Women Telegraph Operators on the Western Frontier

W W W omen Telegraph perators ON THE WESTERN FRONTIER O O O O

by Thomas C. Jepsen

. . . While the typical woman operator in the East tended Women played an important, to work in a group environment, sometimes in a sexually yet almost totally segregated “ladies deforgotten, role in the partment,” of a large Westward expansion of telegraph company the telegraph. Of the Harper’s Magazine, august, 1873 like Western Union or many images of frontier the Postal Telegraph women that have appeared in popular literature, Company, her Western counterpart was often the that of women telegraph operators on the Western sole operator of a rural telegraph offi ce, located in frontier is least remembered. Yet, in 1886, a writer the railroad station of a town or railroad crossing. for Electrical World could state that “Far out on the Like all women on the frontier, her responsibilities western plains, wherever there is a road station, were great and her resources limited. almost invariably the traveler sees a pretty lace or In the West, the railroad operator often was muslin curtain at the window, a bird cage hanging the local Western Union operator as well; in this up aloft and some fl owering plants on the narrow arrangement, the railroad paid the telegrapher’s sill, or a vine trained up over the red door (these wages, while the Western Union provided the stations all along the line of the road are painted equipment and lines. Railroad operators, in addia dull, dark red) and other signs of the feminine tion to handling personal and business messages, presence, and if he looks out as the train stops he handled train dispatch orders and were responsible will be nearly sure to see a bright, neatly dressed, for the scheduling of train arrivals and departures. white-aproned young woman come to the door . . . The single-operator offi ce typically consisted of and stand gazing out at the train and watching the a desk or bench in the railroad depot where all the passengers with a half-pleased, half-sorry air. This telegraph equipment was located. A technically is the local telegraph operator, who has taken up accurate illustration of such an offi ce, with a her lonely life out here on the alkali desert amid female operator at the key, can be found in an arthe sage brush, and whose only glimpse of the ticle entitled “The Telegraph,” which appeared in world she has left behind her is the brief acquain- the August 1873 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magtance with the trains which pass and repass two or azine. The equipment consisted of a cut-off switch, three times during the day. These are true type[s], a telegraph key, a telegraph relay, and a telegraph all of them, of our brave American girl, whose “sounder” or “register.” The sounder produced courage is equal to the emergency.” audible clicks that the operator had to decipher

by ear; the register marked or impressed dots W. B. Dougall. I passed successfully and was asand dashes onto a paper tape for later decod- signed to the office at Woods Cross, Utah. I held ing. The wet battery, which supplied electrical this position for five years from October 1, 1879, power for the telegraph, was usually located in until June 1,1884. I resigned to marry the man of a wooden cabinet underneath the desk. my choice, Seth Chauncey Jones of Salt Lake City. When the operator wished to transmit a mes- I never missed one roll call, which was at 8 a.m. sage, she opened the switch lever located My salary was advanced three times. I clothed on the telegraph key, “breaking” the cir- and boarded myself and gave my mother cuit. This placed the key between the $10.00 each month and helped clothe battery and the telegraph wire, and my youngest sister Sarah. I worked for allowed the key to make and break the Western Union also the Utah Centhe circuit to produce the dots tral Railroad.” and dashes of Morse Code. Expe- Anne was the sole operator at a rienced operators could identify sparsely equipped railroad station one another by their distinctive where the telegrapher’s equipment style of sending, or their “hand.” consisted of only her instruments, After transmitting a message, the a flag and red lantern for signaling operator would spindle the mes- trains, and a supply of train orders and sage form on a hook on the wall; at telegraph forms. She sometimes had the end of the day, the forms would to work as long as 18 hours a day when be filed for archival purposes. trains had been rerouted because of bad In addition to sending and receiving messages, the operator at a W. B. Dougall weather or accidents. Her friends would call at the station to see if she could go small station was also responsible with them to parties and dances; howfor battery maintenance. This involved periodic ever, as she later recalled, “I had to remain at my cleaning of the battery terminals and adding post until the last train cleared and they often were water and electrolyte when required. Telegraphic late, so I missed a lot of social life.” schools taught battery maintenance as part of their . . . The connection of the Eastern and Western curriculum; instructions could also be found in sections of the Transcontinental Telegraph was the Western Union Rule Book, a compendium of made in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1861; its successregulations and practical advice for running a tele- ful completion stirred interest in the Mormon graph station. . . . Many telegraphers also served as community in creating a telegraphic system to ticket agents, or as express agents; some doubled connect the widely separated Mormon settlements as Wells Fargo agents. . . . in Utah, Nevada, and Idaho. Construction of Western railroad operators, unlike their urban the Deseret Telegraph, as it was named, was sisters, rarely had the luxury of regular working completed in early 1866. Women were employed hours. In addition to the 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. hours as operators from the beginning and formed a required to handle telegrams and commercial considerable proportion of the operators. Within messages, railroad operators had to be present the Mormon community, telegraphic work was rewhenever trains passed by the station. garded as a form of community service. A commu Anne Barnes Layton became the operator at nity would elect a young man or woman to go to Woods Cross, Utah, in 1879 at the age of 16. Her Salt Lake City, receive telegraphic instruction, and personal reminiscences, written later in life, pro- return to the community to serve. Utah historian vide a glimpse of her experience: Kate Carter collected oral and written histories “When I was fifteen years old I studied tele- from surviving women operators in the late 1950s graphy from my oldest sister, Mary Ann, who and 1960s for “The Story of Telegraphy,” a section became Mrs. George Swan 12 December 1878. of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers’s multivolume In four months I took the examination from Our Pioneer Heritage. One of the earliest surviving

photographs of women telegraphers and their equipment is one taken of Barbara Gowans and Emily Warburton upon their graduation in 1871 from the telegraphy school run by the Deseret Telegraph in Salt Lake City (see below). Barbara Gowans was born in 1855 in Liverpool, England; shortly thereafter her parents, Mormon converts, immigrated to the United States. They settled in Tooele, Utah, where Barbara’s father became mayor. Barbara and a friend, Emily Warburton, became the fi rst telegraph operators in Tooele after attending the course in Salt Lake City. Barbara recalled: “When I was sixteen I went to Salt Lake City to learn telegraphy. Emily Warburton and I went together. We rented a room from a Mrs. Ure in the 15th Ward. We batched and our parents sent in provisions. We were three months in Salt Lake City being taught in President Young’s offi ce, whom we saw every day. We celebrated Pioneer Day in Salt Lake City in 1871 and participated in the telegraph fl oat in the parade. “In the fall of 1871 the Western Union opened an offi ce in Tooele. Emily and I were the operators. I will never forget the fi rst message I sent. Emily did not want to send it. I was very nervous, I tried but all that was received was the address and the signature.” Barbara Gowans married Benjamin L. Bowen in 1876 and had 11 children; she was succeeded as telegraph operator by her father after his return from missionary work in England. One of the distinguishing characteristics of women telegraph operators in the 19th century was a surprisingly high degree of mobility. This was due in part to the fact that railroads often offered free passes to telegraphers, enabling them to move easily from place to place in search of work. Moving around was a way of advancing one’s pay scale relatively quickly as well; staying in one place and waiting for a promotion often took years, while relocating to a distant city to fi ll a vacant position at a higher pay grade could bring a quick raise in salary. Such positions were frequently advertised in the telegraphers’ journals, and word of job openings spread quickly via the electric “grapevine.” As telegrapher Minerva C. Smith observed in 1907, “Often the only way the operators can secure an ultimate raise without incessant and usually fruitless demands is to travel from city to city and from one company to the other.” For women who regarded telegraphy as a career, moving around became part of a lifestyle that appears surprisingly contemporary to modern observers. . . . Women operators enjoyed unusual freedom in the 19th century. Their skills, and the discretionary income that their trade provided, allowed them to change jobs and venues at will. Thus women operators were able to transcend the bounds of a patriarchal society, if they chose to do so. . . . Both male and female telegraphers tended to enter the profession in late adolescence. An entrylevel, or second-class, woman operator might make a starting salary of $20 to $25 a month; after a few years’ experience, she might make as much as $45 a month. Her male counterpart typically started at about the same rate of pay, but moved up more rapidly to a typical salary of around $60 a month. The majority of women operators seem to have left the profession after a few years to marry. . . .

Barbara Gowans and Emily Warburton,

Deseret Telegraphy school graduation, 1871.

The percentage of telegraphers who were women was slightly lower in the West than in the East. The census of 1870, the fi rst to differentiate occupations by sex, showed four percent of telegraphers to be women nationwide, while only about three percent were women in the Plains, prairie, and Far West regions. By 1900, when the census showed nearly 13 percent of the operators nationwide to be women, the West still trailed the East with only 11 percent women. However, refl ecting the generalized Westward population shift, the actual number of women operators employed in the Western states grew from around 73 in 1870 to 2,456 in 1900. Like all fi gures dealing with the employment of women in the 19th century, the census fi gures almost certainly err on the low side. Some anecdotal accounts place the actual percentage of telegraph operators who were women to be as high as 20 or 25 percent. . . . The number of telegraphers peaked in the 1920s and then began to decline, as the telegraph was replaced by the telephone for commercial use, and by automatic signaling equipment in its railroad applications. However, women and men continued to serve as Morse telegraph operators until the mid-1970s; the use of telegraphic signaling continued the longest in the rural regions of the West. The telegraph operator fulfi lled a special role in the development of the West, providing the means of communication that linked isolated communities to the rest of the world. The telegraph provided rural communities with news, commodity prices, and personal messages relating to births and deaths; it enabled the railroads to transport goods and passengers in a safe and orderly manner. Western newspaper editors relied heavily on telegraph operators to provide them with the latest news from the East and often spent many hours in the telegraph offi ce awaiting reports. The women who served as telegraph operators were not only technical professionals, but also communicators, who provided their communities with much-anticipated information; the telegraph operator was often the bestinformed person in the community. Women on the Western frontier found innovative ways to fulfi ll their responsibilities, combining domestic work and telegraphy in ways that still seem original and innovative.

Katherine Fenton Nutter

came west as a telegrapher and became Utah’s cattle queen. When Katherine died in Salt Lake City on July 17, 1965, at age 94, the Salt Lake Tribune called her “perhaps the last of the West’s cattle queens.” Wife of Preston Nutter, she was a telegrapher and manager of the Colorado Springs Postal Telegraph Company’s offi ce during the Cripple Creek, Colorado, mining boom. After the death of her husband she became president of the Preston Nutter Corporation, a large cattle ranching corporation. Katherine evidently never forgot her telegraphy skills. On one occasion when she was ordering railroad cattle cars, a friend recalled, “she overheard the telegrapher rattling off an order for the cars in [Morse] code, stopped him and said, ‘I ordered cattle cars, not sheep cars.’ The surprised telegrapher realized she had read his message as fast as he sent it and had caught the error.” Excerpts from Thomas C. Jepsen, “Women Telegraph Operators on the Western Frontier,” Journal of the West (April 1996): 72–80.

Thomas C. Jepsen, author of numerous articles on the history of telecommunications technology, is a telecommunications systems architect in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Left photos courtesy Utah State Historical Society. Images courtesy National Archives: American Progress, by John Gast (4–5); telegraph workers (6–7, 10–11); telegraph map and engraving (8–9); Indian drawing (12); Deseret Telegraph station (22); St. George offi ce (30).