The First Transcontinental Telegram: Wiring a Continent

How a federal subsidy, two construction crews, and a meeting of wires at Salt Lake City joined the Atlantic and Pacific coasts in October 1861 through the telegram— and why the Pony Express closed two days later.

On October 24, 1861, telegraph crews joined the eastern and western halves of a new line at Salt Lake City, completing the first telegraph connection between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.¹ Until then, the fastest overland way to send a message between Missouri and California was the Pony Express, whose riders carried mail between the two in about ten days to make the run.² Within hours of the line’s completion, a message from California was on its way to Washington.

That message was addressed to President Abraham Lincoln. The story of the line that carried it is a story about infrastructure, federal policy, and a republic fighting a civil war while wiring itself together.

A Continent Measured in Weeks

Before 1861, even the fastest mail between California and the eastern states took days rather than hours to arrive.¹ The Gold Rush and California’s admission as a state in 1850 made the problem more pressing, as a fast-growing population on the Pacific coast remained separated from the national capital by plains, mountains, and deserts.

Faster service arrived in stages. Beginning in April 1860, the Pony Express carried mail by horse-and-rider relay between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, an 1,800-mile route.² It was the fastest overland mail the country had, but it remained bound by the limits of horses and riders.

By then, the electric telegraph had been changing communication in the East for more than fifteen years. Samuel F. B. Morse sent his first message over an experimental line between Washington and Baltimore on May 24, 1844.³ He sent it from the room in the U.S. Capitol where the Supreme Court then met, to his assistant, Alfred Vail, in Baltimore.⁴ By 1861, telegraph networks served both the eastern states and California. What neither coast had was a line connecting the two.

A Missing Link, Not a Coast-to-Coast Line

The transcontinental telegraph was not built from Washington to San Francisco. What was missing in 1861 was a link between existing networks: a new line running west from Omaha, in Nebraska Territory, and east from Carson City, in Nevada Territory, to meet at Salt Lake City.¹ Once joined, it connected the telegraph system of the eastern states to California’s.

That framing matters because it explains how the work could be finished so quickly. The crews of 1861 were not wiring a continent from scratch. They were closing a gap of more than a thousand miles across the plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the Great Basin, where there were few settlements, few roads, and almost no timber.

Congress Sets the Terms

The federal government made that link possible. On June 16, 1860, President James Buchanan signed the Pacific Telegraph Act, which authorized a ten-year contract for a line to San Francisco at a cost to the United States of no more than $40,000 a year.⁵ The money came with conditions.

The government would have priority in the use of the line, and the line would be open to the use of all citizens of the United States on payment of regular charges.⁵ Those charges could not exceed three dollars for a single dispatch of ten words.⁵ The contractor could also use public land for stations, up to a quarter section at any one station.⁵

Other provisions reflected the government’s own interests. According to the National Park Service, the act called for repair stations on average no more than fifteen miles apart, allowed the military to connect its posts to the line, and let the Smithsonian Institution, the Coast Survey, and the National Observatory use it free of charge for scientific purposes.¹

Hiram Sibley of the Western Union Telegraph Company had pressed for a transcontinental line even when his own board was hesitant, and Western Union won the government contract after other bidders withdrew.¹ The company organized two firms to do the building: the Pacific Telegraph Company, working west from Omaha, and the Overland Telegraph Company, working east from Carson City.¹

Building Across the Plains and the Great Basin

Edward Creighton, an Omaha merchant, surveyed the route west from Omaha in the winter of 1860–61 and then led the eastern construction.⁶ Work began in early July 1861.⁶ Crews strung between three and eight miles of line a day.¹

The hardest problem was often the poles themselves. Much of the route crossed the nearly treeless Great Plains and Great Basin, so timber had to be found and hauled long distances.¹ Creighton arranged with Brigham Young, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for Latter-day Saint workers to supply poles.¹ Hundreds of oxen hauled supplies across the plains, and materials for the western crews were shipped from the East Coast around Cape Horn.¹

The central stretch of new construction, more than 1,000 miles between Fort Kearny in Nebraska Territory and Fort Churchill in Nevada, required some 27,000 poles set about seventy-five yards apart.⁶ Figures for the line’s total length and pole count vary among accounts, depending on where each one measures the new construction from and to.

The eastern crews reached Salt Lake City on October 18, 1861.⁶ The National Park Service notes that sources differ on that date, but agrees that the line was completed on October 24, when the Overland Telegraph Company’s crews arrived from the west.¹ From the first post hole to the final connection, the work had taken about four months.⁶

The First Messages

The first messages over the new line did not wait for the coast-to-coast connection. Once the eastern section reached Salt Lake City, it could carry messages from Utah to Washington. On October 20, 1861, Frank Fuller, acting governor of the Utah Territory, telegraphed congratulations to President Lincoln, assuring him of Utah’s loyalty to the Union.⁷ Lincoln replied the same day, calling the line’s arrival at Salt Lake City a hopeful sign for the stability and union of the country and returning Utah’s congratulations.⁷

On the evening of October 24, with the western section joined, Brigham Young sent the first telegram from Salt Lake City to San Francisco, addressed to H. W. Carpentier, president of the Overland Telegraph Company.¹

That same evening, the first message to cross the continent went to the president. Stephen J. Field, chief justice of the California Supreme Court, sent it on behalf of the people of California in the temporary absence of the state’s governor.⁸

The message congratulated Lincoln on the line’s completion and pledged California’s support for the federal government.¹ Field wrote that the new connection would “be the means of strengthening the attachment which binds both the East and the West to the Union.”⁶ He closed by promising that Californians would stand by the government “under all fortunes.”⁹

According to the National Park Service, the message was sent at 7:40 in the evening of October 24 and received in Washington at 11:30 the next morning.¹ The message’s purpose was political as much as celebratory. Six months into the Civil War, the loyalty of a distant, gold-producing state mattered to the Union government, and Field used the first transcontinental telegram to pledge it.

Setting the Record Straight

Popular retellings of this story, including an earlier version of this article, tend to compress it. A few points are worth stating directly.

Lincoln did not reply “What hath God wrought?” The earlier version of this article reported that Lincoln answered Field with Samuel Morse’s famous phrase. No reliable source consulted for this revision documents any reply from Lincoln to Field, and none records him using those words. The phrase belongs to Morse’s demonstration of May 24, 1844. Taken from the Bible, Numbers 23:23, it had been suggested to Morse by Annie Ellsworth, the young daughter of a friend.³ The claim that Lincoln repeated it in 1861 appears to conflate the two events.

Lincoln’s documented telegraph reply that week went to Utah. His October 20 answer to Frank Fuller, described above, is the exchange the available record supports.⁷

Accounts differ on where and when Field’s message was sent. The National Park Service places Field in Sacramento and dates the message to the evening of October 24.¹ Other accounts place him in San Francisco.⁸ Some date the message to October 25.⁹ This article follows the National Park Service chronology.

“First” depends on what is being counted. Fuller’s telegram reached Lincoln days before the line was complete, over the eastern section alone.⁷ Young’s was the first sent west from Salt Lake City over the finished line. Field’s is the one remembered as the first message to cross the continent from coast to coast.

The End of the Pony Express

The Pony Express operated for only about eighteen months.² Two days after the telegraph lines were joined, on October 26, 1861, the service officially closed.¹⁰ Its last run came several weeks later, on November 20, 1861.¹¹ A relay of horses and riders could not compete with a wire.

The Pony Express has lasted far longer in memory than it did in operation. Its brief life is a reminder of how quickly the telegraph changed expectations: a service that had been the fastest in the country in the spring of 1860 was obsolete by the fall of 1861.

The Wire and the War

The line’s completion mattered to the Union government for the reasons Field’s message made explicit. In the first year of the war, communication with the Pacific coast that was nearly instantaneous by the standards of the day reduced the risk that distance alone would loosen California’s ties to Washington.

The war also changed how the government used the telegraph. As the conflict went on, mobile telegraph stations and hastily strung wires began to connect scattered military units.³ Lincoln became a regular presence in the War Department’s telegraph office near the White House, where he read dispatches from the field and sent messages to his commanders.¹² Those messages gave a president a new and more direct line to his armies than any of his predecessors had known.

For business, the change was practical. Market news, prices, and orders could now move between the coasts faster than any horse or ship could carry them. The commercial effects of the 1861 line itself are not well measured, but economists studying a later link offer a sense of what faster information could do. After the transatlantic cable connected the United States and Britain in 1866, the average gap between cotton prices in New York and Liverpool fell by more than a third, and price differences between the two markets became much less volatile.¹³

The telegraph also helped railroads coordinate trains on single-track lines, reducing the need to build parallel tracks. One economic historian has estimated the efficiency gains from this development at around 7 percent of GDP by 1890.¹³ That estimate reflects a broad change in railroad operations, not the effect of the 1861 transcontinental line alone.

The Man Who Sent the Message

Field’s place in the story did not end in 1861. Lincoln appointed him to the Supreme Court of the United States, and he took the judicial oath on May 20, 1863.¹⁴ He served until December 1, 1897, a tenure of more than thirty-four years.¹⁴ The California judge who sent the first message across the continent went on to spend more than three decades on the nation’s highest court.

Legacy and Civic Relevance

The original route did not last long in its first form. In 1869, after the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad, the lines were moved to run alongside its tracks.¹⁵

The first transcontinental telegram is usually remembered as a triumph of technology. It is equally a story about public policy and private enterprise. Congress did not build the line. Instead, it set the terms under which a private company could: a decade of subsidy, the use of public land, priority for government messages, a cap on prices, and access for all citizens.⁵

Those terms raised questions that did not end with the telegraph. Who should pay for a network that serves the whole country? Who may use it, and at what price? What should the public receive in return for public support? Americans would return to versions of those questions with the railroads, the telephone, the interstate highways, and the internet, and they have answered them differently in different eras.

The Erie Canal posed a similar question a generation earlier. Completed in 1825, the canal connected the Atlantic seaboard with the Great Lakes and helped bind the interior to eastern markets. Thirty-six years later, the telegraph did something comparable for information, carrying words in hours across a distance that had taken weeks. Both showed how a single piece of infrastructure could draw distant regions closer together, and both depended on decisions made by governments as well as by builders.

A companion article, The Erie Canal: The Waterway That Connected a Growing Nation, explores how an earlier generation of infrastructure connected a growing country. For the territorial growth that made a transcontinental network necessary, see James K. Polk and the Expansion of the United States.

Endnotes

1. National Park Service, “The Transcontinental Telegraph.” https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-transcontinental-telegraph.htm
2. U.S. Postal Service, “Pony Express,” Postal Facts. https://facts.usps.com/pony-express-history/
3. Library of Congress, “Today in History — May 24: What Hath God Wrought?” https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/may-24/
4. Samuel Finley Breese Morse, “First telegraphic message — 24 May 1844,” Samuel Finley Breese Morse Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/mmorse000107/
5. An Act to facilitate Communication between the Atlantic and Pacific States by Electric Telegraph (Pacific Telegraph Act), ch. 137, 12 Stat. 41, approved June 16, 1860. U.S. Statutes at Large, via GovInfo (U.S. Government Publishing Office). https://www.govinfo.gov/link/statute/12/41
6. WyoHistory.org (Wyoming State Historical Society), “The Telegraph Crosses Wyoming, 1861.” https://wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/telegraph-crosses-wyoming-1861
7. David J. Kent, “Lincoln Receives First Transcontinental Telegraph Message,” October 24, 2019. https://davidjkent-writer.com/2019/10/24/lincoln-receives-first-transcontinental-telegraph-message/
8. RealClearPublicAffairs, “Great American Stories: Wiring a Continent,” October 24, 2023. https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/articles/2023/10/24/great_american_stories_wiring_a_continent_988261.html
9. “The First Transcontinental Telegram Was Sent to DC 155 Years Ago,” Washingtonian, October 25, 2016. https://washingtonian.com/2016/10/25/1861-first-transcontinental-telegraph-was-sent-to-dc/
10. Library of Congress, “Today in History — October 24: The Transcontinental Telegraph and the End of the Pony Express.” https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/october-24/
11. National Park Service, Pony Express National Historic Trail, “Pony Express Trail Junior Ranger.” https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/pony-express-trail-junior-ranger.htm
12. Tom Wheeler, Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War (New York: Collins, 2006).
13. Helen Fessenden, “The Great Telegraph Breakthrough of 1866,” Econ Focus, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Second Quarter 2018. https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2018/q2/economic_history
14. Supreme Court of the United States, “Justices 1789 to Present.” https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/members_text.aspx
15. Thomas C. Jepsen, “Telegraph,” Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.med.045.html

Image Sources

• First Telegraphic Message, May 24, 1844
  Morse, Samuel Finley Breese. First telegraphic message—24 May. 24 May, 1844. Image. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/mmorse000107/>. Samuel Finley Breese Morse Papers, Manuscript Division. Public domain (1844).
• Justice Stephen J. Field
  Justice Stephen J. Field. Photograph, between 1855 and 1865. Brady-Handy Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Reproduction number LC-DIG-cwpbh-00822. No known restrictions on publication. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2017896843/>.
• Pony Express Route, April 3, 1860 – October 24, 1861
  Jackson, William Henry, Howard R. Driggs, and American Pioneer Trails Association. Pony express route April 3, – October 24, 1861. [Bayside, New York: American Pioneer Trails Association, 1960] Map. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2004629238/>. Geography and Map Division. Library of Congress rights advisory: no known U.S. copyright restrictions; rights assessment is the user’s responsibility.
• U.S. Military Telegraph Construction Corps, April 1864
  O’Sullivan, Timothy H., photographer, and Alexander Gardner. U.S. Military telegraph construction corps / negative by T.H. O’Sullivan, positive by A. Gardner. April 1864, published c1866. Photograph (albumen print). Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/pnp/ppmsca/12500/12583v.jpg>. Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-12583. Published in Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, v. 2, no. 62. Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication.