OLD-FASHIONED TELEGRAPHS.

THE MUSKET TELEGRAPH.

There are many people living who can remember when there were no telegraphs such as we have now.  The telephone is still younger.  Railroads are not much older than telegraphs.  Horses and stagecoaches were slow.  How did people send messages quickly when there were no telegraph wires?

When colonies in America were first settled by white people, there were wars with the Indians.  The Indians would creep into a neighborhood and kill all the people they could, and then they would get away before the soldiers could overtake them.  But the white people made a plan to catch them.

Whenever the Indians attacked a settlement, the settler who saw them first took his gun and fired it three times.  Bang, bang, bang! went the gun.  The settlers who lived near the man who fired the gun heard the sound.  They knew that three shots following one another quickly, meant that the Indians had come.

Every settler who heard the three shots took his gun and fired three times.  It was bang, bang, bang! again.  Then, as soon as he had fired, he went in the direction of the first shots.  Every man who had heard three shots, fired three more, and went toward the shots he had heard.  Farther and farther away the settlers heard the news, and sent it along by firing so that others might hear.  Soon little companies of men were coming swiftly in every direction.  The Indians were sure to be beaten off or killed.

This was a kind of telegraph.  But there were no wires; there was no electricity; only one flint-lock musket waking up another flintlock musket, till a hundred guns had been fired, and a hundred men were marching to the battle.

TELEGRAPHING BY FIRE.

The firing of signal guns was telegraphing by sound.  It used only the hearing.  But there were other ways of telegraphing that used the sight.  These have been known for thousands of years.  They were known even to savage people.

The Indians on the plains use fires to telegraph to one another.  Sometimes they build one fire, sometimes they build many.  When a war party, coming back from battle, builds five fires on a hill, the Indians who see it know that the party has killed five enemies.

But the Indians have also what are known as smoke signals.  An Indian who wishes to send a message to a party of his friends a long way off, builds a fire.  When it blazes, he throws an armful of green grass on it.  This causes the fire to send up a stream of white smoke hundreds of feet high, which can be seen fifty miles away in clear weather.  Among the Apaches, one column of smoke is to call attention; two columns say, “All is well, and we are going to remain in this camp;” three columns or more are a sign of danger, and ask for help.

[Illustration:  A Smoke Signal.]