Since the "Seneca Chief" carried DeWitt Clinton from Buffalo to the Atlantic in 1825, it has been the custom to make the completion of a new road an occasion for formal celebration. On the 10th of May, 1869, the whole United States stood still to signalize the junction of the tracks. The date had been agreed upon by the railways on short notice, and small parties of their officials, Governor Stanford for the Central Pacific and President Dillon for the Union Pacific, had come to the scene of activities. The latter wrote up the "Driving the Last Spike" for one of the magazines twenty years later, telling how General Dodge worked all night of the 9th, laying his final section, and how at noon on the appointed day the last two rails were spiked to a tie of California laurel. The immediate audience was small, including few beyond the railway officials, but within hearing of the telegraphic taps that told of the last blows of the sledge-hammer was much of the United States. President Dillon told the story as it was given in the leading paragraph of the Nation of the Thursday after. "So far as we have seen them," wrote Godkin's censor of American morals, "the speeches, prayers, and congratulatory telegrams ... all broke down under the weight of the occasion, and it is a relief to turn from them to the telegrams which passed between the various operators, and to get their flavor of business and the West. 'Keep quiet,' the Omaha man says, when the operators all over the Union begin to pester him with questions. 'When the last spike is driven at Promontory Point, we will say "Done."' By-and-by he sends the word, 'Hats off! Prayer is being offered.' Then at the end of thirteen minutes he says, apparently with a sense of having at last come to business: 'We have got done praying. The spike is about to be presented.' ... Before sunset the event was celebrated, not very noisily but very heartily, throughout the country. Chicago made a procession seven miles long; New York hung out bunting, fired a hundred guns, and held thanksgiving services in Trinity; Philadelphia rang the old Liberty Bell; Buffalo sang the 'Star-spangled Banner'; and many towns burnt powder in honor of the consummation of a work which, as all good Americans believe, gives us a road to the Indies, a means of making the United States a halfway house between the East and West, and last, but not least, a new guarantee of the perpetuity of the Union as it is."
No single event in the struggle for the last frontier had a greater significance for the immediate audience, or for posterity, than this act of completion. Bret Harte, poet of the occasion, asked the question that all were framing:—
"What was it the Engines said,
Pilots touching, head to head
Facing on the single track,
Half a world behind each back?"
But he was able to answer only a part of it. His western engine retorted to the eastern:—
"'You brag of the East! You do?
Why, I bring the East to you!
All the Orient, all Cathay,
Find through me the shortest way;
And the sun you follow here
Rises in my hemisphere.
Really,—if one must be rude,—
Length, my friend, ain't longitude.'"
The oriental trade of Whitney and Benton yet dazzled the eyes of the men who built the road, blinding them to the prosaic millions lying beneath their feet. The East and West were indeed united; but, more important, the intervening frontier was ceasing to divide. When the road was undertaken, men thought naturally of the East and the Pacific Coast, unhappily separated by the waste of the mountains and the desert and the Indian Country. The mining flurries of the early sixties raised a hope that this intervening land might not all be waste. As the railway had advanced, settlement had marched with it, the two treading upon the heels of the Peace Commissioners sent out to lure away the Indians. With the opening of the road the new period of national assimilation of the continent had begun. In fifteen years more, as other roads followed, there had ceased to be any unbridgeable gap between the East and West, and the frontier had disappeared.
[CHAPTER XX]
THE NEW INDIAN POLICY
Through the negotiations of the Peace Commissioners of 1867 and 1868, and the opening of the Pacific railway in 1869, the Indians of the plains had been cleanly split into two main groups which had their centres in the Sioux reserve in southwest Dakota and the old Indian Territory. The advance of a new wave of population had followed along the road thus opened, pushing settlements into central Nebraska and Kansas. Through the latter state the Union Pacific, Eastern Division, better known as the Kansas Pacific, had been thrust west to Denver, where it arrived before 1870 was over. With this advance of civilized life upon the plains it became clear that the old Indian policy was gone for good, and that the idea of a permanent country, where the tribes, free from white contact, could continue their nomadic existence, had broken down. The old Indian policy had been based upon the permanence of this condition, but with the white advance troops for police had been added, while the loud bickerings between the military authorities, thus superimposed, and the Indian Office, which regarded itself as the rightful custodian of the problem, proved to be the overture to a new policy. Said Grant, in his first annual message in 1869: "No matter what ought to be the relations between such [civilized] settlements and the aborigines, the fact is they do not harmonize well, and one or the other has to give way in the end. A situation which looks to the extinction of a race is too horrible for a nation to adopt without entailing upon itself the wrath of all Christendom and engendering in the citizen a disregard for human life and the rights of others, dangerous to society. I see no substitute for such a system, except in placing all the Indians on large reservations, as rapidly as it can be done, and giving them absolute protection there."