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Excerpt from "The Last Tie"

Published in Overland Monthly, July 1869

"Could I refuse to share in this triumph on the great day, long prayed for, that was to witness the finishing blow to the greatest enterprise of the age?"

The completion of a railroad linking the East Coast to the western United States, in Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869, was a famous event in the history of the expansion of the United States to include all of America. It was also an important symbol of how the Industrial Revolution—the process of incorporating machines and factories into manufacturing goods—was reshaping American society.

Dr. J. D. B. Stillman (1819–1888) of California recognized the importance of the new rail link in his eyewitness account of the ceremony that was held to mark the occasion, when a symbolic golden spike (nail) was pounded into the last tie, to hold...