Golden Spike National Historic Site in Utah tells the story of America's first transcontinental railroad, which transformed a nation by linking its coasts.
BY RYAN DOUGHERTY
Today, travelers can get on a plane and fly from New York to San Francisco in about six hours. That makes it hard to appreciate the historical significance of the first transcontinental railroad. Indeed, mid-19th century Americans would have scoffed at the notion of coast-to-coast travel. To go "out there," to the vast, unknown West, was to most a pipe dream. Little did they know that an ambitious effort by two companies would, within two decades, link the Atlantic to the Pacific and transform a nation.
Once America's first railroads started running in the 1830s, visionaries dreamed about transcontinental rail travel. They believed that bridging the gap to the West would boost trade, ease the emigrant's trip, and help the military to control American Indians hostile to white settlement. But the first proposal for the idea in 1832, by Samuel Dexter, was, historians say, about as bold as if one had said in 1932 that an American would walk on the moon within 40 years.
By 1861, however, an engineer named Theodore Judah had persuaded rich Sacramento merchants to form the Central Pacific Railroad. Congress then authorized the Central Pacific to build a railroad eastward from California and chartered the Union Pacific Railroad in New York. Each railroad received loans of $16,000 to $48,000 per mile. The Central Pacific began in January 1863, the Union Pacific started that December, but neither got very far-the country's attention, and that of investors, was fixed on the Civil War.
Central Pacific's Collis Huntington and Union Pacific's Thomas Durant, both frustrated and exemplifying the unscrupulous business ethics of the times, visited Washington with enough cash to get congressmen to listen. A second Railroad Act doubled the land subsidies. Once the war ended, Central Pacific crews began work on the Sierras. Although Union Pacific started on easier terrain, Plains Indians harassed its workers. Still, both companies progressed faster than expected, placing up to five miles of track each day.
Crucial to Union Pacific's efforts were about 10,000 unemployed Americans, German, Irish, and Italian immigrants, Civil War veterans of both sides, and formerly enslaved blacks. Because so many westerners had joined the rush for gold, Central Pacific imported 10,000 Chinese workers. By 1868, its crews had crossed the Sierras and laid 200 miles of track, and Union Pacific had laid 700 on the plains.
As the two railroads neared each other in Utah, they rushed to lay more track and earn more land subsidies. They eventually passed each other and went in opposite directions for about 200 miles. Congress then declared Promontory Summit, in Utah, as their meeting place. Two locomotives pulled up to the remaining gap left in the tracks on May 10, 1869. A golden spike was ceremoniously tapped and a final iron spike driven to connect the railroads. Combined, the companies had laid 1,776 miles of track. In the words of a reporter of that time, "they overcame that old enemy of mankind, space."
The railroad spurred new social, economic, and political opportunity-but it also marked the end of the western frontier and way of life for the American Indian tribes. Settlers flocked westward. Their journey, which once took six months by wagon, was now a six- or seven-day train ride. Plains Indians fought white settlement on their lands, but the loads of troops and supplies brought by the railroad soon overpowered them. Twenty years after the railroad's completion, the frontier was gone, forever replaced by industry.
