May 10 · This Day in America
At Promontory Summit in the Utah desert, two locomotives ease toward each other until their cowcatchers nearly touch. The Central Pacific has come east through the Sierra; the Union Pacific has come west across the plains. Between them stretch tens of thousands of miles of rail laid by Chinese, Irish, Mormon, and Black workers whose backs built this thing. A telegraph key is wired to the final spike. When the hammer falls, a single word goes out to the whole country at the speed of lightning: DONE. Bells ring in Philadelphia. Cannons fire in San Francisco and New York. A journey that took six punishing months now takes a week. The nation that fought itself nearly to death four years earlier has just been stitched coast to coast with iron, and it can feel, for one ringing afternoon, like one country.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1775
Before dawn, Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, with Benedict Arnold beside him, row across Lake Champlain and walk straight into a barely guarded British fort. The startled commander surrenders in his nightclothes. The prize is the cannon — dozens of guns that Henry Knox will drag through winter to Boston, forcing the British out. The Revolution's first offensive victory, won in the dark, bloodlessly.
Source: www.battlefields.org