Forty Years On The Pacific/Yukon Telegraph Trail
ANOTHER body of self-sacrificing and efficient men are the telegraphers and their linesmen of the Canadian North, on a line known as the Yukon Telegraph Trail. They exist in cabins, forty miles apart. Terrific storms play havoc with the lines, but communication must be kept open, entailing great exertion and risk. With the characteristic hospitality of the frontier, they will share their fire and food with the lost traveler. At times, the fierce cold is beyond their endurance and one may succumb, as the pathetic case of one McKenzie, near Hazelton, British Columbia, in 1909. One morning members of a passing pack train found McKenzie frozen to death in his cabin. He lay in his rough bunk, with his head craned over its edge, listening to the telegraph sounder. Doubtless his linesman was out when McKenzie woke up to find his fire gone out during the night—the cold had crept in and the walls were lined with frost. Probably he felt enfeebled from the keen cold and delayed getting up to light his fire. Such delay in the north is fatal—the encroaching frost had numbed him so that he was too weak to rise. And so he died. But the feature of the whole incident which strikes home, and forcibly accentuates the irony of fate, was that even in death his head was still inclined toward the sounder which was clicking away merrily the latest Associated Press news for the Dawson City papers. News from London, Paris, Berlin, Shanghai, New York. News from the four corners of the earth, not two hours old.
Kennicott—The name Kennicott, associated with the famous Alaskan copper mine, is worthy of reference here, because it was founded by an old Western Union telegrapher of that name. About 1865, the Western Union Telegraph Company started to connect America with Europe by telegraph. They sent a body of experts into the northwest, headed by Mr. Kennicott, to construct the line. For many months these brave men were engaged in the erection of a telegraph line through this unknown waste, intending to cross at Behring Strait, and reach Asia, and thence on to Europe. About this time, the successful completion of the Atlantic cable was accomplished by Cyrus W. Field, so there was no necessity for constructing a line across Behring Strait. Kennicott camped on the spot which retains his name.
Speaking of Kennicott reminds me of an item I saw in a New York paper, in 1916, when I reached there, showing how people plunge on stocks of which they know very little. A conversation was overheard in a train going into the city. One man said to another: "I bought one thousand Kennicott yesterday, Jack," and the other remarked: "What and where is that?" The reply was: "I don't know, but it is some proposition in Connecticut."