The Railroad
See below for details
The last nine miles
The Union Pacific railroad, shown in blue on above map, and the Central Pacific railroad, shown in red were due join up at Promontory Summit, Utah.
With eighty miles left the two railroad companies stopped work in a dispute on who was going to pay for this distance. A dispute so acrimonious that it took Congress to settle the dispute, ordering who should pay what. On the Union Pacific side there was a steep grade to conquer, which was going to be expensive. The elevation of Promontory Summit is 4,932 feet. A steep grade that was bypassed thirty years later due to the effort it took for trains to climb it. At the time it took three engines to manage the ascent and even then at a crawl, sometimes stopping.
When work did presume on April 10th, it progressed through to May 5th when it was halted again. This time by a work stoppage by the Union Pacific workers who had not been paid
The target date for the joining of the railroads was May 8th, 1869, The Golden Spike, the last spike to be driven into the railroad, was engraved with that date. But it passed by with no meeting of the railroad as the workers were still on strike. The next day the dispute was solved and May 10th the ceremony and joining of the railroads was held.
"Bad Medicine Wagons"
Shoshone Nation
There were many difficulties presented to the builders of the railway, not least of which was bringing supplies and men to the railhead. One item that was not in shortage was meat with which to feed the hundreds of Chinese and Irish workers. The meat took the form of bison, which were so plentiful that a path had to be cleared through them just to progress.
The surrounding Nations could see their livelihood being decimated as the railroad approached. They attacked the working parties with very limited success and stole sections of the telegram cable. It was an endeavour that was bound to fail. The Shoshone nation called the trains, 'Bad Medicine Wagons'. By the tie the trains arrived they had been reduced to begging for bread from the passengers in sections where the train had to slow to a crawl.
The Journey
As can be seen by the above timetable it took two days for mail to complete the journey from San Francisco to Corrine. That was in 1870. Up until May 10th 1869 an extra day would have to been added due to the stage coach journey required for the missing section just before Corrine. Our letter arrived at the missing section on May 8th.
Kelton was known as Indian Creek until December 1869. As shown above, the journey from Kelton to Corinne took three hours, 22 minutes, for just 50 miles. This was due to the steep grade on this part of the track. Within a decade this section of the track was bypassed, thus sounding the death knell for Kelton, now a ghost town.
The Nine Mile Gap Cover
