This Week in History, 1865: An international telegraph line is launched in New Westminster
Credit to Author: John Mackie| Date: Fri, 09 Aug 2019 18:06:32 +0000
The cover story in the Aug. 12, 1865, edition of Harper’s Weekly magazine was on the Collins Overland Telegraph, which was looking to connect North America to Europe by running a “submarine cable” across the Bering Strait.
Ground Zero for the North American section of the line was New Westminster. Harper’s illustrated the story with two drawings of the fledgling city, which was only six years old.
New West historian Archie Miller said the city’s population varied at the time, depending on how many miners were passing through on their way to the Cariboo gold fields. But the permanent population was probably 400 to 600.
One of the illustrations shows a steamboat and canoe on the Fraser River, with New West rising on a hill in the background. The illustration is so early there are only a couple dozen structures — there are more tree stumps than houses.
Still, Harper’s did its best to hype what was then the capital of the mainland colony of British Columbia.
“New Westminster has already become a place of some size and importance, and contains, besides many stores and dwellings, four churches, a bank, the colonial hospital, and the Government buildings,” said Harper’s.
“The residence of the Governor is delightfully situated near the river, a mile above the town. As a port, New Westminster is possessed of great advantages, the Fraser being navigable for vessels drawing 18 or 20 feet of water as far as this place. The overland telegraph crosses the river in front of the city by means of a submarine cable 2500 feet in length.”
The second illustration at the bottom of the page is the Collins Overland Telegraph Building, a three-storey wooden structure with balconies out front. The company name is written on the front and side, and there is a big pole out front flying the American flag.
This seems a bit provocative, given that B.C. became a Crown colony in 1858 because Vancouver Island’s governor James Douglas was worried about the influx of Americans during the Fraser Gold Rush.
Terminal Station of Collins’s Overland Telegraph, New Westminster, from the Aug. 12, 1865 Harper’s Weekly magazine.
There is no address for the Collins Overland Telegraph building, which no longer exists. But Miller thinks it was just up from the river, perhaps at the foot of today’s Church and Columbia streets.
“Where the police station is today at 6th and Columbia, that’s where the post office and assay office and everything was (in 1865),” said Miller. “I think this was a little bit to the north, going upriver.”
The telegraph had already been extended from California to New West by the Western Union and California Telegraph companies. The idea was to run a line along the Fraser “nearly to its source” and then go through the interior to Alaska “to a point at or near Bering Strait, which will be crossed by a submarine cable.”
Much of mainland B.C. had never been explored by white people, so U.S. Major Franklin L. Pope had been charged with exploring the unknown country and finding “the most practicable route for the telegraph.”
Pope was a multi-talented fellow. He drew the illustrations of New West used in Harper’s, and after returning to the U.S. Northeast, formed a company with Thomas Edison that designed the stock market ticker.
Front page of Harper’s Weekly on Aug. 12, 1865, featuring images and a story on New Westminster.
A 1966 master’s thesis on the Collins Overland Telegraph by Stewart Andrew Robb has a map showing the proposed B.C. route, which went from New West to Williams Lake, Quesnel, Fort Fraser and Hazelton.
According to the thesis, progress of the line from New West during the summer of 1865 “was phenomenal.”
“Mid-August saw the completion of both a road and telegraph to Hope; mid-September completion to a point about 20 miles beyond Quesnel,” Robb wrote.
Progress in the north was slower, however. The impetus to build the line to Siberia was lost when a Trans-Atlantic telegraph cable reached Newfoundland on July 27, 1866, connecting Europe to North America.
In 1867, construction of the Collins Overland Telegraph ended at Fort Stager (now called Kispiox), at the confluence of the Skeena and Kispiox rivers. While the overall project was a failure, the Collins line was a boon to B.C., opening up communications from the province to the U.S. and from the Lower Mainland to the Interior. It also provided work for people when the Cariboo gold rush faded.
“It was a relatively successful failure,” wrote Robb.
Harper’s Weekly had another story on B.C. on July 17, 1858, when it reported gold had been discovered in western North America. The illustration was included in a story on the discovery of gold “on the shores of Frazer’s and Thompson’s rivers” in what would become British Columbia. The gold rush would be one of the big factors in the establishment of the colony of British Columbia on Aug. 2, 1858.
The logo for Harper’s Weekly, “A Journal of Civilization,” on Aug. 12, 1865.
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