Oh, 13 trains rumbled by a whitewashed marker on the spot of the driving of the last spike of the Northern Pacific Railroad on Sept. 8, 1883.
But even that was light. Twenty is par for the Montana Rail Link line these days.
On that smoky, overcast Saturday in 1883, more than 3,000 people packed a pavilion near the banks of the Clark Fork River built especially for the national and foreign luminaries who'd been spirited by the railroad from both coasts.
Ambassadors, congressmen, governors, British and German officials, and ex-President Ulysses S. Grant were among those who arrived on four excursion trains from the east and a fifth from Portland, Ore.
They came to see the formal completion of the nation's second transcontinental railroad, 14 years after the Union Pacific's Golden Spike ceremony at Promontory Point, Utah.
Never mind construction crews from the east under W.O. Winston and from the west under his brother, P.B. Winston, had actually met on Aug. 22, and that trains had been running over the tracks for two weeks.
Six hundred feet of rails were removed for the Sept. 8 re-enactment. Speeches were delivered by NP president Henry Villard, former Secretary of State William Evarts and, at the urging of a vocal local, a reticent Grant.
The military band from Fort Keogh near Miles City led rail layers in from the west. Cannons boomed as a number of people, including Grant, Villard's wife and 3-year-old son, drove home the final spike. Either the first or final blow (accounts differ) was delivered by H.C. Davis, who as superintendent of construction had driven the same spike in 1870 in Minnesota to launch the project.
Both the spike and the sledgehammer were wired to telegraph each blow to Northern Pacific officials in St. Paul, Portland and New York.
It was a monumental day in the making of both the nation and Montana Territory. Alas, someone forgot to remind Villard about the latter entity.
“There were no accommodations whatsoever for Montana dignitaries, except at the last minute they whistled up a chair car train out of Helena for Sam Hauser and his cronies,” said Bill Taylor, a Missoula author and historian who with wife Jan has written four books about the Northern Pacific's colorful history in Montana.
Even then, the Montana contingent went unfed and was offered no seats in the wooden pavilion at Independence Creek, a few miles east of Gold Creek, the site often credited for the ceremony. A photo of the ceremonies shows the Montanans milling around behind the speech-givers, who stood at the base of the grandstands and fairly shouted their words of wisdom and progress.
“They, with one exception - General Grant - gave the cold shoulder, in fact, the whole back, to the (Montanans),” huffed a reporter from Virginia City's Madisonian.
It almost got ugly after the ceremony, when guests on the eastbound were told they had to wait for those on the main excursion trains to finish eating. Thinking they'd be fed on the train, they'd showed up at the station early in the morning with no food.
“It was well after dark before anybody started to move out of there,” Taylor said. “The participants on the four excursion trains were fed on their dining cars but again, no provision for the locals, and they got rather restive.”
Things became contentious enough that soldiers were posted to keep “irate eastbounders and locals from burning down the pavilion and band shell,” the Taylors wrote in “The Northern Pacific's Rails To Gold and Silver.”
Those returning to Missoula were refused rides on Villard's westbound trains. Bill Taylor said he's heard stories that some made do by hitching rides on the engine or truss rods.
“Blessed is he that driveth his own team and has his own lunch basket,” rhapsodized the Deer Lodge New Northwest. “Then he will not be left to any alarming extent when the sun declineth and the man in the Pullman car filleth himself with terrapin, truffles and Burgundy.”
The German-born Villard, a former newsman himself, was the object of much venom. He was especially vilified by those from Butte and other mining centers bypassed in the NP's initial sweep through Montana.
“Hank and His Hessions (sic),” read the headline over the Madisonian report. “Scenes at the Northern Pacific's Spike-Driving. A Combination of Triumph and Humiliation.”
“The whole thing was a gambit on Henry Villard's part to sell stock, and he was selling that to European capitalists and so forth,” Bill Taylor said. “I don't think he saw local yokels buying NP stock. They weren't on his radar screen.”
Villard's staged event failed miserably. By November, the railroad was bankrupt and he was out as president, though he returned as chairman of the board in 1889.
The Taylors have read unconfirmed reports that railroad investors were jumping ship even before they arrived at the last spike arena.
“There are accounts of people stepping off the excursion trains as they traveled out here, telegraphing their stockbrokers to sell because they just couldn't imagine this big wasteland ever amounting to anything,” Bill Taylor said.
But a transcontinental railroad meant much to Montana Territory. It reduced cross-country trips of six months to six days. It was an economic boost of almost unfathomable proportions to the town lucky enough to have a railroad run through it.
“One of the greatest analogies I've heard was it was the Internet of the 19th century,” said Taylor. “If you were on line, you prospered and if you weren't on line you didn't.”
It wasn't long before NP branch lines and rival railroads - especially Jim Hill's Great Northern and what's now called the Milwaukee - opened up virtually all of Montana. All promoted the state, often shamelessly, to prospective settlers in the East, West and overseas.
Over the ensuing decades, homesteaders, miners and mine and millworkers flooded into Montana, to the point that the state's population in the World War I era topped a million - considerably more than live here today.
“It largely settled Montana as we know it,” said Taylor. “It was the impetus behind shrinking the Indian reservations and getting them resettled. It was behind the Custer thing in southeast Montana. It just had a tremendous role to play in the development of the state.”
In 1970, the NP merged with three other railroads to form Burlington Northern. Montana Rail Link has operated most of BN's Montana lines since 1987.
The black eye the Northern Pacific received in Montana in its infancy never quite healed. Chartered by Congress in 1864, and signed into law by Abraham Lincoln, the NP was the largest of five land-grant railroads.
The U.S. government presented the railroad with some 40 million acres, much of it unsurveyed, in a 100-mile wide band of alternating sections from the Great Lakes to Puget Sound. It was the largest transfer of federal land into private ownership in the nation's history - and it didn't sit well with Montanans.
“They saw it as taking it out of production, taking it away from local people who were looking to use the resources,” Taylor said. “They saw it as giving away the land to the rich easterners. There was a lot of resentment over that in Montana.”
Much of the land given to the railroad then belongs to Plum Creek Timber Co. now. And the company is selling some of those tracts as residential real estate.
“Montanans today probably feel very similarly to the Montanans then about big corporations dealing with our land here,” Taylor said. “We haven't gotten over some of these things.”
“I think,” he concluded, “that it makes a big difference if you look at Montana as a business opportunity, or if you look at it as a place to live.”
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)