William Cornelius Van Horne: John A Macdonald

Chinese Labourers Dept: I memorized dates and names from the hagiographies of the Canadian Pacific Railway saints, John A. Macdonald, Sanford Fleming, William Cornelius Van Horne, Donald Smith and Andrew Onderdonk, according to Vancouver Sun. There was an unspoken history that I didn't learn, the story of the 15,000 Chinese labourers who actually built the Canadian Pacific Railway. Their labour saved the railway company an estimated $5 million in construction costs. That would be around $100 million in today's dollars. But the savings were paid for with workers lives. Some say every tie laid in the Fraser Canyon is a gravestone for a Chinese labourer and perched in a wooden lift-top desk with working ink well, at first in a two-room schoolhouse and then in a recently vacated army hut, I was initiated into the mythology of Canada's sacred megaproject, the building of a railway from Atlantic to Pacific. The tale was cast as a hero quest. There were trials, villains and temptations. Governments fell and were resurrected, heroes strayed and returned to the true course after hairbreadth escapes. I learned about steel-driving Irish navvies laying rail across scorching prairies and how profane, tobacco-chewing Maj. A.B. Rogers found a hidden pass through the Selkirks. As reported in the news.
@t canadian pacific railway, sanford fleming