The Golden Spike Ceremony
The last rail was laid and last spike was driven, a symbolic golden spike, on May 10,1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah, completing the first transcontinental railroad and telegraph that linked the United States east cast to the west coast. Travel from coast to coast could now be completed in six or seven days instead of the six months that it had taken horse-drawn wagons to cross the continent or had taken ships to sail 15,000 miles around the treacherous waters of Cape Horn. Completion of the first transcontinental railroad was recognized as a monumental achievement that held great promise for the people of the United States.
It is difficult to imagine today how audacious the idea was to build a railroad across the western wilderness when it was first proposed by Doctor Hartwell Carver in 1832. West of the Missouri River was considered Indian country and a foreign land. But tales of the West by the scout Kit Carson thrilled the Easterners, and pioneers began moving westward by the hundreds. Gold discovered in California attracted hundreds more.
The idea of a transcontinental railroad gained supporters in Congress as the West became more settled. President Abraham Lincoln saw the opportunity to unify the continent into one nation, spanning coast to coast. In 1858 he met with General Dodge, Chief Engineer of the Union Pacific Railroad, to discuss construction of a coast-to-coast railroad. In 1862 Congress passed "An Act to Aid in the Construction of a Railroad and Telegraph Line from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean, and to secure use of the same for postal, military and other purposes". It was called "The Enabling Act". The railroad from Omaha to Sacramento was built under this act.
The railroad was built by the blood and sweat of thousands of men who labored under extremely harsh conditions for starvation wages. The Union Pacific started at Omaha and built westward, completing 1,086 miles of railroad using about 10,000 laborers drawn from unemployed Irish, German and Italian immigrants plus Civil War veterans from both sides and ex-slaves. Because laborers were in such short supply in the west, the Central Pacific imported 10,000 Chinese laborers. Starting at Sacramento, they built eastward, completing 690 miles of railroad through the high Sierra Mountains. For each mile of track laid, each railroad received 16,000 to 48,000 dollars, depending on the difficulty of the terrain, and also received a 400-foot width of land. As they approached each other in Utah, rushing to claim more land, and because no one had specified where they should join, they overlapped by 200 miles on parallel grades. Congress declared the meeting point to be Promontory Summit.
The railroad drove a wedge through the western frontier. Some Indians fought the white settlement of their land, but could no longer resist when the railroad brought in carloads of Army troops and supplies. The Union Pacific built railroad stations and dormitories and sold supplies along the route. Towns grew up around them, and the settlers turned the land into farms and ranches. They and eastern hunters killed the buffaloes almost to extinction. Twenty years after the Golden Spike Ceremony, the western frontier was history, and the Indian's way of life was lost forever.