The Gold Creek Golden Spike Ceremony

By Editor

Powell County, Montana Territory, September 8, 1883

There is a valley in western Montana, narrow and green, where a small creek descends from the mountains to join the Clark Fork of the Columbia River. The creek is called Gold Creek, for it was here, in 1852, that the first placer gold in Montana was discovered, though the discovery yielded little and was largely forgotten in the years that followed. The valley is unremarkable by the standards of that country: a corridor of cottonwoods and willow brush between grassy slopes, the mountains rising to the south and north, the sky enormous overhead. It is the kind of place that a traveler passes through without stopping.

On September 8, 1883, five trains stopped there.

They had come from both directions: four from the east, carrying 300 guests who had traveled from New York and Washington and the capitals of Europe, and a fifth from the west coast, bearing the dignitaries of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. Together they constituted the most elaborate celebration the American West had yet witnessed, a spectacle organized at enormous expense by Henry Villard, the German-born financier who had seized control of the Northern Pacific Railway two years earlier through a "blind pool" syndicate and had driven its construction to completion with a speed and audacity that left his creditors breathless.

Villard had invited the world to Gold Creek, and much of the world had accepted.

Among the guests who descended from the eastern trains was former President Ulysses S. Grant, who had last been in Montana territory as a general pursuing the business of war and was now a private citizen in the employ of a brokerage house that would shortly fail. Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan were present, men who had spent the better part of the previous decade clearing the northern plains of the people who had lived there, making way for the very railroad they had come to celebrate. Frederick Billings, chairman of the Northern Pacific's executive committee, was there, as were governors, senators, members of the British Parliament, and a contingent of German investors whose capital had made the whole enterprise possible. There were journalists from a dozen newspapers, and a painter named Amédée Joullin who would later commemorate the scene in oil on canvas.

The spike that Villard had brought to Gold Creek was not made of gold. It was iron: the same spike that had been driven into the ground at Carlton, Minnesota, thirteen years earlier to begin the construction of the Northern Pacific, retrieved now to close the circle. The track that had been laid across the valley floor in the preceding weeks was ceremonially torn up and relaid during the festivities, so that the guests might witness the completion as a drama rather than a fait accompli. The final spike was driven by Villard himself, then by Grant, then by Henry C. Davis, who had been present at the Minnesota groundbreaking and had traveled to Montana to see the work finished.

The speeches were long and the sentiments were large. The Northern Pacific was described as a bond between the oceans, a highway of civilization, a fulfillment of the national destiny. The mountains that surrounded the valley were invoked as witnesses to American enterprise. The Clark Fork, running cold and clear a few hundred yards from the ceremony, was not mentioned.

What was also not mentioned, in the speeches or in the toasts that followed, was the cost at which the line had been built. The Northern Pacific's construction had required the removal of the Sioux and the Crow and the Nez Perce from the lands through which it passed, a process accomplished by the armies of Sherman and Sheridan in the years between the groundbreaking and the completion. The Chinese laborers who had graded much of the right-of-way through the mountains were not among the 300 guests. The homesteaders who would be lured onto the Montana plains by the railroad's promotional literature, and who would fail there in the drought years that followed, had not yet arrived.

After the ceremony, the five trains departed: the eastern guests continuing west to Portland and Tacoma, where Villard had arranged further celebrations involving naval parades and fireworks; the western guests returning to their cities. The valley at Gold Creek returned to its customary silence. Within four months, Villard's financial overextension had caught up with him, and he resigned the presidency of the Northern Pacific amid creditor demands and falling share prices. The railroad he had built would pass through receivership, reorganization, and eventual absorption into the Burlington Northern, but the line itself would endure, threading the valley at Gold Creek for another century.

The site where the spike was driven is marked today by a wooden sign visible from Interstate 90, near the confluence of Independence Creek and the Clark Fork. The Deerlodge National Forest erected a monument there in 1935, and the site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983, one hundred years after the ceremony. The cottonwoods along the creek are the same species they were in 1883, though none of the individual trees remain. The mountains have not changed at all.

See also

• Northern Pacific Railroad Completion Site, 1883, National Register of Historic Places
• Henry Villard, Northern Pacific Railway president
• Northern Pacific Railway, history and route