![]() ![]() The "Golden Spike" (or "Last Spike") ceremony marking the completion of the world’s first transcontinental railroad was the brainchild of David Hewes, brother-in-law to Jane Stanford, the wife of Central Pacific Director Leland Stanford. ![]() Thomas Durant, began work two years later, and had been steadily marching westward across the Great Plains from the west bank of the Missouri River at Omaha. The Union Pacific, under the direction of Dr. Headed by Leland Stanford, the Central Pacific began work in Sacramento at that start of 1863 and slowly moved eastward across the rugged Sierra Nevada mountains and into the desert toward the Great Salt Lake. The herculean effort, spearheaded by an act of Congress in 1863, which offered the builders subsidies as well as generous land grants to sell to new settlers, had been undertaken by two companies: the Central Pacific and Union Pacific. Stretching nearly 2,000 miles from Sacramento to Omaha, the road provided, for the first time, easy and reliable travel between California and the great industrial centers of the east, leading the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin to declare: "The States of the Pacific will not longer be divorced from the sympathies and affections of 'the old States.' The iron road will be a bond of amity as well as of commerce…." Not only did the railroad reduce the time and effort required to travel across the country-eliminating the need to travel to the west coast either “around the horn” of South America or via the perilous and difficult passage via the Isthmus of Panama-it offered a new trade route to the Pacific and Asia, making the world just a little smaller. ![]() To contemporaries, the completion of the first transcontinental railroad was the supreme marvel of the age. ![]()
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