Prior to the coming of the telegraph, news was transmitted by mail that was carried by travelers, pony express, and then stages. The news could be weeks, even months, old before it reached Jacksonville. Even after Samuel Morse invented the telegraph in the 1830s and created the dot-dash-space Morse code to represent letters, numbers, and punctuations, it was May 24, 1844, before the first message was sent between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.— “What hath God wrought?” It was another 17 years before the first transcontinental telegraph system was completed, and 2 years more before Oregon and Jacksonville were linked to the telegraph.
Multiple challenges delayed the installation. The country was in the middle of the Civil War. The ship carrying the wire for the Oregon telegraph was wrecked off the coast; 200 miles of wire was lost and had to be reordered. Ownership of the telegraph rights changed hands. And once the telegraph reached as far as Yreka, the connecting line to Southern Oregon had to be strung over the Siskiyous.
Finally, by early December, the telegraph wire stretched within 20 miles of Jacksonville—only to have a major storm demolish 80 miles of the line. It was late January of 1864 before Jacksonville was finally connected by telegraph with Yreka. On January 22, 1864, the first message between California and Oregon was finally received.
Some years later, Judge William Colvig recalled the difference the telegraph made. “Before that, news generally was ancient history before it reached us, and it certainly relieved the monotony of pioneer life when news started coming with the swiftness of the lightning’s flash.”