East and West Shaking Hands was the title given to the photograph above, taken on May 10, 1869. The meeting of two railroads at Promontory Point, Utah, joined a country that had been recently divided by civil war. But the men shown in this picture are only part of the story. Who built the lines? Who traveled upon them? What effect did this handshake between East and West have on the frontier?

Magically transforming everything they touched, railroads united people and altered how they lived and worked. They created and destroyed cities. Dreams were built and broken on the iron rails that crossed America as settlers swept westward in the expansion of empire.