Northern Pacific Railroad Completion Site, 1883

The Northern Pacific Railroad was the fifth transcontinental train route in the United States, but the first to traverse the northernmost states. The first railway companies to make the connection between the East and West were the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads, which linked Omaha, Nebraska, to San Francisco. The driving of the final spikes at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869 was a dramatic historic moment—there was so much national excitement that one of the spikes was linked to a telegraph wire so that the rest of the nation would receive the tap-tap-tapped message that the line had finally been completed. [1]

The Northern Pacific Railroad (NPRR), which spans from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Seattle, was built between 1864 and 1883. Financial problems plagued the company, and it wasn’t until 1878 that the western portion of the route began construction. [2] Finally, on August 22, 1883, Chinese crews from the West raced against an eastern crew of mostly Irish and Slavic immigrants to see which side would be the first to arrive at the completion point on Independence Creek. [3] “At three o’clock the tracklayers from the East came up and the ends of the track met,” a journalist wrote of the climactic event. “Michael Gilford (spiker from the West) drove the last spike.” [4]

Two weeks later, the last 1,000 feet of track were ripped up so that they could be ceremoniously relaid at a mammoth celebration. On Sept. 8, four train cars filled with 300 special guests from across the United States and the globe arrived at Independence Creek and watched workers reclose the gap. Northern Pacific Railroad owner Henry Villard used the spike from the ceremony inaugurating the railroad’s construction, 13 years earlier in Minnesota, to honor its completion—dramatically driving it into the ground alongside President Ulysses S. Grant and former NPRR official H.C. Davis. [5]