Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 13.djvu/368

 360 CLARENCE B. BAGLEY 10 cents each, and that was the smallest coin known in Oregon in those days. The line was a failure, technically and finan- cially. The wires soon began to break down. Animals and men got tangled in them, and runaways and serious injuries became so frequent that the adjacent farmers were compelled to make common cause and strip the wire from the poles. Coils of it were seen for years on fence stakes and other places where it could be kept out of the way.* The telegraph line was completed from Sacramento to Yreka October 24, 1861, but it was not until March 5, 1864, that it reached Portland. September 4 of that year it reached Olympia, and October 26, Seattle. From that time until the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad across the conti- nent, in 1883, while the telegraph served the newspapers and business needs of Oregon and Washington, the mail service was a never-ending source of frauds, injustice and hardships to the general public. The Oregon Railroad was begun in 1868, but not completed until 1887, and the Northern Pacific, begun at Kalama in 1871, reached Tacoma in 1873. Those sections of railroad, joined to steamboat service on the Columbia River and Puget Sound, helped to better mail and passenger service, but one reading the newspapers of the Northwest will find the mail service under discussion and complaint year in and year out from 1849 to 1883. In Portland and the lower Willamette Valley, served by sea and gradually by stage, it was bad enough, but as practically all the mails for Washington came by way of Portland and the wagon road from the Columbia River to Olympia was, in winter, notoriously the worst in the world, the trouble of Ore- gonians were but a drop in the bucket compared to ours on Puget Sound. The last link in the telegraph line from St. Louis, Mo., to Yreka, in Northern California, was completed October 24, 1861. This cut off from the Pony Express its most profitable business, and it was at once discontinued, and in commenting in the possession of this Society.
 * An insulator, a piece of wire, and a stamp used to stamp the dispatches, is