Page 106 - The Lost Ways

If it’s SHTF time, a lot of the intruders you’ll be facing are starving refugees from the city.
You don’t want them stealing your supplies, but you don’t want to shoot them either if
you can avoid it.

Communications

It’s amazing how quickly we’ve become used to today’s hyper-connected world. Most of

us are never out of touch, wherever we are, but only 25 years ago cell phones were a
rarity and mobile Internet completely unheard of. If you wanted to talk to someone while
you were out, you found a pay phone and hoped they were at home.

In the Old West, even that option didn’t exist. There were no telephones, and the only
quick way of communicating over long distances was the embryonic telegraph system.

The first telegraph line went up in 1844, linking Washington, D.C., with Baltimore. By 1856
there were around 40 U.S. telegraph companies, all based in the eastern states, but one
of them, which had recently renamed itself Western Union, had begun buying up many
of the others. Western Union opened the first transcontinental line in 1861 between New
York and California, and through the rest of the century, the telegraph network slowly
spread through the developing West.

Not every town had a telegraph station though, and few had more than one. Sending a
message wasn’t a fast process. Each one had to be tapped out by hand using Morse code
then written down at the receiving end. Then either the person it was addressed to had
to pick it up at the telegraph station or a Western Union runner would deliver it.

Even so, it was a huge improvement over what went before: – the Pony Express. Riders
on fast horses, changing mounts frequently, could carry a 20-pound sack of mail from St.
Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, in around ten days. The Pony Express became

a legend of the West—but it closed two days after the transcontinental telegraph started
operating. Still, riders were the quickest way to get a message between most towns out
west until well into the 1880s unless you lived beside the railroad.

If society collapses, you’ll suddenly find your communication options at least as narrow
th
as those of a 19 century pioneer. Cell phones, landline exchanges, and the Internet will
go down quickly. The only modern communications that will work are self-contained
radios with their own power sources, and if you don’t have them in your SHTF kit, you’ll

be back to using riders to carry messages outside your local area. If you don’t have any
horses and have to rely on automobiles or motorbikes, that’s going to use valuable fuel

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