Western Union Telegraph Expedition

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The Western Union Telegraph Expedition of 1865 was an overland exploration of a possible telegraph route across Alaska undertaken by the Western Union Company. The declared purpose of this expedition was to create an inter-continental telegraph from America to Europe via Siberia. The motivation for this project was the failure of the undersea telegraph. This goal was abandoned after the undersea cable was functional.

However, maps indicate that the territory of Alaska was served by a telegraph line that ran along much of the original route surveyed by Kennicott in 1865-66. Hudson Stuck's 1917 map of Alaska, drawn at the scale of 1:5,000,000 or eighty miles to the inch, shows the telegraph and cable line from St. Michael to Copper Center and ending at Chitina.

[edit] Expedition members

Robert Kennicott was the expedition naturalist. Although Kennicott died on the expedition, his work was publicized by W. H. Dall. This publication and the publicity about the Kennicott's death at the age of thirty helped Secretary of State William H. Seward convince Congress to purchase Alaska from Russia in 1867.

W. H. Dall was another naturalist hired by Kennicott. Dall's published exploration of the Yukon was the standard source until well into the twentieth century. Dall was accurate in detailing what he saw, but unfortunately, he recorded imagined facts, such as the length of the Koyukuk River.