Driving the Last Spike (as Seen from a Distance)

The news came to the Truckee Meadows camp three days after it happened, carried by a supply rider who had heard it from a telegrapher in Elko who had received the signal directly from Promontory Summit.

The railroad was finished. The golden spike had been driven on May 10, 1869, at a ceremony that, the rider said, had included champagne and speeches and a telegraph wire attached directly to the spike so that the impact could be transmitted to every station simultaneously. Wei Ah Lum listened to this from the edge of the camp and did not say anything.

He had been working the Central Pacific's eastern Nevada section for fourteen months. Before that he had worked the Sierra grades -- the tunnels, the snowsheds, the cuts through granite that the engineers had said would take years and the Chinese crews had done in months. He had not been at Promontory. None of the Chinese workers had been at the ceremony, or at least none that anyone could tell him about. The photographs that came through later showed white men in suits standing around a locomotive.

He understood this was how it worked. He had understood it for some time.

What he had not decided was what to do now. The railroad was offering passage back to Sacramento for the Chinese crews, and Sacramento was where most of the men he knew were going. There was a neighborhood there, a community, people who had come from the same counties in Guangdong province that he had come from. There were restaurants and a temple and a certain density of familiar things that he had not realized he missed until the rider had said the words and the work was suddenly, officially, over.

He stayed in the meadows camp for two weeks after most of the other men left. He told himself he was deciding. What he was actually doing was watching the Truckee River, which was running high with spring snowmelt, cold and clear over the rocks at the ford. He had crossed a lot of rivers in five years. The Truckee was the one that kept stopping him.

The town of Reno was a year old and was not, in any sense he would have recognized from Sacramento, a place for Chinese workers. There was no neighborhood, no temple, no cluster of familiar faces. What there was: a small laundry operation on the east end of Commercial Row, run by a man named Fong who had stayed on after the track-laying crews moved east. Fong told Wei that the laundry had more work than he could handle, which was true because the town was full of men who needed their clothes washed and had no one to do it.

Wei took the work. He told himself it was temporary.

In August he sent a letter to his brother in Guangdong province with enough money for passage to San Francisco and directions to Reno. His brother arrived the following April. By then Wei had a second tub and a line strung between two posts behind the building and a regular roster of customers that included the foremen from the railroad maintenance crew and a man named Kellerman who ran a saloon on Virginia Street and sent his tablecloths weekly without fail.

The ceremony at Promontory had happened without him. The railroad it celebrated ran directly through the town where he now lived. He walked across the tracks every morning to get water from the river.

He did not think about this constantly. Some mornings he thought about it. Other mornings he thought about the river.

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