Work crews completed the transcontinental telegraph in short order.
The first transatlantic telegraph cable, completed on August 5, 1858, made it possible for a New York or Chicago merchant to send a message to London, the gold capital of the world, in a matter of minutes. But sending a message from New York or Chicago to San Francisco, the gold capital of America, took a month by clipper ship around Cape Horn or by stagecoach from St. Joseph, Missouri, across the Great Plains and over the Rockies. The transatlantic telegraph cable failed within three months, after operators had sent just 732 messages to London. But an improvement of a sort in the messaging system to California came in 1860, when the young riders and hardy horses of the Pony Express cut the delivery time between St. Joseph and the Sacramento River steamer to 10 days— albeit at a hefty $5 per half-ounce. Clearly, though, the technology was available to provide a speedier way to deliver messages across the country; it was a business opportunity too good to miss.
Edward Creighton, an Ohio-born son of Irish immigrant farmers who started his working life as a wagon driver at 14, was up for the job. An independent construction contractor from his early 20s, he cultivated contacts with commercial telegraph pioneer Hiram Sibley of Western Union Telegraph Co. In 1855 Sibley sent Creighton on a bogus line survey of the South known as “the lemon squeezer,” as Creighton’s seeming intent on forging a competing line frightened owners of the existing line into granting Western Union a favorable use-lease. Business problems forced Creighton to relocate with his wife to Omaha, Neb., former terminus of the Eastern telegraph grid. He soon set up a connection between Omaha and St. Joseph and Fort Smith, Ark.
Sibley and Benjamin Franklin Ficklin, meanwhile, had incorporated the Omaha-based Pacific Telegraph Co., an expanding network that soon consolidated smaller companies in California. Sibley employed Creighton in 1860 to survey a route for a transcontinental telegraph. Creighton and party traced a path from Omaha to Salt Lake City through Fort Kearny, Fort Laramie, South Pass and Julesburg, then up through Carson City and past the Sierra Nevada to Sacramento and, ultimately, San Francisco. When Creighton arrived in Salt Lake City, he found that Mormon leader Brigham Young was in favor of the telegraph. “I want a company raised to stretch a wire through our settlements in this territory that information may be communicated to all parts with lightning speed,” Young said. The Mormon network had to wait some years, but the Mormons provided Creighton with supplies, labor and much needed poles.
The original plan had been to fund construction through private investments—Creighton put up much of his own money—but in June 1860 Congress appropriated a 10-year, $400,000 subsidy to the Pacific Telegraph Co. Logistics for the Pacific link, the Overland Telegraph Co., involved ordering wire and insulators from the Eastern factories and shipping them around Cape Horn, as well as distributing poles by ox wagon from Carson City to Salt Lake City. James Street of the Overland Telegraph negotiated with Brigham Young for another 400 miles worth of poles. “Along that portion of the route the mountains and plains were treeless as far as the eye could reach, viewed even from the highest point,” James Gamble, superintendent of the Overland Telegraph crews, wrote.“Where, then, the poles were to come from, I could not conceive. But the frontier men with whom the bargain had been made appeared to know their business, and as I afterward learned, they had in their hunting expeditions discovered canyons and gorges in the mountains where stunted pine and quaking asp[en] could be found sufficiently large for telegraph poles.”
Street also made an agreement with Sho-kup, head chief of the Shoshones (Sacagawea’s tribe), who agreed to keep the peace along the telegraph route so long as the Shoshone people were fairly treated. The chief had started out for San Francisco by stagecoach to meet with the principals of the Overland Telegraph when he learned that one of his two wives was sick Sho-kup decided to return home. He did, however, send a telegram—by the existing line from Carson City—to Overland Telegraph President Horace W. Carpentier:
Sho-kup, Big Chief of the Shoshones, says to Big Captain at San Francisco that his Indians will not trouble the telegraph line. Sho-kup is a friend of the white man. His people obey him. He will order them to be friendly with the white men and not injure the telegraph. He would like to see the Big Captain but must return to his tribe and cannot go to San Francisco.
On July 4, 1861, Western Union officially launched the project, and construction crews set out to link the telegraph between Omaha and the approaches to California. Actually, crews on the Overland section had gotten a head start: Gamble reported that on May 27 an expedition set out to cross the Sierra Nevada with 228 oxen, 26 wagons, 50 men and several horses.The wagons were so heavily laden that they often blocked the narrow roads until men could break down the loads. It took the party a month to cross the mountains, then crews on both sections worked energetically to distribute the poles, wire and insulators.
The crews were similarly organized: Men measured and staked off the line, followed by the hole-diggers, the pole-setters and then the wire party. Their rate of completion was anywhere from three to eight miles a day. Commercial service stretched from each base of operation to the farthest extent of the wire even as the work progressed. Operators kept newspapers in San Francisco abreast of progress on a daily basis.
As a diplomatic measure, the Overland Telegraph employed Indians to tend livestock and provide wild game for food. “I never had any reason to regret the confidence I placed in them,” Gamble recalled. “That this good feeling with the Indians was maintained throughout was also in a measure due to a general order issued at the start, that any man of the expedition getting into trouble with the Indians, or their squaws, would be immediately dismissed from the service, and this rule was strictly enforced.”
But the Indians were leery of molesting the wires for other reasons. On one occasion a wire snapped during a thunderstorm, and a crew of workmen in buckskin gloves was repairing the line. One friendly Indian who was not part of the regular crew agreed to help tug the wire into place. “The ground being moist and the Indian in his bare feet,” recalled Gamble, “he received an electric charge that doubled him up in a knot. A more astonished Indian was probably never seen…. After that, no Indian could be induced to go near the wire or touch the poles.”
Weather sometimes proved an obstacle to construction. Gamble described how one night a heavy snowfall covered up his crewmen, who had fallen asleep in blankets on the open ground. “We had tents with us, but many of them did not think it worthwhile to put them up,” he wrote. “When I awoke and raised the tent door, my worst forebodings seemed fully realized:The ground was white with snow. …Hummocks of snow, uniform in size and arranged with all the silent precision of a cemetery, were grouped about me. One good loud shout of, ‘Rouse out! Rouse out!’ sufficed, however, to animate the scene, as the men in answer to my call shook themselves from their blankets and coverlets of snow. The rapidity of the change in scene from the deathlike silence of the snow-covered sleepers, of whom not a vestige could be seen, to the noise and activity of a mountain camp, was panoramically grotesque.”
The converging crews had agreed to an informal race to see which could complete its respective segment first, and Creighton’s Pacific Telegraph Co., with 1,100 miles to cover from Omaha, reached Salt Lake City seven days ahead of the Overland Telegraph crew from California. On October 24, 1861, a project Abraham Lincoln had expected to take up to 10 years, if it could be done at all, was completed in less than four months. The Western Union telegraph system— created by crews of the Pacific Telegraph, led by Creighton, and the Overland Telegraph, headed by Gamble—was fully operational by November 15. The transatlantic telegraph cable, despite boosts in electric power, did not come back online until 1866, but Western Union, which had plowed its profits back into equipment through the 1850s, now began paying dividends. Between 1860 and 1864 cash dividends ranged from 3 to 11 percent, and the value of Western Union stock soared by 133 percent.
There was one more proof to the pudding: Two days after Western Union linked the country, the Pony Express went out of business.
Originally published in the October 2012 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
