1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [130]
Without ceremony, the telegraphist handed back the pouch, the rider threw it across the saddle of a fresh mount, swung himself on top and was off again still westward, his precious cargo clutched again between his thighs: terse business letters from New York and Baltimore, minutely penned political dispatches from Washing-ton, reports on the latest Eastern prices of California bonds and California bullion. There was little room for anecdote or sentiment in a Pony Express pouch; each half ounce of mail cost its sender a five-dollar gold piece plus surcharges, and each rider could carry only ten pounds. Recipients slit open envelopes with a surgeon’s care and extracted leaves as thin as tissue paper, still smelling of sweat and dust and leather.4
Back up the trail at the river bend, the men and mules, too, had resumed their labor. Like the passing horseman, they had little time to spare. They carried with them, eastward, the promise of a future without ponies, without pouches, without onionskin paper. Only electrical impulses: weightless, instantaneous, smelling of nothing.
Congress had opened the way the previous summer, by enacting the Pacific Telegraph Act. This was guided discreetly to passage by a certain private gentleman from the East, Mr. Hiram Sibley of New York, who proved quite expert at ducking and running amid the legislative fusillades of sectional conflict, emerging safely downfield with the only major legislation of that entire miserable year.5 He had strong incentives to succeed. The final version of the act offered a federal subsidy of up to $40,000, along with other valuable considerations, to any company completing a transcontinental line within two years. Competing bids were invited; rival consortia formed. When the deadline for bids arrived in September, however, it appeared that all except one had been unexpectedly withdrawn at the last minute. That lone bid—asking the maximum subsidy, of course—happened to be in the name of Mr. Hiram Sibley of New York.6
Why all the competition withdrew was a mystery perhaps known only to Mr. Sibley and his business partners. These were not men who felt particularly constrained by the rules of gentlemanly fair play. Indeed, they were exactly the type of hard-fisted Yankees that Southerners were always complaining about. Several years earlier, for instance, they had set their eye on the New Orleans & Ohio line, the most profitable in the South. One of Mr. Sibley’s associates had shown up in Louisville, the northern terminus, and word quickly spread among the N.O.&O.’s owners that this Yankee interloper was scouting out the terrain, pricing poles, wiring coded messages to New York—in other words, clearly laying the groundwork for a rival line. In a cold panic, the Southerners signed a contract with Sibley for a relative pittance, effectively ceding him control of their company. It emerged later that the coded messages to New York had been mere gibberish; the whole “rival line” a ruse. And thus the N.O.&O. network had, like so many others, tumbled into the omnivorous maw of the Western Union.7
Still, whatever else you might say about Hiram Sibley and his ilk, they certainly knew how to get things done. Within weeks of receiving the Pacific telegraph contract, he had agents fanning out across the West. Lincoln had been elected; the South had seceded; Sibley