The telegraph manual: a complete history and description of the semaphoric, electric and magnetic telegraphs of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, ancient and modern.

A WESTERN TELEGRAPH CROSSING. 667
civilization. The Missouri river was about 2,100 feet wide,
and one of the most turbulent streams in America. On the
south bank of the river, the line was built to the frontier; and
to avoid traversing the Indian territory, the wire was stretched
across the river, and then built to St. Joseph, some seventy
miles further westward.
Since that time, brief as the period is, a wonderful change
has taken place in that part of the country. In places where
I saw the Indians as the sole inhabitants, and the whole broadspread prairies beautifully adorned with the varied flowers and
green grass, now the white man has full possession, and villages have sprung up as by magic, and the ploughshare upheaves the soil so lately traversed with the red man armed with
his deadly weapons, the tomahawk and the bow. On that
very soil, but a few years since, the blood of the father, mother,
and child, dripped from the scalping-knife, while fiendish beings
danced with joy around the trophies cut from the heads of the
murdered. To-day civilization reigns supreme over that same
land, and the tomahawk, the scalping-knife, and the ironpointed arrow, have been bound together with the olive branch,
and now move by the breath of the Creator at the top of tho
sacred spire