Telegraph Point is the historical site of a telegraph station on the north bank of the Skeena River, about 48 miles (77 km) southwest of Terrace and 28 miles (45 km) southeast of Prince Rupert, British Columbia. The Skeena River here crosses the Coast Mountains, which built up over the Mesozoic as the western edge of North America grew by accretion. Oceanic plates subducted beneath the continent while fragments of crust, including Intermontane terranes to the east and Insular terranes to the west, were carried in and welded onto its margin. By about 100 million years ago, the Insular and Intermontane terranes were sutured together, and the Coast Belt formed in the zone between them. Magma rising from the subduction zone then intruded this composite terrane in plutons that crystallized between roughly 170 and 45 million years ago. Together they form the Coast Mountains batholith, also called the Coast Plutonic Complex, one of the largest granitic masses in the world. Remnants of older metamorphosed sedimentary and volcanic rock lie between the plutons. Repeated glaciation later sculpted the valley. Ice from the most recent Fraser Glaciation flowed down the Skeena and split near Terrace, sending one lobe south toward Kitimat and another west toward Prince Rupert. As the ice retreated, the sea flooded far inland over land still depressed by its weight, turning the valley into a fjord.

The lower Skeena lies in Tsimshian territory. The river linked the Tsimshian, whose name means ‘inside the Skeena’, with the Gitxsan, ‘people of the Skeena’, who lived near present-day Hazelton. The Kitselas, one of the 14 Tsimshian tribes, have occupied the nearby canyon for at least 5,000 years, according to archaeological and ethnographic evidence. Their name, Gitselasu, means ‘people of the canyon’. They controlled passage through the canyon until 1872, when the British took control of the river and ended their right to charge travelers. Samuel Morse’s electric telegraph, developed in the 1830s and 1840s, sent signals along wire strung between stations. Cyrus Field’s Atlantic Telegraph Company laid the first transatlantic cable in 1858, but it broke about three weeks later and could not be repaired. In 1865, Western Union began the Collins Overland Telegraph, also known as the Russian-American Telegraph, as an overland alternative to the undersea link. The route was to run from San Francisco through Oregon, Washington Territory, the Colony of British Columbia and Russian America, then across the Bering Strait and Siberia to Moscow. A second transatlantic cable, completed in July 1866, restored telegraph service between Europe and North America and made the overland scheme obsolete. The project was abandoned in July 1867.

In British Columbia, the Collins line was built north from New Westminster on the Fraser River and reached the Skeena at Hazelton before work halted in 1867. Hagwilget people at Hazelton later built a bridge from cable the company had left behind. Under the terms of British Columbia’s entry into Confederation in 1871, the Dominion government took over the lease and operation of the telegraph lines. From 1901 to 1902, it built the Skeena Line, 203 miles (327 km) from Prince Rupert to Hazelton, with log cabin stations to house operators and linemen. The Dominion also reused the old Collins route for the Yukon Telegraph, completed in 1901. The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway was completed in 1914 to link Prince Rupert and Winnipeg, and a parallel Grand Trunk Pacific Telegraph ran alongside the Skeena Line. Family-history records show people living at Telegraph Point from 1915 to 1933, among them a government telegraph lineman in a government-owned wood building in 1921, a railway section foreman that year, and a laborer in 1933. Today the site is a large pullout and rest area on the Yellowhead Highway and the historical Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. Little remains beyond occasional telegraph poles and heavy galvanized wire lying in the underbrush. In March 2024, a Kitselas Lands and Resources eulachon monitoring program sampled for the fish’s DNA at Telegraph Point, one of four lower Skeena sites. Read more here and here. Explore more of Telegraph Point and Skeena River here: