On May 10, 1869, a golden spike was driven to connect the transcontinental railroad. The story often told of that day at Promontory Summit, Utah, was of a race between two railroad companies — and of a great political achievement.
Left out of the story were the tens of thousands of workers who built the track.
Now a new, much larger spike is following the transcontinental route to commemorate those workers. The 43-foot-tall monument was built to celebrate those who survived perilous conditions to connect the United States. That includes between 15 and 25,000 Chinese immigrants.
“I think a lot of the focus had been more on the politicians and the financiers and what we wanted to focus on was not really them,” said Douglas Foxley, chairman of the Golden Spike Foundation. “We wanted to talk about the unsung heroes. It was the workers.”
Their story is not an easy one to tell because nobody was keeping records of them.
“All we know is that they periled in very difficult circumstances,” Foxley said. “Many lost their lives, many lost their health, but in the end, they accomplished something pretty magnificent.”
The original golden spike, which is now kept at Stanford University in California, has the names of railroad officials engraved into its sides. The new monument includes representations of the faces of the laborers.
One of State Sen. Karen Kwan’s ancestors worked on the railroad, but their name is lost to history. She didn’t learn much about the Chinese workers growing up and wants to change that for the next generation.
“The Chinese immigrants who worked on the railroads did the harshest work for the least pay and the least recognition. And so it would be a shame to lose the stories of who built America.”
Kwan said it can be hard to think about the hardship these workers went through. Still, she hopes “that when people come and see the monument, that they not only feel the lives of those who worked but also feel the triumph that we have achieved.”
One of the first opportunities she had to learn about this history was with Chris Merritt, the state historic preservation officer. He’s part of a team that has been excavating the ghost town of Terrace, Utah. In the 1860s it was bustling with railroad workers.
“It's all been covered over by dunes out on the Great Salt Lake desert for 100 years until we were able to excavate it back out.”
They found over 3,000 artifacts related to the residents of Terrace. Merritt’s favorite is a small cracked piece of ceramic “not because it's whole, because it's broken. It's not because it's rare or valuable, because it's not. It's because that is the edge of a hand carved in stone.”
That carved edge told him that the ceramic used to be part of an inkwell. That means “the person living in the home was literate in a time when a lot of immigrants, whether from China or Ireland, were illiterate. And so that brings a person into focus, right?”
Merritt is also searching for details about people whose stories weren’t recorded and this monument and its tour are a chance to help share them.
The second half of the giant spike’s tour kicked off from the campus of the University of Utah. From there, Foxley said it’s on a 10-day journey to Nevada and then to the California State Rail Museum before returning for several stops across northern Utah. After that, the monument will be installed in Brigham City.
Foxley said the “goal is to hopefully get people to become interested in this and then hopefully get off the road and go 38 miles west out to Golden Spike National Historical Park and see what really happened.”
