Sir John A. Macdonald

Sir John A. Macdonald had been in politics for four decades and prime minister of Canada for three terms, but he’d never seen anything like the apocalyptic year of 1885. The issues cascaded relentlessly: threats to the sovereignty of Canada from London and Washington; armed resistance in the North-West; the spectre of starvation among Indigenous peoples; financial crises that endangered the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR); protests over Chinese immigration to British Columbia; n