August 17, 2025 - Golden Spike National Historic Site
Visitor Center

This one has been high on my bucket list for years.  It's the Golden Spike National Historical Site on Promentory Summit, Utah, on the northern end of the Great Salt Lake.

America's first transcontinental railroad (known originally as the "Pacific Railroad" and later as the "Overland Route") was a 1,911-mile continuous railroad line built between 1863 and 1869 that connected the existing eastern U.S. rail network at Council Bluffs, Iowa, with the Pacific coast at the Oakland Long Wharf on San Francisco Bay.

On May 10, 1869, after roughly six years of construction, the two railroads finally met at Promontory Summit:  the Union Pacific had built westward from Omaha, Nebraska and the Central Pacific had built eastward from Sacramento, California.  The project had been enormously difficult, expensive, and dangerous.  But now a six month journey across the continental United States now took less than a week.  It was huge.
   
I consider this place on the short list of great historical sites in the U.S.,  right up there with 1903 First Flight at Kitty Hawk, the 1848 gold discovery site in Coloma, California, the 1859 Drake Oil Well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, and the battlefields at Yorktown, New Orleans, and Gettysburg.
   
We flew into Salt Lake City, picked up the rental car, and headed north.  It was about an hour and a half drive from the Salt Lake City airport to the Golden Site National Historic Park Visitor Center.
   
 
   
 From 1863 to 1869, the Union Pacific built west (blue line) and the Central Pacific built east (red).  The Western Pacific built the last leg (green).  (Map from Wikipedia)
   
This profile of the Pacific Railroad from Council Bluffs/Omaha to San Francisco, published in Harper's Weekly December 7, 1867, gives some idea of how difficult the terrain was where the railroad went through.  (diagram from Wikipedia)
   
This is Andrew J. Russell's famous picture recording the joining of the First Transcontinental Railroad.   (Wikipedia)
 
Before the railroad, crossing the continent could take months by wagon or stagecoach, or require a long and hazardous sea voyage around South America. The railroad dramatically reduced the journey to roughly a week.  Its effects were enormous.  It tied California and the West much more closely to the rest of the United States.  It accelerated settlement and economic development in the West.  It transformed freight, mail, travel, and communication.  It helped create a truly national economy.  Unfortunately for the Indians, it also facilitated U.S. military expansion and settlement on lands they inhabited.
 
The Golden Spike was both a tremendous engineering triumph and a turning point with complicated human and natural consequences.
   

The painting "The Last Spike" by Thomas Hill, (1881)  (Wikipedia)

Actually Leland Stanford missed his swing and hit the tie, while Durant apparently didn't even hit the tie. A railroad worker ultimately drove the actual last spike. At 12:47 p.m., the telegrapher sent the famous message:  "D-O-N-E."
   
We watched a 20 minute movie, then toured the Visitor Center museum.
   

At the joining ceremony, several special ceremonial spikes were presented, including the famous gold spike. Leland Stanford, president of the Central Pacific and later founder of Stanford University, participated in the ceremony. Thomas Durant represented the Union Pacific.

The famous golden spike was ceremonial—it was not simply the ordinary iron spike that remained holding the railroad together. After the ceremony, the precious spikes were removed and replaced with  regular spikes. The original gold spike was privately owned and is now located at Stanford University in California, in the Cantor Arts Center in Palo Alto.

The event was also a remarkable early mass-media spectacle. Telegraph wires allowed news of the completion to be transmitted almost immediately across the country. Celebrations broke out in cities far from Utah when word arrived that the railroad had been joined.

David Hewes, a San Francisco businessman and brother-in-law of Central Pacific president Leland Stanford, commissioned the spike. He paid about $400 in gold, although the actual spike contains only about $350 worth of gold. It is 17.6-carat gold, about 5? inches long, and weighs 14.03 ounces.

It was not actually driven into the railroad tie. Stanford made a ceremonial swing, but the spike was placed in a pre-drilled hole; afterward it was removed and replaced with a conventional iron spike.

Hewes kept it after the ceremony and donated it to Stanford University in 1892. It has remained in Stanford's collection ever since, although it has occasionally traveled for special exhibitions.

The spike is engraved on four sides and the top. One side famously says, "May God continue the unity of our Country as this Railroad unites the two great Oceans of the world."

Hewes actually had another gold spike made. For many years its whereabouts were unknown, but it remained in the Hewes family and surfaced in 2005. That second spike is now at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento.

 
   
There were three other ceremonial spikes.  On the right is a Silver Spike, presented by the state of Nevada (home of the Comstock Silver Lode).  It was made from about 25 ounces of silver supplied by Virginia City assayers and forged by a blacksmith.  It was initially rather crude and unpolished; after the ceremony it was polished and additionally engraved.  It eventually became part of Stanford's collection along with the Golden Spike.
 
A specially prepared California laurelwood tie had four holes drilled into it, one for each ceremonial spike. The spikes were put into those holes and gently tapped with a silver-plated ceremonial maul. They weren't intended to be driven home like working railroad spikes.  Then the whole ceremonial arrangement was removed.  A regular pine tie was put in its place, and ordinary iron spikes were driven into it.
   

On the left is the "Arizona Spike".   This one was particularly unusual: an ordinary iron spike with a gold-plated head and silver-plated shaft.  Arizona Territorial Governor Anson P. K. Safford presented it.  Its inscription included the wonderful phrase: "Ribbed with Iron Clad in Silver and Crowned with Gold."  The Arizona Territory was essentially using the occasion to say, “We've got the southern route—build a railroad to us next!” Arizona eventually got its transcontinental connection in 1881.

The Museum of the City of New York acquired the Arizona Spike spike in 1943.  They loaned it out for display at museums like the Union Pacific Railroad Museum in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and the Smithsonian.. The museum sold the spike at auction in 2023 for more than $2.2 million in order to fund the acquisition of other items.  The current location is unknown.

On the right is a second golden spike.  This was commissioned by Frederick Marriott, proprietor of the San Francisco News Letter.  It was also made of gold, but was smaller than the Hewes spike.  It carried an inscription from the San Francisco News Letter honoring the joining of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.  Its present whereabouts are unknown.
   
The history of the Golden Spike site is interesting.
 
The site was essentially forgotten for nearly a century before becoming a National Park Service property.
 
After the famous ceremony on May 10, 1869, Promontory Summit wasn't preserved as a historic shrine. It became a working railroad location, and a small town called Promontory developed around it.  For several decades, trains crossed the summit along the original transcontinental route.  But the route had a serious disadvantage: it involved substantial grades and curves around the north end of the Great Salt Lake.  The railroad had to climb the Promontory Mountains, with steep grades and sharp curves.  By the 1890s, traffic had increased enormously. Heavy trains often required multiple locomotives and helper engines to get over the summit.   The route itself wasn't particularly efficient, adding about 44 miles compared with a direct route across the lake.   Southern Pacific, which eventually controlled the Central Pacific, constructed the Lucin Cutoff across the Great Salt Lake. Completed in 1904, it provided a substantially faster and easier route;  shorter, straighter and flatter.
 
The Lucin Cutoff was that direct route across the lake.  It ran about 102 miles from Ogden to Lucin, Utah. The spectacular portion crossed the lake itself.   It consisted of roughly 15 miles of rock-and-earth fill, a 12-mile wooden trestle across the deepest part of the lake, and enormous quantities of timber and fill material.  The lake bottom was a nightmare of soft, unstable mud and salt.  The water was as much as 35 feet deep.
 
Promontory Point, is actually part of the Lucin Cutoff. The railroad crossed the lake from the west, reached Promontory Point, and then continued eastward.  The wooden trestle turned out to be surprisingly durable.  It survived decades of salt-water exposure, storms, derailments and other mishaps. In 1909, an earthquake-generated seiche—essentially a huge oscillating wave in the lake—rose more than 12 feet and overtopped the trestle. The structure survived.  But by the 1950s, railroad technology had changed enormously. Locomotives and trains were much heavier, and Southern Pacific wanted a more substantial roadbed.  So instead of maintaining the wooden trestle, the railroad built a solid earthen causeway across the lake.  By about 1959, it had replaced the wooden trestle.    The old wooden trestle was eventually abandoned. In the 1990s, salvage operations began dismantling it, and by about 2000, essentially the entire historic trestle was gone.  Photographs of the original cutoff are spectacular—long passenger and freight trains apparently floating across the Great Salt Lake.
 
The cutoff opened to freight traffic in March 1904, with passenger trains following later that year.  Most traffic now bypassed Promontory.  The town declined dramatically.  By the 1930s, Promontory was essentially a ghost town, and the old railroad line had little economic justification.  During World War II, Southern Pacific removed the rails from the old Promontory route for recycling to support the war effort
 
There was little effort to preserve the actual ceremony site.  However, in 1916, Southern Pacific (formerly the Central Pacific railroad) did ereck an obelisk marking the location of the last-spike ceremony. It stood there for decades, a lonely sentinal.  But the area remained fairly isolated and undeveloped.
 
The National Historic Park we see today is largely the story of one remarkable Utah woman:  Bernice Gibbs Anderson, who is now known as the “Mother of the Golden Spike.”
 
Bernice was born August 5, 1900, in Colorado and grew up primarily around Corinne, Utah, near Promontory Summit. As a young girl she accompanied her grandmother and family members into the Promontory area, where she heard stories from cowboys and local residents about the great 1869 railroad construction and Golden Spike ceremony. The stories captivated her.  She later recalled the area as a child and became convinced that the location where the railroad was joined ought to be preserved.
 
Bernice married Laron G. Anderson in 1918. She raised six children, but simultaneously developed a career as a journalist and writer.  She worked as a correspondent and staff writer for the Salt Lake Tribune, while also writing for the Box Elder News-Journal. Her historical articles were frequently picked up by other newspapers.
 
By 1926, Anderson had begun actively campaigning to preserve Promontory Summit.  Her argument was remarkably simple:  How could the nation celebrate the completion of the first transcontinental railroad while allowing the actual location to deteriorate and disappear?At the time, Promontory was an isolated, largely abandoned railroad location.  She began writing letters to congressmen, presidents, Park Service officials, railroad executives and other government officials.  She didn't just send a few letters.  She kept at it for decades.
 
The National Park Service says her campaign lasted 38 years before the site finally entered the National Park System in 1965. Another conservation organization describes her effort as a five-decade campaign, because she remained involved after federal recognition and continued promoting the site.  One measure of her persistence is that the National Parks Conservation Association says she produced almost 3,000 articles, press releases and letters during the campaign.
 
Anderson realized that she needed more than her own letters.  In the early 1950s she helped establish the Golden Spike Association of Box Elder County, a citizens' organization devoted to preserving and commemorating the site. She became its president.  The organization began holding annual reenactments of the Golden Spike ceremony in 1952.  Those reenactments were important because they demonstrated that there was public interest in preserving the site.  Anderson became a sort of unofficial caretaker, historian, publicist and tour guide all rolled into one.
 
In 1957, the federal government finally recognized the significance of Promontory by designating a seven-acre tract as a national historic site.  But the land wasn't federally owned. From 1957 to 1965, the Golden Spike Association, under Anderson's leadership, helped maintain the site through a cooperative arrangement involving the federal government, Utah and the railroad companies.
 
On July 30, 1965, Congress authorized the site as Golden Spike National Historic Site and brought it into the National Park System.  After 38 years of campaigning, Anderson had finally achieved her goal.  Four years later, the 1969 centennial brought roughly 28,000 people to Promontory for the 100th anniversary.  Anderson was there.  She had lived long enough to see the place she had fought for transformed from an isolated, neglected patch of railroad desert into a nationally recognized historic site.
 
When the site became a National Historic Site, the National Park Service had only four years to get the place ready for the 100th anniversary.  They built a new visitor center and, remarkably, reconstructed about two miles of railroad track at the summit.  The NPS also researched the old photographs carefully so that the telegraph poles, track, ties, locomotive positioning and other details would resemble the 1869 scene.
 
Then came May 10, 1969.  Approximately 28,000 people showed up for the centennial celebration.
 
The steam-powered locomotive replicas Jupiter and No. 119 were completed in 1979.  On the 110th anniversary, they were brought together at Promontory Summit.
 
The 125th anniversary in 1994 brought approximately 14,000 visitors.
 
Then came the enormous 150th anniversary in 2019, when approximately 23,500 people attended the May 10 celebration.
 
Congress passed legislation on March 12, 2019, redesignating the site to Golden Spike National Historical Park.
   

In 1965 the National Park Service assumed ownership of the aging Southern Pacific Monument (built in 1916), restored and preserved it, and moved it to the Visitor Center courtyard.
   

The vast herds of Bison roaming the Great Plains did not benefit from the transcontinental railroad, to put it mildly.

At their peak, estimates commonly put the North American bison population at 30–60 million animals. They occupied an enormous range—from Alaska and western Canada through the Great Plains and as far east as the Appalachians.

In the early 1800s, enormous herds still covered portions of the Great Plains. Some observers described herds stretching for miles.  The animals could be so numerous that travelers reported spending hours passing through them.  But the bison population was already beginning to decline in some areas because of commercial hunting, habitat changes and increased settlement.

Before railroads, killing large numbers of bison wasn't particularly profitable because getting the hides and meat to distant markets was difficult.  The railroad solved that problem.  By the 1870s, hunters could travel rapidly into the Plains, kill bison, remove the valuable hides, and ship them east.  Industrial tanning of bison hides. made the slaughter even more efficient.  The thick winter hide was extremely valuable for industrial leather.

During the early 1870s, millions of bison were killed every year.  The southern Plains herd was essentially destroyed by the late 1870s.  The northern herd survived somewhat longer, but it too was devastated.  By approximately 1883, the great free-ranging herds of the American West had effectively disappeared.  From perhaps 30–60 million animals a few decades earlier, only a few hundred wild bison remained.

Moreover, the destruction of the bison was intertwined with the forced displacement of Plains Indians.  Once the herds disappeared, Native peoples who had depended upon them were increasingly dependent on government rations and confined to reservations.

A small group of people realized that the bison was disappearing.  Among them was William Temple Hornaday, a zoologist and taxidermist who became one of America's most important early conservationists.  In the 1880s, Hornaday went west and became convinced that the American bison was headed for extinction.  He helped establish a captive breeding herd, which eventually contributed to the survival of the species.

Another critical refuge was Yellowstone National Park.  Yellowstone's bison population became one of the last wild populations in the United States.

Today there are roughly hundreds of thousands of bison in North America, although most aren't members of truly wild herds—they are managed commercially or in conservation herds.  There are approximately 5,000–6,000 bison in Yellowstone, making it one of the largest and most genetically important free-ranging populations in North America.
   

There is no reliable total of the deaths building the transcontinental railroad. The railroads did not keep a comprehensive death register, particularly for Chinese workers.  It is estimated that at least 1,000 died, and possibly several thousand among the workers who built the 1,776-mile line between 1863 and 1869.  The Sierra Nevada portion alone was an astonishing feat of dangerous human labor. Chinese crews blasted and hand-excavated 15 tunnels through solid granite, sometimes working from both ends and from vertical shafts.  Dangerous business.

This is a monument to their memory.
   
 
   
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