(The following story by Dixie Reid appeared on the Sacramento Bee website on May 8, 2009.)
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Sacramento’s grandest celebration to date was months in the making and, like a runaway train, would not be stopped.
On the morning of May 8, 1869, bells pealed, cannons boomed and cheers erupted as thousands of Sacramentans noted the exact moment when former Gov. Leland Stanford used a silver hammer to tap a gold spike into a laurelwood railroad tie at Promontory Summit, in the far-off Utah Territory.
After six years of back-breaking work, the two sections of the transcontinental railroad were joined, finally and forever uniting California with the rest of the country.
Except it didn’t happen, not on that day.
The Utah ceremony was postponed until May 10 after a Union Pacific Railroad executive was held up, literally, on his way to the meeting place.
Sacramentans learned of the delay by telegraph but went on with their gala as planned.
“The 8th was a Saturday. That was the perfect day for it to happen,” says Sacramento historian Mead B. Kibbey. “They had spent all this time getting ready, and they weren’t going to be messed with. They lined up on the levee something like 10 or 15 locomotives and let them build up a lot of steam, then they tied down their whistles and almost deafened everybody.”
Most towns waited until the formalities in Utah actually took place, but San Francisco threw a party – referred to in one historic text as “a triumph of mass civic inebriation” – that began May 8 and continued for three days.
This weekend, the California State Railroad Museum marks the 140th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad’s completion with “Building the Central Pacific,” a lecture and slide show by Kibbey at 5 p.m. Saturday.
Also Saturday, the museum debuts its exhibition “The Rail Splitter and the Railroads: Lincoln, the Union and the Golden State” (closes Feb. 15, 2010) and celebrates National Train Day.
The completion of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad meant that Californians were a few days by train, instead of difficult weeks overland by wagon, away from the places they had left to come here.
“The railroad changed everything,” says Kibbey. “It was very much as if the Panama Canal had been dug across the country, and that little tunnel (through the Sierra Nevada) was as important as the Gatun locks on the Panama Canal. If you were to close that tunnel, you would close off California.”
Sacramento was the western terminus of the Central Pacific Railroad. The ground-breaking took place Jan. 9, 1863, at Front and K streets.
Stanford, who was one of the railroad’s Big Four financiers (along with Mark Hopkins, Collis P. Huntington and Charles Crocker), addressed the citizens who gathered under rainy skies that day.
“We may now look forward with confidence to the day, not far distant, when the Pacific Coast will be bound to the Atlantic Coast by iron bonds that shall consolidate and strengthen the ties of nationality, and advance with great strides the prosperity of the state and country,” Stanford said.
As the Central Pacific Railroad made its way eastward, the Union Pacific Railroad crawled westward from the Missouri River and across the Rocky Mountains.
The work was dangerous and difficult, particularly for a mostly Chinese labor force chiseling and dynamiting its way through the Sierra Nevada.
When at last the railroad was finished, Central Pacific officials waited two days for their Union Pacific counterparts’ arrival at Promontory Summit.
A terrible rainstorm threatened to wash out a temporary railroad bridge east of Ogden, Utah, and Thomas Durant, a Union Pacific executive, was delayed by a group of angry railroad workers.
“They chained his car to the rails until he paid them,” says Kibbey. “He couldn’t move his private car. They were really mad.”
Durant took care of company business and proceeded to the meeting point.
On May 10, about 12:45 p.m., with two locomotives – the CP’s Jupiter and the UP’s No. 119 – facing each other, Stanford raised his silver hammer.
“This was the first event in the history of America that the whole country knew about at the actual moment,” Kibbey says. “They put one wire of the telegraph line to Stanford’s hammer and the other to the spike, and they stopped all telegraph operations. There was silence all across the United States. They set up a telegraph receiver on President (Ulysses S.) Grant’s desk.
“There was that long silence and one click. That was the completion of the railroad, and the whole country knew about it.”
All across the United States, celebrations began. They rang the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and set off a 100-gun cannon salute in New York’s Central Park.
San Franciscans continued their joyous inebriation and, in Sacramento, the locals swelled with pride.
“The Central Pacific at that time was very much a Sacramento endeavor,” says Kyle Wyatt, history and technology curator at the Railroad Museum. “They were enthusiastically in support of it. There were congratulatory signs all over town to the Central Pacific.
“A lot of people in Sacramento felt vested in the railroad enterprise, and for Sacramento, the completion of the railroad is a major psychological boost. It breaks a strong sense of isolation that exists beforehand. Suddenly, (people) are connected with the rest of the United States.”
President Abraham Lincoln signed the Railroad Act on July 2, 1864; it allowed the construction of a transcontinental railroad to begin. California fascinated him, and he was eager to see her beauty and famed gold first-hand.
“Lincoln, reportedly on the night he was killed, as he and Mary Todd Lincoln are on their way to the theater, the subject of California comes up, and he expresses a desire – after the railroad is completed and he’s out of office – to visit California,” says Wyatt.
An actor named John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln that night, April 14, 1865.
Four years later, train travel was commonplace, thanks in great part to Lincoln’s vision for uniting the country.
WHILE AT THE RAILROAD MUSEUM
Don’t miss the Central Pacific Railroad’s first locomotive, the Gov. Stanford; Thomas Hill’s 1891 painting of the 1869 ceremony at Promontory Summit; and the “lost” gold spike, which few people knew about for 136 years.