One of the dramatic events of American history took place at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869. On that day a golden spike was driven into the last stretch of track, and for the first time the East and West were linked by a railroad. After the spike-driving ceremony, the engineer of the Central Pacific, which had started east from San Francisco, and the engineer of the Union Pacific, which had been built west from the Mississippi, ran their engines up until they touched. Then they shook hands and broke champagne bottles over each other’s locomotive. There were speeches before and after, as gangs of Irish and Chinese laborers joined governors, railroad dignitaries and other notables in celebrating the momentous occasion.

Walt Whitman Writes of the Continental Railroad

To Walt Whitman this event had a highly emotional significance. It came in the same year that the Suez Canal was opened, and to Whitman the two events marked a great step forward in the advance of civilization. In his poem, “A Passage to India,” Whitman writes of the continental railroad:

I see over my own continent the Pacific railroad surmounting every barrier,

I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte carrying freight and passengers,

I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam-whistle,

I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world,

I cross the Laramie plains, I note the rocks in grotesque shapes, the buttes,

I see the plentiful larkspur and wild onions, the barren, colorless, sage-deserts,

I see in glimpses afar or towering immediately above me the great mountains, I see the Wind river and the Wahsatch mountains,

I see the Monument mountain and the Eagle’s Nest, I pass the Promontory, I ascend the Nevadas,

I scan the noble Elk mountain and wind around its base,

I see the Humboldt range, I thread the valley and cross the river,

I see the clear waters of lake Tahoe, I see forests of majestic pines,

Or crossing the great desert, the alkaline plains, I behold enchanting mirages of waters and meadows,

Marking through these and after all, in duplicate slender lines,

Bridging the three or four thousand miles of land travel,

Tying the Eastern to the Western sea,

The road between Europe and Asia.

Samuel Bowles Travels on the Union Pacific

During the summer before the railroad was finished, the editor of the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican, Samuel Bowles, visited the West. He traveled over the Union Pacific from Omaha, which he noted had become a boom town since he had visited it last in 1865. He describes his ride along the same route followed by the Oregon Trail and the Overland Stage.

The day’s ride grows monotonous. The road is as straight as an arrow. Every dozen or fifteen miles is a station—two or three sheds, and a waterspout and wood-pile; every one hundred miles or so a home or a division depot, with shops, eating-house, “saloons” uncounted, a store or two, a few cultivated acres, and the invariable half-a-dozen seedy, staring loafers, that are a sort of fungi indigenous to American railways. We yawn over the unchanging landscape and the unvarying model of the stations, and lounge and read by day, and go to bed early at night. But the clear, dry air charms; the half dozen soldiers hurriedly marshalled into line at each station, as the train comes up, suggest that the Indian question is not disposed of yet; we catch a glimpse of antelopes in the distance; and we watch the holes of the prairie dogs for their piquant little owners and their traditional companions of owls and snakes—but never see the snakes.

The Plains proper and the first day’s ride end at Cheyenne, five hundred and sixteen miles from Omaha. Here a branch road goes off south a hundred miles to Denver, where it connects with the St. Louis or Eastern Division of the Pacific road. Cheyenne is also a great railroad work and supply shop, as becomes its location adjoining the mountain and winter-exposed section of the road.

He continued on across Wyoming to the end of the line, which then was crossing the high, arid tablelands near Rawlins. He saw the track laid over the Continental Divide and marveled at the speed with which the job was being accomplished. By the next May the construction crews had laid another 250 miles of track to complete the work.

Within this desert of the mountains, the divide of the continent occurs both on the old stage road and the new Railroad line; and here, in the summer of 1868, we witnessed the building of the track over the parting of the waters. The last rail on the Atlantic slope and the first on the Pacific were laid in our presence; and Governor Bross pinned them down with stalwart blows upon their spikes. As yet, still, no mountains appear in the path of the track, and it winds easily along through these rolling sand-hills, occasionally helped over a deep dry gulch, and spanning a feeble or possible river. But the whole section is mountainously high, from seven thousand to eight thousand feet above the sea level.

We witnessed here the fabulous speed with which the Railroad was built. Through the two or three hundred miles beyond were scattered ten to fifteen thousand men in great gangs preparing the road bed; plows, scrapers, shovels, picks and carts; and, among the rocks, drills and powder were doing the grading as rapidly as men could stand and move with their tools. Long trains brought up to the end of the completed track loads of ties and rails; the former were transferred to teams, sent one or two miles ahead, and put in place upon the grade. Then rails and spikes were reloaded on platform cars, these pushed up to the last previously laid rail, and with an automatic movement and a celerity that were wonderful, practiced hands dropped the fresh rails one after another on the ties exactly in line, huge sledges sent the spikes home, the car rolled on, and the operation was repeated; while every few minutes the long heavy train behind sent out a puff from its locomotive, and caught up with its load of material the advancing work. The only limit, inside of eight miles in twenty-four hours, to the rapidity with which the track could thus be laid, was the power of the road behind to bring forward the materials.

As the Railroad marched thus rapidly across the broad Continent of plain and mountain, there was improvised a rough and temporary town at its every public stopping-place. As this was changed every thirty or forty days, these settlements were of the most perishable materials—canvas tents, plain board shanties, and turf-hovels—pulled down and sent forward for a new career, or deserted as worthless, at every grand movement of the Railroad company. Only a small proportion of their populations had aught to do with the road, or any legitimate occupation. Most were the hangers-on around the disbursements of such a gigantic work, catching the drippings from the feast in any and every form that it was possible to reach them. Restaurant and saloon keepers, gamblers, desperadoes of every grade, the vilest of men and of women made up this “Hell on Wheels,” as it was most aptly termed.

When we were on the line, this congregation of scum and wickedness was within the Desert section, and was called Benton. One to two thousand men, and a dozen or two women were encamped on the alkali plain in tents and board shanties; not a tree, not a shrub, not a blade of grass was visible; the dust ankle deep as we walked through it, and so fine and volatile that the slightest breeze loaded the air with it, irritating every sense and poisoning half of them; a village of a few variety stores and shops, and many restaurants and grog-shops; by day disgusting, by night dangerous; almost everybody dirty, many filthy, and with the marks of lowest vice; averaging a murder a day; gambling and drinking, hurdy-gurdy dancing and the vilest of sexual commerce, the chief business and pastime of the hours—this was Benton. Like its predecessors, it fairly festered in corruption, disorder and death, and would have rotted, even in this dry air, had it outlasted a brief sixty-day life. But in a few weeks its tents were struck, its shanties razed, and with their dwellers moved on fifty or a hundred miles farther to repeat their life for another brief day. Where these people came from originally; where they went to when the road was finished, and their occupation was over, were both puzzles too intricate for me. Hell would appear to have been raked to furnish them; and to it they must have naturally returned after graduating here, fitted for its ... most diabolical service.