When Stephen Ambrose's editor suggested he write a book about the first transcontinental railroad, the historian wasn't thrilled. He regarded the investors and officials of the rival Union Pacific and Central Pacific--including CP president Leland Stanford--as thieves who "had made obscene profits which they used to dominate politics to a degree unprecedented before or since." But by the time Ambrose finished researching Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, he had revised his opinion. Laying tracks from Omaha, Neb., to Sacramento was an unparalleled engineering feat, he writes, requiring creative financing, daring imagination and workforces the size of armies. His sweeping saga culminates in the ceremony at Promontory Point, Utah, where on May 10, 1869, Stanford drove in the final spike joining the two railroads.
When the Golden Spike went into the last tie to connect the last rail, it brought together the lines from east and west. Lee's surrender four years earlier had signified the bonding of the Union, North and South. The Golden Spike meant the Union was held together, East and West.
Hyperbole was common in the 19th century. In part, that was because people had had so little with which to compare inventions, advances or changes; in part, because they just talked that way. Thus the transcontinental railroad was called the Eighth Wonder of the World.
They may have exaggerated, but for the people of 1869, especially those over 40, there was nothing to compare to it. A man whose birthday was in 1829 had been born into a world in which President Andrew Jackson traveled no faster than Julius Caesar, a world in which no thought or information could be transmitted any faster than in Alexander the Great's time. In 1869, with the railroad and the telegraph, a man could move at 60 miles per hour and transmit an idea or a statistic from coast to coast almost instantly.
In the 21st century, change is so constant as to be taken for granted. This leads to a popular question: what generation lived through the greatest change? The one that lived through the coming of the automobile and the airplane and the beginning of modern medicine? Or those that were around for the invention and first use of the atomic bomb and the jet airplane? Or the computer? Or the Internet and e-mail? For me, it is the Americans who lived through the second half of the 19th century. They saw slavery abolished and electricity put to use, the development of the telephone and the completion of the telegraph, and most of all the railroad. The locomotive was the first great triumph over time and space. After it came and after it crossed the continent, nothing could ever again be the same.
Parts of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific ran through some of the grandest scenery in the world, but the spot where the two were joined together was improbable and undistinguished. No one had ever lived there and, shortly after the ceremony, no one would ever again. The summit was just over 5,000 feet above sea level, a flat, circular valley, bare except for sagebrush and a few scrub cedars. The only "buildings" were a half-dozen wall tents and a few rough-board shacks, set UP by merchants selling whiskey. They ran along a single miserable street.
The dawn on May 10 was cold, near freezing, but the rising sun heralded a bright, clear day, with temperatures rising into the 70s. During the morning, two trains from the CP and two from the UP arrived at the site, bearing officials, their guests and some spectators. On board the CP train were the last spike, made of gold; the last tie, made of laurel; and a silver-headed hammer.
Almost nothing had been planned. Some decisions had been made, including the attachment of a telegraph wire to the Golden Spike, with another to the sledgehammer. When the Golden Spike was tapped in, the telegraph lines would send the message all around the country. If everything worked, this would be a wholly new event in the world. At the moment it happened, it would be known, simultaneously, everywhere in the United States, Canada and England.
But many decisions had to be improvised. UP leaders Grenville Dodge and Thomas "Doc" Durant argued with Stanford for nearly an hour over who should have the honor of placing in the Golden Spike. The CP officials declared that, since Leland Stanford had tossed the first shovelful of earth in the construction of the road and since the CP had been incorporated earlier than the UP, Stanford was the man to drive the last spike. Dodge said Durant should do it, because the UP was the longer railroad. Just a few minutes before noon, Stanford and Durant settled the controversy.
The two railroads' chiefs of construction put the last tie, the laurel tie, in place. Durant drove in his spike. Then Stanford. When he tapped the Golden Spike, he would signal the waiting country. Reporters compared what was coming to the first shot fired at Lexington. One said the blow would be heard "the fartherest of any by mortal man."
Stanford swung and missed, striking only the rail. It made no difference. The telegraph operator closed the circuit, and the wire went out, "done!"
From Nothing Like It in the World by Stephen E. Ambrose. Copyright © 2000 by Ambrose-Tubbs, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
