Golden Spike and Gentiles
Jul. 7th, 2019 04:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chris_gerribOn my trip to Utah, I visited the Golden Spike National Historical Park in Promontory Utah. Promontory is the name for a bit of high ground just north and west of the Great Salt Lake. Back in 1869, it was picked as the site to link up the first Transcontinental Railroad, not because it had any intrinsic value, but because it was a handy spot on the map. So, on May 10, 1869, they held a ceremony to complete the railroad. Basically, by nightfall that day, everybody was gone and the place was just a stretch of railroad track in the middle of nowhere.
It's still in the middle of nowhere, except now there's a National Park with a rather spare visitor's center. If you go, you can see replica steam-powered locomotives roll down the tracks, and on weekends they reenact the ceremony. It's a nice way to spend a couple of hours.
Of note to the title is the closest town to Promontory, namely Corinne, Utah. The town was founded less than a month after the railroad was finished, and for a decade or so thereafter, it was the site of a serious attempt to create a second power structure (other than the Mormons) in what was then the Utah territory. The attempt failed, and the town eventually became a sleepy Mormon farm village.
As far as Promontory, in 1904, the Union Pacific built the Lucin Cutoff, a route that crossed over the Great Salt Lake near Ogden Utah, cutting over a hundred miles off of the route. As a result, the old tracks (except for a few miles that tied Corinne into Ogden) were abandoned. In WWII, the tracks themselves were pulled up and recycled for the war effort. It wasn't until the late 1950s that tracks came back when the site went into government hands.
It's still in the middle of nowhere, except now there's a National Park with a rather spare visitor's center. If you go, you can see replica steam-powered locomotives roll down the tracks, and on weekends they reenact the ceremony. It's a nice way to spend a couple of hours.
Of note to the title is the closest town to Promontory, namely Corinne, Utah. The town was founded less than a month after the railroad was finished, and for a decade or so thereafter, it was the site of a serious attempt to create a second power structure (other than the Mormons) in what was then the Utah territory. The attempt failed, and the town eventually became a sleepy Mormon farm village.
As far as Promontory, in 1904, the Union Pacific built the Lucin Cutoff, a route that crossed over the Great Salt Lake near Ogden Utah, cutting over a hundred miles off of the route. As a result, the old tracks (except for a few miles that tied Corinne into Ogden) were abandoned. In WWII, the tracks themselves were pulled up and recycled for the war effort. It wasn't until the late 1950s that tracks came back when the site went into government hands.
