The story of the photograph of the driving of the Golden Spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, on 10 May 1869 — the frame that recorded the completion of the first transcontinental railroad: the event, the photographer whose authorship is itself a disputed part of the record, and what the picture teaches a player about dating an 1869 photograph.
The photograph shows two steam locomotives facing each other nose-to-noseon a single track across a barren Utah plain, with a crowd of officialsand workers packed between them and archways of flags overhead — theinstant the rails of the Central Pacific, built eastward from California,met the rails of the Union Pacific, built westward from the Missouri. Itwas taken at Promontory Summit in the Utah Territory on 10 May 1869, theday the two lines drove the ceremonial last spike and joined what becamethe first railroad to cross the North American continent. In one frame itpreserves the exact moment two railway-building armies, labouring one fromeach coast for nearly seven years, finally met.
The ceremony had been planned for weeks, and the dignitaries arrived withthe event’s weight on their shoulders. There were four ceremonial spikes:the famous solid-gold one engraved with the Central Pacific’s directors —supplied by contractor David Hewes — plus a silver spike from Nevada and agold-silver-and-iron spike from the new Territory of Arizona. LelandStanford, president of the Central Pacific, and Thomas Durant of the UnionPacific placed them in a polished California-laurel last tie. The goldenspike itself was wired to the telegraph line that had just been strungalong the route, so that the blow of the sledge could be telegraphedacross the country; the telegrapher W. N. Shilling tapped the word “DONE”and bells and cannon celebrated from coast to coast. In the famous tellingStanford swung and missed on his first attempt — either way, work crewsdrove the spike home and the railroad was joined.
The Central Pacific and the Union Pacific were the two halves of a singlefederal enterprise authorised during the Civil War. The Union Pacificbuilt west from Omaha, across the plains and over the Rockies; the CentralPacific built east from Sacramento, through the Sierra Nevada — cutting,blasting and hand-carrying its way over the mountains, with much of itshardest construction labour done by thousands of Chinese workers. The tworaced toward each other across the Great Basin, and by spring 1869 bothwere converging on Promontory Summit, a few miles north of the Great SaltLake. When they joined on 10 May 1869 the United States gained its firstrail link between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts — roughly 1,900 miles ofcontinuous track and one of the defining engineering feats of the century.
For a century the frame was credited to Charles R. Savage, the Salt LakeCity photographer long thought to be the man on the scene. Then ahistorian working through the American Geographical Society’s collectionturned up the original wet-plate glass negative — cracked, but stilllegible — bearing the title and negative number of Andrew J. Russell, theofficial photographer of the Union Pacific, who had been documenting theline and reached Promontory in time for the ceremony. The plate’s markingsmake a strong case that Russell, not Savage, made the famous exposure.Both men photographed that day, and the record has never wholly settledwhich of them produced the iconic frame. It is a perfect lesson for aguessing player: even one of the most reproduced photographs of thenineteenth century reaches us through an attribution the archive itselfcannot pin down — exactly the habit of checking the record that the gametrains.
For a guessNow player this photograph is an object lesson in letting thenewest things in the frame set the date. The trains are the strongestanchors: they are steam locomotives of the classic 4-4-0 style of themid-nineteenth century — nothing like them existed much before the 1830s,and their low-slung, stovepipe-chimney form belongs firmly to the 1860sand 1870s. The crowd’s dress — frock coats and top hats, wide skirts andshawls, Civil War-era grooming — pins the scene to the 1860s. Then thesetting itself clamps the date hard: a bare plain, freshly laid trackmeeting exactly nose-to-nose, two rival crews celebrating a completion.That is the transcontinental railroad, finished at exactly one spot onexactly one day — Promontory Summit, 10 May 1869. As always the disciplineis ours: read the newest thing (the locomotive, the rails, the telegraph),bracket the era, and then let the famous-to-the-day event finish the job.The how to date an old photograph guideand the dating a Victorianphotograph guide walk through thissame sequence for the nineteenth century.
The photograph is one of the rounds inguessNow’s archive. It arrives revealed piece by piece, and you slide tothe year you think it was taken before your HP runs out — read the twolocomotives, the top hats and the bare plain, and commit. Can you land theafternoon of 10 May 1869 the way the record itself does? Then reveal thephotographer, licence and source and check your reasoning against thearchive.