The Transcontinental Railway

On the morning of November 7, 1885, at a remote spot in the mountains of British Columbia called Craigellachie, a group of men in dark coats gathered around a length of track. Donald Smith, one of the railway's principal financiers, raised a hammer and drove in the final iron spike. The photograph taken at that moment, showing a crowd of bearded faces staring solemnly at the camera, became one of the most famous images in Canadian history. It is also, historians now point out, a picture of who was left out.

The Canadian Pacific Railway had begun as a political promise. When British Columbia agreed to join the young Canadian federation in 1871, it did so on condition that a railway would link it to the east within ten years. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, convinced that without such a link the western territories might drift towards the United States, staked his reputation on the project. Having lost office in 1873 over a scandal involving campaign donations from a railway promoter, he returned to power in 1878 still determined to see it built.

The obstacles were enormous. North of Lake Superior lay hundreds of kilometers of ancient rock, swamp and muskeg, into which, it was said, whole sections of track would occasionally sink overnight. Further west, the line had to climb through the Rockies and the Selkirk Mountains, where avalanches buried camps and engineers searched for passes that existing maps barely recorded. William Van Horne, the American general manager hired in 1882, drove the work forward at a pace that astonished even his critics, laying, on the open prairie, several kilometers of track on a good day.

Much of the most dangerous work, however, was done by people whose names appear in no official history. In British Columbia, the contractor Andrew Onderdonk, struggling to find enough labor, recruited thousands of workers from China, many of them brought over from Guangdong province or from the United States. Estimates vary, but somewhere around fifteen thousand Chinese laborers are thought to have worked on the line. Paid considerably less than their white colleagues, and often expected to buy their own food and equipment, they were frequently given the most hazardous tasks, such as handling explosives in the narrow canyons of the Fraser River.

How many of them died is still debated. Contemporary record-keeping was poor, partly because the deaths of Chinese workers were rarely considered worth recording. The figure most often cited is around six hundred, though some researchers believe the true number was considerably higher. Rockfalls, accidental explosions, disease and the cold all took their toll, and many of the survivors, having been dismissed once their section was complete, found themselves without the money to return home.

The treatment of these workers did not improve once the railway was finished. In 1885, the very year the last spike was driven, the government introduced a head tax on Chinese immigrants, later raised to five hundred dollars, a sum equivalent to roughly two years' wages. In 1923, Chinese immigration was almost entirely banned. It was not until 2006 that a Canadian prime minister formally apologized in Parliament for the head tax.

None of this means that the railway was not a remarkable achievement. It shortened a journey of weeks to a matter of days, made the settlement of the prairies possible and arguably held the country together. Yet it also accelerated the displacement of Indigenous peoples on the plains, whose lands it crossed. Looking at the famous photograph today, many Canadians see not only the men holding the hammer but also the absence of those whose labor made the moment possible.