May 10, 1869: The Golden Spike

May 10, 1869: The 1st transcontinental railroad is completed, at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, connecting the Union Pacific Railroad, which had been building westward from Omaha, Nebraska, with the Central Pacific Railroad, which had been building eastward from Oakland, California.

Leland Stanford, once Governor of California, later one of its U.S. Senators and founder of a university he named for his son ("The Leland Stanford Junior University," usually just called "Stanford University" today), and at this point the President of the Central Pacific, completed the process, using a silver hammer to ceremonially complete the driving in of a golden spike.

The photograph of the event, by Andrew J. Russell, is familiar, more than a century and a half later: Two locomotives facing each other, with the ceremony's participants all around them. One was the Jupiter, of the Central Pacific. The other was simply named Union Pacific No. 119.

The original Golden Spike was replaced, and is now on display at the Cantor Arts Museum at, somewhat appropriately, Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, on "The Peninsula" between San Francisco and San Jose. Russell, who worked as a photographer for the Union Pacific, and had already become famous for his photos of the American Civil War, lived until 1902.

In 1901, the Southern Pacific Railroad, which had bought the Central Pacific and all its assets, sold the original Jupiter for scrap. No. 119 faced the same fate in 1903. Even at the dawn of the 20th Century, when the American Revolution was closer in time than the Golden Spike is to us now, our country had insufficient regard for its history.

Golden Spike National Historical Park is now on the site of the ceremony, with replicas of the two locomotives. Ironically, there is no passenger rail service to it: Service stopped running to and past the site in 1962, a later Amtrak route bypassed it, and the site can only be reached by car.

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May 10, 1869 was a Monday. Now, you may be thinking that, since there was, as yet, no major league baseball, capitalized or otherwise, there must have been no scores on this historic day. But there was one.

The 1st openly professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, had already begun play. On this day, at the Union Grounds in Cincinnati, they played one of the more established baseball clubs of the Midwest, Kekionga of Fort Wayne, and beat them, 86-8. That is not a misprint: Eighty-six to eight.

"Kekionga," pronounced "Key-KEY-ong-gah," was the original Native name of the place where Fort Wayne was built, and it means "blackberry bush." It became the capital of the Miami tribe, whose name predates not only the small Ohio city with the name, but the much larger Florida city with it.

Unlike the Cincinnati club, Kekionga would survive long enough to enter the 1st professional baseball league, the National Association, in 1871. They played the 1st NA game, at what was officially named the Kekionga Ball Grounds, but nicknamed the Grand Dutchess. They beat Forest City of Cleveland, 2-0.

That would be the highlight of the team's history. Attendance was bad, there weren't enough gate receipts to pay players their agreed-to salaries, the good ones left, the team had a bad season, and then, at the end of it, their ballpark burned down. (Insurance fraud?)