George Kennan was slightly younger.[23] He was born in 1845 in Norwalk, Ohio. He received little formal education but became an expert telegrapher and was used on important assignments by the Western Union Telegraph Company, including service in the telegraph office of the White House during the Civil War. As the Civil War drew to its close, the American and Russian governments became interested in a plan for linking San Francisco and St. Petersburg by telegraph. Parties of trained men were sent to various points in the northwest and to Siberia to make the preliminary surveys and to build the line. Kennan was placed in charge of the section that was working in the northern part of Siberia. He spent some years in the wilderness there and became familiar with the life of the native population as well as the Russians. When construction was stopped after the completion of the Atlantic cable, Kennan traveled extensively in the Caucasus and spent some time in St. Petersburg. He recounted his experiences in a volume, _Tent Life in Siberia_, published in 1870. His familiarity with the natives of Siberia and the wilder tribes of the Caucasus led him to feel that Russia, with its multi-national population, was in a way similar to the United States of his day with its still unintegrated masses of immigrants and its still hostile Indian population. After working as a reporter and war correspondent, he was sent in 1885, by the Century Company to visit and report on the Siberian prison camps. He was able to do this because of the many friends in high position that he had made during his previous visit. He was profoundly shocked by the conditions and his attitude, previously friendly to the imperial regime, turned into utter disgust. He secured priceless material from the Russian revolutionists whom he met on his travels and when he published it in the Century Magazine and later in book form, in 1891 (_Siberia and the Exile System_), it speedily became one of the outstanding denunciations of the imperial regime. It had much to do with opening the eyes of the Western World to the cruelty and barbarity of the imperial administration of justice. George Kennan continued his work as a reporter and war correspondent in both the Spanish-American and Russo-Japanese Wars. He died in 1924.