SEX, TIME, AND THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD

Abstract Labor and the Queer Temporalities of History 2

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

— Henry David Thoreau

Fungibility

Figure 1.1 is the celebrated telegram sent by Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) president William Van Horne, an American from Chicago tasked with overseeing the construction of the CPR who became, according to Pierre Berton's famous account, "more Canadian than any native." His telegram is addressed to Prime Minister John A. Macdonald and announces the completion of the railroad in Craigellachie, British Columbia, on November 7, 1885. Unlike the well-known photograph of the ceremonial driving of the last spike, the focal point of the telegram is time: it is the hour and minutes — 9:22 A.M. — that precisely mark the consolidation of the settler nation. The telegram, itself a representation of nineteenth-century advances in communications, symbolizes a new national temporality achieved through technological innovation.

Van Horne was known to frequently draw pictures on the reverse side of these kinds of telegrams. On the back side of one of the few that survived is his sketch of a Chinese laborer's facial profile, complete with a long tapered mustache. Surrounding the man's face are a busy series of numerical calculations that seem indicative of Van Horne's financial worries during the railroad's construction. The CPR, now a multi-billion-dollar corporation, objected to the reproduction of the sketch in this book. What's interesting is that the grounds for the CPR's censorship of the image rested on the mere association of Van Horne with the Chinese man, suggesting a perverse content attributed to the sketched figure and its capacity to corrupt Van Horne's reputation. This chapter probes exactly what constitutes this unnatural, obscene content and why it is out of sync with the settler temporality glorified on the face of Van Horne's telegram to the prime minister.

Probing the obscene content of Van Horne's sketch of the Chinese man further, the juxtaposition of the human profile and numerical sums evokes the economic connection between Chinese railroad labor and their low wages. Drawing out the financial significance of the image, Margot Francis explains that Chinese labor was "indispensable to the CPR's early financial viability as their 'cheap wages' saved Andrew Onderdonk, the contractor for the western section of the line, between $3 and $5 million and allowed him to escape bankruptcy." The Chinese whom Onderdonk contracted to work the western section were recruited from San Francisco. Many of them had worked on the US transcontinental railroad, which had been completed over a decade earlier, in 1869. Although Chin