Completion of Transcontinental Railroad
Good morning, it’s May 10. The Transcontinental Railroad was completed amid great fanfare on this date in 1869 at a place called Promontory, Utah.
Barack Obama has an odd habit of referring to it as the “Intercontinental Railroad,” which if you think about it would be a neat trick, but the actual feat itself was as celebrated as the moon landing would be 100 years later.
When it comes to Washington’s role in their everyday lives, Americans have long been of two minds. Another way of saying it is that we like having it both ways.
We venerate the idea of local and state control over schools, land use prerogatives, environmental protection, the criminal justice system, and a wide array of social policies, including health care. Yet we also want free-flowing interstate highways, state-of-the-art bridges, flawless anti-terrorism policies, gleaming national parks, transcontinental railroads, efficient airports, moon landings…and quality health care.
Small wonder, then, that our elected officials have trouble keeping in voters’ good graces. In 1869, however, with the Civil War behind us and the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny” in full swing, the completion of the cross-country railroad was hailed as a sign of unified national progress.
It was also – although this word was not used – a multi-cultural achievement, as related in the matter-of-fact racial language of the time by a French-born pioneer and former Pony Express rider named Alexander Toponce.
The Promontory festivities were punctuated by the sight of various luminaries, including California Gov. Leland Stanford and Union Pacific executive Thomas Durant hammering a golden spike into the last railroad tie that would bind the eastern and western sections of the track.
Telegraph operators with their fingers on the keys, as in a television game show, simultaneously sent messages all the way to San Francisco in the West and New York City in the East, setting of celebratory bells and cannon fire in each city and everywhere in between.
“I saw the Golden Spike driven at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869,” Toponce recalled. “On the last day, only about 100 feet were laid, and everybody tried to have a hand in the work. I took a shovel from an Irishman, and threw a shovel full of dirt on the ties just to tell about it afterward.”
“It was a very hilarious occasion,” Toponce continued. “Everybody had all they wanted to drink all the time. Some of the participants got ‘sloppy,’ and these were not all Irish and Chinese by any means.”
Some of this hilarity, at least in the minds of the cowboys and pioneers on hand for the occasion, came when Gov. Stanford swung the sledgehammer – and whiffed.
“What a howl went up! Irish, Chinese, Mexicans, and everybody yelled with delight,” Toponce recalled. “‘He missed it. Yee!’ The engineers blew the whistles and rang their bells. Then Stanford tried it again and tapped the spike and the telegraph operators had fixed their instruments so that the tap was reported in all the offices east and west, and set bells to tapping in hundreds of towns and cities.”
Durant took up the sledge next, and Toponce reports that the railroad chieftain also failed to connect the first time. “Then everybody slapped everybody else again and yelled, 'He missed it too, yow!'”
Although the ceremony was remembered as a great success, Alexander Toponce’s recollections offer a cautionary tale to politicians and other orators about the limitations of their craft.
“Both before and after the spike driving ceremony there were speeches, which were cheered heartily,” he recalled. “I do not remember what any of the speakers said now, but I do remember that there was a great abundance of champagne.”
