When the Country Was United

A hundred years ago last week, about 500 Irish and Chinese laborers, politicians, railroad men and prostitutes gathered on a lonely plateau at Promontory, Utah, to witness a momentous event: the joining of East to West by the first transcontinental railroad. Central Pacific President Leland Stanford picked up a silver sledgehammer, swung at. the final spike and missed. Union Pacific Vice President Thomas Durant took his turn--and also missed. Finally, a Union Pacific laborer stepped up and drove it home. A waiting telegrapher tapped out the message: "The Pacific railroad is completed."

Salute Fired. Champagne and whisky flowed at Promontory, and the nation joined in the celebration. Fire bells pealed in San Francisco, a 100-gun salute was fired in New York, and in Philadelphia the Liberty Bell rang loudly. Today the great age of steel and steam is long past. The Promontory line, which followed the edge of the Great Salt Lake, was replaced in 1903 by a causeway that cut directly across it. The historic trackage was hauled off and melted down to help meet World War II metal shortages. Even the causeway line is now used by only one passenger train, the City of San Francisco, and the railroad wants to suspend service between Ogden, Utah, and Oakland, Calif.

Undeterred, an estimated 15,000 history buffs and railroad fans showed up in Promontory last weekend for a centennial re-enactment of the last-spike ceremony; 81 of them paid $995 apiece for a round-trip ride from New York to Utah on a special train hauled by steam locomotive as far as Kansas City, where a mammoth Union Pacific diesel took over for the long pull across the Rocky Mountains. U.P. President Ed Bailey arrived in a private car hitched to a passenger train, but some of his vice presidents chose a faster way. They arrived from Omaha for the ceremonies aboard one of the railroad's two Sabreliner executive jets.

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