The Victory Highway was a transcontinental road dedicated to American forces who died in World War I, running from New York City to San Francisco and following, for much of its 3,205 miles across 14 states, the course of the earliest settlers through the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri valleys. Incorporated in Topeka, Kansas, late in 1921, the Victory Highway Association worked to locate and mark the route, and bronze eagle markers of the 1920s were intended for each county line with plaques honoring the sons and daughters who served their country; only five original bronze eagles are known to survive, two in Kansas and three in California. The road at Wendover was completed in 1925, and an official opening ceremony for the highway took place on June 25, 1925, just east of Wendover on the Bonneville Salt Flats, officiated by Utah Governor George Dern, Nevada Governor James Scrugham, and Secretary of Agriculture William Jardine. From Salt Lake City, the route skirted Great Salt Lake over the Wendover Cutoff, whose crossing of the Bonneville Salt Flats required five years of labor and created a new auto route across northern Nevada to Reno, parallel to the Lincoln Highway to the south. In the early to mid-twenties, only 81 of the 371 miles of the Victory Highway across Utah were paved, 107 miles were gravel, and 183 miles were relatively unimproved, and less than 14 percent of the full highway remained unimproved. Shortly after the Wendover Cutoff was completed, state and federal highway officials designated the route as Route No. 40, and Highway U.S. 40 later replaced this section to the south, now known as Wendover Boulevard; the Victory Highway remained in use until the 1940s. Its selection as the federal road across Utah and Nevada followed the Federal Highway Act of 1921 and the move from named highways to a numbered national system, with the federal government choosing the Wendover route over the Lincoln Highway in those states.