Since the "Seneca Chief" carried DeWitt Clinton from Buffalo to the Atlantic in 1825, it has been the custom to make the completion of a new road an occasion for formal celebration. On the 10th of May, 1869, the whole United States stood still to signalize the junction of the tracks. The date had been agreed upon by the railways on short notice, and small parties of their officials, Governor Stanford for the Central Pacific and President Dillon for the Union Pacific, had come to the scene of activities. The latter wrote up the "Driving the Last Spike" for one of the magazines twenty years later, telling how General Dodge worked all night of the 9th, laying his final section, and how at noon on the appointed day the last two rails were spiked to a tie of California laurel. The immediate audience was small, including few beyond the railway officials, but within hearing of the telegraphic taps that told of the last blows of the sledge-hammer was much of the United States. President Dillon told the story as it was given in the leading paragraph of the _Nation_ of the Thursday after. "So far as we have seen them," wrote Godkin's censor of American morals, "the speeches, prayers, and congratulatory telegrams ... all broke down under the weight of the occasion, and it is a relief to turn from them to the telegrams which passed between the various operators, and to get their flavor of business and the West. 'Keep quiet,' the Omaha man says, when the operators all over the Union begin to pester him with questions. 'When the last spike is driven at Promontory Point, we will say "Done."' By-and-by he sends the word, 'Hats off! Prayer is being offered.' Then at the end of thirteen minutes he says, apparently with a sense of having at last come to business: 'We have got done praying. The spike is about to be presented.' ... Before sunset the event was celebrated, not very noisily but very heartily, throughout the country. Chicago made a procession seven miles long; New York hung out bunting, fired a hundred guns, and held thanksgiving services in Trinity; Philadelphia rang the old Liberty Bell; Buffalo sang the 'Star-spangled Banner'; and many towns burnt powder in honor of the consummation of a work which, as all good Americans believe, gives us a road to the Indies, a means of making the United States a halfway house between the East and West, and last, but not least, a new guarantee of the perpetuity of the Union as it is." No single event in the struggle for the last frontier had a greater significance for the immediate audience, or for posterity, than this act of completion. Bret Harte, poet of the occasion, asked the question that all were framing:-- "What was it the Engines said, Pilots touching, head to head Facing on the single track, Half a world behind each back?" But he was able to answer only a part of it. His western engine retorted to the eastern:--