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Show I An American Railroad Maintains a Unique Museum Which Links the Present With the Historic Past of the Regions It Serves ill' S kv rut -sr- i; Ss$'&. L., MA&'-Vtl ,4 - V J 5 M'S J! , . - ' , i i'$ fiimi 1 war-mutin-. " -utm" w.w- The "Wedding of the Rails" at Promontory Point, Utah, May 10, 1869, marking the completion of the first transcontinental railroad. The Central Cen-tral Pacific engine is on the left, the Union Pacific on the right. (From an original photograph by C. R. Savage in the Union Pacific museum.) when the buffalo roamed the western west-ern plains by the millions a bleached, whitened skull of one of the great shaggy beasts. And, of course, there is many a memento of the man who won his fame as a slayer of bison "Buffalo Bill" Cody and the notables, both American and European, whom he guided on their hunting parties. Among them were James Gordon Bennett, famous fa-mous publisher of the New York Herald, the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia and the Ei lish nobleman, the earl of Dunraven. Over there is a memory of the epic migration of pioneers over the old Oregon Trail, a huge ox-yoke which once encircled the necks of the patient animals that dragged the covered wagons up through the Platte River valley, across the barren bar-ren plains of southern Wyoming and through South Pass toward their goal beyond the Rockies the very route over which speed the streamliners stream-liners of today. Here, too,- are mementos of the day of the cattleman and the cowboy cow-boy one of them a rare old book showing the trails from Texas to Ellsworth, Kan., one of the roaring "cow towns" on the Kansas Pacific in the seventies. Then there's a collection col-lection of branding irons which once burned the insignia of famous "cow outfits" on the hides of Texas long-horns long-horns and Mrs. Hamilton will tell you that these branding irons were of special interest to one party of visitors a short time ago. They Pacific and the history of the U. P. is studded with the names of prominent promi-nent easterners Asa Whitney, Oliver Oli-ver Ames, George Francis Train, Thomas C. Durant and Massachusetts-born Grenville M. Dodge, who surveyed the route for the first transcontinental railroad and then was chief engineer for its building. It may surprise you to see how many ' relics of Abraham Lincoln there are here, too. But it is not inappropriate that they should be, for it was the Great Emancipator who, on July 1, 1862, signed the Pacific railway bill, passed by congress, con-gress, which provided for a land grant and subsidy from the government govern-ment to aid in the construction of a railroad westward from the Missouri Mis-souri river to California and for another an-other road eastward across California Califor-nia to connect with it. It was President Presi-dent Lincoln who designated Council Coun-cil Bluffs, Iowa, as the eastern terminus of the U. P. and among the most treasured documents in the museum's collections is an original origi-nal Lincoln letter an executive order, or-der, dated October, 1863, appointing appoint-ing Springer Harbaugh of Pennsylvania Pennsyl-vania as a government director of the projected railroad. Fortunately for posterity, photography photog-raphy had become a well-established art by the time the Union Pacific began building west and to that region re-gion flocked many of the daring early-day "camera men" who had won their spurs as photographers on the battlefields of the Civil war. Among them were such men as Alexander Al-exander Gardner, Capt. A. J. Russell, Rus-sell, who became official photographer photogra-pher for the U. P., William H. Jackson, Jack-son, Savage and Ottinger and others. oth-ers. So an important part of the collections in the U. P. museum are the photographs made by these men which comprise a priceless pictorial record of one of the most thrilling epochs in American history. It was Savage who made some of the best pictures at the historic ceremony cere-mony at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869, when there took place the "Wedding of the Rails" the driving of the golden and silver spikes which symbolized the joining of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific lines and the completion of the first transcontinental railroad. And incidentally one of the most interesting in-teresting of the documentary exhibits exhib-its in the museum is the photostat of the diary of this same C. R. Savage Sav-age from May 4, when he set out from his studio in, Salt Lake City, ' By ELMO SCOTT WATSON Released by Western Newspaper Union. IT'S only a yellowing piece of paper upon which is scrawled a single sentence, yet there's a lot of American history, past and present, bound up in that brief message. mes-sage. Visit the Union Pacific museum in Omaha, Neb., and there you can read for yourself your-self this historic telegram: "You can make affidavit of completion of road to Promontory Promon-tory Summit." The date was May 9, 1869. The writer was Grenville M. Dodge, who had been a general gen-eral in the Union army during the Civil war and who was now chief engineer of the Union Pacific railroad. And when he penned that laconic message to President Oliver Ames of the U. P. he was writing writ-ing a new Chapter in the history his-tory of transportation also a new chapter in the annals of America. For the first time these United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, were bound together by twin bands of steel, never to be broken. No longer would the westward-faring pioneer have to plod along afoot or on horseback or ride in swaying, jolting stagecoach or prairie schooner schoon-er in order to reach the new lands of opportunity which beckoned him in the West. The overland journey which had once been a matter of months, even years, would now be reduced to weeks, then days. That is the Past in this scrap of paper. As for .the Present well, at the very moment you are reading Dodge's telegram there is flowing over this first transcontinental railroad, rail-road, as well as the others which have been built in the last three-quarters three-quarters of a century, an endless stream of men and munitions, bound for the far-flung battle lines of the greatest war in human history. Soldiers, Sol-diers, sailors and marines', machine guns and jeeps and tanks; shells and gasoline and food powerful locomotives are speeding them west toward their final destination: Tokyo. And these huge iron horses meet and roar past others headed east, pulling behind them the men and munitions which will break down the walls of Hitler's European fortress. - - - But Dodge's telegram is not the only document in the collections of this museum which links the past and the present in graphic manner. We hear a lot of talk today about the manpower shortage. Back in 1869 it was also a problem, as witness wit-ness a letter, preserved in the U. P. museum, written by Brigham Young, president of the Church of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons), in which he tells of his struggle to secure enough labor to build a connecting con-necting link of railroad from Salt Lake City to the U. P. main line. Or talk to Mrs. Ruth Hamilton, the kindly gray-haired lady who is the -curator of the museum, and she will tell you how the Past frequently walks through its doors in the person per-son of some one of the thousands of persons who visit the place annually. annu-ally. There was the day when a little group of dark-skinned boys came shyly into the big room and surveyed in silence the Indian relics in one of the cases. Suddenly there was an exclamation of delight it seems that one of the boys had recognized rec-ognized an old-time photograph of one of his forebears Crow Dog, a great war chief of the Sioux. Then there was the day when two big-hatted westerners showed unusual un-usual interest in -one grim relic in the museum the shackles used on "Big Nose George," a famous outlaw, out-law, when he was brought back from Montana for an attempted holdup hold-up of a Union Pacific train. The label on this relic says that the sheriff who captured "Big Nose George" was one Joseph Rankin. "That was your grandfather, you know," said the elder man to the younger, and he might have added that Joe Rankin was not only a famous fa-mous western sheriff in the early days of Montana but he was also a renowned scout for the army. In fact, the collections in the Union Pacific museum constitute a veritable graphic history of the old West. The era of the fur trade is symbolized in two relics of one of ' its greatest figures the watch and scissors used by Old Jim Bridger. Here is a mute symbol of the days li- . 1 11111 it ' - ' - I Rare photograph of Col. W. F. Cody, "Buffalo Bill," autographed by him to Chief Red Shirt of the Sioux, who was one of the Indian notables in his Wild West show. This is one of the few pictures ever taken of-Cody wearing the uniform of the Nebraska national guard in which he was an officer and is here reproduced repro-duced for the first time. (Original in the Union Pacific museum.) came from Argentina where similar irons are used today to mark the cattle that roam the pampas of that country by the hundreds of thousands, thou-sands, and the designs of their branding irons are not unlike the Spanish designs which were used by the vaqueros in the early days of California. Of course, most of the exhibits in the museum relate directly to the history of the Union Pacific railroad itself, but since U. P. history is so inextricably interwoven with the history of the trans-Missouri frontier fron-tier it is almost impossible to say where one leaves off and the other begins. Nor are all the relics there mementos of westerners. The East is well represented, too, for it was eastern capital that built the Union through May 11 after his work at Promontory Point was done. Too many museums are places of "static exhibits where the whole atmosphere at-mosphere is that of the dead and moldering past. To visit this unique museum in Omaha (unique in that no other railroad, so far as is known, has set aside space in its headquarters headquar-ters to preserve materials connected with its own history and the history of the country it serves) is to have a feeling of seeing history on the march, with the past blending into the present in the continuing story of a nation still being built. It may be due to the vision of Carl R. Gray, former president of the Union Pacific, Pa-cific, who established the museum mu-seum and sponsored its early development. devel-opment. Then again it may be due Bto the galvanic influence of his successor suc-cessor who takes a keen personal interest in the place and is responsible respon-sible for the addition of many an interesting item to its collections. His name, in case you don't happen to remember that dynamic personality personal-ity who went to the national capital a year or so ago and showed Washington Wash-ington officialdom how to do a big job quickly and efficiently,, is "Big Bill" Jeffers. |
