The completion of the Transcontinental Telegraph in 1861 completed telegraphy's mile-by-mile trek across the West. In addition to linking the coasts, the telegraph represented an extraordinary American effort in many fields of endeavor to know, act upon, and control a continent.

Merging new research with bold interpretation, James Schwoch details the unexplored dimensions of the frontier telegraph and its impact. The westward spread of telegraphy entailed encounters with environments that challenged Americans to acquire knowledge of natural history, climate, and a host of other fields. Telegraph codes and ciphers, meanwhile, became important political, military, and economic secrets. Schwoch shows how the government's use of commercial networks drove a relationship between the two sectors that served increasingly expansionist aims. He also reveals the telegraph's role in securing high ground and encouraging surveillance. Both became vital aspects of the American effort to contain, and conquer, the West's indigenous peoples—and part of a historical arc of concerns about privacy, data gathering, and surveillance that remains pertinent today.

Entertaining and enlightening, Wired into Nature explores an unknown history of the West.

| Cover Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Landscapes, Ecosystems, and Prevailing Westerlies: The Great Plains 2. Storms Moving in a Ring of Fire: The Civil War 3. Changes in the Forecast: Data Gathering, Mapping, and Weather Predictions 4. Dreams of a Boreal Empire, Nightmares of a Polar Vortex: The Arctic 5. Hot Winds on a Sun-Baked Desert: The Southwest Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index |"It is a wonder that nobody wrote this history earlier—and bravo to Prof. Schwoch for undertaking it. . . . Making good selective uses of archival resources, Schwoch provides the human touch by relating individual stories for all of his chapters in Wired into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier. . . . An enjoyable book offering considerable insight." —Communication Booknotes Quarterly
"A fine example . . . Wired into Nature is an informative study wherein the author places the establishment of communication systems and their social/political practices central to the twenty-first-century in the development of telegraphy in the North American West in the last half of the nineteenth century.," —South Dakota History
"Schwoch presents an engaging study that highlights the central role of western, and westward-looking, actors in shaping modern ideas about information gathering and the power offered by controlling rapid means of communication." —Western Historical Quarterly
|James Schwoch is a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of The American Radio Industry and Its Latin American Activities, 1900-1939 and Global TV: New Media and the Cold War, 1946–69.