Railroad

I remember when we went to the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. We went through the trains and saw wax figures. There was a display of a wax figure resembling a Chinese man in a wicker basket dangling off a cliff. The excerpt described how they had to put explosives at the bottom of the cliffs and had to be pulled up before the gunpowder went off. Many did not survive.I remember reading this statistic: "4 Chinese men died for every mile of railroad track."There was a painted picture at the end of the museum in celebration of the completion of the CPR. Every person in the picture was depicted as white.

"The white foreman, thinking that all of the dynamite had gone off, ordered the Chiense workers to enter the cave to resume work. Just a that moment the remaining charges suddenly exploded. Chinese bodies flew from the cave as if shot from a cannon. Blood and flesh were mixed in a horrible mess. On this occasion about ten or twenty workers were killed... I am proud if the fact that we Chinese contributed much to the development of transportation in Canada. Yet now the government is enforcing forty-three discriminatory immigration regulations against us. The Canadian surely must have short memories."-Reminiscences of an old Chinese railroad worker, Wong Hau-hon(1926)