At 12:47 p.m. on May 10, 1869, the telegraph operator at Promontory Summit tapped out a single word: Done. Stanford swung the silver maul at the golden spike and missed. Durant swung and also missed. A railroad worker drove the actual spikes home. The 10,000 Chinese workers who had hung in wicker baskets over Sierra Nevada cliffs to drill blasting holes, the Irish immigrants who had graded 425 miles of Wyoming desert in a single year — they had already gone. The champagne was for the men who had financed it.
Iron Road is the complete transcontinental railroad history: from Asa Whitney's 1845 lobbying campaign through the Pacific Railroad Acts Lincoln signed in 1862, the Sierra Nevada tunnels, and the Crédit Mobilier scandal in which Thomas Durant and Oakes Ames extracted $44 million in fraudulent overcharges — distributing stock to congressmen "where it will do the most good to us."
Inside this American railroad history:
- The Chinese workers — 10,000 men from Guangdong Province, paid $26-$35/month and covering their own food, drove the Summit Tunnel through 1,659 feet of Sierra Nevada granite, and were rewarded with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (Chapter 6)
- The Crédit Mobilier scandal — Durant's company charged the Union Pacific $94 million for $50 million of actual work, distributed stock to the Speaker of the House, and saddled the railroad with debt that drove it to bankruptcy in 1893 (Chapter 13)
- The Big Four — Stanford, Crocker, Hopkins, and Huntington extracted an estimated $65–$70 million in construction profits; Stanford's $30 million estate endowed a university in memory of his fifteen-year-old son (Chapter 14)
- The war for the plains — Red Cloud's Fetterman Fight killing 80 soldiers in 1866; Sherman's bison extermination policy; 30 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890 (Chapter 12)
- The economic transformation — freight from Omaha to Sacramento: $270/ton by wagon in 1866, $105/ton by rail in 1870; Nebraska's population up 268 percent in the 1870s (Chapter 20)
The transcontinental railroad did not merely connect two coasts. It settled the Great Plains, destroyed the bison herds, dispossessed the Plains nations, generated the century's greatest corporate fraud, and created the national market that made Carnegie's steel and Rockefeller's oil possible. This is the complete railroad narrative history — the golden spike, and everything it cost.
For readers of Stephen Ambrose's NOTHING LIKE IT IN THE WORLD and David Grann's KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON.