The western portion of the railway (built 1881-1885) was designed to link British Columbia with the rest of the country and improve trade and commerce between Eastern and Western Canada. Andrew Onderdonk, head contractor of the CPR, promised that he would hire white workers for the project … almost immediately, however, many of the white labourers contracted from San Francisco found the work treacherous and abandoned camp …
From 1881 to 1884, more than 17,000 Chinese men arrived in Canada to work on the CPR—10,000 of them arriving on chartered ships straight from China.
Asian Heritage Society of New Brunswick
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This typical Canadian scene could have been shot in any month from October to April, but in this instance the image dates from Christmas 2022. A freight train, snow, a lone walker in the distance.
I took this photograph on my iPhone in Bottomlands Park, Calgary, a curated urban “wilderness” where my partner Yoke-Sum and I have often walked our standard poodles—our elegant Luci, who grew up in England and had never seen snow in her life until we rudely transported her across the Atlantic in 2016 (rudely transported her for the second time: the first was for a sabbatical year at UT Austin in 2013), and her successor Alice, our big-boned girl from southern Alberta who has never known anything else and is happiest when the mercury hovers around minus ten Celsius.
The landscape looks empty. It never was. And those railroad tracks didn’t get there by themselves.
Camera lucida 
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