HOW IT ALL BEGAN - All Aboard: The Complete North American Train Travel Guide - page 10

ble, which meant it was always dangerous and frequently fatal.
Nevertheless, work on the tunnel went on from both ends and,
when the crews finally met, the two holes were only a few inches
off. Still, after five years of prodigious effort, the Central Pacific
crews had laid only 100 miles of track.
Meanwhile, the Union Pacific didn't have the awful terrain
to deal with and was making much faster progress heading west
across the Great Plains. There were still problems aplenty, how-
ever, such as finding wood from which to fashion cross ties, since
there were no trees on the Nebraska prairie. To fill this obvious
need, the railroad contracted with men called tie hacks to cut ties
from trees in the western mountains and haul them eastward to
meet the railroad.
The Union Pacific paid its railroad workers $1 per day, and
all of them lived in railcars that followed them as track was laid.
Many were immigrants of Irish and German descent, and many
had served in the Civil War. As the railroad moved farther west,
it entered Sioux territory. The Indians had largely ignored the
occasional wagon train, but this development was clearly a seri-
ous threat to their way of life. Attacks became more frequent
and progress slowed as the ex-soldiers were diverted into armed
units assigned to protect the remaining work crews. Through it
all, fueled by relatively high wages and visions of huge profits,
the work went on at a feverish pace. In fact, one Union Pacific
crew laid just a little more than 10 miles of track in one day—an
astonishing feat considering the backbreaking nature of the work
and the lack of any kind of power equipment.
The transcontinental linkup finally occurred on May 10,
1869, when the two railroads met at Promontory Summit, Utah.
Several hundred people gathered at the site for the event, which
included prayers and lots of speeches by many dignitaries. Sev-
eral ceremonial “last spikes” were used in the official dedication,
including a gold one, but the actual last spike was an ordinary