Wild West – June 2019

EDITOR’S LETTER

4 WILD WEST JUNE 2019

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Wild West editor

Gregory Lalire wrote

the 2014 historical

novel Captured: From

the Frontier Diary of

Infant Danny Duly,

and his Our Frontier

Pastime: 1804–

is due out in July 2019.

His short story “Halfway

to Hell” appears in the

2018 anthology The

Trading Post and Other

Frontier Stories. His

article about frontier

baseball in Roundup,

the membership maga-

zine of Western Writers

of America, earned him

a 2015 Stirrup Award.

Four years after the American Civil War westward emigration—already

going strong among Northerners and Southerners, including former slaves

—received a boost with the completion of the first transcontinental railroad.

The “Last Spike” (or “Golden Spike”) ceremony on May 10, 1869, at Promon-

tory Summit, Utah Territory, was certainly worth commemorating then and

now, 150 years later. The uniting of the nation via the Central Pacific and

Union Pacific railroads was a long time in coming. As early as the 1840s entre-

preneurs had recognized the vast potential of a coast-to-coast railroad. The

Civil War was still heating up on July 1, 1862, when President Abraham Lin-

coln signed the Pacific Railroad Act. The Central Pacific broke ground during

the war’s second year, and the Union Pacific did so three months after the Confederate surrender at

Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Tracklaying was an intense, often risky process, but the work

got done (see “Finished Working on the Railroad,” P. 38). When the last rail was laid, Union Pacific

chief engineer Grenville Dodge and other railroad bigwigs sent a telegram that read in part, “This will

have an influence upon the future and upon the commerce of the world that no one can today estimate.”

In this sesquicentennial year Americans can appreciate in retrospect the impact of that first transconti-

nental railroad, that there was a

time in this country when trains

rather than planes carried more

passengers and when trains rather

than trucks moved most of the

freight across the United States.

Before the wedding of the rails in 1869 it took a traveler six months to cross from New York to California

at the soaring cost of about $1,000. Afterward, a traveler could cross in about a week for $150.

The Last Spike marked both the conclusion of a grand engineering feat and the beginning of an era

of prodigious tracklaying west of the Mississippi in the latter half of the 19th century. The nation wasn’t

about to stop at one transcontinental railroad. On March 8, 1881, Atchison, Kan., connected to Los

Angeles when the Southern Pacific met the Rio Grande, Mexico & Pacific Railroad (a subsidiary

of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe) in a “Silver Spike” ceremony at Deming, New Mexico Territory.

The Southern Pacific also helped link east Texas to Los Angeles later that year and New Orleans to L.A.

in January 1883. The Northern Pacific, with crews working in both directions, began work on a route

between Minnesota and the West Coast in 1870 and completed it on Aug. 22, 1883, though its own

“Golden Spike” ceremony didn’t take place until September 8 at the completion site near Gold Creek

in Powell County, Montana Territory. In 1893 James J. Hill, without federal aid, completed the Great

Northern Railway, from St. Paul, Minn., to Seattle, to compete with the Northern Pacific. By then

Canada had also gotten into the transcontinental railroad business. On Nov. 7, 1885, the Canadian

Pacific Railway completed a route from Montreal to the budding city of Vancouver, holding its

“Last Spike” ceremony at Craigellachie, British Columbia.

Publicists naturally hailed the transcontinental railroads for promoting opportunity and settlement

in the West as well as national unity through commerce. Of course, as with all major enterprises, the

railroad story has some negative aspects, including highhanded methods by railroad robber barons;

corruption, shady dealings and scandals (particularly how the financiers of Crédit Mobilier bought their

way through Congress); forced relocation of American Indians from lands adjacent to the tracks; the

destruction of natural resources to build tracks and stations; railroad corporations stressing expansion

and profits at the expense of passenger comfort and safety; equipment failure and accidents; and,

of course, that new gripping form of Old West crime—train robberies.

TRACKING

PROGRESS

This obelisk stands

where the “Last Spike”

was driven in 1869.

AFTERWARD, A TRAVELER

COULD CROSS IN ABOUT

A WEEK FOR $