, he was governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company from 1889 to 1914.

Smith entered politics in 1870 as Conservative member for Winnipeg in the new Manitoba legislature. Becoming a member for Selkirk in the Canadian House of Commons in 1871, he withdrew his support of the Conservative leader Sir John Macdonald during the Pacific Scandal (1873), thus contributing to the defeat of the Conservative ministry. With his partners he successfully promoted the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway, but because of Macdonald’s antipathy he was not formally a member of the syndicate formed to build the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1880. Nevertheless, his financial support was vital to the enterprise, and he was accorded the honour of driving the last spike at Craigellachie, B.C., in 1885. He became president of the Bank of Montreal in 1887 and honorary president in 1905.

Defeated in Selkirk in 1880, he returned to Parliament in 1887 and remained until 1896, when he was appointed high commissioner for Canada in London. There he was knighted in 1886 and was granted a peerage in 1897 (revised 1900). His peerage passed to his only child, Margaret Charlotte Howard.