Utah

On May 10, 1869, a single telegraphed word changed the country: "Done." At Promontory Summit in northern Utah, workers drove a golden spike to connect the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads. It completed 1,800 miles of hand-built track and cut a months-long journey across America down to about a week.

More than 10,000 Chinese laborers built east from Sacramento, blasting tunnels through solid granite in the Sierra Nevada. Over 1,000 of them are estimated to have died doing it. Thousands of Irish, German, and formerly enslaved workers built west from Omaha.

Ute, Shoshone, Goshute, Paiute, and Navajo peoples had lived in this region for thousands of years. The Ute gave the state its name.

In 1847, Brigham Young led the first group of Mormon pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley, fleeing religious persecution that had followed them across the Midwest. Their founder, Joseph Smith, had been murdered by a mob in Illinois three years earlier. The settlers built irrigation systems in the desert, planted crops, and founded roughly 500 communities across the region.

As Mormon settlements spread, they pushed into Ute and Shoshone homelands. The Walker War of 1853 and the Black Hawk War of 1865 both grew out of Native peoples losing access to the land that fed them. In 1863, U.S. soldiers killed as many as 350 Northwestern Shoshone at Bear River, one of the deadliest massacres of Native Americans in the country's history.

Utah became the 45th state in 1896, but only after the Mormon church officially agreed to stop allowing men to marry more than one wife in 1890. The federal government had refused statehood for decades over the issue.

Hike the narrow slot canyons of Zion National Park, stare up at over 2,000 natural stone arches at Arches, and drive the scenic road through Capitol Reef. Float in the Great Salt Lake (it's so salty you can't sink), and visit Golden Spike National Historic Park at Promontory Summit, where they reenact the ceremony with replica steam engines every summer.