By the mid-1800s, traders were moving in and out of Santa Fe in growing numbers. U.S. soldiers had arrived. The feds ruled the territory. Settlers were coming in from the south and the east.

Along their pathways sprouted telegraph lines, the original information highway and a key instrument of America's push into the Southwest.

Santa Fe was the regional headquarters of the Signal Corps, the branch of the U.S. Army that built and operated the nation's telegraph lines. From Santa Fe, the telegraph line stretched south to El Paso and west across a wide swath of desert to Phoenix.

Propelled by Manifest Destiny, America's self-endowed claim on the West, the Signal Corps took control of the telegraph in 1867 and strung lines that speeded communications between army commanders and government officials in the East and their outposts across the West.

The men who made the wires talk had a sense that their mission was big. The telegraph served as "a helper to the people without the distinction of persons" and delivered information "on terms that will barely pay for compiling and transmitting it," boasted a Santa Fe-based Signal Corps officer.

The telegraph line running south from Santa Fe was the picture of left-brain precision. Among the Signal Corps' awestruck neighbors was a correspondent for The New Mexican.

"The telegraph lines (are) a fine piece of work, symmetrical and durable," William Dawson wrote in a newspaper article. "The poles are all of uniform size and height and numbering precisely 25 to the mile all along the line."

Soldiers in the Signal Corps considered theirs a plum assignment. They saw themselves as an elite corps and tended to make long careers of the Army.

Reporters and soldiers may have been amazed by the network of floating wires, but the power of the telegraph didn't impress everyone.

Vandals, it seemed, couldn't resist pulling down the wires or smashing the glass insulators. The telegraph line was a frequent target in the late-1860s and 1870s of people bent on destruction.

Why? Was it one person's desire to tear down what someone else built, or was it sabotage as an act of resistance against American expansionism? Decades later, writer Oliver La Farge speculated that the motive was not so sinister, not so calculated.

Maybe, he wrote, a man cut down the wire simply because he needed it to fix his wagon.

Contact Rob Dean at 986-3033 or rdean@sfnewmexican.com.