In Wired into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier, James Schwoch offers new perspectives onto the spread, use, and effects of the telegraph, and debates over it. His focus is the region west of the Mississippi during the years between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century, through the West's connections to Washington, DC and the use of information by the government. Rather than focussing his narrative on firms or entrepreneurs, Schwoch organizes his analysis around four broad and overlapping themes: the high ground, the signal flow, the state secret, and the secure command. These themes are touched on throughout the chapters, sometimes with comparisons to recent issues, such as the rise of the surveillance state and net neutrality, and sometimes with speculation about motivations and counterfactuals.

The high ground refers to the mastery of terrains, such as the desert Southwest or the mountainous Rockies. The high ground refers to both the construction of telegraph lines and the advantages that doing so affords. Signal flow invokes questions of the reliability and reach of the telegraph network and prioritization of different types of messages. Greater signal flow allowed for greater transmission rates and for greater gathering and dissemination of information. One example is scientific information regarding the environment and the climate. The state secret refers to the structure, reach, and confidentiality of the telegraph. The themes in this area include whether the government should own its own telegraph system, how to keep messages sent over those systems secure, and how much information telegraph companies needed to share with the government. Finally, the secure command refers to the origin of a communications hub in Washington, DC that could be used by the President to coordinate agents throughout the country and the world. Schwoch highlights the challenges of securely transmitting messages to and from the President.

The book has chapters applying the four themes to the telegraph in the Great Plains, the Civil War, data gathering, the West, the Arctic, and the Southwest. During the Civil War and in the following decades, the telegraph network was a mix of government and private construction and operation. The United States Military Telegraph (USMT) was an uneasy alliance between Western Union and the military, serving the military but run by Western Union, which often gave preference to commercial over military messages and which provided poor security for those military messages. The Signal Corps, although temporarily supplanted by the USMT during the Civil War, was the military's telegraph unit. In his discussion of the USMT and the Signal Corps, Schwoch addresses questions of government versus private ownership and the government's powers and ability to regulate the network.

The telegraph was both subject to the whims of nature and a means of understanding it. Delivering telegraph supplies to remote locations could be an arduous task. Line workers could die of yellow fever in the Plains, dehydration in the Southwest, and hypothermia in Alaska. But once the lines were erected and in good working order, they could be used to understand nature and control adversaries. One part of the Signal Corps was the Signal Service, which provided weather information and forecasts by tracking storms throughout the West. In the 1870s, tensions arose between the Signal Service and telegraph companies around the Signal Service's use of a cipher, designed to reduce the number of words needed to transmit weather information. Telegraph operators transcribed dots and dashes into words, but the context of the message was a critical component of distinguishing between two words that had similar codes. This led to a paradox of messages that were shorter but required more time to transmit due to the care with which a ciphered message must be transmitted. Schwoch draws parallels between the technology used to track storms and the technology used to track the movement of outlaws, contain Native Americans, and secure the border. The development of ciphers was important for military messages, as lines could easily be tapped and messages intercepted.

By focussing on the themes of the high ground, the signal flow, the state secret, and the secure command, Schwoch provides four analytical lenses through which to examine the telegraph on the frontier. The parallels between the telegraph and modern communications technology show that many of the issues with which we struggle today, such as the surveillance state, net neutrality, government control, security, and espionage, are rooted deep in communications history.