Telegraph Office

Telegraph Office. Fort Buford State Historic Site. The Telegraph Office was a single-story, wood frame building measuring thirty-six by seventeen feet. Extension of the telegraph line from Fort Stevenson (near Garrison, ND) to Fort Buford was completed in October 1878. The arrival of the telegraph greatly enhanced the speed of communications to and from Fort Buford. Prior to the telegraph, communications with "the States" and other frontier posts was sometimes irregular and infrequent. , In 1873, the Post Commander, Colonel William B. Hazen, complained that it sometimes took him up to three months to get responses from the St. Paul headquarters of the army's Department of Dakota. , Three main communications routes existed prior to the arrival of the telegraph. The first of them was the Missouri River, which was only navigable for half of the year. The other two were overland mail routes. One extended from Fort Buford to Forts Stevenson, Totten and Abercrombie to St. Paul. The other ran from Fort Buford to Forts Rice and Sully, and then to Sioux City, Iowa. All communication routes were at the mercy of the region's unforgiving weather.