Canada - In a photo of stiff men in stiff Victorian suits, he is the only one in motion.
 
His face is haloed with a bright, white beard, his top hat is firmly in place, and despite already being past retirement age, he swings the sledge hammer down, hard, pinning together a country with steel.
 
This is the only image most Canadians have of Donald Smith, First Baron Strathcona of Glencoe and Mount Royal.
 
Smith is one of the oddest mysteries in Canadian history, a man who languished in the wilderness until he was middle aged, then stormed the worlds of business and politics simultaneously, conquering everything in his path.
 
He has as good a claim as even John A. Macdonald to being one of Canada's most important founding figures.
 
Yet most of us only remember him from that photo, Smith, then head of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, driving the golden spike into the tracks in Craigellachie, B.C.
 
Editor's Note:  No Matthew Claxton!  It was a plain iron spike!  Will people ever get our history right?
 
The railway was finished, Canada's promise to British Columbia fulfilled, and the country united.
 
Smith was a Scottish boy, half-trained as a lawyer in the early 1800s, who chose adventure as a Hudson's Bay Company clerk.
 
Within a year of his arrival at Montreal in 1838, where he was grading muskrat furs, he seems to have attracted the enmity of George Simpson, the company's governor.
 
Possibly this had something to do with all the attention he paid to Simpson's younger wife.
 
In 1841, he was essentially exiled, spending the next several years running posts along the St. Lawrence in Quebec.
 
He had energy, but not for keeping his books in proper order.
 
"Damn Donald Smith! I cannot make head nor tail of this!" reads a margin note left by a frustrated superior in one of Smith's account books.
 
In 1847, Smith headed back to Montreal, complaining of snow-blindness.
 
He was accused of faking it, and sent even farther afield in 1848, to Labrador, this time.
 
It was a promotion, technically.
 
Smith spent almost every minute of the next 20 years, until he was 49, in one of the coldest and most remote places in Canada.
 
While there, he married Isabella Hardisty, officiating himself.
 
This was not uncommon in fur trading country.
 
But it seems to have bothered Smith that his first wedding wasn't in a church.
 
He would marry Isabella five times in total during their lives together.
 
Finally, in 1869, Smith had accumulated enough seniority and goodwill from his superiors to take over the Montreal region for the HBC.
 
Within three years he was one of the richest and most powerful men in the country.
 
He was sent west by the government to help defuse the Red River Rebellion, and emerged serving as both a provincial and federal representative for the new province of Manitoba.
 
He became a board member of the Bank of Montreal.
 
He continued to rise within the HBC.
 
In 1873, he went against Macdonald to bring down the government over the CPR scandal.
 
He would later be defeated politically, pour his own cash into the CPR, and become one of its key controlling investors.
 
He turned the HBC's interests to land speculation, and was a canny inside trader, using his own position to advance his interests in every direction.
 
He was made a baron by Queen Victoria, built hospitals, and endowed schools.
 
He raised Strathcona's Horse for the Boer War, the unit remains in the Canadian Army and currently prefers tanks to horses.
 
In his early 90s, he was a founder of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which would later become BP.
 
He was a cold man, even seen as cruel in his early trading years.
 
When asked to create a coat of arms, he chose a beaver gnawing on a maple tree.
 
The motto underneath read "Persistence".
 
Matthew Claxton.