Across The Fence: Scalped at Plum Creek

At 9 o'clock on the evening of Aug. 6, 1867 the telegraph went dead at the Union Pacific's Plum Creek Station near present day Lexington, Nebraska. Telegrapher William Thompson, a recent immigrant from Hampshire, England cussed his bad luck as he made his way to the section house. A dead line meant there was a downed line and William would have to roust out the section crew and join them in a search for the location of the problem. He suspected that the trouble was directly related to the continuing skirmishes between the railroad, the telegraph, the Army and the Cheyenne. Most likely a huntin...