Where the Northern Pacific Drove Its Last Spike

On September eighth, eighteen eighty-three, the Northern Pacific Railroad drove its last spike at Gold Creek, Montana, completing a transcontinental line that stretched from Lake Superior to Portland. The ceremony was extravagant. Former president Ulysses Grant attended, along with British financier Henry Villard, who had bankrolled the final construction push, and the former Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman.

It was, briefly, the northernmost transcontinental railroad in the United States. The completion site is near Gold Creek in Powell County, along the Interstate Ninety corridor. Unlike the Union Pacific golden spike at Promontory Summit, the Northern Pacific ceremony involved a silver spike.

The railroad transformed Montana Territory, accelerating settlement, cattle shipping, and the final displacement of Indigenous peoples across the northern plains. Within a year, Villard's financial empire collapsed, but the railroad he finished endured for nearly a century before merging into Burlington Northern in nineteen seventy.