Gold Creek: The Last Spike and a Very Strange Party

On September eighth, eighteen eighty-three, four private trains pulled into a remote siding at Gold Creek, Montana Territory and disgorged three hundred dignitaries into the sagebrush. They had come from three continents, representatives of the United States government, the English Parliament, and the German Empire, to watch a former president drive a ceremonial spike into a railroad tie and declare the Northern Pacific Railway complete.

The man who organized this spectacle was Henry Villard, a German-born American financier who had taken control of the Northern Pacific and driven it to completion across fifteen hundred miles of mountain, desert, and open plain. Villard understood that completing a transcontinental railroad was also a media event, and he managed it accordingly. The former president was Ulysses S. Grant, who had left the White House in eighteen seventy-seven and who now arrived as a private citizen to lend the proceedings whatever weight his presence could add.

The actual connection of the two track ends had been made quietly on August twenty-second, a few miles from Gold Creek, where the crews from East and West met without ceremony. What happened on September eighth was something else entirely, a performance of completion designed to project confidence to European investors who had backed the line and to demonstrate that the American Northwest was now permanently open for business.

The Northern Pacific did not use a golden spike. The last spike was, in fact, the first spike that had been driven into the ground at the eastern terminus in Minnesota, symbolically removed and brought west to be driven again at the closing moment. It was a nice piece of theater in a ceremony that was entirely theater.

The railroad transformed Montana. Towns appeared along its route overnight. Livingston, Missoula, Billings, all of them owe their existence or their scale directly to the line whose completion was celebrated here in the sagebrush, in a ceremony that lasted an afternoon and changed the territory forever.