The first transcontinental telegraph: wired across America in 1861 through Mitchell Pass

On the evening of October 24, 1861, the first transcontinental telegraph was finished, and a message from Sacramento reached President Lincoln in Washington by 11:30 the next morning: a trip that took far longer by Pony Express or stagecoach. The line followed the Oregon-California Trail through Mitchell Pass, in what is now Scotts Bluff National Monument in Nebraska. It gave North America nearly instantaneous electronic communication for the first time.

The telegraph lines visible in Mitchell Pass in 1866. William Henry Jackson, Scotts Bluff National Monument collection.

From signal towers to electricity

“Telegraph” comes from Greek words for “distant” and “to write.” The first practical systems used no electricity but semaphores, flags and moveable arms on hills and towers, in chains of stations in sight of one another, starting in the late 18th century. Electricity came next. Alessandro Volta invented the first electric battery, the voltaic pile, in 1800. In 1820 Hans Christian Ørsted saw a compass needle move whenever a circuit was completed, revealing the link between electricity and magnetism, and in 1825 William Sturgeon found that wire wound around an iron core strengthened the effect.

No single inventor can be credited with the electric telegraph. William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented a needle telegraph in London in 1837, and the first permanent system, 13 miles along the Great Western Railway, followed in 1839. Joseph Henry, an American physicist, solved part of the problem of electrical resistance over long wires by winding several shorter coils in series; he published his findings in January 1831 and showed a prototype to students at the Albany Academy that rang a bell from a mile of wire. He went on to become the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1846. Samuel Morse’s simpler key and sounder became the most successful design. Morse built on Henry’s published work, and with the help of a chemistry instructor made an electromagnet that sent signals through 10 miles of wire. Henry thought Morse’s telegraph merely an application of principles that he and other physicists had found, and their relationship soured in 1845 over a book by Morse’s assistant that Henry felt did not credit him.

Joseph Henry. U.S. Library of Congress.

Morse code and the first lines

Morse and his assistant developed a system of dots and dashes in the 1830s. Because it could not handle languages with accent marks, International Morse code was introduced in 1851 for Europe. The original became known as American Morse code, which U.S. telegraphers kept using into the 20th century and which, unlike the international version, used dashes of three lengths. SOS, in International Morse, was first used as a distress signal in maritime radio in the early 1900s and was not a distress signal on 19th-century American telegraph lines.

In 1843 Congress funded a test line from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, 40 miles, along the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Ezra Cornell first buried cables in a lead pipe, which failed from poor insulation, then strung them from poles and trees and invented glass insulators. On May 24, 1844, Morse sent the first message from the Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol, “What hath God wrought?,” a Bible verse suggested by a friend’s young daughter, and his assistant sent it back from Baltimore. By the end of the 1840s lines linked eastern towns.

Western Union and the California line

In 1849 a New York businessman, Hiram Sibley, found there were too many small telegraph firms to compete with and began buying all the lines west of Buffalo. In 1856 the company was renamed Western Union. In the early 1850s more than 50 telegraph companies operated in the country; by 1861 only six major ones were left. In California a semaphore on San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, built in 1849 to announce ships entering the Golden Gate, gave the hill its name; in 1853 a line from Point Lobos made it obsolete. That year the California State Telegraph Company strung wire from San Francisco toward San Jose, Stockton, Sacramento and Marysville. A ten-word message from San Francisco to San Jose cost 75 cents. California’s legislature offered $6,000 a year to the first company to build a line across the continent.

Paying for it, building it

Investors balked at the cost of a line across plains, mountains and deserts, while the government wanted faster military communication between forts. On June 16, 1860, President James Buchanan signed the Pacific Telegraph Act. It promised up to $40,000 a year for up to ten years for building and maintaining a line from the eastern cities to San Francisco, allowed the company to use public land, required repair stations no more than 15 miles apart on average, gave government messages priority and let the Smithsonian, the Coast Survey and the National Observatory use the line free for science.

Only Western Union kept its bid until the deadline and won the contract from the Treasury Secretary. Two affiliates built it: Nebraska’s Pacific Telegraph Company, from Omaha west, and California’s Overland Telegraph Company, from Carson City east, both aiming for Salt Lake City. Work began on July 4, 1861, with the two crews betting on who would arrive first. Surveyors marked the route, then crews dug holes, set poles and strung wire, three to eight miles a day, with a mobile station reporting progress. Hundreds of oxen hauled supplies; wire and insulators for the western section were made in the East and shipped around Cape Horn; poles were scarce on the treeless Plains and Great Basin, so arrangements were made for Mormon workers to supply them for a long stretch.

A wood insulator from the telegraph line through Mitchell Pass. NPS photo.

Finished

The Overland company reached Salt Lake City on October 24, 1861, several days after the Pacific company had finished its eastern section (accounts vary on its exact date). The first telegram sent from Salt Lake City to San Francisco was written by the leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The first message the whole way across was sent at 7:40 p.m. from Sacramento by the chief justice of the California Supreme Court to President Lincoln, congratulating him and pledging California’s loyalty during the Civil War. Other messages brought news of Civil War battles.

Native peoples and the wire

Some Native Americans were hired to herd livestock during construction and were paid in provisions and clothing, and company men met with chiefs, including the head chief of the Shoshone, to build good relations. Not all accounts were friendly. One army officer’s account says the company deliberately taught Native leaders to fear the wire through invented stories and electric shocks, as it was financially useful for them to dread it. For everyone, bare poles and wires strung across the land were unlike any earlier technology. The telegraph’s speed mattered in February 1865 at the Battle of Mud Springs, after the November 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, in which soldiers killed about 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho. A group of Cheyenne, Sioux and Arapaho headed north, raided Julesburg and retreated toward the Mud Springs telegraph station, about 12 miles southeast of present-day Bridgeport, Nebraska. The telegrapher called for help and troops from two forts defended it.

What followed

The telegraph soon became obsolete: on May 10, 1869, the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, completed the first transcontinental railroad, and a multi-wire telegraph was built along it, so the first line was no longer the main route west. Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, and radio, developed in the 1890s, first sent Morse code and was called “wireless telegraph.” Telegrams peaked in the 1920s and 1930s because they were cheaper than long-distance calls, and in three 20th-century wars the military used them to notify families. Western Union launched its first communications satellite, Westar 1, in 1974. Its telegram service lasted until 2006, and it now offers money transfers from Denver.

By the 1930s, telephone lines ran through Mitchell Pass along the route of the first transcontinental telegraph. NPS photo.

Sources

• National Park Service, Scotts Bluff National Monument, “The Transcontinental Telegraph,” https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-transcontinental-telegraph.htm; rewritten in hubnx’s own words. An illustration credited to a private individual is left out.