The Golden Spike: How a Photograph Celebrated the Transcontinental Railroad
CAPTURED HISTORY THE GOLDEN SPIKE HOW A PHOTOGRAPH CELEBRATED THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD by Don Nardo Content Adviser Bob Zeller Co Founder and President The Center for Civil War Photography COMPASS POINT BOOKS a capstone imprint
Chapter One HISTORIC CONNECTION Andrew J Russell stood near a tall tree towering by itself in a canyon in the northern reaches of the Utah Territory Standing beside the Union Pacific Railroad’s still unfinished new line the aged pine marked the spot at which the tracks had come exactly 1,000 miles 1,609 kilometers Company employees wanted to commemorate making it that far from Omaha in Nebraska Territory where construction had begun four years before They made a sign that read 1000 Mile Tree and hung it from the lowest branch of the pine A group of about 40 Union Pacific workers posed beneath the tree on January 9 1869 One of them had climbed to the top At the right moment Russell signaled him to wave and with a camera mounted on a tripod he captured the scene A photographer who had made a name for himself creating visual images of the recently fought Civil War Russell 39 had been hired the year before by the Union Pacific His assignment was to document one of the largest construction projects ever attempted in the United States In 1862 Congress had passed legislation authorizing the creation of the first transcontinental railroad which would link the eastern United States to the West Coast Some far-thinking people had been calling for such a project for almost 20 years Yet at the time Congress approved it not all Americans saw the wisdom of it A few even thought that building a railway line more than 1,700 miles 2,736 km long through vast stretches of largely unexplored wilderness was impossible They continued to echo the sentiment of a Cincinnati newspaper that had ridiculed the idea To claim that the railroad link would create settlements commerce and wealth the 1846 article said was like pledging to unite neighboring planets in our solar system and make them better acquainted with each other
A railroad worker perches atop the 1000 Mile Tree in Andrew Russell’s 1869 photo The Weber Canyon Utah tree has since died but was replaced by a new pine tree But the naysayers began to fall silent as the gigantic project slowly but steadily moved forward In the mid-1860s as the Union Pacific headed westward from Omaha another company the Central Pacific Railroad Company pushed eastward from California Their goal was to meet somewhere in between forming a single railway line that would bridge much of the continent Early in 1869 it became clear that the historic meeting place would be in northern Utah
