Telegraphies: Indigeneity, Identity, and

Nation in America’s Nineteenth-Century

Virtual Realm Kay Yandell
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Telegraphies
 Telegraphies
Indigeneity, Identity, and Nation in
America’s Nineteenth-​Century Virtual Realm

K AY YA N D E L L

1
 1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Yandell, Kay, 1968–author.
Title: Telegraphies : indigeneity, identity, and nation in America’s
nineteenth-century virtual realm / Kay Yandell.
Other titles: Indigeneity, identity, and nation in America’s
nineteenth-century virtual realm
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2019] |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018013259 | ISBN 9780190901042 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9780190901066 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190901059 (updf)
Subjects: LCSH: American literature—19th century—History and criticism. |
Telecommunication in literature. | Telegraph in literature. | National characteristics,
American, in literature.
Classification: LCC PS217.T53 Y36 2018 | DDC 810.9/003—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018013259

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For Auster-​Aurelio Unole Yandell-​Teuton, born 20 August 2009
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction: A Virtual Realm in Morse’s Dot and Dash  1

1. Moccasin Telegraph: Telecommunication across Native

America  24

2. Crossing Border Wires: Telegraphers’ Literatures and the State of

American Union  56

3. Corsets with Copper Wire: Victorian America’s Cyborg

Feminists  81

4. Emily Dickinson’s Telegrams from God  105

5. Engineering Eden in Walt Whitman’s “Passage to India”  129

Conclusion: Hawthorne’s Celestial Telegraph and the Cycle of

History  158

Notes  177
Index  201

vii
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’ve enjoyed the good fortune to have many colleagues, friends, and family
members who have shared their time and thoughts with me as I’ve written this
book. Roger Gilbert, Laura Donaldson, and especially Laura Brown read first
drafts of chapters and gave detailed responses, and I thank them very much for
their guidance.
David Zimmerman, Roberta Hill, Jeffrey Steele, and especially Russ
Castronovo read various drafts and offered meticulous reports that improved
the book before I sent it for press review. Russ Castronovo also helped me un-
derstand the market demands of book publishing in ways that undoubtedly
caused publishers to receive my manuscript more warmly.
My tireless advocate, editor, and friend Craig Werner offered insight on the
manuscript as a whole, coached me, as he has coached so many scholars, through
the editorial process, and simply improved my life greatly by always being there
when I needed him.
I must especially thank Priscilla Wald for accepting a version of ­chapter 1 for
publication in American Literature; the prize committees who awarded that essay
the Don D. Walker Prize for Best Essay Published in Western American Literary
Studies, and honorable mention for the Norman Foerster Prize for Best Article
Published in American Literature of course made me feel just wonderful, and also
helped to garner interest for the larger work.
I thank my wonderful English Department colleagues at the University of
Arkansas. Conversations with fellow Americanists Lisa Hinrichsen and Susan
Marren never fail to sharpen my thinking. The prize committee who awarded me
the Ray Lewis White Publications Award contributed research funds that I used
toward this and subsequent books. Dorothy Stephens I must thank for more
help than I can name here, probably more than I can remember that I owe her.
The readers for Oxford University Press offered suggestions for changes to the
manuscript which, though they differed greatly from each other, helped me take

ix
x Ack nowl edg ments

the book in new directions that surprised even me. Sarah Pirovitz and Abigail
Johnson have been absolute godsends, and their work to convey information
with and from my anonymous press readers, and to organize book production,
assured that the book reached publication.
My final thanks go, as always, to my beloved late parents, Bobby and Brian
Yandell, and to my husband Sean Teuton, for their love and support. Sean, to-
gether you and I have done what at times seemed impossible: built two aca-
demic careers while raising four glorious children. Together, there is apparently
little we cannot accomplish.
Telegraphies
 Introduction
A Virtual Realm in Morse’s Dot and Dash

In 1844, Samuel Morse (1791–​1872) strung a wire between Washington, DC,

and Baltimore, Maryland, and sent America’s first official telegram. From that
day in Baltimore, Americans conceived in the electromagnetic telegraph a so-
cial revolution as sweeping as those produced by the printing press in the fif-
teenth century or by the internet in the twentieth century.1 As human speech
went electric, nineteenth-​century Americans perceived it to enter another dis-
embodied electric realm, a realm held aloft either metaphorically or physically
by the new telegraph wires. This realm of perceived instantaneous, disembodied
electric talk, for which nineteenth-​century writers used an array of terms, we
might today productively invoke as nineteenth-​century America’s own progen-
itor virtual realm.2 The body of literature inspired by and imagining this earlier
manifestation of the virtual realm constitutes one subject of this book.
Though many of the era’s authors represent his work as revolutionary, in
technical terms Morse invented neither the telegraph nor the electric telegraph.
With the help of scientists who knew better than he how to construct the de-
vice, he did, however, adapt existing technology to create a machine that set new
telecommunication standards, first for the Americas and then for the world.
Morse’s machine eventually predominated because of its simplicity. Its basic
form consists of a single wire with metal contacts at each end. These contacts
separate or touch to open or close the electrical circuit, producing either silence
when the circuit opens, or a buzzing sound when it closes. Using Morse Code,
an operator turns this buzzing sound on and off to produce a series of long and
short buzzes, called dashes and dots respectively. A few dots or dashes combine
to form the code for each letter of the alphabet, number, or punctuation mark.
An operator next assembles the symbols into words and sentences. By modern
standards, of course, Morse composition entails an agonizingly slow process, but
by the standards of the 1850s, Americans of all ranks stood in wonder at this

1
2 Introduction

miracle machine, ubiquitously touted to speak so rapidly across such inconceiv-

able distances as to have “eliminated the boundaries of time and space.”
In social terms, it was the electromagnetic telegraph’s relative speed of com-
munication that incited what we now call a telecommunications revolution. In
1841, for example, public information took an average of eight days to travel
from New York to Detroit, ten days to move from New York to Chicago, and it
typically moved out to smaller towns only after arriving at metropolitan hubs.3
As the wires spread worldwide, however, communications between New York
and London, which had previously taken ten days as letters arrived by ship, by
1858 might take only a few minutes. As the transcontinental telegraph replaced
the Pony Express beginning in 1861, U.S. citizens gained a new, if short-​lived,
sense of national identity: telegraph pioneer James D. Reid, for instance,
celebrates a new conception of national union girded by Morse’s “magic belt of
fire” that united the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.4 Telegraphy radically changed
not only the practices of whole societies on a mass scale, but also the awareness
of individuals from all social locations. As ­chapter 3 of this study will treat in
detail, because they desperately needed the skilled labor, telegraph companies
opened the position of telegrapher to women, allowing many women previously
unimagined opportunities for financial support, travel, and access to govern-
ment, business, and personal news that many men of the era did not possess.
Businessmen had immediately to change their financial theories to accommo-
date stock-​exchange information and orders arriving “instantaneously” from
afar. As the wires transmitted each newspaper story entering citizens’ homes
more directly from a reporter on the scene, national news began to take prece-
dence over local news, the political opinions accompanying news became more
homogenous nationwide, and newspaper prose itself became more declarative
and truncated to avoid the modification errors that more periodic sentences
could cause telegraphers. Telegraph instruments filled city office buildings as
the wires initiated new standards for business and government communica-
tions, and though personal telegrams remained expensive, they decreased in
relative cost as the century progressed. By the 1880s, middle-​class Americans
commonly telegraphed personal news requiring a quick response, and as the
telegraphers’ writings investigated in c­ hapter 2 show, office workers’ use of com-
pany machines for personal communication insured that electric speech became
accessible to telegraphically skilled members of the working class as well. One
telegrapher explains his personal use of company lines to speak with his faraway
sweetheart after hours: she “bribed the burly porter . . . to lend [her]. . . a key”
to the building, and then the lovers communicate by listening to the beeping
sounder but without using the ticker tape that records messages in written
Morse: “[I listened] off the Morse instrument without letting the paper run.”5 As
­chapter 2 will detail, however, the physical working conditions of telegraphers
 Int roduc tion 3

remained harsh: operators worked ten-​and twelve-​hour days. Companies held

railroad telegraphers responsible for large amounts of cash arriving by train, and
fined or fired them if they were robbed. These and other abuses cause us better
to understand the second half of the nineteenth century—​the age of telegraph
expansion—​as the great age of worker organization and violent corporate sup-
pression, a fact voluminously treated in what, for the purposes of this study,
I refer to as telegraph literature.
This book analyzes telegraph literature—​the fiction, poetry, social critique,
and autobiography that experiences of telegraphy inspired authors from vastly
different social locations to create throughout mid-​and late nineteenth-​century
America. The possibilities afforded by the telegraphic virtual realm inspired nu-
merous authors to explore how this seemingly instantaneous, disembodied, na-
tionwide speech, its accompanying truncated and coded telegram form, and the
physical web of copper wires it spread over the American continent challenged
American conceptions of self, text, place, nation, and God. Canonical American
authors, including Horatio Alger, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, joined such lesser known authors as
Ella Thayer, Lida Churchill, and Sarah Winnemucca to imagine in their writings
the import of telegraphic speech. The chapters that follow investigate a substan-
tial and diverse but underexamined body of nineteenth-​century American lit-
erature about different types of telegraphs; these literatures nonetheless have
enough in common that I find it productive to group them as their own telegraph
literature subgenre. Authors of telegraph literature craft what I have called their
“progenitor virtual realm,” a proliferation of alternative disembodied worlds, fre-
quently imagined as especially utopic or dystopic. Such alternative worlds I term
disembodied technotopias. Telegraph literature often envisions its virtual realm as
a sort of laboratory in which to test new hypotheses of place making, personal
identity, and political transformation. Authors and readers of telegraph litera-
ture often seek to enact their virtual-​realm technotopias in the physical world,
in ways that stretch many current critical definitions of nineteenth-​century iden-
tity performance and political imagination. Nineteenth-​century authors writing
about Morse’s machine celebrate the telegraph’s ability to unite speakers “in-
stantaneously” across vast distances, in new and specifically user-​created virtual
worlds. By analyzing the discourse created within these virtual worlds, I hope to
add new dimensions to Elaine Scarry’s definitions of the verbal arts: though they
“are almost wholly devoid of actual sensory content,” the verbal arts “somehow
do acquire the vivacity of actual perceptual objects,” or, if we admit telegraphic
virtual speech as an art, even of extraperceptual objects in a world where objects
and characters potentially escape the laws of the physically possible.6 Telegraphic
interlocutors often perceived their virtual speech acts to occur for the first time
in ways unlocatable within such traditional communication modes as embodied
4 Introduction

face, age, ethnicity, gender, class, voice, accent, location, or even disembodied
signature or handwriting. Many authors of telegraph literature, this book argues,
thus actively appropriated the nineteenth-​century virtual realm as its own sort
of disembodied second life, as a sort of impromptu theatrical stage whose virtual
sets and dramatis personae—​prototypes perhaps of a later era’s online avatars—​
could not only be manipulated by their users, but could also perform as exper-
imental selves that actors could pull down from their virtual worlds to model
new forms of subjectivity in an embodied and geographically bound, but often
equally idealized, young nation.
The following chapters’ individual arguments interlock to access from dif-
ferent angles the high political stakes that repeatedly arise throughout telegraph
literature. For example, nineteenth-​century American authors imagined the vir-
tual realm in many ways, but recurringly as a site of competition for control over
social constructions of indigeneity, identity, and community in a young nation.
Some telegraph authors, for example, imagined the virtual realm specifically
through analogies of place, as a sort of nation. They often imagine this virtual lit-
erary nation as analogous to the U.S. nation, complete with nineteenth-​century
desires for western lands and the attendant justifications of U.S. imperialism.
Indeed, the telegraph literature this book studies emerged from a historical
moment that made a primary project of wresting American land from Native
Americans.7 This book argues that, perhaps as a result of the era’s settlement-​
building projects, some authors of telegraph literature tended to test in their vir-
tual nations what they conceived as a new sense of place through which better
to connect with recently acquired and inhabited, and therefore potentially
alien, embodied American lands. To do so, this book argues, some telegraph
literatures sought to spread distinctly mythicized European American stories,
alongside U.S. histories, through the wires being strung across otherwise un-
known American geographies. Perhaps because telegraph literature so often
specifically treats relationships to land, however, the new myths spread via tel-
egraph, and became monumentalized in telegraph literature, in ways surpris-
ingly often designed to emulate, and simultaneously to overwrite, the similarly
orally disseminated literatures informing the sense of place of the land’s previous
Native American inhabitants.
This book seeks to balance attention to such imperialistic, racialized, or gen-
dered impulses in telegraph literature by emphasizing other writers who use
long-​distance communication modes in the service of colonial resistance, who
infiltrate Morse’s own discourse networks to empower minority communities,
or who literarily reclaim telegraphic operation to redress past wrongs. While
Walt Whitman, for example, might celebrate telegraphic organization of colonial
settlement (see ­chapter 5), Nathaniel Hawthorne imagines telegraphic networks
that force Americans to admit and redress their ancestors’ past land thefts (see
 Int roduc tion 5

the conclusion). To imperialist technotopias imagining that telegraphy can dis-

seminate their nation’s origin myths and thus sacralize settlers’ connections to
American lands, this study contrasts literatures presenting Native Americans’
own visions of telegraphy. As ­chapter 1 will treat in more detail, long before non-​
Native settlers arrived, American Native peoples used extensive and powerful
telecommunication systems to enact their own political goals, and to carry the
mythic stories that attach their own histories to American lands. These previously
existing telecommunication systems, which telegraph literature sometimes refer
to as the moccasin telegraph, vied with and sometimes bested Morse telegraphy
along the frontier, even as Native peoples simultaneously appropriated Morse
telegraphy toward their own political ends.
Telegraph literature also implicitly debates the ways that users might stabilize
or challenge identity—​with its attendant hierarchies of region, class, ethnicity, or
gender—​through their use of the virtual realm. Some authors theorize the social
purpose of electric speech by imagining that traditional definitions of commu-
nity and personal identity inhere within the new virtual realm. Such insistence
on stable identity hierarchies within intertwined virtual and physical new worlds
might arise as a response to the panic of anxiety and hope that emerged in con-
sideration of the virtual realm’s power fundamentally to alter all formulations
of American identity. Within telegraph literature’s self-​conscious remaking of
place in a new America, therefore, this book investigates an alternative problem-
atic within technotopias that hypothesize radically new formations of subjec-
tivity and community to argue, not only that speakers theorize and practice new
identities in the virtual realm, but also that the perceived disembodied nature
of the virtual enables new conceptions of what can count as an identity, poten-
tially in ways that transcend the bounds of the previously imagined possible.
Once technotopically conceived, such new subjectivities could nonetheless be
enacted to varying degrees in the physical world of a burgeoning nation.
Concerns surrounding virtual identity seem to pervade telegraph literature
in response to authors’ awareness that one’s choice of online persona and com-
munity directly affects real-​world power relations. While stressing the ephem-
eral, unlocatable nature of this virtual realm, then, authors of the technotopic
virtual nonetheless recognized the earth-​shaking power that decisions made
there had on lives socially located in the physical world. We see this influence in
such examples as the following, in which by dominating the virtual realm, social
elites can determine what even nonusers of the telegraph learn about their world
through the newspapers.
Beginning in 1846, only two years after Morse’s first public telegraph demon-
stration, the heads of the major New York newspapers held a series of meetings
to secure their respective market shares against several newer, cheaper, more sa-
lacious newspapers that threatened to overtake the city’s news markets. “Where
6 Introduction

were these meetings held?” historians of the events later asked. “Nowhere,” they
were told. “Was it difficult to convene meetings between newspaper moguls of
celebrity status?” “No,” answered the founders, because they rarely physically
convened. Rather, the newspaper leaders met in the progenitor virtual realm, via
the very telegraph network—​thereafter called the Associated Press (AP) Wire
Network—​that soon assured their market dominance by allowing their collec-
tive to release news earlier than the smaller papers. More importantly, the AP
wire network allowed these editors to guide interpretations of news—​what we
today commonly call “spin”—​to homogenize public opinion of events, creating
what Menahem Blondheim identifies as a “monopoly of knowledge.”8 Only two
years after Morse’s first demonstrational line, then, the powerful had largely
appropriated the telegraphic virtual for their own political motives, attempting,
as James Carey and Harold Innis observe, to “determine the entire world view
of a people,” to create “an official view of reality which can constrain and control
human action.”9 But even as America’s predominant telegraph network increas-
ingly enmeshed the continent, telegraph systems outgrew their builders’ desires
for complete corporate or governmental control. Resistant American identities
of all sorts infiltrated telegraphic discourse with vigor and imagination and,
often, with surprising success.
Having addressed some of the main political stakes that recur throughout
telegraph literature, I now address the historicity of the modern internet terms
that I invoke as lenses through which to view the telegraphic literary and so-
cial revolution. Some recent critics have viewed telegraphic speech modes
through descriptions we more typically reserve for its great-​grandchild, the in-
ternet. In his history of British and other historical telegraphs, journalist Tom
Standage, in fact, dubs nineteenth-​century telegraphy the “Victorian Internet.”
Readers will have noticed that this book, too, sometimes retroactively applies
internet terms—​virtual realm, the Web, online identity, avatars, chat rooms—​
metaphorically to nineteenth-​century telegraphic speech forums, in instances
that are in some aspects necessarily anachronistic. I do not seek within the
bounds of this study precisely to delineate how appropriately or inappropri-
ately such terms parallel telegraphic speech practices or perceptions in any
given literary work or historical example. Rather, while I fully invite readers to
gauge the extent to which specific telegraphic interactions converge with or di-
verge from internet discourse, I invoke such terms more because they do in so
many instances seem to align with nineteenth-​century perceptions of telegraphic
speech, and because they allow first-​generation internet readers, fully aware
that the Web has performed a paradigm shift in our own worldviews, better to
envision the shock, wonder, and excitement similarly experienced by the first
generations of telegraphic speakers. Other recent critics more frequently apply
virtual-​age terminology to nineteenth-​century literature to refer to characters’
 Int roduc tion 7

interior worlds as virtual realities or to fictions written about a physical landmark

as that site’s virtual existence.10 My study differs from such considerations of the
virtual in nineteenth-​century literature in that I am investigating a phenomenon
much closer to our own era’s daily encounter with the virtual—​a specifically
technologically accessed and user-​created fantasy world in which one nominally
speaks in real time and in which one’s virtual identity potentially exceeds the
physical boundaries of the otherwise experientially possible. In so doing, I en-
gage the ways that use of the telegraphic virtual drastically alters both everyday
behavior and human consciousness in the literature of mid-​and late nineteenth-​
century America.
My arguments for how the nineteenth-​century virtual changed American
literature also provide an exception to the predominant—​and I think equally
valid—​readings that locate in telegraphy the birth of a fractured modern con-
sciousness and of modernist aesthetic movements. Many current critiques em-
phasize telegraphic speech as the instigator of such modern social problems as
performance decline while multitasking, attention deficit disorder, increased
physical disability, and a preference for mediated over personal intimacy.
Friedrich Kittler reads alienation in nineteenth-​century mass media that intro-
duce “the irruption of the mechanism in the realm of the word.” For Maggie
Jackson, telegraphic “experimentation with mediated experience and the con-
trol of perception has helped inure us to a world of fragmented, diffused, and
manipulated attention.”11 Sherry Turkle demonstrates that we choose mediated
communications over personal interactions to create the illusion of companion-
ship without the emotional demands of friendship.12
Kittler’s association of mechanized speech forms with modernist aes-
thetics redounds throughout current criticism of the telegraph. Theorists
of telegraphy’s effect on literature often underscore the role of mechanized
transmissions on formations of more intensely realist forms and perceptions,
and of fractured modernist ontologies and aesthetics. For Richard Menke, one
“powerful expression of . . . media shifts . . . is . . . fictional realism.” Mark Goble
investigates “the way that modernist expression wants to wire bodies into
circuits.” Jennifer Raab names as “telegraphic” the “fragmented transmission”
and “particularly modern character” of some nineteenth-​century American
travel writing.13 Although these equally valid studies form helpful delineating
contexts for my own, my study traces a different impulse within telegraph liter-
ature, one in which writers romanticize telegraphic form and imagine for teleg-
raphy the power to create idealized new worlds. My emphasis on such distinctly
romantic aesthetics of much American telegraph literature to build utopias for
subsequent enactment in the physical world sets Telegraphies apart from many
recent understandings of the effect of telegraphy and related technologies on
literature.
8 Introduction

Having delineated some of this study’s major approaches and structuring

concerns, I’d now like to give an instance of the sort of highly romanticized and
politicized technotopia we frequently find in nineteenth-​century American tel-
egraph literature. This fantasy of telegraphically enabled control over American
land, resistant ethnic groups, and women’s social roles serves as a model of the
imperialist technotopias that I will reference throughout this study, but it also
stands as precisely the sort of fantasy that the more liberatory literatures treated
later in the book will seek directly to resist.

Imperialist Technotopias on the

American Frontier
As John Crawford (1847–​1917) recovered at an army hospital from his Civil War
battle wounds, his nurses taught him to read and write. After the war, Crawford
published poems and stories while working as a soldier in the Indian Wars and
a performer in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and he developed a literary ca-
reer as a self-​described “U.S. Cavalry Scout Poet.” “Captain Jack” Crawford’s
1894 serialized fiction “Carrie” opens with what its first-​person narrator, Fred
Saunders, describes as an “enigmatical” relationship between himself and the
eponymous object of his affection. “I found myself falling in love with her,” he
says, “yet I had not the least tangible idea of her personal appearance, and knew
not whether her voice was soft and musical or . . . harsh and disagreeable . . . . This
may all seem enigmatical to the reader, but will assume an aspect of entire plau-
sibility in the light of the fact that she and I were telegraph operators at widely
separated stations on a western railway.”14
The story’s first paragraph introduces to nineteenth-​century readers the mys-
tery of how Fred can fall in love with a woman he “had not met”; the second
paragraph, quoted here, solves the mystery as readers realize with pleasure that
the pair consort in a way they could not have guessed—​by telegraph. This mys-
tery can exist at all, and can inspire what the story presents as a novel plotline,
because telegraphers Carrie and Fred find their disembodied love in a moment
when, in the minds of most Americans, talk itself has transformed forever. As
the story enacts Crawford’s fantasies for telegraphic control—​of gender, indi-
geneity, class, and imperialism—​it neatly registers many major nexuses of con-
tention in telegraph literature. Crawford stages “Carrie” in its own virtual Wild
West show, a literary technotopia heavily informed by and informing Crawford’s
literary persona and national reputation as a U.S. Frontier Cavalry Scout and
Poet. Crawford’s title names “Carrie, the Telegraph Girl” as “A Romance of the
Cherokee Strip.”15 The reference to the Cherokee Strip links Crawford’s virtual-​
realm fiction to the geographical location of the 1893 Cherokee Outlet land run.
 Int roduc tion 9

Congress had promised to the Cherokee Nation in perpetuity the area of Indian
Territory known as the Cherokee Outlet, but it then pressured the tribe to sell
the land and opened the Outlet to the largest settler land run in world history.
Crawford’s story is set just before the land run, however, in the transfrontier
“wilderness”16 of 1892 Indian Territory “inhabited only by Indians . . . and
roving bands of desperadoes under the leadership of the Dalton brothers.”17
At the point in the story when Fred and Carrie finally meet in person at Fred’s
railroad telegraph station, the seeming spirit of this untamed American wilder-
ness itself, here instanced through twinned threats from wild Indians and the
Dalton Gang desperados, interrupts the lovers’ plans for a physical domesti-
cation of their heretofore disembodied attraction. As Carrie visits the station’s
freight room for a drink, and Fred decides “that a lifetime spent in her society
would not weary me,” the Dalton Gang bursts through the door, threatening
Fred’s fantasies of civilizing the wilderness with a homestead and family, Carrie’s
maiden virtue, and the railroad’s westward progress: the Daltons threaten to kill
Fred, rape Carrie—​“what indignities might not be offered her by these . . . cruel,
reckless men who had less regard for women than for dumb brutes”—​and rob
the train that will arrive at the station shortly. Unnerved by “this harsh transfor-
mation from a blissful dream of love to the very precincts of death,” Fred dashes
for the telegraph sounder to call the sheriff to restore order, but a Dalton bullet
to his leg stops him short. While Fred lies bleeding, Carrie “the Telegraph Girl”
appropriates the station’s outgoing telegraph wires to save Fred, but also to pro-
tect corporate profits and colonial control of newly won Native land as “duty
demands”: Carrie climbs a ladder from the freight room to the attic, whence she
taps the end of an outgoing wire with anything metal to telegraph “the keen-​
eared night guardians of the company’s interests.” These fellow telegraphers at
nearby stations send the “sheriff ’s posse” on the next train crossing the frontier
west into Indian Territory. The telegraph even allows Fred and Carrie to con-
verse in Morse Code under the very noses of the Daltons. Over the beeping
sounder, Fred hears Carrie telegraph her fear that he has been killed by the shot
she heard; for her benefit, he loudly describes his wounds “to the Daltons,” and
Carrie responds by wiring for a doctor and explaining the case that awaits his ar-
rival, then speaks directly to Fred on the sounder: “I will be with you the minute
the train gets here—​Cr.”
Telegraph literature sometimes ends with the text of a telegram inserted di-
rectly into the narrative in a way that allows the story’s real hero—​the telegraph
itself—​to speak the story’s denouement. In “Carrie,” this telegram arrives in
the next scene, set at the telegraphers’ wedding. The telegram fictively arrives
from the actual superintendent of Western Union, R. B. Gemmell, to assert
that the telegraphy of “our little heroine” has indeed restored the conventional
orderings of European American erotic process and familial structure, corporate
10 Introduction

profitability, colonization of Indian Territory, and government control of its

wild inhabitants. The telegram informs us that Carrie will quit her job to settle
one more European American family in Indian Territory: “We regret the loss
of the valued services of our little heroine.” The Dalton Gang’s train robberies
will cease. In fact, Crawford wrote the story to commemorate the fact that “Bill
Dalton was punctured by a well-​directed bullet from the rifle of a deputy United
States marshal but a few days ago.” The Oklahoma land run will take place on
land cleared of resistant Native inhabitants, and Fred will escape the working-​
class realities of a job as a telegrapher through the $2,000 reward that Gemmell
has wired along with the story’s technotopic telegram.
This resolution also serves literarily to inscribe Captain Jack Crawford’s
technotopia onto the physical world, as Fred announces this fiction as factual
American history: “Were I dealing with fiction I would write a lurid description
of a desperate conflict between the sheriff ’s posse and the outlaws, but as I am
dealing in actual experiences . . . I must adhere closely to the lines of truth.” Such
insistent infusion of technotopic virtual-​realm fantasy into American history
in the making recalls the larger metaphysical power of Crawford’s storied tele-
graph in his technotopic world. Crawford’s 1894 story accords the telegraph the
power to clear the transfrontier wilderness of “prowling Indian[s]‌” and “reck-
less men” so that the frontier may push inevitably westward; so doing, it invokes
Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous pronouncement, published just the year be-
fore Crawford’s story, that the American frontier between Indian savagery and
European American civilization had just closed. Perhaps most productively
read considering Turner’s “Frontier Thesis,” Crawford’s story names the tele-
graph as the central tool of the racial and cultural evolution Turner perceived
to occur on the American land along its ever-​westering frontier line. Indeed,
Turner’s essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893)
mentions Crawford’s specific local frontier, “the present eastern boundary of
Indian Territory,” and naturalizes “communication with the East” as the network
of “nerves” that close this frontier and replace the savages’ wilderness with an
increasingly “civilized,” increasingly European American United States: “[T]he
wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization growing ever more
numerous. [Through] the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the
originally simple, inert continent . . . we are to-​day one nation, rather than a col-
lection of isolated states . . . . In this progress from savage conditions lie topics
for the evolutionist.”18 Crawford fictively answers Turner’s call to “evolutionists”
(Turner means social evolutionists), to reveal the telegraph as the metaphysical
key that accomplishes Turner’s equally metaphysical racial and cultural evolu-
tion along the American frontier.
Crawford endeavored to enact his telegraphically enabled Wild West
technotopia in his own life as well. As chief scout with Buffalo Bill Cody of the
 Int roduc tion 11

U.S. Fifth Cavalry, Crawford had worked with General George Custer19 to subdue
western tribes, often by using Native telegraph signal chains (see ­chapter 1). After
learning in a telegram from Buffalo Bill of Custer’s infamous death at the hands
of local tribes at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, Crawford published an
ode to Custer that may have inspired Walt Whitman’s elegy of Custer, as well as
the cosmic importance that this study argues, in c­ hapter 5, Whitman attributes
to Custer’s westering mission. After the Indian and Civil Wars, Crawford re-​
enacted his role as a performer in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show, and gained
literary fame by publishing Indian-​fighting stories accompanied by photos of the
author in which he assumes a frontiersman persona like Custer’s, complete with
Native beaded moccasins and fringed buckskin (see figure I.1). Even his adapta-
tion of the moniker “Captain Jack” suggests his desire to inhabit an Indian iden-
tity: in the 1873 Modoc War, tribal leader Kintpuash, or Captain Jack, became
the only Native during the Indian Wars officially to kill a U.S. general.
The telegraph served Crawford’s and others’ disembodied technotopias as the
key to erasing the resistant bodies of America’s Native peoples, and to usurping
indigenous peoples’ storied connections to American land.
As it intervenes to resolve otherwise unconquerable obstacles to characters’
erotic, Turnerian, and manifest destinies in Crawford’s “Carrie,” the telegraph
acts as exactly the kind of contrived plot device against which Horace’s Ars
Poetica warns: the deus ex machina. At the same time, it does so by appearing,
at least within the technotopias with which this study contends, as a machina
ex deo, a machine from God, sent to earth to do metaphysical and political
work in the literary technotopias of nineteenth-​century American authors.
This invocation of the machine’s divine powers constitutes more than an aes-
thetic problem. I would like here to introduce a metaphysics that I will argue
redounds throughout nineteenth-​century understandings of telegraphy, and
which serves to naturalize the competing political ambitions that often inspired
the technotopias we read throughout telegraph literature.

Machina Ex Deo: Morse’s Metaphysics and

the Birth of Telegraph Literature
It comes as a surprise to most modern readers, steeped as we are in common
twenty-​first-​century antipathies between scientific and religious thought, to
learn that Morse and many of his contemporaries understood most discourse
conducted by signal chain not primarily through its scientific bases, but within
variously inflected metaphysical, spiritual, or even biblical contexts. In fact,
authors of telegraph literature seem particularly preoccupied with reconciling
their technotopias with their era’s spiritual matrix, perhaps because the main
Figure I.1 John “Captain Jack” Crawford photographed in beaded moccasins and fringed
buckskin. Bennet and Brown Photographers, Santa Fe, NM, 1881. Courtesy of Heritage
Auction House.
 Int roduc tion 13

ethereal realm referred to throughout the nominally pretelegraphic nine-

teenth century is the realm of the dead—​heaven, in Western terms—​that spir-
itual realm to which human souls relocate upon permanently leaving the body.
Spirituality in telegraph literature assumes disparate stances, but beliefs about
the metaphysical nature of telegraph speech seem often to ally it in writers’
minds with such alternative spiritual approaches as Unitarianism, natural the-
ology, spiritualism, transcendentalism, older earth religions, or wholly new
spiritual formulations. This desire to reconcile ideals of technologically and spir-
itually disembodied existence perhaps in part explains why telegraph authors
so often craft for telegraphic speech decidedly romantic narratives in which the
telegraph accomplishes feats of a supernatural nature, specifically conceived to
fulfill God’s higher purpose. Articulating what I will refer to as a telegraph met-
aphysics for their virtual technotopias, telegraph writers often imagine the tele-
graph to provide a metaphysical conduit between the material confines of the
corporeal world and the mind of God, as idealized within the often liberating,
sometimes dangerous space of the virtual universe. This book seeks in part to
interrogate the political and social resonances of authors’ mystic technological
visions, to disclose within each its underlying, often radical reimagining of their
nation’s aesthetic theory, growing empire, and rapidly changing constructions
of gender and class, of ethnicity and place. This investigation helps to retool our
critical conceptions of nineteenth-​century American telecommunications prac-
tice and of how writers appropriated this practice to enact their metaphysical
visions for a new America.20
When authors of telegraph literature crafted their resolutely political
technotopias in the new metaphysical realm of virtual speech, they continued a
tradition begun by Samuel Morse himself. During an early public demonstration
of his machine in New York’s Washington Square, in 1838, Morse telegraphed
the following cryptic message along a mile of wire to a printer that produced
written Morse Code: “Attention! The Universe! By Kingdom’s Right Wheel!”
These abstruse sentence fragments seem to grant Morse’s machine a revo-
lutionary power to command the attention of the entire universe and even to
envision a talking wire that fulfills a messianic mission: according to Morse,
his telegraph does nothing less than stand (as for Calvinists like Morse, Jesus
stands) at the right hand of the Creator to act as the prime moving wheel of the
Kingdom of God. Newspaper and historic accounts of the event roundly echo
the cosmic importance that Morse’s potentially apostatic prophesies attribute to
the machine. Claims one nineteenth-​century biography of Morse’s Washington
Square demonstration: “The work bordered upon the miraculous. ‘To see is to
believe,’ but this result staggered the faith of spectators.”21 Morse’s official first
telegram from 1844 quotes the Bible’s book of Numbers 23:23 to ask prophet-
ically, “What Hath God Wrought?” With this quotation, Morse again positions
14 Introduction

his telegraph as something that not only the science of humankind but, finally,
the mind of “God Hath Wrought,” an implement made by God for what Morse
calls a specific metaphysical purpose.
Morse casts the telegraph’s electric disembodied realm as a metaphysical
tool of God’s will; he simultaneously casts the flow of electricity in safe, or-
ganic metaphors of the wires as a naturally occurring nervous system that re-
assuringly unifies the United States body politic. Morse claims in a letter
on February 15, 1838 that “it [will] not be long ere the whole surface of this
country [is] channeled for those nerves which are to diffuse, with the speed of
thought, a knowledge of all that is occurring throughout the land.” Following
suit, American Telegraph Magazine explains in 1853 that electricity functions in
a manner “identical with the nervous fluid” of the human body. An 1857 article,
“On the Influence of Electrical Fluctuations as a Cause of Disease,” likens the
“electric fluid” to the “nervous force.” Industrialist Jay Gould fought Vanderbilt
interests for control of Edison patents because he considered the telegraph to be
the “nerve of industry.” An 1862 Harper’s Magazine article explains the human
nervous system as something that “presents a very curious analogy to” the tel-
egraph system. James Carey assesses this early naturalization of telegraph wires
as equivalents to human nerves: “[T]‌he nineteenth century,” he concludes,
“was obsessed with organicism.” Such organicism still emerges in predominant
twentieth-​century understandings of the social function of telegraphy. Marshall
McLuhan reassured readers that “the discovery of electromagnetism is to be
regarded as ‘a prodigious biological event.’ ” “Electricity may be said to have
outered the central nervous system itself . . . . Failure to understand the organic
character of electric technology is evident in our continuing concern with the
dangers of mechanizing the world.”22
By simultaneously naturalizing, politicizing, and creating a spiritual purpose
for his nationwide virtual-​discourse forum, Morse worked to establish his tele-
graph among those inventions that helped to create for the nineteenth-​century
United States what David F. Noble astutely identifies as a “religion of tech-
nology.” Other scholars similarly attribute a metaphysical rhetoric to nineteenth-​
and twentieth-​century understandings of “American technology.” By 1934,
Lewis Mumford had described an American “mechano-​idolatry.” By 1938, he
had identified what he called America’s “mechano-​centric religion.” And by the
turn of the twentieth century, Thomas P. Hughes perceived that “a god named
technology has possessed Americans.” For Joel Dinerstein, “technology is the
American theology” [Dinerstein’s emphasis].23
In the nineteenth-​century United States, we might partially explain the pre-
ponderance of such mystical understandings of industrialized technologies in
general, and especially of the telegraph, as a response to the rapidity and enor-
mity of the changes electric machines occasioned in American lives. Jeffrey
 Int roduc tion 15

Sconce explains, “[E]‌lectricity was for many a mystical and even divine sub-
stance that animated body and soul. When harnessed by the telegraph . . . this
‘life force’ seemed to allow for a mechanical disassociation of consciousness
and the body. Telegraph lines carried human messages from city to city and
from continent to continent, but more important, they appeared to carry the
animating ‘spark’ of consciousness itself beyond the confines of the physical
body.”24 It is most often this telegraphic disembodiment, the way the tele-
graph enabled human consciousness and congress to dislocate from the phys-
ical body and even the from physical transport of written text that inspired
writers’ technotopias to be interpreted spiritually through telegraph literature.
But Morse’s telegraph also used electromagnetic energy to disseminate coded
messages in an era when many scientists believed “electro-​magnetism” must
be related to the animal magnetism used by mesmerists. Because nineteenth-​
century science often theorized electricity as a liquid flowing through the
“ether” that Gods and angels were imagined to breathe, some Americans heard
in the electromagnetic telegraph the electric voice of God. A (usually female)
telegrapher’s ability to receive aurally, translate, and relay orally to an uncom-
prehending customer a bodiless, coded message sounded from afar resembled
to many a (usually female) spiritual medium’s ability, during a seance, to trans-
late table-​knockings sent from beyond, on what spiritualists had already called
the “spiritual telegraph.”25
Morse invoked electricity as a natural force with a supernatural purpose
in order to spread his own Anglo-​American values, which many considered
conservative in the nineteenth-​century United States. Morse was a staunch
Calvinist who published tracts and spoke denouncing Catholics, Unitarians,
and immigrated Mexicans, Irish, and Italians. He supported the Nativist
movement advocating closing the U.S. borders to new immigration, and
backed plans to invade Mexico. A Federalist supporter of Jacksonian Indian-​
Removal policies, he supported Lewis Cass for president and “went through
the Civil War years assailing the ‘usurpations’ of the Lincoln administration”
by becoming a “Copperhead,” a Northern defender of slavery.26 Morse ac-
tively promoted the institution of telegraph lines as a means to achieve these
political goals.
Within months of Morse’s first metaphysical telegrams, and as the lines
spread across the continent and the world, so-​called high and more popular
American literatures alike began to appropriate for their own, often resistant,
social visions Morse’s original, socially conservative metaphysical purposes
for his machine, to create romantic and transcendental technotopias specifi-
cally aimed at expanding Morse’s Calvinist vision. In one paradigmatic assess-
ment, Henry David Thoreau provides an elegant example of telegraph wires
that, while they fulfill “lower” business uses, nonetheless enact a “higher”
16 Introduction

purpose steeped in “ineffable divinity.” As Thoreau crosses a railroad track

early one morning, he hears “the telegraph harp singing its message through
the country, its message sent not by men [and not by God], but by gods . . . .
It told of things . . . worthy of the electric fluid to carry the news of, not of
the price of cotton and flour, but it hinted at the price of the world itself and
of things which are priceless, of absolute truth and beauty.”27 Thoreau’s tel-
egraph is a cultural landmark of Homeric proportion. Wires and poles here
build a transcendentalist monument that surpasses its mundane duties, not
only by harmonizing nature to human art, but also by transcending previous
Christian paradigms of social interpretation. In doing so, it nonetheless acts
as a sort of living gospel, bringing to humankind the good “news” from the
gods, to reassure Americans of an earthly purpose “of absolute truth and
beauty” very different from Morse’s Calvinist vision of a divine speech forum
delivered to the elect few.28 Such famous writers as Mark Twain followed suit
to publish articles postulating that a “mental telegraphy” operated daily be-
tween the unconscious minds of Americans.29 Horatio Alger’s rags-​to-​riches
story The Telegraph Boy (1879) enacts the American Romance through tele-
graphic visions of the American Dream for the very classes that Morse hopes
his machine will exclude.
More immediately mystical telegraphic worlds can be found in such
stories as the anonymous “Mesmeric Telegraphy” (1876). In this story, a
young bachelor, while “magnetized” (hypnotized) by his cousin Moses, is led
into a virtual Promised Land of ideological unity with an American populace.
This anonymous bachelor learns that “all magnetisms are one in essence” to
the extent that he can touch a telegraph cable and not only hear the voices
speaking their telegrams but also feel the emotions of the senders. The cry
for help of a worried mother affects him as if his own child lay gravely ill. The
honeymoon arrangements of newlyweds fill him with love and joy. After this
dip into the emotions of the Americans around him from whom he has pre-
viously held himself aloof, he realizes that there is a “certain spiritual signifi-
cance” to telegraphic speech. He decides to stop living a life that he compares
to a nonconducting glass insulator along the wires, and instead to become in
daily life more of an electric receptor and conduit for the emotions of those
around him: “It gives one a great idea of human communion, this power of
sending spark messages thousands of miles in a second . . . ; poetical, too, is
it not?”30 Fully steeped in the U.S. demos in a way he never before imagined,
the narrator encounters universal ideals of the sort that reverberate romanti-
cally throughout nineteenth-​century American telegraph literature, to allow
the nation the transcendentalist “disembodied brotherhood” touted ubiqui-
tously throughout the promotional materials of the era as the inevitable out-
come of instantaneous virtual discourse.
 Int roduc tion 17

American Telegraphs and the Anxiety

of Colonized Voices
As this body of telegraph literature grows from nineteenth-​century fascination
with the rise of new telegraphic speech forms, it often insists that any attempt
to establish chronological boundaries for what we may call “telegraph speech”
eventually proves only that telegraphic speech—​which it defines as all coded
long-​distance communication perceived in its time to be instantaneous—​is
in fact as old as human speech itself. Indeed, telegraph literature reminds us
often and pointedly that, whether by hand signal, semaphore flag, fire, smoke
beacon, or Pony Express, humans have always made telegraphs. The term “tel-
egraph” itself, combining the Greek etymological elements τŋλε-​, or “tele-​,” far,
and γραφ, or “-​graphe,” writing, was invented before Morse to refer to telegraphs
previous to Morse’s. The term does not originate in the United States and, as
the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us, refers not only to electromagnetic,
but to any far-​writing “apparatus for transmitting messages to a distance . . . by
signs.”31 Thus when Morse demonstrated his model, Americans considered it
to be one of many already-​existing telegraph systems and, in fact, one of many
already-​existing electric telegraph systems. American telegraph literature also
conceives previous American telegraph systems less as quotidian tools than
as mystical wonders fulfilling a spiritual purpose. This study thus includes the
literatures of telegraph systems that predate Morse’s, most importantly, Native
American telegraphs, because like Morse’s, they also cover and contribute to
social understandings of nineteenth-​century American land. Chapter 1 makes
claims for telegraph technologies that most readers will not have considered as
such. But before moving to that chapter, I would like to explain the extent to
which, to nineteenth-​century American minds, telegraphs had long since existed
in most every culture, possibly since the dawn of human communication itself.
Nineteenth-​century American telegraph manuals and histories tell us that tel-
egraph systems—​as the term denotes all chained, coded, rapid communication
devices—​have existed since ancient times across the world. These manuals de-
scribe the social importance of Morse’s telegraph specifically in terms of the cul-
tural work of earlier telegraphs, especially as these previously spread the voices
of other cultures across the American land.32 W. J. Johnston’s 1880 Telegaphic
History begins with a history of “Pre-​electric Telegraphs” that places the earliest
documented telegraph in ancient Africa: “One of the earliest recorded systems
of telegraphy for signaling over long distances originated among the African
negroes, and has been practiced from time immemorial . . . . [As with Morse’s
machine] noises are made to produce a perfect and distinct language, as intelli-
gible to the operator as that uttered by the human voice.”33
18 Introduction

Taliaferro Shaffner’s 1859 Telegraph Manual explains that telegraphy struc-

tured the ancient Greek empire, as seen in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. The
play begins with a description of the court in a state of dismay as the queen,
Clytemnestra, announces during her husband’s long absence that the Greeks
have taken Troy the night before, and that Agamemnon will soon return home.
A messenger wonders how Clytemnestra can have such unaccountable knowl­
edge, which has seemingly come from nowhere: “Do you honor as credible
visions which come to thee in dreams?” he asks her. Clytemnestra answers by
detailing the exact path of the visual telegram she received from her husband
on the battlefield, via a beacon telegraph using Hephaestus, the Greek god of
fire.34 In the literature of ancient Greece, telegraphic speech conveys seemingly
supernatural knowledge to those who understand its code. In Agamemnon, it
conveys “incredible” knowledge from the god of fire, through as apparently un-
canny a conduit as that conveying a prophetic vision or dream. Like Morse’s and
other telegraph systems, the medium itself is metaphysical—​here it is a god—​
exactly because its message imparts ordained political power. While the mes-
sage informs Clytemnestra of her family’s victory, the medium vouchsafes her
personal political coup against her husband, which forms the action of the play.
Other pre-​Morse electric telegraphs include that of Georges-​Louis Le Sage of
Geneva (figure I.2), which in 1774 used one wire for each letter of the alphabet,

Figure I.2 Le Premier Télégraphe Electrique (Georges Le Sage, Geneva, 1774).

Engraving from Louis Figuier’s Les Merveilles de la Science (1868), vol. 2, p. 89.
 Int roduc tion 19

and that of William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in England, which in 1837
reduced the number of wires and became the standard British telecommunica-
tions system.35
But nineteenth-​ century American telegraph literature seems especially
preoccupied with telegraphs that preceded Morse’s across the American
landscape. Hal G. Evarts’s 1927 novel The Moccasin Telegraph describes the
supernatural power Yukon prospectors in the 1840s ascribed to the Native tel-
ecommunications systems they encountered there, and names these systems
“telegraphs.” “Perhaps, in lieu of a better definition one might term [the moc-
casin telegraph] a manifestation . . . . It has defied both scientific analysis, and the
metaphysical gropings of the whites, yet the fact remains that weird rumors, later
proven to be founded . . . are circulated by some mysterious agency [among] iso-
lated native camps that are separated by vast distances. And those who have lived
long in the North do not disregard the mutterings of the Moccasin Telegraph.”36
This book invokes this preoccupation with Native American telegraphs to
argue that telegraph literature accords to previous American telegraphs the
ability to spread previous inhabitants’ words—​their inscrutable and potentially
dangerous texts, culturally located stories, and oral literatures—​across America
to create a spiritual connection to that land, a sense of place that, as I will treat
further in ­chapter 1, cultural studies now allow us to describe as “indigeneity.” As
European Americans appropriate land from its previous inhabitants, European
American telegraph literature appropriates through technotopias of Morse’s
national telegraphic virtual realm the ability to spread new oral traditions and
cultural histories, similarly to create for the land’s new inhabitants a sense of spir-
itual connection to their recently acquired America. While this book employs
Native American telegraph literatures to contradict such fantasies, it also invokes
recent assertions that “science is politics by other means,” to broaden what this
study reads as a telegraph. Technology critic Sandra Harding astutely advises
cultural critics about how best to investigate the larger cultural significance of
scientific practices and the resultant technologies: “Groups with conflicting
social agendas have struggled to gain control of the social resources that the
sciences—​their ‘information,’ their technologies, and their prestige—​can pro-
vide. For those who have suffered from what seem to be the consequences of the
sciences, their technologies, and their forms of rationality, it appears absurd to
regard science as the value-​free, disinterested, impartial, Archimedean arbiter of
conflicting agendas, as conventional mythology holds.”37 Extending such critics’
work, this book moves beyond the realm of what are often perceived to be exclu-
sively European American machines. All groups have histories of inquiry, have
science, have technology, and we should realize that we can and, indeed, must ar-
bitrate between competing forms of science and resulting technologies. As they,
too, construct spiritual visions of telecommunications systems and build a sense
20 Introduction

of place from the stories these systems carry, this project incorporates analysis
of Native American communications systems. By contrasting to the dominant
narratives the alternate communications theories of some peoples who resisted
electromagnetic telegraph imperialist projects, this book seeks to intervene in
the “conventional mythologies” that science and technology somehow occur
apart from cultural and political concerns, that only iron machines count as
technologies, and that only Western minds created telegraphs.

Disembodied Technotopias and the

Reincarnation of America
The disembodied literary technotopias this book investigates generated intense
theoretical debates among nineteenth-​century cultural theorists. When writers
actively try to pull their technotopic fantasies out of the virtual realm and to “re-
incarnate” them within new embodiments of texts, selves, national communities,
senses of place, and relations to divine will in a geographically located America,
these debates can swell into culture wars. The chapters that follow delineate how,
as telegraphy allows new categories to be instituted and enacted in the physical
world, it particularly disrupts predominant social performances of literary style,
empire, gender, ethnicity, class, and relation to the divine. Sustained attention
to virtual culture wars complicate the “disembodied brotherhood” of Thoreau’s
and Twain’s formulae for telegraphic spirituality, Alger’s happy endings, or some
telegraphers’ fantasies that the telegraph will ethnically cleanse the brotherhood
of the disembodied realm. Lida Churchill’s Interweaving (1892), for example,
imagines a new world of American telegraphic romance in which families and
communities fully accept a woman telegrapher’s marriage to another woman.
Emily Dickinson’s letters show that she sidesteps social expectations by sending
telegrams secretly. Through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s telegraph in The House of
the Seven Gables (1851) divine will forces Americans to face the crimes of their
past and return stolen American land. The pages to follow will show how these
mystic technotopias of the telegraphic virtual alter our critical understandings
of the nineteenth-​century American political imagination, especially as this
national imaginary constructs theoretical debates raging around the westward
imperialism and sense of place, ethnicized hierarchies, feminist struggles, and
workers’ movements that define the era.
Chapter 1, “Moccasin Telegraph,” seeks to broaden critical assumptions
about Morse’s electric long-​distance speech, to suggest alternative paradigms
for the consideration of nineteenth-​century telecommunication practices on
the American continent. Some nineteenth-​century telegraph manuals begin
their explanations of telegraph technology with histories of the telegraphs that
 Int roduc tion 21

precede Morse’s invention, introducing such American Indian technologies

as smoke signals, wampum runners, or Indian Sign Language as telegraphs
that influenced later theories of telecommunication, and helped the first
Americans rapidly disseminate information. The chapter analyzes the universe
of some indigenous peoples as it was enacted by the literature of Plains Sign
Talk in the nineteenth-​century American West, through the autobiographies of
Plenty Coups and Pretty Shield, both members of the Crow Indian tribe. Both
autobiographies are set in the pre-​contact western plains and both are told by
moccasin telegraph in Indian sign language. Chapter 1 describes one historic
moment when Native and Morse telecommunications systems worked with and
against each other, to argue that the Western signal systems of the era both de-
fine themselves against Native people’s telegraph systems, and, sometimes, at-
tempt nonetheless to emulate the indigenizing practices of Native oral traditions
enacted in part by moccasin telegraph.
Chapter 2, “Crossing Border Wires,” examines what I call “telegraphers’ lit-
erature,” fictional and autobiographical stories written by telegraph operators
that depend for their plots on their characters’ use of the telegraph. Examples
include epistolary telegram novels of love between telegraphers who have never
met in person, western adventures of outlaws who flee by train but are caught
when a sheriff wires descriptions of the desperados across the border, and
autobiographies in which telegraphers appropriate corporate wires to organize
or dispel workers’ unions. Telegraphers’ fictions and autobiographies, with such
titles as Lightning Flashes and Electric Dashes (1877), and Tales of the Telegraph
(1899), begin to appear in midcentury as periodical short stories, poems, and full-​
length novels, written by and about telegraphers but largely for nontelegraphers,
usually with the explicit goal of explaining to the uninitiated the mysteries of
the telegraph. The often-​astonishing disembodied worlds of some telegraphers’
literatures present technotopias in which the telegraph creates a national “disem-
bodied brotherhood,” but only insofar as it simultaneously enforces American
colonial, racial, and gender domination in the embodied world. Contrasting
telegraphers’ literatures by minority authors, such as Mattie Collins Brite’s au-
tobiography Ma Kiley: The Life of a Railroad Telegrapher or Abraham Burstein’s
short-​story collection The Ghetto Messenger: Sixty Tales of a Unique Seventy Year
Old Telegraph Messenger “Boy,” provides both technotopic imaginings and per-
sonal histories in which minority groups facing discrimination use telegraphy
to protect and empower themselves socially. Chapter 2 uses post-​Marxist uto-
pian theory of the school most associated with Fredric Jameson and the simi-
larly otherworldly genre of science fiction to argue that telegraphers’ literature
promoting ethnic divisions ultimately isolates authors who otherwise share sim-
ilar working-​class interests, and provides a utopic realm of protected discourse
for only the corporate elite.
22 Introduction

Chapter 3, “Corsets with Copper Wire,” investigates telegraphers’ novels by

women writers. The disembodied technotopias of women telegraphers differ
markedly from the predominant visions of their male colleagues, to imagine
worlds where women receive decent pay to rescue their families from financial
ruin, marry better men online, form all-​woman-​telegrapher families, bring lesbian
love from the virtual to the physical world, and live gender-​fluid lives in the vir-
tual realm. These fictional conversations in the mystical virtual realm impact the
literature they inspire by ushering a new breed of realistic, three-​dimensional fe-
male protagonists into the telegraphic romances of the era. As nineteenth-​century
telegrapher, suffragist, and novelist Ella Cheever Thayer reminds readers of her
semi-​autobiographical, telegraphing protagonist Nathalie Rogers in Wired Love: A
Romance of Dots and Dashes (1879), “[R]‌emember, she was not one of those im-
possible, angelic young ladies of whom we read, but one of the ordinary human
beings we meet every day.”38 As Thayer’s novel shows, not only can women learn
from the empowering, ungendered experience they gain in the telegraphic virtual
realm. They can also anonymously share women’s experience in this disembodied
space and use both types of experience to compose more-​empowered female
protagonists in other disembodied technotopias: the fictions they compose
imagining the power for social change instituted by electromagnetic telegraphy.
Chapter 4, “Emily Dickinson’s Telegrams from God,” enlarges visions of
women’s telegraphic utopias to include the poetry of Emily Dickinson, who
wrote poetic odes to the telegraph. In poems written primarily around 1862
when the telegraph came to her home in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson po-
etically imagines the electric telegraph to harness God’s lightning “tongue” for
human speech; its electric speech inspires a process in which poetic inspiration
“stun[s the poet] with bolts of melody,” and the poet in turn translates this electric
bolt into, in Dickinson’s case, distinctly telegram-​like poems. In these and other
poems, Dickinson obliquely compares her own role as a female poet to that of fe-
male telegraphers, who communicate at lightning speed in what her poems con-
ceive as a potentially blasphemous rebellion against society, government, or God.
Chapter 5, “Engineering Eden in Walt Whitman’s ‘Passage to India’ ”
analyzes the technotopias of Walt Whitman’s famous poem “Passage to India,”
in which Whitman imagines the telegraph as a mythic symbol to commem-
orate westward expansion throughout the ages. Whitman wrote the poem to
commemorate the 1869 completion of the trans-​Atlantic telegraph and other
“world-​spanning” machines. This and other of Whitman’s telegraph poems en-
vision that the seemingly prophetic wonders these machines accomplish will
bring about a global reconciliation of previous rifts, not only between different
cultures and nations, but between science and religion and between humans
and the land to which they wish to feel indigenous, to create what the poem
describes as a technologically enabled “worship new.” Chapter 5 claims that one
 Int roduc tion 23

real key to the poem lies in Whitman’s lionization of Christopher Columbus

and his invitation to readers to view American imperial projects though
Columbus’s eyes. If we accept Whitman’s invitation, ­chapter 5 argues, readers
come to understand that all the poem’s Orientalizing mysticism surrounding
“India” comes to refer to Columbus’s India as well, to the landscape Columbus
died insisting must be India and must contain the earthly paradise of Eden: the
America continent. By using the term “India” throughout the poem to refer to
both “the mystical east” generally but also to America, and by simultaneously
proposing in other poems that the “Indians” will melt into the land and leave
us their oral traditions, Whitman’s technotopia posits America as a New Eden
from which God destines Native Americans to disappear, and to which God
destines settlers to become spiritually connected and finally fully indigenous.
The study concludes with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s technotopias because, though
written earlier, Hawthorne’s work provides a surprisingly inclusive answer to many
of the hierarchical technotopias presented throughout this book. In The House of
the Seven Gables (1851), Hawthorne depicts telegraphic speech that intervenes as
a tool of the divine in humans’ desires for their signifying practices, but in ways
that directly warn against assumptions of European American land theft and
manifest destiny. Hawthorne cautions American readers that the generations to
come cannot virtually escape the psychic burden of having stolen the land whose
purpose they seek to reimagine in the virtual realm. Hawthorne’s oral traditional
stories of spiritual relationship to land—​which this study traces throughout to ex-
press a desire for indigeneity, here telegraphically enacted—​can only end happily
when tellers right, to the best of their abilities, the land thefts of the past.
These nineteenth-​century literatures of telegraphy often show that the tele-
graph, like other telecommunication conduits, actually is a tool of metaphysics,
as nineteenth-​century authors suggest and most today have forgotten, insofar
as it performs the worldview, and thereby helps construct both the natural and
supernatural beliefs of the culture that employs it. In considering deployments
of “instantaneous” long-​distance speech in literary technotopias of the virtual
realm, this study re-​evaluates many current critical formulations of the American
political imaginary and reveals the importance of this medium—​both in eve-
ryday life and in constructions of self, community, and God—through telegraph
literature.
 1

Moccasin Telegraph
Telecommunication across Native America

In 1859, Taliaferro P. Shaffner sat down to write The Telegraph Manual.1 Shaffner
published his manual fifteen years after Morse’s first public lines were instituted,
and he had witnessed the communications revolution the wires had inspired. As
an expert on electromagnetic telegraphy, he was surely steeped in the sorts of
perceptions explored in the introduction to this book, of Morse’s virtual realm
as a divine staging ground of U.S. manifest destiny, whose mythic stories could
build community and sacralize settlers’ connections to new lands. Nonetheless,
Shaffner lived in a time that knew better than our own that Morse’s was only one of
many telegraphs invented since the dawn of humankind, and so, like some other
histories of the technology mentioned in the introduction, Shaffner’s Telegraph
Manual begins its discussion of American telegraphy not with explanations of
electromagnetism, codes, or wires but instead with descriptions of the American
Indian telecommunication technologies that Europeans found upon arriving on
this continent.
In such conflations of electromagnetic and moccasin telegraphs, tele-
graph literature enters debates on how Morse telegraphy adds U.S. voices to
the American landscape, to create a mythic connection between U.S. citizens’
stories and the land these stories newly inhabit, much as these literatures some-
times imply the telecommunications systems conveying Native oral traditions
can.2 Such assertions that Native stories create a sense of spiritual connection
between listeners and their landscapes arise commonly throughout Native
American literary studies, but they may surprise scholars unfamiliar with the
oral literatures of indigenous cultures, and so perhaps deserve further explana-
tion here. Many Native people build their sense of indigeneity through a body
of ancient and more recent stories that they traditionally orally repeat across
generations, but that they also sometimes convey visually through a number of
not strictly oral methods, including pictographs, petroglyphs, sign language (see
­figures 1.1 and ​1.2), quipus, ceremonial dance, codexes, or, in the modern era,

24
 Mocca s in Tel eg raph 25

Figure 1.1a–1.1b “TELEGRAPH–​Make sign for WRITE, then hold

flat hand back out, in front of breast; with lower edge of extended right
hand strike upper edge of left, with a rebound, and then make sign for
GO, quickly. A flexible modern sign.” From William Tomkins’s 1926
Dictionary of Indian Sign Language.

Figure 1.2a–1.2b “Hold out flat left hand, back up, touch back of fingers
with inside of fingers of right hand; then reverse this process; then make
sign for TALK.” From William Tomkins’s 1926 Dictionary of Indian Sign
Language.

alphabetic writing. This body of stories, whether graphically or orally conveyed,

scholars generally refer to as the oral tradition. As Leslie Marmon Silko explains
some functions of the oral tradition, many Native peoples traditionally conceive
of themselves as intrinsically integrated parts of their surrounding landscapes—​
environments might be a better word—​and conceive a ripple effect in which their
actions affect every other aspect of the landscape, and vice versa. Traditionally,
many Native peoples’ storytelling practices convey the human cultural history
associated with various geographic features of the landscape, in tales constructed
to teach listeners how to live properly according to the unique requirements
of that environment. Storytellers invoke the area’s geographical features as
26 Telegraphies

mnemonic devices to retell both legendary and historical, culturally specific

stories that happened there—​the boulder that mythic heroes pulled from the
heart of a monster, or the mesa where Apaches killed her ancestors in Silko’s
examples. Over generations, these mnemonic geographical features themselves
become perceived to hold, and actively to participate in, the mythic and re-
corded history of one’s people, past generations of whom have since returned
to the very land which holds their stories, and whose spirits now live actively
in the land. Many traditional Native people believe that their landscapes retain
their peoples’ spirits and their stories, to the extent that storytellers can speak of
one by referencing the other, to guide the moral decisions—​the spirituality—​of
that people.3
The feeling of spiritual connection or belonging to land and larger
environment—​often conveyed in this study through the workings of an oral
tradition—​I will here generally refer to as “indigeneity.” My use of the noun
“indigeneity” as a tool of literary analysis, however, can differ markedly from
legal and political use of its adjectival form, “indigenous,” which usually denotes
people who have occupied a region since before the formation of that region’s
nation-​state, and who consider themselves culturally different from the nation-​
state’s mainstream culture. Often throughout this study, I invoke a sense of the
term “indigeneity” conveyed from its first (and therefore perhaps broadest) def-
inition in the Oxford English Dictionary; I often purposefully conceptualize “in-
digeneity” widely, as a socially constructed and often metaphysical sense that
one and one’s people are “produced naturally in a land or belong naturally to
the soil” [original emphasis].4 Humans from many cultures throughout history
have, through the stories they tell of their people’s origins from, history on, and
relationship to specific landscapes, built this sense that oneself and one’s people
possess a special spiritual connection to, or especially belong to, a certain phys-
ical environment. I have explained the building of the feeling of spiritual con-
nection to land to constitute one major literary task of the body of stories that,
whether conveyed orally or visually, we often collectively call a culture’s oral
tradition.
Put simply, telegraph literature often conceives the stories conveyed by
disembodied telegraphic speech to constitute a new and powerful form of
indigenizing oral tradition. The telegraph literature genre implicitly debates
how its new and still forming tribe (of U.S. citizens, that is) will employ this
oral literary form to spread its new mythic tradition, to disseminate a feeling of
peoplehood, and to create a new electric indigeneity, even to recently acquired
lands. At the same time, telegraph literature engages its authors’ competing
denials and inclusions of preexisting or resistant oral literary traditions—​and
resulting telecommunications forms—​that create other groups’ sometimes
 Mocca s in Tel eg raph 27

much longer-​standing sense of spiritual belonging or indigeneity to these same

American lands.
In using this literary definition of “indigeneity,” I in no way mean to un-
dermine previously established political uses of the adjective “indigenous,” as
commonly found within legal uses of the term “indigenous peoples.” Working
for the United Nations, José R. Martinez Cobo defines “indigenous peoples” as
ethnic groups whose ties to a territory predate colonization or nation-​state for-
mation, and who consider themselves culturally and politically separate from
their territory’s mainstream nation-​state.5 I intend my literary use of the term
“indgeneity,” and its growth from a people’s mythic stories, to complement
rather than undermine such political definitions of indigenous peoples, which
rely on cultural continuity and separateness in ways a literary deployment of
the term does not stress. I mean my literary use of the term to emphasize a so-
cial need within many different cultures in which people tell stories of emerging
from, spiritually connecting with, mythically belonging to, or, sometimes, even
becoming their land and its larger environment of air, water, plants, or animals.
I see this need expressed in origin stories in which Creator names first woman
“Corn” because upon her death she will return yearly from the earth in veg-
etable form to feed her offspring; I also see it expressed in origin stories in
which Creator forms first man from red earth, and then names him Red Earth
to signify his integration into the garden that Creator prepares for his use.6
Although differing literary and political deployments of the term both rely on
people’s storytelling methods for determining how they are indigenous, these
oral literary practices are not interchangeable. In fact, in the case of Native-​
settler relations, we might argue that settler cultures invent indigenizing stories
precisely because of a nagging awareness that others’ longer relationship with
an environment has produced more, better, or more indigenizing stories. As
Sioux legal scholar Vine Deloria conceives this phenomenon: “Underneath all
the conflicting images of the Indian, one fundamental truth emerges: the white
man knows that he is alien, and he knows that North America is Indian—​and
he will never let go of the Indian image because he thinks by some clever ma-
nipulation he can achieve an authenticity which can never be his.” Jace Weaver
agrees that through fantasies of (here telegraphically) dispatching Native peo-
ples, settlers work to “convince themselves of their own indigeneity.”7 The im-
perialist anxiety underlying different claims to indigeneity forms one focus of
this book.
This project will elucidate some of the complicated literary implications for
the ways that American Native and settler groups attach stories to landscapes,
and it will investigate competing cultural claims that disembodied, or dif-
ferently embodied, telecommunications technologies—​ telegraphs, broadly
28 Telegraphies

defined—​spread a culture’s stories across and saturate the land to aid in the
production of a culture’s indigeneity. The suggestion in telegraph literature that
Morse’s telegraph infuses landscapes with their inhabitants’ stories, and thus
with their very consciousness, to construct indigeneity to new lands, we might
usefully designate as the wish for a sort of technological indigeneity. The com-
plicated dance of inclusion and exclusion that occurs between colonizing and
colonized oral traditions and transmission modes in telegraph literatures allow
us further to refine this wish toward the formation of what we might best term a
“transcultural” instant indigeneity.
Because of its writers’ technotopic desires that their nation-​spanning,
story-​carrying machine manufacture a new and improved American indige-
neity, telegraph literature displays a preoccupation with previous American
telegraph systems and the ways these preexisting story-​carrying technologies
construct the indigeneity of their users. This chapter inserts indigenous
people’s literatures of telegraphy and indigeneity into the discussion, to in-
tervene in, and to complicate, some telegraph literatures’ conceptions of
competing Native and U.S. constructions of telegraphic indigeneity. It begins
with European American telegraph literature that identifies Hal Evarts’s
“moccasin telegraph” (see the introduction) and what Taliaferro Shaffner
designates as “the aboriginal telegraph,” to claim that nineteenth-​century
European American telegraph writers often conceived Native telegraph sys-
tems not as primitive, merely metaphorical precursors to their own superior
technology, but as in some ways differing, in some ways equivalent, but always
valid and potentially threatening real telegraphs. Users of the moccasin tele-
graph perceive it to function metaphysically, to deepen their connections to
their larger world by carrying their oral traditions to construct indigeneity.
Native moccasin-​telegraph literatures often interpret their telegraph systems
in idealized, utopian, or otherworldly terms as metaphysical and indigenizing
as any the U.S. telegraph literatures of Morse’s telegraphic realm can in-
vent. This chapter will suggest that U.S. telegraph literatures might seek to
borrow these modes of interpretation—​the metaphysical power to cement
a tribal sense of community and an indigenous sense of place—​for their
understandings of their own new American telegraphs. Finally, this chapter
presents one historic story from Native telegraph literature in which Native
and U.S. telegraphs competed during the Indian Wars, yielding surprising na-
tional divisions and results, to show the extent to which perceptions about
Native telecommunication systems potentially influence nineteenth-​century
and current understandings of the power of moccasin and electromagnetic
telegraphs.
Shaffner’s and other nineteenth-​century telegraph manuals and histories list
indigenous American telegraph chains among those inspiring Morse and others
 Mocca s in Tel eg raph 29

to build for their own culture a speaking landmark across the American land-
scape. Such manuals refer to smoke signals, wampum runners, and Indian sign
language as the first telegraphs to span great distances on the American conti-
nent, and they suggest that the nationwide installation of Morse’s electromag-
netic telegraph constitutes an extension of the long-​distance speech theory that
inspired the American Indian telegraph chains. By the nineteenth century, news-
paper accounts and frontier novels in the United States refer to these telecom-
munications systems collectively as the “moccasin telegraph.” As the Saturday
Evening Post describes it, Native people communicate rapidly across distances
through the “agency known to white men as the Moccasin Telegraph.”8 As sev-
eral Native autobiographies attest, this moccasin telegraph system “happens on
a spectrum of media modes”—​smoke signals, tracking skills, heliograph flashes,
relay runners, coded calls, blanket signals9 and, as I will examine most closely
here, Indian sign language—​in what Matt Cohen describes as a “Networked
Wilderness” of alternative indigenous American writing systems.10 Shaffner
alters this term slightly, and devotes an entire section to understanding the
chains that he describes as the “North American Aboriginal Telegraph” (see
figure 1.3):
Shaffner explains: “The most remarkable signaling records are to be found
on various parts of the North American continent. The aborigines . . . had their
signal stations . . . . Upon the loftiest summits beacon fires were built, and the
rising smoke by day and the red flame by night communicated intelligence to
others far distant.”11
Nineteenth-​century Native peoples similarly explain their ancient telecom-
munication systems as telegraphs. Native rights activist Sarah Winnemucca
(1844–​1891) speaks of smoke signals as an indigenous counterpart to Morse’s
electromagnetic telegraph as she remembers her brother’s decision to bring her
father’s band into the Piute reservation, lest they be shot for roaming the land
of western Nevada. Winnemucca recounts her brother’s explanation to a U.S.
Army colonel that the Native “telegraphs” worked not unlike the European
American systems: “I will find my father [soon] for I will make the son’s signal-​
fire as I go along, and my father will know it is I who is coming to see him (the
signal-​fires are like so many telegraphs of many kinds and orders), and he will
come to meet me.”12 Winnemucca does not divulge the details of these signal-​
fire telegraphs, but this passage does show that the syntax of smoke signals
contains an understanding of social relations sophisticated enough to allow
a son to communicate his relationship individually to his father across the
rolling deserts of Nevada, even without knowing exactly where his father is. By
invoking smoke signals as a type of telegraph, Winnemucca suggests how this
ancient telecommunication technology serves the specific needs of migrating
Piute people.
30 Telegraphies

Figure 1.3 Photo courtesy of Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York.

The moccasin telegraph comprises several different types of signal code,

each adapted for different conditions. These include heliograph codes flashed
from polished pieces of mica or silver, robe or blanket signals, wampum texts
disseminated between towns by wampum runners, and most importantly for
the purposes of this chapter, Indian Sign Language. The chapter examines the
surprising ways both Native Americans and non-​Natives used these moccasin
telegraphs between and among groups across the nineteenth-​century American
West. It investigates two American Indian autobiographical texts delivered
in Indian sign language for their explanations of how this moccasin telegraph
functioned in one precontact American Indian culture, between two Crow-​
speaking Native people and their English-​speaking interviewer, and at one of
the most notorious Indian battles in United States history. By including sign-​
language autobiographies as a type of Native telegraph literature, it engages a
set of cross-​colonial allusions and anxieties that have often gone overlooked in
nineteenth-​century American literature.
Of the various Native telegraph systems, one of the most complex and ex-
pressive, but perhaps also the most visually striking, is Plains Sign Language, or,
as it is sometimes officially known, Plains Indian Sign Talk. Across nineteenth-​
century America, Plains Sign Language acted as a telegraph in two senses. First,
it was used very much as various European American telecommunication sys-
tems were (the Pony Express text-​relay system, for example) to convey informa-
tion rapidly across great geographical expanses, along chains of signers. Second,
Plains Sign Language conveys information across different expanses than the
distance across the American plains: the distance between hearing and deaf
 Mocca s in Tel eg raph 31

people or between members of two cultures with spoken languages as different

from each other as German is from Japanese. Plains Sign Language spans this
cultural difference with a single system of long-​distance signification, a semi-
otic far-​speaking code that does not require knowledge of any specific spoken
or written language.
The moccasin telegraph also differs in many ways from electromagnetic
telegraphy. Unlike some telegraphs, Plains Sign Language is sited on the
body. Plains Sign Language is a visual rather than an oral communication
mode. Like other visual communications such as pictographs, quipus, or
winter counts, however, it is nonetheless used to convey the oral traditional
stories through which Native people construct indigeneity. In fact, within
many Native societies, it is intimately connected to the transmission of the
oral tradition. Its performance accompanies regular speech to the extent that
throughout the nineteenth-​century, most members of every Native Plains lan-
guage group, including women and children, used it fluently as part of their
everyday speech practices. As a result, upon meeting a member of another cul-
ture or language group who spoke Plains Sign Language, most individuals of
any nineteenth-​century plains tribe could communicate with that speaker of
a foreign language. This lingua franca requires no paid interpreters with spe-
cial skills, and the message can potentially remain private if conversants wish,
since no third and fourth parties are needed to repeat and complete their dis-
course, as they are along Morse lines. Because Plains Sign Language is sited
on the body, and spoken generally, it is immediately available, free, and, for
better and worse, allows conversants to hold one another visually responsible
for their utterances.13
Despite the valuable role the sign language plays for Natives in everyday
speech and recorded literature, scholars of Native autobiography often devote
scant analysis to the critical role sign language may play in some examples of
the genre. This is probably because, as Michael Herzfeld shows, we inherit the
legacy of nineteenth-​century assumptions that Native languages in general,
and certainly sign languages, have no true linguistic structure and consist of
nothing more than spontaneous pointings and wavings, elucidating only vague
and subjective interpretation. “The upper-​class Victorian English regarded ges-
ticulation as a ‘natural’ act, and therefore as ‘rude’ (cf. Latin rudis, ‘raw,’ ‘un-
formed’) . . . in this regard it contrasted diametrically with the precise language
of educated people.14 It was, after all, 1960 before William Stokoe’s ground-
breaking article “Sign Language Structure” convinced many readers that even
American Sign Language for the Deaf had as much a structure as any other
language.15
32 Telegraphies

Among tribes residing in the western plains of what came to be called North
America, such groups as the Pawnee, Shoshone, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Crow,
and Siouxian tribes, the moccasin telegraph functioned with runners on foot or
horseback or forming chains, with each signer stationed just in sight of the next.
Plains Sign Language uses an extensive vocabulary of physical hand and body
signs and movements to signify individual words, ideas, or phrases. Because
some Americans denied the possibility of such a language, however, when
Lewis Hadley invented a script for the sign language in the 1880s, he first had
to address disbelief that there could exist a sign language not tied to a specific
spoken language. He thus begins by assuring his readers that “such a language
adequate to all requirements of the Indian does furnish means of intercommu-
nication between all of the tribes, from Mexico to the Frozen Regions.”16 Native
users themselves were often willing to explain the discourse of their own tele-
graphic space. While helping U.S. Army Captain W. P. Clark compile his 1876
dictionary of Indian Sign Language, Lakota chief Iron Hawk compared the
different purposes of Native and European American signifying practices and
ascribed to each a spiritual significance: “The whites have had the power given
them by the Great Spirit to read and write, and convey information in this way.
He gave us the power to talk with our hands and arms, and send information
with the mirror, blanket, and pony far away, and when we meet with Indians
who have a different spoken language from ours, we can talk to them in signs.”17
By drawing parallels between Western written and Native signed literacies, Iron
Hawk here affirms the equivalent metaphysical merit of each group’s communi-
cation technologies.
Brenda Farnell elucidates that the regular speech patterns of nineteenth-​
century Plains people incorporate the sign language to the extent that they often
communicate their tales with their voices and their hands at the same time,
even when speaking to others with the same first language; for this reason, they
often make no distinction in their autobiographies between things said with the
voice and things signed with the hands. Some Native people explain that be-
fore U.S. contact on the plains, sign language formed so much a part of daily
discourse that a person unable to sign was considered unable fully to commu-
nicate. As Bad Hawk explains to Assiniboine historian First Boy, the ability to
sign served as a primary marker of not only human civilization but humanness
itself. Bad Hawk recounts his tribe’s first encounter with a European American.
A group of Native men surrounds the white man and asks him to identify him-
self: “In sign language he was asked as to what tribe he belonged, but instead
of an answer the man dropped his gun and raised his hands high above his
head . . . . The rest of the party, when they saw the act, ran over and surrounded
the man. Several spoke up, ‘Don’t any of you kill him, he is a different kind of
man, let’s look him over.’ ”18 Descended upon and scrutinized by a war party
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Volume XIV.
TORRENS’ LIFE OF MELBOURNE: Memoirs of William Lamb,
Second Viscount Melbourne. By W. M. Torrens. With
Introduction by the Editor, and Portrait of Lord Melbourne.
 “It is, indeed, one of the best and most interesting biographies
ever written.... For ourselves, we must admit we have read the book
from cover to coyer with avidity, and we hope it will reach the hands
of tens of thousands of our middle and working classes.”—Daily
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Volume XV.—Third Edition.

THACKERAY’S VANITY FAIR. Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero.
By William Makepeace Thackeray. With Biographical
Introduction by the Editor, Portrait of the Author, and full-page
Illustrations.
“The masterpiece of Thackeray’s satire is here placed within reach
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Volume XVI.
BARTH’S TRAVELS IN AFRICA: Travels and Discoveries in North
and Central Africa. Including Accounts of Tripoli, the Sahara, the
Remarkable Kingdom of Bornu, and the Countries round Lake
Chad. By Henry Barth, Ph.D., D.C.L., With Biographical
Introduction by the Editor, Full-page Plates, and Illustrations in
the Text.
“Barth’s journey through Tripoli to Central Africa is full of
instruction and entertainment. He had a fine feeling for the remote,
the unknown, the mysterious.... Altogether, his is one of the most
inspiring of records.”—Saturday Review.

Volume XVII.
VICTOR HUGO: SELECT POEMS AND TRAGEDIES. (“Hernani”
and “The King’s Amusement.”) Translated by Francis, First
 Earl of Ellesmere, Sir Edwin Arnold, K.S.I., Sir Gilbert
Campbell, Bart., Bp. Alexander, Richard Garnett, LL.D.,
Andrew Lang, LL.D., Clement Scott, M.A., Charles
Matthew, M.A., Nelson R. Tyerman, and many others. With
Portrait of Victor Hugo.
“One of the best volumes yet issued in the splendid series of
‘Famous Books’ which go to make up Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co’s
‘Minerva Library.’”—Northampton Mercury.

Volume XVIII.
DARWIN’S CORAL REEFS, VOLCANIC ISLANDS, AND SOUTH
AMERICAN GEOLOGY: With Critical and Historical
Introductions, specially written for this edition by Professor John
W. Judd, F.R.S., Professor of Geology in the Normal College of
Science, South Kensington. With Maps and Illustrations.
Darwin’s “Coral Reefs” is at once one of his most notable and
charming books, and one that has excited a most vigorous recent
controversy. His account of the Volcanic Islands he visited, and his
still more remarkable book describing the vast changes that have
taken place in South America in geological time, are also reprinted in
this volume, thus completing the “Geology of the Voyage of the
Beagle.”

Volume XIX.—Second Edition.

LOCKHART’S LIFE OF BURNS: The Life of Robert Burns. By John
Gibson Lockhart. Revised Edition. With New Notes,
Appendices, and Literary Illustrations by John H. Ingram. With
Portrait and Full-page Illustrations.
“One of the best biographies ever written, and every admirer of
Scotia’s well-known bard who has not got it should hasten to procure
the wonderfully cheap and good edition now within his reach.”—
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 Volume XX.
BARTH’S TRAVELS IN AFRICA. (Second and Concluding Volume):
Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, including
accounts of Timbúktu, Sókoto, and the Basins of the Niger and
Bénuwé. By Henry Barth, Ph.D., D.C.L. With Full-page Plates
and 50 Woodcuts.
“These travels rank among the foremost of the enterprises which
have illuminated our ignorance about Central Africa; and the work
possesses at the present time, a special interest.”—Newcastle
Chronicle.

Volume XXI.
LYRA ELEGANTIARUM: a Collection of some of the best
Specimens of Social and Occasional Verse by Deceased
Authors. Revised and Enlarged Edition. Edited by Frederick
Locker-Lampson, assisted by Coulson Kernahan. With
Notes, and Portrait of the Editor.
The Lyra Elegantiarum, which is a standard and exhaustive
collection of the best vers de Société and light lyrical verse in the
language, has for some time been out of print, and second-hand
copies have recently been sold for more than ten times the original
price. In announcing this New Edition, the Publishers wish to call
attention to the fact that not only has the work been thoroughly
revised and brought up to date, but that it has also been greatly
enlarged, and contains very many Poems not to be found in previous
issues.

Volume XXII.
CARLYLE’S SARTOR RESARTUS, Heroes and Hero-Worship, and
Past and Present. With a Critical Introduction by the Editor,
Portrait of Carlyle, etc.
 “Messrs. Ward & Lock’s ‘Minerva Library’ comes with particular
acceptance. The first seven volumes of the series are before us, and
they are models of cheapness and general excellence.”—The Star.

Volume XXIII.
THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN; including his
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This is the fullest and most important life of Franklin, almost
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extraordinary early struggles, his career as a printer, and his
scientific struggles, a copious account of the events which led up to
the War of Independence, the negotiations during the war, and those
by which peace was concluded.
WARD, LOCK AND CO., London, New York, and Melbourne.
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Harry Lorrequer. Lever.
Charles O’Malley. Lever.
Cardinal Pole. Ainsworth.
Constable of the Tower. Ainsworth.
The League of Lathom. Ainsworth.
Spanish Match. Ditto.
Constable de Bourbon. Ainsworth.
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Myddleton Pomfret. Ainsworth.
Hilary St. Ives. Ditto.
Lord Mayor of London. Ainsworth.
John Law. Ditto.
Emma. Jane Austen.
Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austen.
Mansfield Park. Ditto.
Northanger Abbey. Ditto.
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Prince of the House of David. J. H. Ingraham.
Throne of David. Ditto.
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*Cosette and Marius. Victor Hugo.
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*Hunchback of Notre Dame. Victor Hugo.
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Old Curiosity Shop. Ditto.
Barnaby Rudge. Ditto.
Martin Chuzzlewit. Ditto.
Mudfog Society, &c. Ditto.
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Kenilworth. Ditto.
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The Antiquary. Ditto.
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Pelham. Bulwer.
Midshipman Easy. Marryat.
Paul Clifford. Bulwer.
Japhet in Search of a Father. Marryat.
Jacob Faithful. Ditto.
Peter Simple. Ditto.
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Time, the Avenger. Ditto.
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The Heathen Chinee. Ditto.
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Twain.
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Smoke. Ditto.
Fathers and Sons. Ditto.
Dimitir Roudine. Ditto.
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The Blithedale Romance. Nathaniel Hawthorne.
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Innocents Abroad. Twain.
American Drolleries. Ditto.
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Last of the Mohicans.
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The Spy. Ditto.
The Prairie. Ditto.
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The Daughters. Ditto.
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Squanders of Castle Squander. W. Carleton.
Evelina. Miss Burney.
Unrequited Affection. Honore de Balzac.
Scottish Chiefs. Porter.
The Improvisatore. Hans Andersen.
Genevieve. Lamartine.
Tales of Mystery, &c. Poe.
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Year One of the Republic.
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