![]() ![]() 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. This purported sense of unity is a bit of whitewashing on an undertaking that, in addition to supporting the Manifest Destiny-fueled colonization of North America, also cost many thousands of ( mostly Chinese) immigrant workers their lives, but the power of the spike as a symbol of American progress clearly resonated with contemporary bidders.To contemporaries, the completion of the first transcontinental railroad was the supreme marvel of the age. That sense of unity means as much today as it did when the transcontinental railroad was finished less than four years after the Civil War.” A steel railroad spike clad in gold and silver used in the ceremony marking the completion of the transcontinental railroad, May 10, 1869 “I think the spike captured the imagination of collectors, in part, because it is a potent symbol of national unity. “In the end, the value soared past our expectations,” Klarnet added. To the unknowing spectator, the approximately five-inch-long piece may look like a slightly overblown souvenir from the state train museum, but Peter Klarnet, Christie’s senior specialist of Americana, said he and his team “knew it would be the subject of intense competition among collectors.” The event, which involved four commemorative spikes in total, was one of the first events in history to be live-broadcast to an entire nation. “Hewes opted to commission instead a golden spike as his offering to commemorate the meeting of the two railroads,” Christie’s catalogue essay explains. ![]() Hewes had benefited greatly from the railroad development, capitalizing on steam shovels to fill in wetlands surrounding San Francisco, and was seeking a celebratory gesture to combat what he saw as a lack of “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.” First envisioned as a notion of “silver rails” at the connecting railway lines, the idea morphed into a golden spike. Safford, it took its cue from the first spike commissioned for the event, by David Hewes, the brother-in-law of Jane Stanford, the wife of Central Pacific Railroad Director Leland Stanford. Commissioned and presented by Arizona Territorial Governor Anson P.K. The object was one of four ceremonial spikes used to mark the “meeting of the rails” at Promontory Point, Utah, in May 1869.
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