In 1861, Congress passed the “Land Grant Telegraph Act” which financed the construction of Western Union’s transcontinental telegraph lines. It was essentially “a land grab under the guise of progress.” Hiram Sibley, Western Union’s co-founder and President, negotiated exclusive agreements with railroads to run telegraph lines along their rights-of-way. Eight years before the transcontinental railroad opened, the first transcontinental telegraph linked Omaha, Nebraska and San Francisco, California, and many points in between on October 24, 1861. The Pony Express ended its reign in communications after only eighteen months because it could not compete with the telegraph.
In 1889, the federal government opened two million acres of unoccupied lands in the Oklahoma territory. On April 22, ove
