Here is surely a lonely post. For reasons connected with the maintenance
of the wires and the keeping open of communications, it is necessary to
have telegraph stations every forty or fifty miles, each with two or
three men and a dog team, and shelter cabins about half-way between
stations. A wind that blows a tree down in the narrow right-of-way cut
through the forest--for we were come to forest again--or a heavy
snowfall that loads branches until they fall across the wires, a post
that comes up out of its hole as the thawing of spring heaves the ground
around it, or the caving of the bank of a stream along which the line
passes--any one of a dozen such happenings anywhere along its thousand
miles of course, may put the entire inland telegraph system out of
operation; and the young men in whose section the interruption
occurs--they have a means of determining that--must get out at once,
find the seat of the trouble and repair it. In all sorts of weather,
unless the thermometer be below -40 deg., out they must go.

It may be doubted if any other army in the world ever constructed and
maintained a permanent telegraph line under such arduous conditions. It
has been the army's one contribution to Alaska, the one justification
for the enormous expense of maintaining army posts in the interior.
Indeed it is often said by those who feel keenly the neglect of the
territory by the general government that this telegraph system is the
one contribution of the United States to Alaska. It is certainly a great
public convenience and has assisted very materially in such development
as the country has made. The men of the signal-corps deserve great
credit for the faithful, dogged way in which they have carried out year
after year their difficult and hazardous work, and often and often the
weather-stressed traveller has been grateful for the hospitality which
their cabins have afforded him.

They have not been an unmixed blessing to the country; soldiers do not
usually represent the highest morale of the nation, and though the
signal-corps is in some respect a picked corps, yet the men are
soldiers, with many of the soldier characteristics. Too often a remote
telegraph station has been a little centre of drunkenness, gambling, and
debauchery with a little circumference of native men and women, and
while some of the officers of the corps have been willing and anxious to
do all in their power to suppress this sort of thing in their scatte