In the 1890s, travel writers faced a daunting task: spectacular western sights often tempted them to write fanciful, exaggerated prose for the public. One writer, Stanley Wood, claimed that he had resisted that temptation when he wrote the popular book Over the Range to the Golden Gate.¹ As Wood put it in his preface, “No attempt will be made at ‘fine writing’; every effort will be made to state just such facts as the traveler would like to know, and to state these facts in clear and explicit language.” Like Stanley Wood, I hope to share new facts about a...

In the early 1800s, when the words rail road began to be heard in the United States, much of the area west of St. Louis and east of Spanish California was terra incognita for most Americans. At that time, the term rail road (or, somewhat later, railroad) referred to any method of transport that relied on rails laid horizontal to the ground and upon which wheeled vehicles could roll. At this early date, the rails were wooden, but might also be made of iron. Horses or mules likely provided the power to haul cars over such a railroad. By around...

The report of Stansbury’s 1849 expedition, published in 1852, helped the federal government and the Mormons better understand a portion of early Utah Territory. By that time, this area was being eyed as one of many places through which a transcontinental railroad might run. After all, railroad technology had also improved over the last two decades, generating confidence in the idea of a railroad spanning the entire continent. Private business interests had long speculated about such a railroad, and now official interest was growing. Originally slow to act, the United States Congress now took a serious interest in the project....

On New Year’s Day of 1868, Central Pacific’s Collis Huntington did what he always did on holidays—obsess about business matters. At that time, business and railroad were synonymous to Huntington. Concerned about the slow progress the Central Pacific Railroad was making, Huntington wrote to “Friend Crocker” outlining the turf battle that had been brewing in northwestern Utah, and was about to reach the boiling point. Of the “UNION PACIFIC,” as he wrote the name of his nemesis in capital letters for emphasis, Huntington noted that the “one thing that they do understand is the importance of meeting us west...

The joining of the rails ceremony that took place on May 10, 1869, has become part of the nation’s folklore and mythology. Most books written about the event treat it as the culmination of the transcontinental railroad, but Promontory’s story runs deeper and broader than that. I mean that Promontory should be placed in broader geographical and deeper historical context. The written record enables us to understand how what took place at Promontory compared to what was occurring on the world stage. One observer writing for the Montana Post noted that the event marked “the completing of an enterprise fraught...

In one sense, Promontory in 1869 represented a Central Pacific victory. By pushing Union Pacific back from Promontory to the Bear River, and ultimately to Ogden, the federal system rewarded the California rather than Omaha crowd. A Map Showing U.P.R.R. Lands in the Salt Lake District (fig. 5–1) shows “Land withdrawn by [the] letter of May 15 1869 [and] acknowledged . . . May 24, 1869 . . .” reveals the Union Pacific relinquishing the line over Promontory Summit. A written note on the map, apparently made a few years thereafter, mentions that this is a “Diagram of six...

So much has been written about Promontory as a unique place in 1869 that it has obscured the town’s later role as one of many places along the railroad. During the period 1875 to about 1900, Promontory’s character changed from a historical curiosity to another link in the chain of increasingly big-time railroading. This chapter covers Promontory as a location on a section of the mainline that ran through some of the most forbidding country in the American West.

In the 1870s, and 1880s, popular atlases often featured maps of Utah and Nevada as a single spread that spanned two...

After the Lucin Cutoff diverted almost all of the railroad traffic away from the original line over the summit, telegrapher Earl Harmon recalled that, “There wasn’t much said about Promontory in them days.” This statement beautifully captures how Promontory declined in the early decades of the twentieth century. Born in 1901, Harmon witnessed the era when Promontory found itself off the mainline and became just another place on a branchline. The year 1904 was crucial for the line over Promontory Summit. In that year, the Southern Pacific formally opened its new, more direct line across a portion of the Great...

By the early twentieth century, speculators eyed the Central Pacific lands, which on a map appeared to be part of a huge checkerboard pattern awaiting development (figs. 8–1a and b). The major activity in this area was ranching, and it would soon face competition from farming. Consider, for example, the fate of the Promontory Ranch Company, or PRC, as it was often called. According to its articles of incorporation filed in San Francisco on November 30, 1897, the Promontory Ranch Company was created for the purpose of engaging in and carrying on “the business of raising, buying, selling, exchanging...

The removal of the spike at Promontory in 1942 had special significance to the movie-going public, who had seen the golden spike ceremony of 1869 re-enacted in the recent Cecil B. DeMille film Union Pacific (1939). It was one thing to read about the events of 1869 at Promontory, but quite another to see them recreated on film, that persuasive medium so capable of shaping, even manipulating, popular beliefs. Union Pacific was a celebration of the railroad as a shaper of history. In order to depict the building of the transcontinental railroad, DeMille had to find other locomotives as stand-ins....

In describing the recent (2004) completion of Australia’s first transcontinental railway through the desert heart of that huge country, historian Geoffrey Blainey observed that, “there’s something symbolic about a railway.” Blainey noted that, “a railway is created in one grand gesture” as opposed to a road, which usually develops in stages along the route of earlier trails. Uniting Adelaide with Darwin was, to the Australians, much like uniting New York and San Francisco to Americans almost a century and a-half ago. Both railroads were exercises in “nation-building,” as Prime Minister John Howard characterized the Australian project in 2004. In 1869,...