The Golden Spike, Where America Came Together

May tenth, eighteen sixty-nine. A small crowd gathered at a desolate notch in the Promontory Mountains, northwest of Ogden, in the middle of a high desert that most people would have crossed as quickly as possible. The crowd included surveyors, laborers, dignitaries, and a telegraph operator who had been given an unusual assignment: the moment the last spike was driven, he would send a single coded signal to the wire connecting both coasts, and church bells and cannons from Sacramento to New York would fire in simultaneous celebration.

The Central Pacific Railroad had built east from Sacramento, mostly with Chinese immigrant labor, thousands of men who blasted through the Sierra Nevada with black powder and hand drills, lowered down granite cliffs in wicker baskets, and drove an average of one to two miles of track a day across the Nevada desert. The Union Pacific had built west from Omaha, largely with Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans, racing across the Great Plains and up through Wyoming. They met at a place called Promontory Summit, Utah Territory.

The ceremony was brief and slightly chaotic. Leland Stanford, president of the Central Pacific, swung a ceremonial silver maul at the final spike, a golden one, and missed. The telegrapher sent the signal anyway. The bells rang. Across the country, cities erupted.

What the railroad meant for Utah was complicated. It shrank the journey from months to days, transforming commerce and immigration. But the railroad brought a flood of non-Mormon outsiders, miners, merchants, and speculators, into a territory the Church had tried to keep insular. The golden spike at Promontory did not just connect the coasts. It opened Utah to the American mainstream, whether the territory wanted it or not.