Railroad spike art pdf1/16/2024 ![]() ![]() On the appointed day, scheduled for, these four ceremonial spikes would be set into a rail tie fashioned of polished California laurel bearing a silver plaque to be set beneath the point where the rails from the two lines met. Safford had yet to set foot in Arizona when he commissioned this ceremonial spike. In April 1869, following a lobbying campaign by his political allies, President Grant nominated Safford as governor of the Arizona Territory. Safford migrated from Vermont to the California gold fields in 1850, but soon abandoned the mines and turned to politics, first in California in the state Assembly and then in Nevada where he ultimately rose to Surveyor General in 1867. Finally, Anson Safford, the newly-appointed governor of the Arizona Territory, commissioned the present spike, fittingly composed of gold and silver, the precious metals that had attracted so many to come to the American far west, applied to a base of steel-the material that would bind the region to the rest of the nation. Not to be outdone, a group of Nevadans commissioned a spike made of silver from the Comstock Lode. ![]() Frederick Marriott, publisher of the San Francisco Newsletter, commissioned a second golden spike to be presented at the meeting of the rails. Upon hearing of Hewes' effort to mark the historic event others joined in the act. It was to be one of the first events in history to be brought to an entire nation live, as it happened. Hewes also made arrangements with Western Union to broadcast across the country, so the final hammer blows to the last spike "would have acted as a telegraph operator's fingers do…" He then arranged with General George Ord to connect the telegraph wires to the parapet guns at Fort Point overlooking the Golden Gate in order to fire as the last mallet blows were struck. The silver rail plan, predictably, soon fell to the wayside, and Hewes opted to commission instead a golden spike as his offering to commemorate the meeting of the two railroads. Disheartened that there "was no proper sentiment being expressed by the people of the Pacific Coast, and especially by the great mining industries of the territories through which this railroad passed, it came to be my thought that the Central Pacific and Union Pacific should not be united except by a connecting link of silver rails”) Hewes had made his fortune in steam shovels to fill in wetlands surrounding San Francisco and was an early booster of the transcontinental railroad. 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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