The Men Who Built America's Railroad and Were Erased From the Photo

The famous photograph shows the two railroads meeting, the golden spike, the cheering crowd. Almost no one in it did the deadliest work. The men who blasted the tunnels through the granite of the Sierra Nevada by hand, and died in numbers no one bothered to count, were left just outside the frame. This documentary tells the buried story of the tens of thousands of Chinese laborers who built the hardest stretch of the transcontinental railroad. We follow the race across the country, the decision to hire men everyone else looked down on, the brutal work in the mountains and the winter that buried whole crews, and the strike they organized and how it was broken by cutting off their food. Then we follow how they were written out of the story America chose to celebrate, and the law that told them not to come. It is a story about who gets to stand in the photograph. Bygone Era tells the true stories history left out. New documentary every week. If you like the parts of American history that got left off the plaque, consider subscribing. #History #Documentary #AmericanHistory