Environmental History Workshop: Golden Spike National Historic Site

Students and NPS engineers join in a redo of 1869 photo.

This site commemorates the 1869 completion of the first trans-continental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah. We visited the place this past March to interview people and research administrative records in preparation of writing its administrative history. The setting is spacious and fairly pristine, befitting a site so key in the nation's westward expansion. The NPS built replicas of the two colorful steam locomotives that famously met for the Golden Spike ceremony, and they are featured in reenactments, which have been central to the site's interpretive program ever since the site was established in 1965. The passion of both the NPS engineers and the local people who reenact were wonderful to see. Local community involvement is an element in every park's story, but never before have we found it so entwined with the park's interpretive program.

About Us

ted.r.catton@gmail.com

dianekrahe@gmail.com

Theodore Catton is an associate research professor in the History Department at the University of Montana. He is the author of numerous books, articles, and reports on the national parks, including Inhabited Wilderness: Indians, Eskimos, and National Parks in Alaska, and National Park, City Playground: Mount Rainier in the Twentieth Century. He holds a PhD in environmental history from the University of Washington.

Diane L. Krahe is a research faculty affiliate at the University of Montana. She has written extensively on federal land management issues and is an expert on the history of Indian tribal wilderness in the twentieth century. She has a PhD in history from Washington State University and an MS in environmental studies from the University of Montana.

Catton and Krahe, who are married, reside in Missoula, Montana, where they research and write book-length reports for the National Park Service through both their faculty institution and their home business, Environmental History Workshop.

Collaborative writers since 2002, Catton and Krahe share a concern for the environment and an appreciation of national parks and wilderness areas. When they are not digging through boxes of old government records in the National Archives or pecking away on their laptops they enjoy hiking and camping in those special places that they are researching and writing about.

Some of our histories have been published on the web:

To Make a Better Nation: An Administrative History of the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act

Wonderland: An Administrative History of Mount Rainier National Park

Land Reborn: A History of Administration and Visitor Use in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve

Commemoration and Preservation: An Administrative History of Big Hole National Battlefield

Life, Leisure, and Hardship along the Buffalo: Historic Resource Study, Buffalo National River

Little Gem of the Cascades: Lassen Volcanic National Park Administrative History

Nez Perce National Historical Park Administrative History