Deming: Where the Silver Spike Was Driven

On March eighth, eighteen eighty-one, officials of two competing railroads climbed down from their private cars in the middle of the New Mexico desert, raised a ceremonial mallet, and drove a silver spike into the ground. With that stroke, the second transcontinental railroad in American history was complete.

The Southern Pacific had been pushing east from California. The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe had been building west from Kansas. They met here, at a dusty junction that would become Deming, New Mexico. The silver spike ceremony at Deming was less celebrated than the golden spike at Promontory Summit in Utah twelve years earlier, but its effect on the region was just as transformative. New Mexico suddenly had rail connections to both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts for the first time.

The town was named for Mary Ann Deming Crocker, wife of Charles Crocker, one of the principal builders of the Southern Pacific. It was first known as Rio Mimbres, and it sprang up almost overnight along the tracks.

Deming sits in the Mimbres Valley at an elevation of over four thousand feet, on the northern fringe of the Chihuahuan Desert. The surrounding Luna County, established in nineteen oh one, was named for Solomon Luna, a prominent New Mexico sheep rancher and banker. The area is known today for its exceptional clear skies, which draw amateur astronomers from across the region.

The Great American Duck Race, held every August, has become one of Deming's most unusual and beloved traditions, a reminder that small desert towns know how to make their own entertainment. But the silver spike remains the real story. Deming is where the continent was sewn together.