The 1861 telegraph ended the Pony Express in two days

The first transcontinental telegraph was completed on 24 October 1861, when the Overland Telegraph Company’s line from California reached Salt Lake City and joined the line built from the east. Two days later, on 26 October, the Pony Express was officially shut down.

The line is often said to have carried messages across the continent “in minutes”. The wire was fast but the system was not. The first message sent all the way across went from California’s chief justice, Stephen J. Field, in Sacramento, to Abraham Lincoln. It left at 7:40 pm on 24 October and reached the president at 11:30 the next morning, because operators at relay stations along the route had to receive it and send it on. Field used it to promise that California would stand by the Union, six months into the Civil War.

Coast-to-coast route, 1861	Typical time
Steamship, New York to San Francisco	45 days
Stagecoach, St. Louis to San Francisco	20+ days
Pony Express, St. Joseph to Sacramento	10–11 days
Telegraph, Sacramento to Washington	under a day

Even with an overnight relay, the wire beat the riders by more than a week. At $7 for ten words it was expensive, but still cheaper and faster than a horse. The Pony Express had run for only 18 months, from April 1860, and never made a profit. Its last letters finished their journeys in November.

Accounts disagree on who built which half. The National Park Service has the Pacific Telegraph Company finishing the eastern section several days before the Overland company arrived from the west. The Wyoming State Historical Society’s encyclopedia gives the two names the other way round. Both credit Western Union’s Edward Creighton, who surveyed the route, and the NPS adds that Brigham Young supplied Mormon workers to cut poles for a largely treeless route. Crews strung three to eight miles of line a day. A cable across the Atlantic had already worked briefly in 1858, but a lasting link to Europe did not arrive until 1866.