Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/776

720 the Central Pacific people astonished the Eastern builders by filing a map "claiming" to build as far east as Echo, some distance east of Ogden.

The two companies had 20,000 men at work. The Casement brothers of the Union Pacific construction forces rose to the occasion. Eastern newspapers were carrying daily head-lines, "The Union Pacific built miles to-day." In the beginning a mile a day was considered good work, but the Casements had long been laying two miles a day, and now were working seven days in the week and every hour that light gave them, and they crowned their supreme efforts by laying in one day nearly eight miles of track between daylight and dark.

The Central Pacific people meantime stayed not for stake or stopped not for stone. They had fourteen tunnels to build, but they did not wait to finish them. Supplies, even to engines, were hauled over the Sierras, and the work was pushed until in the spring of 1869 the opposing track-layers met at Promontory, Utah: the moment at which the law had declared a junction must be made had arrived.

On May 10, Leland Stanford, Governor of California and president of the Central Pacific, and Durant, Duff, and Sidney Dillon, of the Union Pacific, assembled with their friends to drive the spike that was to signalize the completion of the great undertaking. A little company of regular soldiers with a garrison band from Fort Douglas preserved the military atmosphere of the long struggle. The Mormons who had helped so faithfully with the road-bed were there, and the coolies from San Francisco and the Irish track-layers from the Atlantic seaboard faced each other. Strawbridge and Reed, the rival superintendents of construction, placed under the rails the last tie of California laurel. Spikes of silver and of gold from Montana, Idaho, and Nevada were presented and driven into it, and Dr. Harkness, on behalf of the great Pacific State, presented the last spike, wrought of California gold.

The country was waiting for the coming moment. Telegraph-wires everywhere had been silenced to repeat the blows of this silver maul which were to ring from the little valley in the Sierras to end and end of the United States. The first engine from the Pacific faced the first engine from the Atlantic, and amid the silence of uncovered heads the Governor of California and Vice-President Durant of the Union Pacific drove the last spike.

Surely no such story is written anywhere on the records of our railroads. The days when Dodge ran the line, Jack Casement laid the rail, Leland Stanford drove the spike, and Bret Harte supplied the poem can never return. Literature and the railroad had not become wholly divorced when the California poet wrote, "What the Engines said." From the stages of theatres and on the first pages of newspapers particular announcement was made of the celebration to come on the next day. The rejoicing in San Francisco reached the extravagance of a kermess. In the bay the shipping was bright with bunting, and between gayly decorated buildings processions of jubilant citizens marched all day. What matters it that we know now the electric current suffered a stage fright and the ring of the sledge on the last spike could not be made to repeat beyond Omaha? Is it not enough that the chief operator was equal to the occasion and drove the heavy blows in dignified clicks at the telegraph-office on the Missouri River? What is of consequence is the way in which the clicks were received—the blows repeated at San Francisco on the great bell of the City Hall, and cannon booming with the last stroke off Fort Point: and on Capitol Hill in Omaha a hundred guns following the explosion of bombs and the screaming of steam-whistles. Capitalists, prominent citizens, volunteer firemen, and horse-shoers could still walk happily in one tiresome procession when the last Pacific railroad spike was driven. Grant took the news in the White House, Chicago turned out a parade four miles long, New York was saluting the Pacific coast with salvos of artillery, Trinity chimes were ringing Old Hundred, and Trinity voices were chanting Te Deum when the earliest transcontinental line was finished; and in Philadelphia the old bell was ringing in Independence Hall. For American railroading surely those were the golden days.