On 10 May 1869, at a windswept spot in the Utah desert called Promontory Summit, two locomotives eased forward until their pilots nearly touched: the Central Pacific's Jupiter, gleaming from the west, and the Union Pacific's No. 119 from the east. A golden spike was set into a pre-drilled hole in a polished laurel tie for the ceremony, but it was an ordinary iron spike and a silver maul, wired to the telegraph network, that carried the final hammer blows out across the continent. Leland Stanford, the Central Pacific's president, swung — and, by most contemporary accounts, missed, striking the rail instead. It hardly mattered. The telegraph operator tapped a single word to a waiting nation: "DONE." Cannon fired in San Francisco; bells rang out across Philadelphia — not the Liberty Bell itself, cracked and silenced since 1846. A journey between the coasts that had taken months now took about a week.
The transcontinental railroad had begun, improbably, in the middle of the Civil War. The Pacific Railway Act of 1862, signed by Abraham Lincoln, chartered two companies to build a single line and let them race towards each other: the Central Pacific eastward from Sacramento, the Union Pacific westward from Omaha. The government paid in land grants and loans per mile of track laid — a subsidy scheme that made speed profitable and honesty optional. The Central Pacific was controlled by four Sacramento merchants remembered as the Big Four: Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker. The Union Pacific's financing later curdled into the Crédit Mobilier affair, one of the great political scandals of the century, in which insiders awarded themselves inflated construction contracts and quieted Congress with discounted shares.
Granite and gunpowder
The Union Pacific had the plains; the Central Pacific had the Sierra Nevada, a granite wall rising more than 2,000 metres in its path. Crocker's answer to a chronic labour shortage was to hire Chinese workers, first a trial gang in 1865, over the objections of foremen who doubted them. They proved the best builders on the line. At the peak, Chinese labourers — many recruited from Guangdong province — made up the great majority of the Central Pacific's workforce, numbering well over ten thousand. They graded roadbed, drilled and blasted with black powder and, later, terrifyingly unstable nitroglycerine, and bored fifteen tunnels through the range. The longest, Summit Tunnel, advanced through granite at times only inches a day, with crews attacking from both ends and from a central shaft. Winters in the high Sierra were murderous: the snow lay metres deep, avalanches swept away whole camps, and the railroad eventually roofed long stretches of track with timber snowsheds — a wooden tunnel system its engineers called railroading in a barn. No one kept an honest count of the dead; estimates for Chinese fatalities run from the hundreds upward, and the companies did not trouble themselves to record names. The Chinese crews were paid less than white workers and, when they struck for equal terms in 1867, Crocker starved the camps of supplies until the strike collapsed.
On the other side of the divide, the Union Pacific's largely Irish immigrant crews, salted with Civil War veterans from both armies, laid track across Nebraska and Wyoming at a ferocious clip, trailed by portable dens of gambling and vice — the travelling settlements that gave English the phrase "hell on wheels". The race produced one immortal stunt: on 28 April 1869, to win a bet between Crocker and the Union Pacific's Thomas Durant, Central Pacific crews laid just over ten miles of track in a single day, a record never matched by hand.
The day the map shrank
Congress had belatedly fixed the meeting point at Promontory Summit, north of the Great Salt Lake — a place pub quizzes love because it is so often misnamed Promontory Point, a different spot miles away. The ceremonial spikes, including the famous golden one, were tapped in gently and immediately removed for safekeeping; an ordinary iron spike took the real blows. The golden spike itself survives at Stanford University, engraved with the hopeful sentence that the railroad might unite the two oceans of the world.
What followed was a genuine compression of space and time. Freight and passengers that had gone by wagon train, by ship around Cape Horn, or across the isthmus of Panama now crossed in days. Settlement, commerce and the army poured west along the line, with consequences that were catastrophic for the Plains nations and the bison herds. In the ceremony's iconic photograph, the champagne toast between engineers, the Chinese workers who had carved the way through the Sierra are nowhere to be seen. The continent had been stitched together with iron thread — and the seam ran straight through the lives of the men history's camera left out.
Quiz nuggets
- The Pacific Railway Act of 1862, signed by Abraham Lincoln, chartered the Central Pacific (from Sacramento) and Union Pacific (from Omaha).
- The rails met on 10 May 1869 at Promontory Summit, Utah — commonly misremembered as Promontory Point.
- Chinese labourers made up the great majority of the Central Pacific workforce that tunnelled through the Sierra Nevada.
- On 28 April 1869 Central Pacific crews laid just over ten miles of track in one day to win a bet.
- The golden spike is preserved at Stanford University; the two locomotives at the ceremony were Jupiter and No. 119.