My wife and I drove out to the Promontory Point, Utah area to the Golden Spike Memorial. We had not been out there for many years and wondered what changes had been made to the area. The experience brought to mind the very significance of that historical event of May 10, 1869. Congress had approved the construction of the Intercontinental Railroad nearly fifteen years before the completion date. Prior to the completion of the continental railroad, the only way west was by covered wagons, handcarts, horseback, or to walk. A few even chose to travel by boat down around the bottom of South America and back up the west coast to San Francisco, etc. All cargo that was too large or heavy for a wagon had to be sent by ship. All methods of traveling west took weeks and in many cases months to reach their destination. It was not only long, but grueling and dangerous. When the transcontinental railway was completed, a trip west, by train, just took a matter of days, and the trip was relatively comfortable. Though it was one continent, the east and west boundaries seemed worlds apart. The railroad essentially brought the continent together and opened up the west to adventuresome explorers and settlers.
A Central Pacific crew started from San Francisco on the west coast, while the Union Pacific crew started from the mid-west just east of the Mississippi river, with the intent to meet somewhere in between. The crews slaved under difficult conditions using primitive tools to grade and level the terrain and to put down ties and track for the train to eventually run on. Where they had access to water and forests, the thousands of ties were sawed to specifications at temporary lumber mills and where they did not, the thousands of ties were hand-hewn. Many of those hand-hewn ties are still available for public view. You can see every rough scar made by a man’s ax in the process, where necessary wooden trusses were built to span large gorges and rivers etc. The crews coming from the east had many Irish Immigrant workers and those coming from the west had many Chinese immigrant crew members. It was grueling and dangerous work.
There were instances where Native Americans, hostile to the invasion of their lands, shot at, and in some cases killed, crew members as they worked their way across the plains.
Where the terrain was very uneven or mountainous the crews were fortunate to have access to explosives, (black powder and nitrogen) to help them carve their way through these areas that otherwise would have taken months to make their way through. An Irish worker wrote a song about the use of these explosives:
Just last week a premature blast went off,
And a mile in the sky went up big Jim Goff.
Now when next payday came around,
Jim Goff a dollar short was found,
When asked the reason, came this reply.
You were docked for the time you were up in the sky.
There had to have been hundreds of crew members from each side straining to meet deadlines. I imagine that many such accidents occurred during the construction period.
One wonders if the hundreds of individuals who worked on those crews have been given proper recognition for such a tremendous accomplishment. Have they been memorialized and most importantly, one wonders, if records were kept, such that their descendants can find them and do their ordinance work for them? To me they were heroic and should be honored as we honor our military veterans because they were willing to put themselves in harms way for a national cause. What they did for this nation should never be forgotten or in any way diminished.