The CB&Q Railroad and the Telegraph

The Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad started in 1849 and by 1900 had lines in eleven states. The Burlington -- as the company was also known -- began building a railroad from Nebraska to Denver in 1881. One crew started laying track from the Nebraska/Colorado border and the other crew started from Denver.

The first train arrived in Denver on this line in spring 1882. In 1887 CB&Q added the “Prairie Dog Special,” which ran from Holdrege, Nebraska to Cheyenne, Wyoming, right through Keota. In small towns across the plains, homesteaders depended on the railroad for travel and for shipping farm goods to market.

The telegraph expanded across the United States alongside railroads -- telegraph lines were strung right next to the tracks. This system made it possible to coordinate train schedules and communicate across long distances using Morse Code.

In 1910, The Burlington was the first railroad company to use the printing telegraph, which allowed operators to type messages that would be directly printed onto paper. Printing telegraphs were slower to send messages than a Morse Code system, but the messages did not have to be converted from dots and dashes in order to be read.

In wet years the railroad prospered, carrying harvests of grain and cattle to places like Chicago at fixed prices. In dry years there wasn’t much to ship, and farmers had no money to pay the freight. Eventually people began using cars for travel, and railroads began to abandon less profitable lines, literally pulling up the track--and leaving small towns like Keota high and dry. The tracks to Keota were removed by 1974.