How The West Was Won

Can the West Lead Us to a Better Place?

An engine of change for 140 years, the region has more influence than ever. Its direction is important to all of us.

By Bill Lane Center Co-Director David M. Kennedy

From the May/June issue of Stanford Magazine

From the evergreen forests of the Pacific Northwest to the spires of the Rockies and the majesty of Monument Valley, the West has long been a land of legends. The region has bred countless fables, songs and stories. Yet the reality of the 21st-century West may well outshine even its own extravagant mythology.

Few of those legends are more fabulous than the saga of the Golden Spike. For six scandal-plagued years, crews of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads, lavishly subsidized by government loans and land grants, pick-axed and sledgehammered their way toward each other across mountain and prairie. On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah, they linked up at last to create the continent's first coast-to-coast rail line.

That morning a Central Pacific crew lowered onto the crusty desert soil the road's last tie, hewed from a California laurel logged off the shoulder of Mount Tamalpais and polished to a mirror finish by a San Francisco billiard-table maker. While a crowd of dignitaries, laborers and high-spirited spectators looked on, another Central Pacific crew, all Chinese, laid a section of rail across one end of the tie; an all-Irish Union Pacific work gang did the same on the other. The gleaming timber's predrilled holes were ready to receive not one but several ceremonial spikes. Among them was a 14-ounce fabrication of pure California gold, on which "The Last Spike" was elegantly inscribed—the very spike that has long been so richly celebrated in Stanford lore, and a replica of which can be viewed at the University's Cantor Arts Center.

Shortly after noon, Union Pacific locomotive No. 119 and the Central Pacific's No. 60, the Jupiter, chugged to within a few hand spans of each other. Central Pacific chieftain Leland Stanford stepped between the cowcatchers. The Golden Spike was gently inserted into its prepared hole. Stanford gingerly tapped it with a silver-plated maul... Complete article

Top of page