1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [131]
The new line would follow an established route, the Central Overland Trail. It was the exact route, in fact, of the Pony Express, across the desert wastes and mountain passes of Utah and Nevada and over the Sierra Nevada into California. Not many years earlier, this country had been considered impassable wilderness. In the winter of 1844, the great Pathfinder himself, John C. Frémont, was hailed as the first white man to cross the Sierra when he and his band of explorers turned up, famished and half naked, on the western side. Two years later, the Donner party met its gruesome fate trying to follow in his tracks, and for a decade after, few others dared to try. But at the very end of the 1850s, private entrepreneurs and military engineers laid out and graded a new trail. By 1861, it had become a busy highway, the quickest and shortest overland route to California. Where frontiersmen had died in a trackless desert, fast stagecoaches now rumbled to and fro, carrying passengers, mail, and even a few tourists. Emigrant wagons passed by the thousands, their occupants pleasantly surprised to find the route lined with trading posts, grog shops, army hospitals, post offices, even hotels. Bridges and ferry crossings spanned the newly tamed rivers.9
That was how things were in the West as the Civil War began. Everywhere, it seemed, the Hiram Sibleys and their money were rushing in, along with throngs of lesser entrepreneurs—all those sutlers, tavern keepers, stagecoach owners, and ferrymen. Together, these ruthless and ambitious seekers were changing the continent, connecting city to city and town to town, drawing lines across the blankness of the country.
Indeed, Sibley’s own ambitions went beyond the continent, beyond even the hemisphere. His transcontinental telegraph was only the beginning. Soon, he hoped, he would continue the line up the Pacific coast, through Russian Alaska, and across Bering’s Strait, where he would connect with the czar’s engineers running their own line east from Moscow. Beyond Moscow: Berlin, Paris, London. Hiram Sibley was going to wire the world.10
And so it was that on May 27, 1861, a train of more than two hundred oxen, twenty-six wagons, and fifty men set out from Sacramento, onto the Central Overland Trail and across the Sierra, laden with coils of high-grade copper wire and crates of glass insulators shipped from back East. Hundreds of contractors had preceded them—those mule drivers along the Carson, for instance—to scour remote valleys for pole material. The route itself was mostly treeless, but they dragged trunks dozens or even hundreds of miles to it: the mighty Western Union bringing Birnam Wood to Dunsinane.11
A few weeks later, at Fort Churchill, they raised the first pole, to the top of which they had nailed an American flag. Tossing hats into the air, the men hailed this moment with a chorus of huzzas: three cheers for the telegraph and three cheers for the Union.12
“THERE ARE GRAVE DOUBTS at the hugeness of the land and whether one government can comprehend the whole.”13
So wrote Henry Adams in 1861, fretting over whether the sundered Union could—or even should—be restored. But young Adams, though he may have been to Naples and dined with Garibaldi, had never seen Nevada or supped with the likes of Hiram Sibley, let alone with sutlers and stagecoach drivers. (He had rarely been west of Cambridge, Massachusetts, actually.) He and many other Easterners knew little, really, of what the Union was—of what it had become. It had grown and changed too quickly.