But with the advent of the
telegraph and telephone, communication and locomotion were divorced.
In a few hours, at most, there could be performed what by the old way
would have required months. In 1837 the needle telegraph was
invented, and nine years later the Electric Telegraph Company was
formed for the purpose of bringing it into general use. Government
postal systems also came into being, later to consolidate into an
international union and to group the nations of the earth into a
local neighbourhood. The effects of all this are obvious, and no
fitter illustration may be presented than the fact that to-day, in
the matter of communication, the Klondike is virtually nearer to
Boston than was Bunker Hill in the time of Warren.
A contemporaneous and remarkable shrinkage of a vast stretch of
territory may be instanced in the Northland. From its rise at Lake
Linderman the Yukon runs twenty-five hundred miles to Bering Sea,
traversing an almost unknown region, the remote recesses of which had
never felt the moccasined foot of the pathfinder.
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