Huntington: Where Two Railroads Met

In November of eighteen eighty-four, a small ceremony near Huntington completed what many accounts call a second transcontinental connection. The Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, building east from Portland, and the Oregon Short Line, building west from Utah as a Union Pacific subsidiary, drove a ceremonial last spike where their tracks joined at the Snake River. Huntington became the division point between the two companies, and within a year it was a busy railroad town with roundhouses and a large depot. Geography had always made Huntington inevitable: the Snake River canyon and the surrounding terrain funnel all movement through this single pass, as it did for Oregon Trail wagon trains decades before the first locomotive arrived.