BY JEFF TERRY/PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR
ON MAY 10, 1869, ONE OF THE MOST important events in American history occurred upon a windswept mountain summit north of the Great Salt Lake in Utah Territory —the completion of the first Transcontinental Railroad, an un- dertaking that forged a permanent link between the industrial centers of the East Coast and the western states. The ceremony held at Promontory Summit marked the end of a decade-long project to bridge the continent by rail, a task believed to be nearly impossible just a generation earlier. The two companies responsible for its construction — the Union Pacific and Central Pacific — both fielded special trains to the “Great
Event,” and spikes made of gold and silver were used to commemorate the special occasion.
Today, Promontory has been pre- served by the federal government as the Golden Spike National Historic Site. Well away from urban centers, the last spike site exists much as it did 144 years ago, with little to indicate — be- yond a paved road and a handful of modern buildings — that it’s now the 21st century. As the 150th anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinen- tal Railroad approaches in 2019, there will undoubtedly be quite a bit of inter- est in the events that transpired in the Utah desert during 1869.
Building the Railroad
President Lincoln believed that a coast-to-coast rail line was vital to the preservation of the Union. In 1861 there were just over 30,000 miles of track in the United States, much of it concentrated on the east coast. In order to truly bring the western territories and states into the Union they would need to be linked to the east by rail. In 1862, after years of lobbying, the U.S. Congress passed the Pacific Rail- road Act authorizing the construction of a rail line from the Midwest to the Pacific Coast, much of it funded by the government. The act chartered the Union Pacific to build west from Oma-
OPPOSITE: A replica of Union Pacific’s No. 119 whistles for the crossing of Golden Spike Road on May 8, 2012. The bells and whistles on the locomotives were created with much care to ensure that they sound as good as those on the original machines. ABOVE: At the last spike site the replica Jupiter and No. 119 face each other just as the originals did on May 10, 1869. The exact location where the last spike was driven was determined to within a few inches when the base of the original redwood flagpole was discovered still buried in the ground.
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