brought into intimate and constant communication with the loyal
States, and made to feel the mighty pulsations of the National heart, in
this heroic and eventful crisis of the Republic's history.

But this not all, nor the best. The old Congress, among its many wise
and beneficent measures, enacted that the government should aid whatever
company would for the lowest annual stipend establish and maintain a
line of Electric Telegraph from Missouri or Iowa to California. A
contract was accordingly made with the Western Union Telegraph Company,
under which active operations were commenced last spring, under surveys
previously made. The grand train of four hundred men, one hundred great
prairie wagons, and six or eight hundred mules or oxen,--a portion of
the cattle for the subsistence of the party,--started westward from
Omaha, Nebraska, in June last, and on the 4th of July commenced pushing
on the construction at the point which it had already reached, some two
or three hundred miles further west in the valley of the Platte. It may
give to some an idea of the destitution of timber on the great American
Desert, to know that the greatest distance over which poles had to be
drawn for the elevation of the wires of this telegraph was _only_ 240
miles! Fresh teams were from time to time dispatched on the track of the
working carts with additional supplies, and the line was pushed through
to Salt Lake City by the 18th of October. Six days afterward, that point
was reached by a like party, working eastward from Carson Valley, on
behalf of the United Telegraph Companies of California, and the young
Hercules by the Pacific vied with the infantile but vigorous territories
this side of her in flashing to Washington and New York assurances of
their invincible devotion to the indivisible American Union. So great
and difficult an enterprise was probably never before so expeditiously
and happily achieved in the experience of mankind.

The distance--some 1,500 miles--over which a working line of electric
telegraph has thus been constructed and put in operation in the course
of a single season is one of the minor obstacles surmounted. The want of
timber is far more serious. From the sink of Carson River, less than one
hundred miles this side of the Sierra, to the point at which the
construction of the line was commenced on the Platte as aforesaid, there
is no place at which a tree can fall across the fragile wires; there is
probably less t