Promontory Summit

On a remote stretch of Utah desert, a single ceremonial spike closed the gap between the Atlantic and Pacific and remade the nation. When the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads met at Promontory Summit on May 10, 1869, a journey that once took months by wagon shrank to about a week by rail. The transcontinental railroad opened the West to settlement and commerce on an unprecedented scale, while accelerating the displacement of Native nations and the destruction of the bison herds that had sustained them.

Authorized by the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, two companies raced to build a rail line spanning the continent: the Central Pacific building east from Sacramento, largely on the backs of Chinese immigrant laborers who blasted through the Sierra Nevada, and the Union Pacific building west from Omaha, relying heavily on Irish immigrant and Civil War veteran crews across the plains.

The two lines finally converged at Promontory Summit, Utah, and on May 10, 1869, dignitaries gathered for a ceremony marking the completion. Leland Stanford of the Central Pacific drove a ceremonial golden spike into a polished laurel tie, while a telegraph operator relayed the moment nationwide with a single word: 'Done.' Locomotives Jupiter and No. 119 touched pilot to pilot in the iconic photograph of the event.

The railroad transformed the American economy, opening western markets, resources, and land to settlement within days rather than months, but it also devastated Native American lands and ways of life and hastened the near-extinction of the bison. The original rail line through Promontory was bypassed in 1904 and later removed for scrap, but the National Park Service established Golden Spike National Historic Site in 1965 (redesignated a Historical Park in 2019), with operating replica locomotives reenacting the historic meeting.