Wired into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier by James Schwoch (review)

While the building of the transcontinental railroad across the western United States has been the subject of an impressive number of books, the transcontinental telegraph has received far less attention from scholars. Wired into Naturehelps to remedy this relative neglect, as well as the paucity of telegraph histories focused on the western half of the country. Schwoch frames his work mainly within communication studies but also within historical sub-fields such as environmental history and the history of technology. Not only does the book embed the building of the transcontinental telegraph in its environmental context, but it also foregrounds use of the telegraph for military strategy (especially in conflicts with American Indians), secrecy and surveillance in weather observing, and telegraph extensions—or, at least, plans for extensions—into other frontier areas with widely varying climates, including Alaska and the Southwest.

Throughout the book, Schwoch emphasizes four motifs, which he outlines in the introduction, that function as shorthand phrases serving alternately as frameworks for analysis and recurring historical patterns he identifies: "high ground" (indicated in this place and time by the "successful mastery of difficult terrains" [p. 4]); "signal flow" (defined as including "reach, reliability, durability, and speed" [p. 5]); "state secrecy" (use of ciphers and codes by the military); and "secure command" (construction of centralized control by the government). As these themes imply, Wired into Naturedevotes greater emphasis to government involvement in telegraphy, through military activities, weather observing networks, and expeditions, and less emphasis to the business history of the telegraph companies themselves. This is in part a conscious choice, to focus on "environment, climate, and surveillance," rather than "capitalization and globalization," as many other scholars have done (p. 3). But it may also be a reflection of the archival records that were more accessible, which include many government collections and papers of government-affiliated scientists, but only a few from business leaders or private companies, such as Western Union, along with some materials from joint government-business ventures such as the Western Union Telegraph Expedition, held in the Smithsonian Institution Archives.

As a professor in communication studies who is presumably trying to make his work relevant to that disciplinary audience, Schwoch frequently brings in analogies to present-day issues, such as net neutrality and the surveillance state. In an illustrative example of this, which I have chosen at random from among many, he asks if one nineteenth-century viewpoint is "akin to those in the twenty-first century who argue that the Global War on Terror justifies such an expansive range of government activities, monitoring, and surveillance on electronic information networks?" (p. 96). Yet despite all these explicit attempts to draw comparisons with the present, Schwoch's overall approach and research methodology remain predominantly historical.

Narratively, the book frequently veers into fascinating side alleys that often illuminate its central themes, but in ways that can be unexpected. Some of the more compelling stories concern the use of government (and especially military) telegraphy in conflicts with American Indians, such as the deliberate use of fire southward from the transcontinental telegraph line by the U.S. Army in the Great Prairie Fire of January 1865. Moreover, a surprising number of intriguing side excursions are in the history of field science, including not only government and military meteorology, but also natural history collecting and anthropological observations on telegraph expeditions, such as in Alaska. The significance of this work to the history of scientific practice could be developed further in relation to the existing scholarly debates, in order to complement the robust framing within the history of communications technologies and the environment.

In sum, Wired into Natureopens up a new field of inquiry by examining the frontier expansion of the telegraph into the western U.S., with commendable attention both to how environmental factors shaped the story and to how the telegraph functioned as an instrument of state power and political...