Collis had been exuberant on the way from Sacramento, inviting newspaper reporters and giggling young girls to share iced champagne in his parlour car. But now he was more subdued. Every now and then he would part the blinds and stare out into the bright Utah morning, squinting as if he had a migraine. From the window he could see the two locomotives, buffed-up and shining in the sunlight and steaming softly. A line of more than a hundred soldiers of the 21st Infantry, in blue dress uniforms and dazzling white gloves, waited beside the track. A crowd of reporters and photographers shuffled impatiently in the sand and the sagebrush, their wooden tripods all set up for the track-joining ceremony, sharing cigarettes and warm bottled beer.

It was 10 May 1869, a glaring Monday, two years after Collis’s men had blasted a pass through the High Sierras. After that, the speed of track-laying had been furious. With the Union Pacific frenziedly putting down rails from the East, Charles had driven their Chinese and Irish graders to the limit, trying to beat the U.P. into the heart of Utah, and as far as the rich commercial prize of Salt Lake City. Each mile of track they laid brought them more federal loans and more land grants, and Collis needed every dollar and every acre of land he could get.

Charles had boasted that it was almost impossible for visiting spectators from California to catch up with his track-laying gang at the railhead; and a San Francisco newspaper reporter wrote with awe that he had seen a half mile of rails laid in under twenty-eight minutes.

On 27 April, as the rival railroads neared Promontory Station, Collis had shared a picnic lunch with Thomas Durant, of the Union Pacific, under a flapping tent. With a flash of his old challenging spirit, he had bet Durant ten thousand dollars that his gangs could lay ten miles of track in a single day. Durant, with his mouth full of game pie, had accepted.

The following day, in a dreamlike ripple of heat and a blur of desert dust, a handpicked crew of gaugers, rail carriers, bolters, and spikers, with Charles Tucker urging them on, had beaded down 25,800 ties, spiked 3250 rails, and between them laid over 250,000 pounds of iron. As dusk fell, they had passed the ten-mile mark, and they laid fifty-six feet more for good luck. Ten Mile Day, they called it afterwards, and put up a sign to commemorate their achievement.

Even when the Sierra Pacific’s graders had met up with the Union Pacific’s graders approaching in the opposite direction, Collis had ordered his men to continue preparing a parallel track — at least until it was officially decided where the two railroads should join. As they passed each other, the Sierra Pacific and Union Pacific gangs had showered each other with dug-up clods of earth, and almost blown each other up with nitroglycerin.