The pole cutting crews worked well in advance of the team setting the poles and stringing wire. In July 1861, the telegraph line advancing west from Omaha reached the Wind River Country. All along the Sweetwater Valley, scouts scoured the hillsides for trees suitable for the requirements of the new telegraph line.
Green Mountain, east of present-day Jeffrey City, was a prime location for lodgepole pine, the preferred species for telegraph poles. Men with broad axes, two-man and single crosscut saws, along with mule teams, worked to the 9,600-foot summit of Green Mountain, where thick groves of lodgepole grew along the creeks. They dragged the poles to central locations where teams of four oxen pulled 100 to 150 of these poles down the mountain on independent wagon axles to the valley below.
As soon as they arrived, the poles were sunk into freshly dug holes, tamped, and men climbed the poles with leather straps around their waists and climbing gear to string the wire around wooden insulators.
It took just 10 days to cover the ground from Three Crossings Station to the west side of South Pass. Not much construction time in the grand scheme of things in Fremont County, but the result of the work brought modern communication to the Wind River Mountains, surrounding foothills, and valleys. It was the arrival of modern civilization in the Wind River County.
It didn’t have the adventure of the Pony Express, or the industrial might of the transcontinental railroad, but it changed the West, and the lives of the people who lived in the expanding territories of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains.
The telegraph doesn’t get much recognition. Few books have been written about it, or its distant cousin, the telephone, but they arguably had a greater impact on the settling of the West, the establishment of towns, and the expanse of commerce than any other technology.
Samuel F.B. Morse is given credit for “inventing” the telegraph, but he was more of a marketing genius than the sole inventor of a new technology.
Morse brought the telegraph to center stage with a carefully orchestrated event on May 24, 1844. He set up a telegraph key in the chambers of the United States Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., and had his assistant Alfred Vail on the other end of a 40-mile line in Baltimore with a similar device.
Morse keyed “’What has God wrought!” taken from the Old Testament, Numbers 23:23.
Though it was amazing and filled the pages of newspapers from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi, the United States government paid it no attention at all, thinking it was simply an oddity that would soon disappear.
Disappear, it did not.
The concept of the telegram traces its roots to the Ancient World. Signal fires, smoke signals, and later semaphore were all primitive examples of line-of-sight, distant communication. The telegraph changed that, creating a medium that would allow communication over thousands of miles rather than just a mile or two in plain sight.
While Congress, the White House, the Senate, and the military had a blind eye toward the telegraph, businesses quickly saw the benefit of the new technology.
Private lines sprang up from the Great Lakes to the Midwest and into the deep south.
In 1853, the first use of the telegraph by both the military and war correspondents came in the Crimean War between England and Russia on the Crimean Peninsula in modern Ukraine.
The English Army set poles as quickly as their army advanced, stringing wire and connecting to a permanent line that extended under the English Channel to London. It allowed instantaneous communication from the battlefield to the Prime Minister’s Office.
This communication breakthrough allowed field commanders to operate much quicker than in earlier wars and was a substantial factor in England’s eventual victory.
The London Times shared the same lines.
People back home in England received reports of battles, field conditions and troop movements from Time’s correspondent William Russell just a few hours after they happened.
Russell’s reports were so moving that they led Queen Victoria to remove Prime Minister George Hamilton-Gordon when the London Times ran a series on the poor conditions English troops were forced to endure.
When combined with another new technology, the photograph, it brought the battlefield to the living room for the first time.
President Abraham Lincoln utilized the same technology in keeping close communication with his field commanders during the American Civil War. Lincoln’s frequent telegrams and frustration with Army of the Potomac commander George McClellan eventually led to McClellan’s firing.
Matthew Brady brought the horrors of the battlefield with his unadulterated images of dead soldiers, horses, and battlefield carnage.
In 1866, Europe and America were first connected by the first of four trans-Atlantic telegraph lines. Powering it required a 600-volt, D.C. charge.
Westward expansion before the first shots were fired at Ft. Sumter both divided and unified the nation. “Bleeding Kansas” and the threat of Texas leaving the Union, along with settlers moving steadily into Oregon and then flooding California after gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, required unification.
California boomed immediately, joining the Union as a state in September 1850. Oregon joined in 1859. Communication with these two isolated states was crucial for government, commerce, and national defense.
It took 45 days by ship with a horseback ride through the Isthmus of Panama, 90 days via ship around Cape Horn, or 20 days on a fast stage from St. Louis to San Francisco. These times were all one-way, with an equal number of days to receive a response. That was if conditions were perfect, which they rarely were. Communication in winter, hurricane season, or wartime doubled or tripled the time.
The solution was obvious. A telegraph for communication and a transcontinental railroad for goods. With a civil war looming, and the vast distances of the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and Great Basin separating the regions, the solution wasn’t as easy as many predicted.
The Pony Express shrank the distance to just 10 days, but only correspondence on paper so thin that the ink on it seemed to be heavier than the stationery didn’t fill the needs. The technology didn’t fit the requirements.
The Pony Express did more for the telegraph than its founders could have ever predicted. The location of express stations every 20 miles or so from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, was ideal for the telegraph technology of the day.
To work a telegraph required many component parts, an operator, poles, insulators, wire, a telegraph, paper, delivery boys, and, perhaps most importantly, a DC battery.
The telegraph used wet cell batteries to generate between 40 and 60 volts of direct current. This was enough to work the spring-loaded magnets on the telegraph machines at regular distances of 20 miles. Higher voltage allowed longer transmission distances, with some batteries producing up to 300 volts.
The primary wet-cell batteries used in the 1860s until the 1880s were Daniell and Grove Cells.
Daniell Cells used copper and zinc electrodes in a sulfuric acid bath, much like a modern car battery.
Grove cells produced higher voltage but required expensive platinum, along with zinc. They used sulfuric and nitric acids, but produced toxic fumes.
Daniell cells maintained their voltage until they were spent; Grove cells gradually lost power over time.
In 1861, just before the shooting started in the Civil War, Congress, in one of its last acts of compromise, offered a subsidy for the building of a telegraph line from Omaha, Nebraska to Sacramento, California.
Western Union, the future telegraph giant, won the bid at $40,000.
They hired Edward Creighton to survey a route for the new line.
Creighton and his brother John set the first pole on July 2, 1861.
Many of the routines the Creighton brothers established were later used in constructing the transcontinental railroad. The first was to build from both directions and then meet in the middle.
Salt Lake City for the telegraph was the halfway point.
Though it didn’t require the manpower, industrial production, or sheer volume of the railroad, the telegraph presented problems.
The foremost was finding enough poles for the 1,086 miles that stretched from Kearney, Nebraska, to Fort Churchill, California.
Poles were required every 75 yards on flat terrain, closer on mountainous slopes. That meant 27,000 21-foot-long poles, with an ideal base of seven inches and a top diameter of three-and-a-half. Only lodgepole pines fit that requirement, and they weren’t available on the windswept plains of Nebraska or the barren sagebrush country of Wyoming.
In their place, Western Red Cedar was often used, with spruce and on the plains of Nebraska and the river drainages of Wyoming, cottonwood.
Cottonwood made ugly, twisted poles, but it was durable, handled the elements well, and was the easiest to harvest along streams, riverbanks, and waddies.
Following the soon-to-be-abandoned Pony Express Stations, the telegraph construction crews reached what would become Wyoming in late July 1861.
Crews could cover an average of 10 miles per day. That meant digging 250 holes at least four feet deep, setting the poles, tamping the earth, attaching insulators, and stringing the zinc-coated wire.
Crew crossed Horse Creek, then Cold Springs, Verdling’s Ranch, and arrived at Ft. Laramie on August 5, 1861.
The future Fremont County’s portion of the telegraph began at Split Rock. Then Three Crossings, Warm Springs, Rocky Ridge, Burnt Ranch, Dry Sandy, and then Big Sandy.
These were all isolated telegraph stations. They eventually served as repeating stations for messages from California east and then back to the Sunshine State.
They didn’t become hubs until 1868 when the railroad began to cross Wyoming, and then the main telegraph line was moved along the Union Pacific tracks a year later.
Ft. Laramie and Rawlins eventually became key telegraph centers beginning in 1878 when the stage route from Rawlins to Lander was opened, and a few years before that when gold was discovered in the Black Hills.
From California, the Overland Telegraph Company had challenges as well. First was crossing the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. Trees had to be cleared along the line to prevent branches from snapping the lines in the frequent high winds. Crossing the desolate, waterless expanse of the Great Basin was another challenge.
On October 18, 1861, the two construction companies met and joined the line at Salt Lake City.
Wyoming isn’t known for litigation, but the first case to reach the Territorial Supreme Court involved the telegraph.
The case was Western Union Telegraph vs. Monseau.
M. A. Monseau was a contractor, hired to furnish 754 telegraph poles at $2.50 per pole. Monseau delivered, Western Union used the poles, but they tried to avoid paying him by claiming the company representative who agreed to the deal was not authorized.
The Supreme Court upheld an earlier court ruling, and Western Union was forced to pay Monseau $1885 plus damages and court costs.
Supplying the telegraph stations required other contractors. The batteries were shipped dry, and water was added to create sulfuric acid to electrify them. As they wore out, they had to be replaced.
Poles had to be replaced as well. Many were lost to storms, but many more to vandalism and, on occasion, outright sabotage by Native Americans who resented the lines crossing their land.
The initial cost of sending a telegram from San Francisco to New York City was astronomical, seven dollars for 10 words, about $260 today, or 26 dollars per word.
The price dropped precipitously as more stations came online, more lines were laid, and a nationwide network evolved.
One of the earliest government messages came from California Chief Justice Stephen Field in early 1862, when he sent a telegram to President Lincoln assuring him that California was loyal to the Union.
There was big money in the telegram business, and operators were paid exceedingly well in comparison to other professions.
A skilled telegraph operator had to be able to listen to the dots and dashes, write letters as they were tapped out on the keys, arrange those letters into words, and then have a delivery boy hand the telegram to the recipient.
Other, less honest operators used the information they received to make stock deals, real estate transactions, and business deals well before the intended message arrived at its target.
Mark Twain wrote of this practice in “Roughing It.”
“A youth of nineteen, who was a telegraph operator in Virginia on a salary of a hundred dollars a month, and who, when he could not make out German names in the list of San Francisco steamer arrivals, used to ingeniously select and supply substitutes for them out of an old Berlin city directory, made himself rich by watching the mining telegrams that passed through his hands and buying and selling stocks accordingly, through a friend in San Francisco. Once when a private dispatch was sent from Virginia announcing a rich strike in a prominent mine and advising that the matter be kept secret till a large amount of the stock could be secured, he bought forty “feet” of the stock at twenty dollars a foot and afterward sold half of it at eight hundred dollars a foot and the rest at double that figure. Within three months he was worth $150,000 and had resigned his telegraphic position.”
The 19-year-old operator was already making $100 a month, more than triple the wage of a dock worker or miner, but he used the information he received to become almost instantly wealthy.
Another young man was fired for a similar practice, but not before he used the information to his advantage.
“Another telegraph operator who had been discharged by the company for divulging the secrets of the office, agreed with a moneyed man in San Francisco to furnish him the result of a great Virginia mining lawsuit within an hour after its private reception by the parties to it in San Francisco. For this he was to have a large percentage of the profits on purchases and sales made on it by his fellow-conspirator. So he went, disguised as a teamster, to a little wayside telegraph office in the mountains, got acquainted with the operator, and sat in the office day after day, smoking his pipe, complaining that his team was fagged out and unable to travel—and meantime listening to the dispatches as they passed clicking through the machine from Virginia. Finally, the private dispatch announcing the result of the lawsuit sped over the wires, and as soon as he heard it he telegraphed his friend in San Francisco.
I am tired waiting. Shall sell the team and go home.”
It was the signal agreed upon. The word “waiting” left out, would have signified that the suit had gone the other way.
The mock teamster’s friend picked up a deal of the mining stock, at low figures, before the news became public, and a fortune was the result.
For a long time after one of the great Virginia mines had been incorporated, about fifty feet of the original location were still in the hands of a man who had never signed the incorporation papers. The stock became very valuable, and every effort was made to find this man, but he had disappeared. Once it was heard that he was in New York, and one or two speculators went east but failed to find him. Once the news came that he was in the Bermudas, and straightway a speculator or two hurried east and sailed for Bermuda—but he was not there. Finally, he was heard of in Mexico, and a friend of his, a barkeeper on a salary, scraped together a little money and sought him out, bought his “feet” for a hundred dollars, returned and sold the property for $75,000.”
Newspapers kept telegraph operators busy their entire shift, sending stories across the wire to distant locations. Competing newspapers paid high prices for “inside” information from unscrupulous operators.
An example came in “Roughing It” on the climatic days surrounding Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg in July 1863.
“And all that time one sorely tried man, the telegraph operator sworn to official secrecy, had to lock his lips and chain his tongue with a silence that was like to rend them; for he, and he only, of all the speculating multitude, knew the great things this sinking sun had seen that day in the east—Vicksburg fallen, and the Union arms victorious at Gettysburg!”
In Wyoming, especially, telegraph lines were subject to raids by hostile Native Tribes. The Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho were especially adept at pulling down telegraph poles and breaking the wire.
Chief Washakie signed an agreement with Creighton to protect the lines near South Pass and along the western edge of the Sweetwater Valley, but the area between modern-day Casper and Ft Laramie was fair game for raiding parties.
A bit of subterfuge by the telegraph companies prevented further damage. They would take Native American men and have them touch the lines when they were electrified. A 40-to-60-volt jolt of direct current burns, more than shocks, but it made an impression on the would-be saboteurs. Many were afraid to touch the lines.
As the novelty of the “talking wires” wore off, the ease of access to telegraph poles became a problem for owners.
Carbon County Journal, September 17, 1887
Travelers on the Rawlins-Lander Road Steal 43 Telegraph Poles
“Lander Mountaineer: “Inspector Walsoe is justly indignant at the barefaced stealing of telegraph poles between Rawlins and Lost Soldier. The inspector counted forty-three stumps from which the poles had been chopped in just the last ten days. The penitentiary is waiting for some of these pole-stealing gentry.
This ongoing practice of chopping down the nearest telegraph pole to fuel a campfire wherever a waggoneer decided to camp for the night, forced the telegraph company to install iron poles in some locations between Lost Soldier and Rawlins.”
Eventually, telegraph poles became landmarks, akin to the delineator posts along modern highways.
Indian Guide – November 1897
“About 3-miles out from Rawlins a road is seen turning off to the right—beware of taking it; this road leads to Sand Creek and Whiskey Gap. If you should do as some have done, you will find your drive to the fort lengthened by about 20 miles. This is about the only spot on the entire stage road where there is danger of taking the wrong road; in fact, remember that telegraph poles are in sight nearly everywhere on the stage road, and these poles serve as a guide.”
Lander had a telegraph office in 1878. Fort Washakie had one by 1880. As the Chicago North Western headed west from Casper in 1906, the telegraph followed. Moneta, Shoshoni, Riverton, Arapaho, and Hudson all had telegraph offices, and Lander joined with Casper and Rawlins in the fall of 1906.
In the end, it wasn’t sabotage, high winds, or the railroad that ended the usefulness of the telegraph; it was advancing technology.
The telephone, radio, television, air mail, internet banking, the internet itself, and the cell phone that ended the era of keyed communication across vast distances.