“Rails East to Ogden:” Abandon Cultural Landscapes, Historical Archaeology and One of USA’s “Unknown National Treasures” (Season 3, Ep. 8)

**Brad Westwood** (0:10)
Welcome to the podcast, Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history, produced by the Utah Department of Culture and Community Engagement. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history of Utah accessible to the widest audience. If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fixed, I hope this is the place.
If this is the first time you're listening, I hope you'll review the catalog of prior episodes and listen to those produced before you discovered Speak Your Piece. Please also rate and review Speak Your Piece on iTunes, Google and elsewhere. We are discussing today on Speak Your Piece, the Bureau of Land Management or BLM's Cultural Resource Series Publication Number 29, entitled Rails East to Ogden, Utah's Transcontinental Railroad Story, published in 2021
I have two principal authors as guests today. First, Michael Polk, Archaeologist, who has spent 40 year plus in his career owning and running cultural resource companies, including Sagebrush Consultants and Aspen Ridge Consultants, both archaeology and heritage resource firms that provide consultation across the Western United States in archaeology, historical archaeology, and architectural history to government, corporate, and private interests.
Some of the most insightful and revealing historical archaeology concerning Utah's past, particularly its 19th century industrial and ethnic communities, has been produced by Mike Polk and his contracting efforts. Cultural resource companies like the ones Mike owns play a vital role in the historical community, especially when industry and development intersects with important historical resources. My second guest is Dr. Christopher W. Merritt, Utah's SHPO, or State Historic Preservation Officer, and a historical and industrial archaeologist with a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Montana. Chris is the author of The Coming Man from Canton, Chinese Experiences in Montana, 1862 to 1943, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2017 Chris serves as the most, really one of the most important promoters and defenders of historical archaeology and the resources around them concerning the Transcontinental Railroad in Utah. These are two exceptional scholars and researchers. Welcome Mike, welcome Chris.

**Michael Polk** (2:57)
Thank you, Brad.

**Christopher W. Merritt** (2:59)
Thank you, Brad.

**Brad Westwood** (2:59)
So good to have you.
Mike and Chris, I know you both are authors and there's so much to being authors and putting this book together. But there's other people who have contributed. Chris, maybe you could tell us who else is involved in this study.

**Michael Polk** (3:17)
Yeah, of course, Brad. And it does take a village to make a 330-page monograph.
And we worked very closely in partnership with the Bureau of Land Management on the publication of this. This is in their public series on bringing archaeology to the public. And so our first main contributor was Dr. Michael Sheehan, who is the archaeologist for the Salt Lake BLM office. And he has been instrumental in getting the resources pointed towards protection and interpretation and investigation of this scenic backcountry byway.
And as an archaeologist, him and I have partnered on field projects. And he was instrumental in pulling the resources together to get this volume produced. Then we have Ken Cannon, Dr. Ken Cannon.

**Brad Westwood** (4:03)
He's out of Utah State University.

**Michael Polk** (4:05)
Well, he actually owns his own cultural resource firm, much like Mike Polk.

**Brad Westwood** (4:09)
Oh, that's right.

**Michael Polk** (4:09)
That's right.

**Brad Westwood** (4:10)
He's up in that area of Utah.

**Michael Polk** (4:12)
But yeah, the Logan area is where he's based out of and he owns his own firm.

**Christopher W. Merritt** (4:18)
Cannon Heritage Resources is the company or consultant, excuse me.

**Michael Polk** (4:24)
Yeah. And Ken got involved as the state received a grant from the National Park Service back in 2015 to document underrepresented groups in Utah. And so we worked with Ken, we contracted with Ken to go do survey work out on BLM land.
And so he got passionate about it. And he's out there all the time and donating tons and tons of hours to the effort to document and protect these sites.
And then Dr. Molly Cannon, she's been providing a lot of really high level technical support. So she's a geophysicist. So she's been doing a lot of ground penetrating radar work out there, helping us look beneath the surface of the land. And so while they're maybe not authors, but they have all contributed significant amounts to this volumes production and ongoing research.

**Brad Westwood** (5:09)
Interesting. Well, like you say, it takes a village and it's an incredible work, much detailed, some wonderful archaeology and history.
The biographical sketches for both Chris and Mike are included in the show notes for this episode. Chris and Michael's research interests, among other subjects, is Chinese labors and their contributions to the history of 19th century America, including the construction of the world's first transcontinental railroad from Council Bluff, Iowa, to Sacramento, California, which involves many, many different immigrant groups, tens of thousands of Chinese labors who largely built the west side of the transcontinental railroad, which all came to its completion here in Utah at Promontory Summit on the edge of the Great Salt Lake on May 10th, 1869 Now, the BLM publication is about an abandoned railroad stretch of area of the grade, as Polk and Merritt described in their introductions, this way. And here's a wonderful quote, a largely unknown national treasure that rests a two-hour drive from Salt Lake City.