1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [159]
ON JULY 4, 1861, a thousand miles from Fort Churchill—at Julesburg in the newly organized Colorado Territory—a crew of workmen raised the first pole at the eastern end of the transcontinental telegraph. On the same day, too, news went out that President Lincoln had just appointed John C. Frémont, newly returned from Europe, to command the Department of the West. He and his wife would set out as soon as possible for St. Louis.
Throughout that summer, two telegraph lines converged over the deserts and plains. As the termini drew closer, the route of the Pony Express grew shorter and shorter, until at last the swift horsemen were carrying messages across only the little distance between the wires. The connection was made in October at Salt Lake City; the indomitable Hiram Sibley and his partners had beaten Congress’s seemingly impossible deadline by more than a year. Within days, communications traffic was so heavy that operators began talking of the need for a second wire and even a third. “When once the Yankees get started,” an Ohio newspaper editor marveled, “it is hard for them to stop.”128
The honor of sending one of San Francisco’s first messages across the continent was accorded to the Reverend Thomas Starr King. His words raced eastward as dots and dashes, arriving thus at the office of the Boston Evening Transcript:
All hail! A new bond of union between Pacific and Atlantic! The lightning now goeth out of the west and shineth even in the east! Heaven preserve the republic, and bless old Boston from hub to rim!
The arc of the sun he had once so powerfully traced was now reinforced by a strand of copper filament.
Over the four years to come, as the war raged east of the Mississippi, more and more lines would be drawn across the West.
In 1862, Congress—suddenly liberated from sectional gridlock in its half-empty chamber—would pass the Homestead Act, promising 160 acres of federal land to any man or woman willing to settle it. In the autumn of the following year, the first lengths of the transcontinental railway were laid at Sacramento. Lines of new counties, farm boundaries, townships, and streets spread across the map, mere pencil markings that soon took shape on the landscape itself. Miles of rail fences followed, and the twin ruts of new wagon roads.
And across all of it, the wire—busier and busier, its indifferent electrons carrying speeches and sermons, grain prices and casualty lists, through mountain passes that the Pathfinder once had crossed.
* * *
*Expedition leaders named an especially prickly new species of hedgehog cactus Opuntia davisii in honor of the secretary of war.
*Joaquin Miller, later a great Western poet, was then a boy on an Ohio farm; he would later remember his father reading him Frémont’s reports aloud: “I never was so fascinated. I never grew so fast in my life.… I fancied I could see Frémont’s men, hauling cannon up the savage battlements of the Rocky Mountains, flags in the air, Frémont at the head, waving his sword, his horse neighing wildly in the mountain wind.… Now I began to be inflamed with a love for action, adventure, glory, and great deeds away out yonder under the path of the setting sun.” Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 2007), p. 47.
*The wild hunt, the German hunt,/For hangmen’s blood and for tyrants! / O dearest ones, weep not for us: / The land is free, the morning dawns, / Even though we won it in dying!
This song, “Lützows wilde Jagd,” dated from the German struggle against Napoleon in 1812–13 and had also been popular during the revolutions of 1848. Baron von Lützow was the dashing commander of a German cavalry corps. The description of the St. Louis volunteers singing “Lützows wilde Jagd” is in Heinrich Börnstein (Henry Boernstein), Memoirs of a Nobody: The Missouri Years of an Austrian Radical, ed. and trans. by Steven