A golden spike that completed the Alaska Railroad is up for auction. Alaskans want to bring it home

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — President Warren G. Harding drove a golden spike into the final coupling of the Alaska Railroad more than a century ago, a ceremonial act that marked the launch of a system to easily bring coal and other natural resources out of the wilderness. The Anchorage Museum, with financial backing from the Alaska Railroad, will bid on the 14-karat solid gold spike when it goes up for auction Friday in New York as part of the Christie’s Important Americana collection, said Aaron Leggett, the museum’s senior curator of Alaska history and Indigenous cultures. “The whole history of our state and really the whole history of this town begins with the Alaska Railroad,” Leggett said of Alaska and its biggest city, Anchorage. Laying tracks across the untamed Alaska wilderness had a “transformational impact on the last century of Alaska’s history,” said Meghan Clemens, the railroad’s director of external affairs.