The Golden Spike Joins a Continent

At noon on a Utah mountaintop, two locomotives faced each other across a single gap in the rails — and with the tap of a silver hammer, America became one country, coast to coast.

On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit in Utah Territory, Central Pacific president Leland Stanford ceremonially drove the last spike of the first transcontinental railroad: a spike of 17.6-karat gold, made specially for the occasion by a San Francisco foundry. The two locomotives — Union Pacific No. 119 and Central Pacific No. 60, better known as the Jupiter — nosed up to each other as government officials, railroad men, and track workers looked on.

It had been a race across the continent. The Central Pacific had built 690 miles east from Sacramento, California; the Union Pacific had built 1,085 miles west from Council Bluffs and Omaha, Nebraska — together a 1,911-mile line across plains, deserts, and the Sierra Nevada, authorized by Congress in the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862. The ceremony was supposed to happen on May 8 — the date was even engraved on the golden spike — but bad weather and a labor dispute delayed the Union Pacific's arrival by two days.

The golden spike itself was the brainchild of San Francisco financier David Hewes, and it was manufactured specially for the occasion by the William T. Garratt Foundry in San Francisco — two of its sides were engraved with the names of railroad officers and directors. It was driven into a special tie of polished California laurel. The site is now the Golden Spike National Historical Park, with a visitor center and two fully functional replicas of the locomotives that met at Promontory Summit.

The line was built by hand, and by the hands of immigrants. Roughly 15,000 Chinese immigrants worked for the Central Pacific, alongside Irish immigrants and Mormon laborers, blasting tunnels and laying track; the work was grueling and unequal, and thousands of Chinese laborers died building the railroad. The U.S. Department of Labor later inducted the Chinese railroad workers into its Hall of Honor.

The change was staggering. A journey that once took six months by wagon now took about a week by rail. Passengers, freight, and news flowed across the continent; within a decade, Salt Lake City's population more than doubled. The railroad bound the western states and territories to the Union and remade the American economy — though its triumphs came with heavy costs, in the lives of the laborers who built it and the lands the rails crossed.

The original golden spike is now on display at Stanford University, but its symbol travels everywhere: the moment a last spike goes in, the job is done. On May 10, 1869, the job was uniting a continent.

Photo: Andrew J. Russell, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).