Promontory

It's well known that Promontory Utah is the location where the Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad were joined by a Golden Spike on May 10, 1869 completing the transcontinental railroad. The site is commemorated by a visitors' center and daily demonstrations by the two steam locomotives that are in residence there.

The town of Promontory Summit was established here to provide a fueling and watering stop for the steam locomotives. The town no longer exists, nor do the tracks, but this an active farming area. What remain are the railroad grades and fills that were built by hand labor with the help of horses and mules. This is a remote spot, 32 miles from Brigham City and about 25 miles from the small town of Corinne. It is hot and windy in summer and cold and windy in winter so it is easy to appreciate the hardships the workers faced, From what remains, I think the greatest difficulty faced by the crews at this point was the pressure to finish as much line in as short time as possible rather than the steepness of the grade.

Promontory Summit is approximately 1000 feet higher than the Surface of the Great Salt Lake so that is the amount of rise the workers had to create in just over five miles coming from the east. Their challenge was that they had to keep the slope to about 1 1/2  %. The Big Fill Trail, a self-guided tour of the approach from the east, is one and a half miles long but very easy since the slope is so slight.

The trail forms a loop since the two sets of railroad crews built parallel constructions here because neither had yet obtained the rights to build this section. Ultimately the UP won the rights and bought out what the CP had completed.

The CP built a wooden trestle which was too rickety for permanent use and was used as a framework for the Big Fill which the UP completed after the buyout.

The Big Fill is still quite obvious.

The rise may have been fairly gentle but most of the grades had to be made through tough aggregate.

Up close the rock looks like this.

One of the sights on the trail is a cave used as a shelter by the workers. It didn't look inviting to me, more like a rattlesnake den.

The visitors' center displays restorations of two of the original locomotives, The CP's Jupiter and the UP's 119. The rangers reminded us that the CP had transported several engines to Sacramento via Cape Horn by boat. 

As a company, the Central Pacific Railroad did not last very long. It was reorganized as the Southern Pacific which was a major regional carrier into the twentieth century. It was eventually bought and absorbed by the Union Pacific which continues to operated today. The route, however has moved.

Promontory Summit crosses the Promontory Mountains, a chain that forms the backbone of a peninsula in the Great salt Lake. In 1902, the Union Pacific began construction of a rail line across the lake that passed the tip of this peninsula at Promontory Point, well south of the original line. This construction took the form of two causeways and a wooden trestle. This "Lucin Cutoff" reduced 44 miles from the route and eliminated the need to cross the mountains. The mountains had required the trains to either break up their loads or use helper engines called "Hoggs" which slowed them down a great deal. The Lucin Cutoff was difficult to build and maintain but was a huge time saver.

Original route through Promontory Summit courtesy d-maps.com

The Lucin Cutoff courtesy d-maps.com

 Because it was so difficult to maintain the trestle, it was demolished in the 1920's and replaced with a continuous causeway which is in use today.

The east causeway looking toward Ogden 

A few of the old pilings are still there but most of the wood has been sold or is still stacked at the point.

The dark line at the base of the mountains is the bridge and west causeway

The new causeway created a problem, however. Although there were a few culverts to let boats through, the flow of water was effectively stopped and the north side of the causeway which has a smaller inflow of fresh water began to get lower than the south and its salinity increased. This resulted in the blooming of pink algae and also posed a threat to the brine shrimp population.

The new causeway and a section of the old causeway

To remedy this, a section of the causeway west of Promontory Point has been replaced by a bridge and the water levels are leveling out.

The west causeway and bridge can be seen at the base of the mountains.

This is a spot of eerie beauty. There is little here but the trains.

Stansbury Peak on Stansbury Island

The old causeway is in the foreground.

In the days of the Golden Spike, it was quite a different story. The small town of Corrine, 25 miles east of Promontory Summit, began life as a "Hell on Wheels" settlement of random services and hangers on that were following the construction crews. Corinne's location is unique in that it is close to the junction of the two railroads, and it is on the Bear River close to where it empties into the Great Salt Lake. Because of this location, it was promoted as a place where the railways could be augmented by steamboats on the river and the lake. Steamboats never became commercially viable, however, since Bear River does not connect any population centers and water levels on the lake vary considerably from year to year. Today, the Great Salt Lake is at a low level because so much water is impounded in the mountain reservoirs.

I'm suspicious that Corinne was seen as desirable by people connected to the railway companies because there was not already an established community of Latter Day Saints, which meant it was possible to develop a polity independent of Brigham Young. In the early 1870's the town grew famous for its many bars and bordellos and had the reputation as the roughest town in the West. Corinne's heyday was brief, however, and today there is little left of the old town.

After it declined as a railroad town, Corinne was gradually taken over by LDS farmers. The Protestant church is now a museum and the streets that were named for other territories like Montana and Colorado now have numbers in the style of Salt Lake City. 

The railroads pioneered a route across the Great Basin that cut off the huge swing to the north followed by the California Trail. They also established towns along the line to service the trains and passengers thereby settling a very inhospitable region. In 1903 a man named George A. Wyman took advantage of these towns to be the first person to cross the country on a motorized vehicle. He followed the rails across Nevada and Utah seeing this as his best route. He vehicle of choice was a 90cc 1.25 hp motorcycle. His story is well told on wymanmemorialproject.blogspot.com. I recommend it.

In short order the railroad companies turned their backs on Corinne and established their headquarters in Ogden which almost immediately replaced it as a center for decadence as well. 

By the turn of the century, Ogden had a national reputation as a place where prostitution and gambling were wide open and all the amenities of the big cities were available. Since the two railroads met here, both freight and passengers had to change trains which  gave Ogden a thriving service economy. Hotels and restaurants thrived but so did barbers, tailors, grocers and other service providers.

 With the coming of Prohibition Ogden became even wilder. It was assumed that every business on 25th Street had a speakeasy on the first floor, a whorehouse on the second floor, and an opium den in the warren of tunnels underneath the street. This was only a slight exaggeration.

Many of the historic buildings on Ogden's 25th Street have been preserved or restored in homage to its past.

In my previous blog, Crossing the Wasatch, I related how the Donner Party and the Mormon emigrants followed the Hastings Cutoff to East Canyon rather than follow Weber Canyon and the Oregon/California Trail. By 1869, Weber Canyon was a well developed route and that's where the rails were laid.

The canyon is crooked but the grades have been leveled a lot.

The completion of the transcontinental railroad effectively ended the usefulness of the Oregon and California Trails along with the Pony Express and Overland Stage. The railroads continued to expand and Conestoga and freight wagons declined as long distance transportation. The discovery of gold and silver throughout the West caused the blazing of new trails often following the routes used by fur trappers and Native Americans. Some of these trails provided the basis for today's highways while others, like the Pony Express Trail are fading traces of our bygone past.