By the Golden Gate; Or, San Francisco, the Queen City of the Pacific Coast: With Scenes and Incidents Characteristic of its LifeCarey, Joseph
History
By the Golden Gate; Or, San Francisco, the Queen City of the Pacific Coast: With Scenes and Incidents Characteristic of its Life
Carey, Joseph
San Francisco (Calif.)
From Salt Lake City to Ogden, the great centre of railway travel,
where several lines converge, is but a ride of thirty-six miles. Here
the train, which was very heavy, was divided into two sections, and,
after some delay, we went on our journey with hopeful hearts. The Salt
Lake Valley and the Great Salt Lake, which we had traced for a long
distance, finally disappeared from view. The journey was begun from
Ogden on what is known as Pacific time. There are four time
sections employed in the United States, adopted for convenience in
1883,--Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific. It is Eastern time
until you reach 82-1/2 degrees west longitude from Greenwich, Central
time up to 97-1/2, Mountain time till you arrive at 11-1/2, Pacific
time to 127-1/2, which will take you out into the Pacific Ocean;
and there is just one hour's difference between each time section,
covering fifteen degrees. So that when it is twelve o'clock, midday,
in New York city, it is eleven in Chicago, ten o'clock in Denver,
and nine o'clock in San Francisco. You adapt yourself, however, very
readily to these changes of time, in your hours of sleep and in other
matters.
One of the places of special interest through which we passed before
leaving Utah is Promontory. Here the last tie was laid and here the
last spike was driven, on the 10th of May, 1869, when the Central
Pacific and the Union Pacific Railways were united and the great
cities of the Atlantic seaboard and San Francisco at the setting sun
were brought into communication with each other by an iron way which
has promoted our civilisation in a marked degree. A night ride over
the Alkali Plains of Nevada, famous for their sage brush, was a
novelty, and in the clear atmosphere they looked like fields of snow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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