Telling history through art

A 43-foot-long golden spike has been making its way across the country for the past two weeks, traveling from the artist's studio in Kentucky to the monument's final home in Utah. The giant spike's last stop before reaching Utah was in Sweetwater County, where it parked outside the Community Fine Arts Center in Downtown Rock Springs for several hours. The CFAC hosted the traveling spike as a special part of their current "Westward Expansion" exhibit, which can be viewed through October 31.

When the spike came on Monday morning, residents and school groups showed up to see the spike, meet the artist, and learn about the history of the Transcontinental Railroad.

Telling the railroad's story

The spike was created as a monument that will be placed at Golden Spike Park off of Interstate 15 north of Salt Lake City, Utah. The Golden Spike Foundation (GSF) is a Utah-based nonprofit that has been working to make the park and the monument a reality.

 "They wanted a piece to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Transcontinental Railroad and help remember the workers who had built it," Douwe Blumberg, the artist who created the spike, explained.

Blumberg is a sculptor who enjoys working on large-scale projects, as well as a fan of history, so when he heard the call for artists to create a piece commemorating the railroad, he applied and sent in his proposal. Out of the roughly 250 artists who applied, Blumberg was selected for his vision for the project - a massive golden spike rising out of the ground, covered in images telling the story of the railroad.

"The golden spike has been so iconic to the Transcontinental Railroad," Blumberg said, thinking back to the ceremonial golden spike that was driven into the railroad at its completion in Promontory Point, Utah on May 10, 1869.

The spike was an obvious image to use, according to Blumberg, as well as a good shape for an outdoor monument since it can be tall, attracting attention and visible from far away, while also not taking up much space on the ground.

"Then I had the idea of 'what if I covered the sides with imagery to help tell the story of creating the railroad?'" Blumberg explained. "One of my big motivations was to try, as much as I could, to show more aspects of the building of the railroad than maybe we typically see or hear about."

The Transcontinental Railroad was a complex project in a complex era, Blumberg said, and it took tens of thousands of people to make it happen. It also had a drastic effect on the entire country and all the people living in it.

"People look at their history through different lenses through different eras," Blumberg added. He pointed out that people telling the story of the railroad in the 1890s likely focused on difficulties like avalanches and Native American attacks, while people in the 40s or 50s may have focused on the money men behind the project and the scandals involved, and people today tend to focus on the people building the railroad and the diversity involved.

"All of those stories are true and all of them are valuable, but when we focus on just a couple of facets of a very multifaceted subject, we're not getting the whole story," Blumberg said.

In creating the spike monument, Blumberg did a deep dive into the history of the railroad and worked with different groups to try to find new angles. Eventually he decided to have the four sides of the spike each tell a different side of the story.

On two opposing sides of the spike, Blumberg represented the two companies building the railroad and their workforces. The Central Pacific Railroad, building from west to east, had a largely Chinese workforce. The Union Pacific Railroad, building from east to west, had a largely European American workforce, including lots of Irish workers. Some of the untold stories of the UP also include the workers who were veterans coming out of fighting the Civil War, as well as freed slaves and free African American workers.

Another side of the spike represents the aspect of the railroad that probably fascinated people the most at the time, according to Blumberg, which was the technology. New inventions and developments like the telegraph and steam power were important at the time, and the technology and engineering involved in creating a railroad reaching across the entire nation was an important part of the story.

Including an untold story

The fourth side of the spike seeks to present another perspective, addressing the impact on the culture and lifestyle of Native Americans whose land the railroad crossed through. To help understand this side of the story better, Blumberg worked with Shoshone Chief Darren Parry, who also traveled with the spike and spoke to school groups during the stop in Rock Springs.

"When we think about the story of the railroad, oftentimes we don't hear the stories about what it did to Native Americans," Parry said.

He explained to the school groups that many Native Americans fought against the railroad, but railroad companies hired other tribes to protect them, leading to Native American tribes fighting against and killing one another. But the biggest impact on the Native Americans was the killing of the buffalo. The railroad brought in hunters who slaughtered buffalo, reducing their numbers from 60 million to 450 in just five years, Parry explained.

"That's what turned the tide," he said. "That's what made the Native Americans say 'ok, enough is enough. We will move to a reservation now. We will move off this land that we've always called home.'"

Despite the negative impacts of the railroad, Parry also acknowledges its positive impacts, allowing people to travel across the country and making it easier to move goods and services and reach new places.

"I love the railroad. The railroad changed the face of America," Parry said. "While the railroad, I think, is the greatest thing that ever has happened in our country, and we need to celebrate it, think for just a few moments about what it cost Native Americans who already lived here. But guess what? We're all in the same canoe now. And it wouldn't do me any good to shoot a hole in the bottom of it. So, let's all come together."

Parry simply encouraged everyone to do research when reading history to find all the different sides of the story. He also expressed his gratitude to Blumberg for looking at different sides and including Native American imagery on the monument since "normally our story is never told."

Crafting a monument

Once the ideas for the spike all came together, the work of making them into a 43-foot reality began.

The process of planning and crafting the spike took Blumberg about three years. He spent six months sketching his ideas, planning the monument, and doing the math to figure out the technical aspects, like the fact that the images have to be increase in size as they move up the spike so they look right from the ground perspective people viewing the monument will have. Once the plans were ready, crafting the actual monument took about two and a half years, with Blumberg and 35-45 other people working to put it together.

Blumberg started by using "a thousand pounds or so of clay" to sculpt all the images that would go on the spike. He separated the images into four by four panels that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Once the sculptures were done, Blumberg made molds, then poured molten aluminum into them. The metal copies of the clay originals were then welded onto an aluminum truss tower which served as the body of the spike. Just the process of rounding the edges of the spike took several months of work. The head of the spike was then hand-fabricated. Once the spike was ready, it was covered in gold leaf, just like a capitol dome would be.

The finished spike weighs about 8,000 pounds - much lighter than the 24,000 pounds it could have been if it were made of another metal like steel or bronze, Blumberg explained. He said the aluminum not only saved weight but will keep down corrosion and help the spike last longer. The gold leaf will also last a long time, not tarnishing and being easier to maintain.

Once finished, the spike was loaded onto a trailer and began its cross-country journey. When it reaches its homes and is set upright in Golden Spike Park, it will draw people in to tell the story of the railroad.

"We should expose a lot of people to this fascinating history," Blumberg said.