The Constitution Sent by Telegraph

This monument near the Nevada capitol honors a document and a deadline. In July of eighteen sixty-four, delegates in Carson City drafted the constitution that would make Nevada a state.

Then they did something extraordinary. With the Civil War on and a presidential election days away, Union men wanted Nevada in the country in time to back Abraham Lincoln. So in late October they transmitted the entire constitution to Washington by telegraph. The message ran more than sixteen thousand words, took two days of continuous tapping, and cost over four thousand dollars, a fortune at the time. It was the longest telegram ever sent, a record it would hold for seventeen years.

It worked. Nevada became a state on October thirty-first, eighteen sixty-four, just one week before the election, which is why Nevada still calls itself the Battle Born State.