The Golden Spike

On the day the last spike was driven, a telegraph blared “DONE!” across the nation. In an instant, travel from coast to coast shrank from a perilous months-long journey to just eight days. America, freshly torn by civil war, was now bound by “a strong band of iron” stretching 1,800 miles. Cities like New York and San Francisco rejoiced, firing 100‐gun salutes and cheering the conquest of distance. The transcontinental railroad was hailed as the “grandest enterprise under God”, promising to pour millions of settlers into the West. But this grand achievement carried a human price. Countless workers – immigrants and veterans – perished in explosions, snowslides, and epidemic disease. Entire Indigenous nations saw their homelands bisected and buffalo herds exterminated in the railroad’s wake. The Golden Spike ceremony itself glossed over these sacrifices. Dignitaries like Stanford and Durant gently tapped a laurelwood tie with precious metal spikes, while the real final iron spike was driven by unseen hands. (Stanford actually missed his swing and hit the tie, but the telegraph operator dutifully signaled completion so “the Nation would not know the difference”.) The laborers who lifted the iron rails into place were largely absent from the official narrative. As one UC Berkeley historian noted, “notably absent are the laborers, most of whom were immigrants, who worked in brutal conditions to make the achievement a reality.” The story of the transcontinental railroad, then, is one of triumph tempered by sacrifice – a driving of the last spike that united a nation, even as it overlooked the people and the costs that made it possible.

When the Central Pacific Railroad ground to a halt in the high Sierra Nevada in 1865, labor was scarce and the work perilous. Charles Crocker, the construction superintendent, made a then-radical proposal: hire Chinese immigrants. Despite initial prejudice (one foreman scoffed at the idea), the experiment proved a success. “Wherever we put them, we found them good,” Crocker recalled, “and if we were in a hurry for a job of work, it was better to put Chinese on at once.” These Chinese migrants – many from Guangdong province – soon formed the backbone of the Central Pacific’s workforce. By 1868, 10,000– 12,000 Chinese were on the payroll, making up as much as 90% of the Central Pacific’s laborers. Working in crews of 20 under white foremen, they earned around $30 per month (minus board), notably less than the $35 plus board paid to white (mostly Irish) workers.

The Chinese “Celestials,” as they were often called, tackled the most grueling and dangerous tasks. They chipped and blasted tunnels through solid granite in the Sierras, hanging in baskets to place explosives on cliff faces. They labored from dawn till dusk, through blizzards and avalanches at 7,000 feet elevation. Dozens were killed by explosions and many hundreds by snow slides and rock falls – contemporary estimates put Chinese fatalities at over 1,000 men during the build. Yet they persevered, living in canvas camps and eventually even constructing wooden bunkhouses under the deep snows. Notably, the Chinese crews maintained healthier habits than their white counterparts: they boiled water for tea (avoiding dysentery from bad water) and ate a varied diet of dried vegetables, seafood, and occasional fresh meat, eschewing the whiskey and monotonous salted beef diet of the Irish camps. Their discipline and resilience earned begrudging respect. When skeptics doubted Chinese could perform skilled masonry, Crocker famously retorted, “Did they not build the Chinese Wall, the biggest piece of masonry in the world?” – and Chinese stonemasons were soon laying rock work for tunnels and retaining walls.

Despite harsh treatment, Chinese workers showed remarkable solidarity. In late June 1867, 3,000 Chinese laborers staged an unprecedented strike – one of the nation’s earliest mass labor actions. They demanded pay equal to white workers ($40 per month), shorter shifts in the hellish tunnels, and a 10-hour workday instead of sunup-to-sundown toil. The work along a 30-mile stretch ground to a halt as the Chinese crews peacefully “stayed in their camps”, refusing to pick up tools. Crocker was astonished at the nonviolent discipline of the strikers, noting that if thousands of whites had struck, “it would have been impossible to control them... But this strike of the Chinese was just like Sunday all along the work.” His response, however, was ruthless. Central Pacific officials cut off food and supplies to the mountain camps. After a week of near-starvation, Crocker confronted the weakened men and threatened to withhold pay for the entire month if they didn’t capitulate. With hunger undermining their resolve – and a posse of armed men looming as a final warning – the Chinese workers reluctantly returned to work, their demands unmet. The strike was defeated by attrition, but it revealed the Chinese workers’ courage and organization in an era when labor rights were virtually nonexistent.

Only two years later, the Chinese crews had their moment of triumph. On April 28, 1869, in a final burst of effort across the Utah desert, Central Pacific’s Chinese (and Irish) tracklayers set a record that astounded observers: ten miles of track laid in a single day. Starting at dawn, some 4,000 men worked with military precision – “a thin line of 1,000 men advancing a mile an hour,” wrote one witness, with supply trains leapfrogging ahead and materials flying into place. Irish rail teams ran 560-pound iron rails on their shoulders, while Chinese gangers leveled the roadbed, set ties, and spiked rails in synchronized rhythm. An onlooker described “an orchestration of humanity...like an army marching over the ground and leaving a track built behind them.” By day’s end, 10 miles and 56 feet of new track spanned the gap – a record “never been equaled”. This feat, achieved largely by Chinese crews under Crocker’s direction, ensured the Central Pacific would beat the Union Pacific’s best single-day mark of 8 1⁄2 miles and secured a win in the friendly rivalry to lay the most track. It was a tour de force of endurance and coordination – and a point of pride frequently cited by Central Pacific officials to highlight their workers’ prowess.

When the Golden Spike ceremony finally took place two weeks later, Chinese workers played a literal role in the railroad’s completion – but their presence was scarcely acknowledged. A specially chosen crew of Chinese tracklayers was assigned to place the last rails up to the meeting point, alongside an Irish crew from the Union Pacific. They positioned the final iron rails that joined the two lines. Photographs taken that day indicate that at least a few Chinese workers stood in the crowds at Promontory .(Stanford University researchers have identified two Chinese men in the iconic Andrew Russell photograph, standing to one side.) However, none were invited to participate in the ceremonial hammering or to be in the forefront of the official portraits. In fact, the most famous photograph of the event shows only white faces; the conspicuous absence of Chinese in that image has long been noted as a symbol of their erasure. Company leaders claimed this exclusion was not deliberate prejudice so much as timing – reportedly, the Chinese crew had been sent off to have a celebratory meal at the moment the primary photo was taken. Indeed, Central Pacific management did treat the Chinese crew to a banquet in a railcar after the ceremony, “honored and cheered” for their incredible work. But in the public eye, the contribution of Chinese workers remained largely invisible. Leland Stanford hammered the golden spike and delivered flowery speeches without mentioning the Chinese by name. As historian Gordon H. Chang observed in later years, “There has been inattention to the role of Chinese workers in this part of American history and our goal has been to correct that.” The Golden Spike may have symbolically united East and West, but it also drove home the bitter fact that the very men who made that union possible were written out of the story.

Building from the East, the Union Pacific Railroad faced its own gauntlet of challenges – open prairies, deserts, and the Rocky Mountains – all under constant pressure to outrun the rival line. Irish immigrants formed the core of the Union Pacific’s labor force, especially in the early years. With the Civil War raging, able-bodied American workers were scarce, so recruiters scoured the docks of New York and Boston for immigrant labor. Thousands of young Irishmen – many fresh off the boat or fleeing famine at home – signed on for the grueling work out west. They were joined by demobilized Union Army veterans (both Union and Confederate) once the war ended in 1865, as well as smaller numbers of English, German, and Italian immigrants. By one estimate, Irish laborers made up the largest ethnic group on the Union Pacific line. These men toiled for similar pay as their Central Pacific counterparts (around $2–$3 per day), and they often endured fierce conditions on the Great Plains: searing summers, bitter winters, dysentery from poor water, and the ever-present threat of attacks by hostile bands of Plains tribes.

Under the direction of Chief Engineer Grenville Dodge and construction boss Jack Casement, the Union Pacific’s advance took on a quasi-military efficiency. Casement, a former Army general, organized his track- laying crews “with military precision”, operating a moveable assembly line that leapfrogged westward each day. As one eyewitness described, teams of horses hauled rails to the front, men on either side snatched them and dropped them onto ties, gaugers aligned the rails, bolters and spikers pounded them into place, and then the whole camp – supply wagons, tents and all – rolled forward along the newly laid track. By this method, Casement’s “army” of rail-layers could finish an average of 1 1⁄2 to 2 miles of track per day, an astonishing pace that occasionally reached even greater lengths. (UP crews once boasted of laying 8.5 miles in a single day, a record they crowed “could not be matched” until the Central Pacific’s Chinese crews surpassed it.) Dodge’s and Casement’s experience in the Civil War showed in the organization – many crewmen even lived in movable railcars and tents that formed wild, itinerant settlements at the railhead.

These transient construction camps became known as “Hell on Wheels” towns – temporary tent cities that sprang up at the end-of-track and moved with it. Hell on Wheels was the definition of the Wild West: saloons, gambling dens, and brothels followed the rail crews, bringing liquor and lawlessness to the plains. Places like Julesburg and Benton, Wyoming were notorious for brawls, prostitution, and murder as roughnecks, gamblers, and camp followers converged. An Omaha reporter in 1867 described one such town as “a synonym for all that is morally hideous,” where death was a nightly occurrence and vigilante justice the only law. The mostly Irish laborers were stereotyped as rowdy and hard-drinking – and indeed many spent their pay in Hell on Wheels saloons as fast as they earned it. Discipline on the job was strict, however. Foremen did not hesitate to fire men for insubordination, and the ever-present specter of cheaper Chinese labor was used to quell demands. (At one point an Irish grading crew struck for higher wages, and management warned they’d bring in Chinese workers to replace them – the Irishmen swiftly backed down.) The Central Pacific’s willingness to employ Chinese had a ripple effect: it “instantly” ended an Irish wage protest when the men realized they could be supplanted.

Working conditions for the Union Pacific crews were brutal in their own way. If the Chinese of the CP had to conquer the Sierras, the Irish of the UP had to race across the vast plains and up the Rockies, laying track over hundreds of miles of desolation. They labored under a hot sun with shovels, picks, and sledgehammers, grading roadbed and hammering iron spikes from dawn to dusk. Water-borne illness like cholera and dysentery periodically swept through the camps due to contaminated water on the prairies. Accidents with explosives, careless gunfire, or falls from supply wagons could be fatal on the remote frontier far from medical care. And looming over all was the fear of Native American attack. Many segments of the UP line cut directly through the hunting grounds of the Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho. To these tribes, the railroad was a menacing invader – “the Iron Horse” plowing through buffalo country – and some chose resistance. Survey parties and isolated work gangs were occasionally attacked; livestock was rustled, tracks sabotaged, and workers killed in sporadic raids. In one 1867 incident, a Cheyenne raiding party derailed a UP handcar, killing all but one of the crew. In 1868, Sioux warriors managed to pry up rails and wreck a train, killing two and injuring others. Such events spread fear among the workers. Chief Engineer Dodge repeatedly pleaded for Army protection, and General Sherman dispatched soldiers to guard surveyors and crews (though Sherman privately felt the Natives posed “no real threat to the project” at first). By 1868, however, Sherman’s view had hardened – enraged by Indian attacks like the Fetterman Massacre, he vowed to “act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.” Troops under Generals Sherman and Sheridan began a brutal winter campaign that devastated the Plains tribes just as the railroad was being completed.

Amid this conflict, the Union Pacific found an unlikely ally in the Pawnee nation. Old enemies of the Sioux, the Pawnee agreed to assist the railroad. The UP gave Pawnee scouts free passage on work trains and employed them to patrol the line and repel raiders. Major Frank North organized 800 Pawnee men into a battalion that guarded the graders and tie-layers, staging occasional mock “Indian attacks” for visiting dignitaries at Durant’s famous 100th Meridian excursion celebration. One Army officer gushed that he had “never seen more obedient or better behaved troops” than the Pawnee scouts, who rendered “excellent service” in keeping the peace. Thanks in part to such protection – and the sheer determination of its workers – the Union Pacific pressed on through peril, laying 1,086 miles of track from Omaha to Utah (compared to 690 miles laid by the Central Pacific from California). By the time they neared Utah, the UP crews were running neck-and-neck with the CP, grading and track-laying almost in sight of each other. The final miles became a mad dash – the “great race” to Promontory – with each side vying for bragging rights. (It was largely symbolic; by then Congress had fixed Promontory Summit as the meeting point. Still, pride was at stake.) Ultimately, the two railheads met in late April 1869, and the exhausted Irish workers could lay down their tools at last.

At the Golden Spike ceremony, Irish workers did have some representation – at least in the photographs. Standing atop Union Pacific engine No.119 or gathered around with celebratory whiskey can be seen grinning men in laborers’ garb, likely including many Irish trackmen. But like their Chinese counterparts, none of the Irish crew were invited to drive the final spike or speak at the podium. The honors went instead to the railroad barons: Union Pacific’s Thomas Durant and Central Pacific’s Leland Stanford took turns with a silver maul to tap the ceremonial spikes (both men embarrassingly missed their strikes, to general amusement). An Irish rail handler named Edward Malloy was given the token job of placing the last tie, and a few other workers from each side held the final rail in place, but they were not named in the official program. One journal of the time noted that the laborers gave three cheers when the last spike was driven – and then immediately began breaking up the work camp, ready to move on. The moment of national triumph would soon give way to layoffs and uncertain prospects for these men who had, in a sense, labored themselves out of a job.

Often overlooked in the saga of the transcontinental railroad is the contribution of African American workers. The end of the Civil War in 1865 freed nearly four million enslaved people, and in the following years some made their way west in search of new opportunities. The Union Pacific, desperate for manpower, was open to employing Black workers – at least in supporting roles – and by 1865 several hundred African Americans had joined its construction crews. One source notes that approximately 300 Black workers were with the UP in 1865, a number that grew after the war as more formerly enslaved men arrived to work on the railroad. These African American laborers worked as teamsters, cooks, smelters, and graders, and a few as carpenters or blacksmiths. They too swung hammers, dug roadbed, and suffered the elements alongside the Irish and other workers – all while facing the racial discrimination prevalent at the time. A Union Pacific executive in 1865 even lobbied the government’s Freedmen’s Bureau to supply Black laborers from the South for the railroad, proposing that emancipated slaves could help fill the workforce gap. (The War Department ultimately declined this idea, preferring to keep freedmen in the Reconstruction-era South.) Later, during the Chinese strike of 1867, Central Pacific officials similarly mused about using African American workers as strikebreakers, theorizing that “a Negro labor force would tend to keep the Chinese steady, as the Chinese have kept the Irishmen quiet.” Such statements reveal how managers pitted ethnic groups against one another. In practice, however, relatively few Black men were brought onto the Central Pacific; the majority of African American railroad labor at the time was on the Union Pacific side.

Those African Americans who did join the UP’s ranks found both opportunity and hardship. For many freed slaves, the railroad offered one of the few paying jobs not explicitly barred to them. They labored for the same low wages as other workers (or sometimes less) and often performed some of the most backbreaking tasks. It was not uncommon for Black workers to be assigned to work detail clearing brush, hauling timbers, or tending the livestock used in grading – jobs sometimes avoided by others. They endured the same brutal weather on the plains and the same dangers from accidents or attacks. A number of Black teamsters drove mule teams that pulled supply wagons, showing expertise honed from plantation days. And some, being Civil War veterans themselves (the United States Colored Troops had thousands of Black soldiers, and after 1865 these men needed employment), no doubt appreciated the military-style order that General Dodge and the Casement brothers brought to the project.

Though they were a minority on the line, the presence of African Americans in 1860s Utah and Wyoming was still significant – enough so that some all-Black work crews were noted in historical accounts. Unfortunately, individual stories of these workers are scarce in the archives. They left few written records, much like their immigrant co-workers. But their legacy endures in the fact that the railroad, once completed, became a major employer of African Americans in the West. In Ogden, Utah, for example – the junction city where the railroads met – the railroad would soon become “the most important employer of African-Americans in Utah.” Many freedmen became porters, cooks, and freight handlers in the expanding rail network. The famous Pullman sleeping cars introduced in the 1870s were staffed almost exclusively by Black porters, often former slaves, who became a familiar and dignified presence on passenger trains. That tradition arguably began with the completion of the transcontinental line: as soon as trains started running, African American men found work as brakemen, firemen (stoking locomotive boilers), and coach attendants on the Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines. While these roles were a step up from pick-and-shovel labor, they still meant long hours and servile treatment, often for lower pay than white counterparts.

At the Golden Spike ceremony itself, African Americans were not visibly present among the celebrating workforce. No records mention Black laborers in attendance, and photographs do not clearly show any (the images are dominated by white workers and officials). If any Black workers were at Promontory Summit that day, they were likely very few – perhaps coach porters or cooks who accompanied the UP delegation. Their exclusion from the public narrative was in keeping with the times. Yet the fact of the matter is that recently freed Black Americans did contribute to building the railroad, helping to tie the nation together with iron and wood just a few years after the Civil War had torn it apart. The transcontinental railroad thus became one of the first great projects in which emancipated African Americans participated in the nation’s industrial growth. It was a bitter irony that the same nation celebrating its unification by rail was still struggling to extend equal rights to Black citizens. The railroad offered a rough sort of meritocracy – if you could swing a hammer or shovel gravel, you had a job – but off the grade, Black workers faced segregation and prejudice in the new railroad towns. In the coming decades, as Ogden and other hubs grew, African Americans formed small but significant communities, finding solidarity in churches and fraternal orders while working long days on the rails. Their labor, too, helped conquer the West, even if the history books seldom give them credit.

Perhaps the greatest human cost of the transcontinental railroad was borne by the Native American tribes whose ancestral lands were pierced by the iron rails. The railroad’s construction coincided with the climax of the Plains Indian Wars, and it both symbolized and hastened the dispossession of Indigenous nations in the American West. As one account puts it, the coming of the railroad “disrupted a centuries-old culture – that of the Plains Indians”, bringing permanent white settlement and the military might to back it up. Tribal leaders had watched wagon trains cross their territory for decades, but a railroad was a different threat: a permanent intrusion, with towns, forts, and fences following close behind. Buffalo herds – the lifeblood of the Plains tribes – were decimated in the railroad’s wake, hunted to near-extinction by commercial hide hunters and thrill-seekers who poured in on train excursions. “Native Americans looked on with horror as landscapes and prairies were littered with rotting buffalo carcasses,” one historian writes, as “hunting by rail” became a macabre sport for some eastern passengers who would shoot bison from train windows for fun. The railroad made such slaughter possible on an unprecedented scale, and by the 1880s the vast buffalo herds were virtually gone – undermining the subsistence and spirit of Plains tribes.

During the railroad’s construction (1865–1869), conflicts flared along the route. In 1864, before track had even crossed the Rockies, the infamous Sand Creek Massacre saw Colorado militia kill over 150 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho – an atrocity that ignited a war on the Plains. Retaliatory raids by Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho warriors in early 1865 (such as the attack on Julesburg, Colorado) targeted stage stations and telegraph lines, foreshadowing what might await the railroad. As the Union Pacific advanced across Nebraska and Wyoming in 1866–67, Chief Red Cloud’s Lakota and their Cheyenne allies fought fiercely to halt U.S. forts on the Bozeman Trail (north of the railroad line). They achieved a stunning victory in December 1866 – luring Captain Fetterman’s 80 soldiers to annihilation – which led General Sherman to call for uncompromising force, “even to their extermination.” While that battle (the Fetterman Fight or “Battle of the Hundred Slain”) occurred some distance from the rail route, it convinced Sherman and other U.S. leaders that the Plains tribes had to be decisively subdued for projects like the railroad to succeed.

The U.S. Army thus made protection of the railroad a top priority. Sherman and General Philip Sheridan both redeployed troops westward; Sherman bluntly stated in 1867, “we are not going to let thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the progress of the railroads.” To guard the UP line, forts were established along the Platte River route, soldiers patrolled, and railroad security forces (sometimes private guards or “detectives”) accompanied work crews. Skirmishes were frequent. Warriors would swoop in on horseback, firing rifles or arrows, then disappear into the plains. Section crews laying track sometimes did so with rifles within arm’s reach, especially after isolated workers were killed. Although large-scale pitched battles along the railroad were rare – leaders like Red Cloud often ordered warriors to avoid the well-guarded rail line – the fear of attack was pervasive. In one incident in 1868, a group of Sioux removed rails and ties, derailing a locomotive and killing crewmen. Historian Robert Utley noted that virtually every rail crew had a guard detail and that progress was measured as much by military considerations as by engineering.

For the Native peoples, the railroad became the symbol of encroachment. As one Lakota elder later recounted, “When the Iron Horse came, it was the end of our way of life.” The treaties signed in the 1850s and 1860s guaranteed tribes certain lands, but once the railroad was built, those treaties were often broken. The U.S. government renegotiated or simply ignored treaty boundaries to accommodate the rail route and the flood of settlers and miners it brought. The Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho, Shoshone, Pawnee, Ute, and Paiute were among the tribes most directly affected along the transcontinental corridor from Nebraska through Utah. By 1869, many of these peoples had been pushed into reservations or were in the process of being forced there by U.S. campaigns that the railroad itself helped supply and expedite.

At Promontory Summit, no Native American leaders were present to witness the iron link that bound the continent – and in effect, sounded a death knell for the old frontier. There is a famous photograph (taken a few years later) of a lone Native American man on horseback, sitting on a hill overlooking the transcontinental railroad, the straight line of track cutting through the vast land. The image is poignant: the man’s back is turned to the camera, gazing at the tracks that herald a new order he never welcomed. During the Golden Spike ceremony in 1869, amid the cheering, a correspondent prophetically wrote of the event’s impact on the “roaming races” of the West, predicting that the railroad would “doom the Indian and the buffalo” by bringing waves of settlers and hunters. This prediction proved true. Within a decade or two, Indigenous resistance on the Plains was crushed, their freedom of movement curtailed by the very rails and telegraphs that met at Promontory. The last free buffalo were gone by the 1880s, and tribes that once followed them were confined to reservations, dependent on government rations delivered by train.

Yet, it’s worth noting that not all Native interactions with the railroad were hostile. The earlier- mentioned Pawnee scouts illustrate how one tribe strategically allied with the U.S. to seek advantage over rivals. In the West, the Paiute in Nevada initially traded with Central Pacific crews, and the Shoshone in Utah, under Chief Washakie, maintained an uneasy peace with the rails traversing their lands. At times, railroad companies even marketed the presence of Native Americans as a tourist attraction – staging sham “raids” or organizing dances for traveling dignitaries (as UP did with the Pawnee). Such cooperation, however, was born of pragmatism amid dire change. The iron road ultimately brought overwhelming forces – people, technology, military power – that Indigenous societies could not resist indefinitely. The completion of the transcontinental railroad thus marks a pivot point in the story of Native America: a moment of triumph for U.S. expansion that directly led to the loss of independence and life-ways for the First Peoples. It is a stark dual legacy – for one people a shining route of progress, for another the end of a world.

While Promontory Summit was the ceremonial meeting point, it was the city of Ogden, Utah that would soon reap the benefits of the transcontinental railroad’s completion. In 1869, Ogden was a modest frontier town of a few thousand residents, many of them Mormon farmers and tradesmen. But almost overnight, Ogden transformed into the bustling crossroads of the West – earning the nickname “Junction City.” This transformation was sparked by a pivotal decision in late 1869: the Union Pacific and Central Pacific agreed to shift their formal junction from remote Promontory to Ogden. In other words, Ogden became the official transfer point where eastbound and westbound trains exchanged passengers and freight. The Central Pacific (soon leased by the Southern Pacific) would extend its line to Ogden, and Union Pacific would terminate there from the east. Ogden’s Union Station thus became, by January 1870, the meeting point of the two great railroads. Promontory, having served its symbolic purpose, faded into a quiet railroad outpost, while all through-traffic was rerouted via Ogden’s rails.

The impact on Ogden was immediate and dramatic. “The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 quickly changed Ogden from a small agricultural community to a major transportation center,” one Utah history notes. In 1860, before the railroad, Weber County had under 2,000 residents; most lived in Ogden and its environs. By 1870 – just one year after the Golden Spike – Ogden’s population had nearly doubled to 3,127. And the growth didn’t stop: by 1880 the city had over 6,000 people, and by 1890 over 12,000, a fourfold increase in twenty years. Railroad workers, merchants, hotel operators, saloon keepers, freighters, and myriad others flocked to Ogden to make a living from the torrent of trains and travelers. The city’s streets, once quiet, now bustled with the movement of freight wagons and the polyglot chatter of newcomers. Ogden became the quintessential railroad boomtown, complete with hurriedly built hotels, saloons, warehouses, and shops catering to the rail trade. As a contemporary observer quipped, “You can’t get anywhere without coming to Ogden.” Indeed, by the 1870s, almost every transcontinental traveler – whether headed to California, Oregon, or east to Chicago – passed through Ogden, making it a vibrant hub of commerce and culture.

The infrastructure in Ogden expanded to meet its new role. A large rail yard and engine roundhouse were constructed to service locomotives. The Union Station (eventually rebuilt in grand style in the 1880s) housed ticket offices, waiting rooms, and dining facilities for passengers transferring between lines. Nine different rail lines eventually connected in Ogden, including the Utah Central (a Mormon-built line to Salt Lake City), the Utah Northern to Idaho and Montana, and later the Oregon Short Line. This made Ogden a true junction of the rails in the Interior West. Telegraph lines converged there, and the city became a communications node as well. The presence of the railroad also spurred a boom in local industries. “Industry flourished in the ‘Junction City,’” with new woolen mills, flour mills, breweries, iron works, and livestock yards springing up to process and ship the goods now easily transported by rail. Ogden’s strategic location – roughly at the crossroads of the mountain routes and the plains – allowed it to develop into a freight transfer and warehousing center. Goods from the Pacific (tea, silk, sugar) could be offloaded and stored in Ogden’s warehouses, then sent east in smaller consignments; conversely, Midwest manufactured wares and East Coast finished goods came in by rail to Ogden and were distributed to points throughout the Rocky Mountain region.

With the railroad came diversity and social change to what had been an insular Mormon community. Suddenly, non-Mormon merchants and workers flooded in, establishing their own businesses, schools, and churches. The city’s demographic makeup shifted, and by the 1880s Ogden had a substantial non-Mormon population. In fact, in 1889, Ogden elected the first non-Mormon mayor in Utah’s history, reflecting how the “diversity of its population” had broken the Latter-day Saint political monopoly earlier than elsewhere in the territory. The railroad also brought immigrant communities. A small Chinatown emerged along 25th Street in downtown Ogden, settled by Chinese who had worked on the Central Pacific and stayed in railroad employment as section hands or cooks. Likewise, as mentioned, African Americans found work in Ogden, mainly with the railroads – the roundhouse, the dining cars, the sleeping coaches – and the city soon hosted a Black community that included the men and their families. These communities added to Ogden’s cultural fabric, even as they often faced segregation (the Chinatown was somewhat self-contained and African Americans were few in number).

Ogden in the late 19th century gained a rowdy streak thanks to the constant flow of travelers and railroad men. 25th Street, near the depot, became infamous for its lively (and illicit) nightlife. Known locally as “Two- Bit Street” or sometimes less kindly as “Notorious Twenty-Fifth”, it was lined with gambling halls, opium dens, and brothels catering to rail workers and drifters passing through. It was said that one could step off a train in Ogden and find every temptation or vice within a block of the station – much to the chagrin of the strait-laced Mormons. This earned Ogden a reputation both as a commercial capital and as a slightly wicked frontier town where cowboys, miners, and rail hands blew off steam. In truth, Ogden’s vice district was not so different from the Hell on Wheels towns that had preceded it, except that Ogden endured and prospered. It became a permanent city, not a transient camp, with elegant hotels (like the Ogden House and later the Broom Hotel), theaters, banks, and brick commercial blocks signaling its settled wealth.

Through the latter 19th century, Ogden billed itself as the “Crossroads of the West.” The city’s leaders embraced the railroad identity. A popular saying arose: “All Roads Lead to Ogden.” This was not far from the truth – the Overland Route (central transcontinental line) ran through Ogden, and it was also the junction for the routes north to Portland and Seattle and south to Salt Lake City. By 1874, even the transcontinental telegraph had its Rocky Mountain relay station in Ogden. The fortunes of Ogden rose with the rail traffic. When luxury transcontinental passenger trains like the Overland Limited and Pacific Express began service in the 1880s and ’90s, they all stopped in Ogden, infusing the city with cosmopolitan airs. At its height, Ogden saw as many as 100 trains a day passing through. By World War II, 150 trains a day – passenger and freight – moved through Ogden, an extraordinary number that underscored its continuing importance.

For the people of Ogden, the railroad’s completion was a mixed blessing. Economically, it was a boon beyond measure – property values soared, and businesses thrived on the constant trade. Culturally, it brought diversity and excitement, but also crime and moral challenges. The Mormon settlers who founded Ogden suddenly had to share it with a parade of outsiders and influences. Over time, though, the city adapted and even gained a certain pride in its gritty, vibrant character. It was “Junction City,” the bustling rail hub where you could rub shoulders with fur trappers, British lords on a grand tour, Chinese cooks, Irish section foremen, Black porters, and Mormon farmers all in one day. Each had a part in the great tapestry of the American West, and Ogden was their gathering place.

When the 50th anniversary of the Golden Spike was celebrated in 1919, Ogden hosted the major festivities (since Promontory was by then a quiet historical site). Notably, descendants of Chinese railroad workers and Irish laborers marched in the parades, and speeches were given honoring the nameless men who built the line. Three elderly Chinese workers who had helped lay the last rail in 1869 were invited as honored guests, a gesture of overdue recognition. Ogden revelers in 1919 rightly celebrated how far their city had come – from a remote farm town to a thriving “Crossroads of the West” – thanks to the iron road. The transcontinental railroad changed Ogden’s destiny, “putting Utah on the map” as a true nexus of American commerce. It was a transformation both exhilarating and tumultuous, much like the railroad boom itself.

The story of the transcontinental railroad is often told as a saga of grand visionaries and golden spikes, but as we step back, it reveals a richer, more human tapestry. It’s the story of the Chinese diggers and dynamiters who conquered the granite of the High Sierra at unimaginable cost. It’s the story of Irish trackmen and Civil War veterans who poured their muscle into the prairie sod and mountain passes, driving west with grit and whiskey and songs of home. It’s the story of African American freedmen taking tenuous steps toward economic freedom on the end of a shovel or the footplate of a locomotive. It’s the story of Native American tribes, whose trails were overrun by steel rails and whose world would never be the same after the iron horse came roaring through.

On May 10, 1869, as the last spike was gently tapped and the telegram flashed “DONE”, a nation rejoiced in unison. The Civil War was fresh in memory, but here was a powerful symbol of reunion – east and west knit together, oceans linked, “one country” made whole by rail. The triumph was real: the railroad did usher in a new era of commerce, communication, and national identity. Within days of completion, travelers could dine on fresh California fruit in Chicago, and the mail moved with unheard-of speed. The railroad would ferry immigrants to settle the West by the tens of thousands, fulfilling (for better or worse) the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. In Ogden, residents saw their sleepy town explode into a mini-metropolis, humming with opportunity. An Ogden newspaper in 1869 exulted that their city had become “the transfer point of a nation, the very fulcrum of trade”, its future bright with promise.

But amid the celebration, there were truths unspoken. The completed railroad stood on a bed of human sweat and bones. For every triumphant financier popping champagne at Promontory, there were dozens of laborers who had lost their lives to blasts or blizzards in the pursuit of this “grandest enterprise.” For every gleaming locomotive that steamed into Ogden’s yards, there were families of displaced Cheyenne or Shoshone watching their old life vanish along with the buffalo herds. The Golden Spike united the nation’s coasts, but it also drove a wedge through Indigenous nations and heralded the final chapter of their autonomous history.

At Promontory Summit, no speech mourned those costs. Yet one could read them between the lines. As the Rails met, Governor Leland Stanford telegraphed that the Pacific Railroad’s completion would “advance the civilization of the world” – a grand notion, pregnant with the 19th-century belief in progress. And indeed, it was a civilizational leap. But the workers who toiled in the dust and snow were, in that moment, largely forgotten in the glow of national pride. A reporter on site described Chinese and Irish laborers breaking into cheers and tossing their hats, then quietly stepping back as the official photographers set up. Those laborers had hammered the last iron spike in place moments before, but in history’s photo they became a blur at the margins.

Today, with the benefit of hindsight, we strive to remember these human stories alongside the steel and steam. We remember the Chinese workers’ strike for dignity, eight days in 1867 when disenfranchised men stood up and said “we deserve better”. We remember the Ten Mile Day, when sweat and skill achieved the miraculous. We remember the Forty Niners from Ireland, who traded their pickaxes for track spikes and built a new life on the new rails. We remember the freed slaves who seized a dangerous freedom in this work, and the Native peoples who, as one ensemble artist recently put it, “were made to sacrifice, in order for us to be where we are today.”

The completion of the transcontinental railroad was both a shining triumph and a human tragedy, a driving of the Golden Spike that signaled a nation’s ascent and some of its peoples’ descent. In Ogden, Utah, the legacy is carved into the city’s very identity – “Junction City,” a place where tracks crossed and so did lives. The old Ogden Union Station stands today as a museum, its grand hall echoing with the ghosts of emigrants, porters, and pioneers. Nearby, a monument honors the thousands of Chinese railroad workers who had been “left out of the American story” for so long. And on each May 10th, locals reenact the moment two locomotives met, not in a spirit of chest-thumping victory alone, but in tribute to the ordinary people who accomplished an extraordinary feat.

The transcontinental railroad bound America together with iron, but it was human hands that forged that iron and laid it in place. Those hands belonged to all colors and creeds – and it is their story, as much as the story of golden spikes and big four tycoons, that makes the saga of the “iron road” so compelling. From Promontory’s windswept summit to the bustling streets of Ogden, the railroad’s history is a people’s history: one of hope and sweat, courage and loss, unity and injustice. In remembering it honestly, we honor both the triumph and the cost – and ensure that the legacy of 1869 lives on, steel wheels singing a song of progress, possibility, and the human spirit that made it all possible.

Until next time,

Raw, weird, and local.