Telegraphy Cowboys: Dots, Dashes, and the Western Expansion

By Pavek Museum Curator Dr. Luis Felipe Eguiarte Souza
Edited by Kaeleen Laird

Picture this: 1830s United States, Jackson Administration. The U.S. is at a turning point, pulled by two forces that are polarizing the country and pushing it to the brink of destruction. On the one hand, the expansion to the West was impaired by treaties with the Native nations and the sovereign soil of Mexico. On the other hand, the issue of slavery – with half the country embracing the practice and the other abhorring it. Since any expansion west would undermine the north-south state balance, the United States was in a quandary. The growing population of the U.S. desired far-reaching Western expansion and believed in Manifest Destiny – the idea that descendants of Anglo-Saxon Europeans were destined by divine mandate to colonize the entire North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

At that time, Samuel Morse, a successful artist, with the help of Joseph Henry, a physicist and inventor, decided to create a new invention: the electric telegraph and Morse Code. The idea of the telegraph was nothing new. During the French Revolution in the 1790s, the Revolutionary Government set up a series of towers using two wooden beams to signal visual messages across great distances. However, Morse’s new invention brought two critical innovations: it was relatively cheaper and faster than its competitors.  With approval from Congress and $30,000 ($981,000 in today’s money), Morse built the first telegraph line from Baltimore, MD, to Washington DC (41 miles) and, in 1844, sent the infamous telegraph message, “What hath God wrought.”  

Two years later, the U.S. invaded Mexico over a dispute about the border of the newly annexed Texas. The war lasted two years, and in the end, it gained the United States access to the Pacific. It made Mexico give up California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Oregon. Jackson Polk, the U.S. President then, wanted all of Mexico. Members of Congress worried that this would give the southern states new and disproportionately sized territory, giving them an edge over the North. Even with the new territory, tensions grew in the U.S. as the balance between free and slave states deteriorated. In this new battlefront, the telegraph played an important role. It is generally believed that Abraham Lincoln saw the power of high-speed communication as necessary to win the war.

After the war, the Western Expansion started earnestly with railroads and telegraph poles as its most important tools. With this expansion, a company rose to symbolize what telegraphy could do for the U.S.: Western Union. Originally founded as the New York and Mississippi Valley Telegraphy Company, it changed its name 5 years after its founding in 1856. The company became synonymous with the Western Expansion. It brought modernization to the Wild West, including services like stock tickers, machines that would print the stock exchange prices from New York to anywhere in the United States. Later, Western Union offered standardized time services that used telegraph lines to ensure clocks were on the correct time, depending on their time zone – an essential tool in keeping trains running on time and preventing collisions. Most famously, in 1871, Western Union provided money transfers through telegraph lines, a service they are still well-known for to this day.

Inside Western Union, the telegraph operators created a life of their own. This unique job created an interest in electromagnetism’s technical aspects, how telegraphy worked, and a distinctive language with abbreviations and particular rhythms to extract the most information possible through Morse Code. Here, they became obsessed with speed, how many words per minute they could type, and how to build a telegraph key that could tap faster.

In the early decades of this technology, figures like Alfred Vail established the culture around telegraphy. Being one of the first telegraph operators with Morse, Vail helped set up early lines and innovated several designs for sending keys. Another iconic figure in this new Wild West of telegraphy was Jesse Bunnell, who at age 17, set the speed record while sending a message on behalf of President Buchanan to Congress, averaging 32 words per minute for two hours. Bunnell was among the first telegraphers to be assigned service in the US Military Telegraph Corp. After the war, Bunnell was interested in creating new and improved telegraph equipment.

Telegraph operators had their own publications, the most famous being The Operator, where telegraph workers could share their technological innovations, best practices, and personal stories. It was particularly popular to share stories where operators would meet a potential date only to discover that they were not the person they said they were, or what we call today “catfishing.”

Telegraph operators also had fraternal organizations vital to them as a workforce, later evolving into what we now know as unions. The most famous was the Order of the Railroad Telegraphers, created in 1866, which would negotiate wages and working conditions. Unlike many other unions of the time, women were an accepted part of the profession. The Order of the Railroad Telegraphers lasted until 1965, when it changed its name to the Transportation, Communication, and Employees Union.

By the end of the 1800s, other technologies, such as the telephone and later teletype, wouldn’t require the expertise of a telegraph operator. This started changing the role of the people who worked at telegraph offices because there was no longer a need to know Morse Code, as the teletype could write out the message. Despite this, Western Union did not discontinue its telegraph services until 2006, marking 150 years of providing an essential service of communication that helped to change the Wild West into what we know today.

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