Fort Apache Operator

Reprinted from "INSULATORS - Crown Jewels of the Wire", November 1984, page 16

(The following is reprinted from the 1880's writings of Will C. Barnes, when he was the lone telegraph operator at Fort Apache. It was sent along to us by R. H. Johnson of Scottsdale, Arizona, and is very interesting and entertaining, besides being full of past history.)

"I had misgivings about my ability," he recalled "when I found myself at the end of a wire with some old-timer two or three hundred miles away hammering out thirty words a minute to me. If anyone ever sweated blood, I was that person for the first three months. But practice makes perfeet and practice at Fort Apache eventually made me perfect.

"Almost every day some Arizona post reported an Indian scare, with frequent killings by raids of Victorio's hand of Warm Spring Apaches. These raids kept the troops of nearly all the southern Arizona and New Mexico posts in constant field service. Every raid was reported to each post commander. It was a busy wire. The emergency call, '39-39-39,' was the 'break in' signal which allowed any such messages to take precedence over all other business, either official or private. An unusually bold raid would bring a general order from the department commander, keeping every operator at his key constantly until the situation was relieved. Several times I put in thirty-six hours straight time at the key -- not working, of course, but ready at any moment to answer a call. It was surprising how, with the instrument rattling away almost without a break, an operator could lay his head on his table and drop off to sleep in a second. No matter what was going on over the wire, he could sleep like a log. But let his office call sound two or three times and he was at once wide awake and ready for business.

"Besides the telegraph work the military operator was required to tike, record and forward by wire four separate weather observations daily. These observations were synchronized with Washington time, which caused the operator at Fort Apache considerable sorrow, for it forced him to make the first report each day at 3:39 a.m. There could be no fudging on this business. The instruments had to be read at 3:39, the report made out and put into code all ready for the call signals which came over the wire from El Paso at exactly 4 a.m. If you weren't there to answer, you later had a painful few moments of wire conference with the chief operator, who was a commissioned officer. Yuma was the most westerly station we had, and it sent the first report. Then, each man, listening to his fellows, picked up the report in his turn, ticked off his ten or fifteen cipher words, signed his initials, got the O. K. from El Paso and went hack to bed.

"The slender strand of wire which connected Fort Apache with the outside world in 1880 was very primitive. To the Apaches it was an exceedingly mysterious affair. The poles were mostly cottonwood saplings, wired to cedar stubs set in the ground. One pole out of fifty, perhaps, could be called straight. The rest were as crooked as a ram's horn. In this year the military lines stretched from San Diego on the west across Arizona and New Mexico and western Texas clear to Denison -- more than twelve-hundred miles of line, with many branches to points like Santa Fe, Prescott and other pioneer towns off the main line.

"What with trees tailing across it and other accidents, the wire was down aso6ften as it was up. On one occasion it had been down for over a week.  The repairman from Apache had gone over his section twice without discovering the break. I decided to go myself. Taking a test key along, I cut in occasionally until I discovered I was beyond the break. I could get Camp Thomas but not Apache. Carefully I retraced my steps, never taking my eyes from that wire suspended above. Cutting in again, I found I was able to get Apache but not Thomas. Ergo, the break had been passed. I doubled back on my trail, scanning the wire foot by foot until I was back at the place I had cut before. Again I retraced my steps; there was something weird about it all. At one place the line crossed Turkey Creek, a small stream with a heavy fringe of large sycamores on each bank. The wire was suspended by poles on each side of the stream and passed through the thick branches of the trees, where it could not be clearly seen. I decided I would make sure of every single foot of that wire so, riding my horse under the sycamore through which the wire passed, I stood up in the saddle, grabbed a drooping limb and swung myself up into the tree. Before doing this I unbuckled my cartridge belt to which my revolver was attached and hung it over the saddle horn. My cavalry carbine was left in its scabbard on the saddle. The horse stood quietly under the tree. Working my way toward the tree top, I found the break and I was well pleased with myself over the work. Some clever rascal had climbed the tree, tied a rope the wire on each side of the tree trunk, and had then drawn it in enough to get considerable slack -- not a hard thing to do on that line. He had then cut the wire and twisted each end around a limb. Thus it went into the branches on one side of the tree and came out on the other side, but between the ends was a foot-wide gap. Anyone looking for a break was thus completely fooled. In a short time I spliced in a piece of wire and the break was fixed; I could get both Apache and Thomas on the test key.

"While at this job I heard voices under the tree -- Indian voices, at that. Peering cautiously through the leafy screen, I discovered below three of the meanest out law Apaches on the reservation. They were all armed, too. What they couldn't understand was the presence of that well-equipped horse standing around without any visible owner. The red men scanned the trail he had made; looked everywhere on the ground for a man's tracks and, of course, could not find any. I held my breath. At last, to my great relief, they rode away without touching a thing, seemingly afraid of some sort of trap. I was convinced that had they seen me up there, unarmed and alone, they would have shot me full of holes and made away with my outfit.

"Who played that cute trick of cutting the wire and concealing the break in the foliage of that sycamore tree? That I found out later on. Two renegade white men from Utah, passing through the reservation with a bunch of stolen horses, had taken this method to prevent word being flashed ahead of them. One of the men, I learned, had been a telegraph repairman. None but a skilled repairman could have worked out a job such as that was.

"When Apaches cut the wire, they threw a lasso over it and pulled it from the pole. Then, with a heavy rock for an anvil and another for a hammer, they pounded it in two. They learned that, by cutting it in two places, fifty or a hundred feet apart, they could hide the cutoff piece in a canyon or the rocks. Repairmen seldom carried more than eight or ten feet of extra wire and such a break could not be mended until a long piece was brought from the post, which took time. Wise lads, those Apaches."