The story was inspired by a train wreck that occurred in 1878 in the town of Bennett, Colorado (then known as Kiowa Crossing) in which a Kansas Pacific Railway train was swept away when a rail bridge washed out. Most of the wreck was recovered save for the locomotive. Ironically, in 1989 (the year the novel takes place) it was discovered that the Kansas Pacific Railway had secretly recovered the locomotive and placed it back into service, yet still wrote it off and therefore committed insurance fraud. A further ironic point was that Canada would sever its last legal dependence on the British government in 1982, the year after the book was published, with the passage of the Canada Act.