The Transcontinental Railroad

On May tenth, eighteen sixty-nine, two locomotives faced each other on a raw rail line at Promontory Summit in Utah Territory, and a ceremonial golden spike was driven into a laurel tie. Wyoming had been the proving ground. The Union Pacific had crossed the entire width of the territory in the preceding two years, and the work done here was the hardest and costliest stretch of the whole line.

The Union Pacific broke ground in Omaha in eighteen sixty-three and reached present Wyoming from Nebraska late in eighteen sixty-seven. The railroad's chief engineer, Grenville Dodge, had scouted the route himself through the Laramie Plains and up across the Black Hills of Wyoming, not the South Dakota Black Hills but the ridge east of Laramie that gives the state its dramatic entry from the east. At Sherman Hill, west of Cheyenne, the line crossed the summit at eight thousand, two hundred and forty-two feet, the highest point on the transcontinental railroad.

The construction workforce in Wyoming was overwhelmingly composed of Union veterans, Irish immigrants, and formerly enslaved men who had fought for the Union. They graded and laid track at a pace of one to three miles per day through summer and early fall, living in rolling tent towns the newspapers called Hell on Wheels that moved west as the rails advanced. Cheyenne, Laramie, Rawlins, Green River, and Evanston all began as end-of-track camps.

The railroad transformed Wyoming permanently. It ended the cattle drives as they had been conducted and began the era of the stockcar. It made coal mining in the territory economically viable by connecting the Rock Springs and Carbon seams to national markets.

And it ended forever the isolation that had made Wyoming something like a different world from the rest of the country.