The Last Spike
The Last Spike is one of the most important photos in Canadian History, and signifies an important event. The picture shows Donald Smith, financier and director of the CPR, driving the final spike into the transcontinental railroad at Craigellachie, BC in 1885. The railroad was a commitment the federal government had made to the province of British Columbia in order to convince it to join the confederation. While this photo symbolizes Canadian history and national unity in some ways, it also shows the end of a long journey that scourged Canada with financial problems and disputes for several years. It also ignores numerous people that contributed to the building of the railroad and the several problems that the promise of building it caused more discord within the nation than unity.
The first noticeable thing in the picture is that all the men in it are white, and most of the men in the photo are famous, such as Sam Steele, Sandford Fleming and Cornelius Van Horne, all men of European descent. This ignores the actual men who slaved to build the railroad, the Chinese immigrants who were underpaid for executing such dangerous jobs, and had to endure severe racism. Complaints of fluctuation in Chinese immigrant rates caused the government to introduce the head tax, which forced workers to come to Canada alone without their families, and borrow money from rich Chinese merhants to pay this tax as they could not afford it otherwise. Thousands of Chinese workers had worked on the railway, yet not a single one appears in this significant photo that commemorates this achievement. The photo only shows the investors who financed the project, and the businessmen who directed it.
Racism in Canada had reached an extreme level where not only immigrants had to deal with it, but also the natives of Canada. One of the most neglected groups who were discriminated against greatly were the Metis. Their land was taken by the government under treaties that were supposed to protect their rights to the land, however, this land was used by the government to build the railway on without taking the approval of the people themselves. The government seeked to
create a sense of nationalism by building this railway, however, the Metis and other natives felt robbed of their lands and origins, and far from being part of this nation Macdonalds government attempted to create. Despite all of this, none of them are seen in the photo.
This photo creates an idea that the businessmen, government officials, workers and the rest of canada worked in unity to accomplish the CPR. However, it does not show any of the hardship and problems that the country faced as a price of completing this railroad. The men present in the picture did not endure any of the tribulation the workers or neglected natives had suffered. Men were killed whilst building the railway, especially in the areas of mountainous British Columbia, where rocks would fall on them or they would