In this time, when we get frustrated if an email doesn’t appear within a few seconds, today’s #stampoftheday reminds us that communicating over long distances used to take days, even months. In doing so, it also underscores the importance of a functioning and timely postal system that hopefully will be deliver mail-in ballots in a timely fashion.
Issued on October 10, 1958, the 4-cent stamp commemorates the first overland mail route across the continental United State, specifically the first shipment of overland mail, which arrived in San Francisco on October 10, 1858.
Before this service began, there was no overland mail to California, which separated from settlements along the Mississippi River by 2,000 miles of largely unsettled plains, deserts and treacherous mountain passes. Consequently, mail to California either travelled by boat around Cape Horn at the tip of South America or by boat, then by land across the Isthmus of Panama and then by boat again. As a result, it usually took six weeks or more for mail to get to California.
As part of its efforts to encourage settlement in the West, in the 1850s Congress told the Postmaster General to contract for mail service from Missouri to California . After two largely unsuccessful efforts, in April 1857, the Post Office again asked for bids to provide service from somewhere on the Mississippi to San Francisco. Because Congress couldn’t agree on specifics, the Post Office didn’t specify where the service had to begin or which general route it should use to provide the service.
Nine experienced stagecoach operators bid on the contract. It was won by Overland Mail Company, which was headed by John Butterfield, a co-founder of American Express (which provided express delivery services) and included investors associated with other leading express firms in the era, including Wells Fargo, a company formed in 1850 to provide banking and express services. Overland proposed a service that would start at both St. Louis and Memphis (a move designed to appease both Northern and Southern interests). However, it also proposed a southern route that passed through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona before entering southern California. The company promised to provide twice weekly service, and to make trips in no more than 25 days. In return, the Post Office agreed to pay $600,000 a year for six years (about $19 million in today’s dollars), which made this the largest contract it had awarded up to that point in time.
Many, including objected to the decision. The New York Times, for example, asked “What possible object there can be in selecting this extreme Southern route we are utterly unable to conceive, unless it is that of forcing the future railroad to take an unnatural course, such as neither buffalo, emigrants nor capital would ever select.” Postmaster General Aaron Brown defended the choice in his annual report to Congress in 1857. The route via Salt Lake preferred by many, he contended, was “entirely out of the question” because “snow caused almost an entire failure for four months of the year.” Similarly, he argued a route via Albuquerque would be so cold it would not only make passengers uncomfortable, it might actually kill them. By contrast, he contended, “the southern or El Paso route was eminently comfortable and desirable for winter emigration.” Moreover, he continued, “for nearly a thousand miles the traveler will be traversing a country abounding in beauty and in healthfulness, possessing a salubrious climate and a fruitful soil.”
Over the next year, the company spent about $1 million (about $32 million in today’s dollars), to create the service, which had about 1,200 employees, as well as over 2,000 mules and horses, about 200 coaches, and about 170 stations along an almost 2,800 mile route that connected San Francisco, Los Angeles, Fort Yuma, Franklin (late renamed El Paso), and Fort Smith (AK) where the service split into routes the ended in St. Louis and Memphis.
The first coach carrying mail left St. Louis on September 16, 1858 and arrived in San Francisco on October 10, a day faster than required time. The journey was neither pleasant nor easy, according to Waterman Ormsby, who described that trip in a series of articles for The New York Sun. Early in the trip, he optimistically noted “we had now gone two hundred and forty-three miles, through, I think, some of the roughest part of the country on the route. . . I find roughing it on the Plains agrees with me.” However, two days later he changed his mind, stating, “I had thought before we reached this point that the rough roads of Missouri and Arkansas could not be equaled; but, here, Arkansas fairly beats itself. I might say our road was steep, rugged, jagged, rough and mountainous – and then wish for some more expressive words…Our heavy wagon bounded along the crags as if it would be shaken in pieces every minute, and ourselves dis-emboweled on the spot.” And by the end of the trip, he merely stated: “Had I not just come out over the route, I would be perfectly willing to go back, but I now know what Hell is like. I’ve just had 24 days of it.”
Despite these hardships, many hailed the new service. President James Buchanan, for example, sent a congratulatory telegram stating: “It is a glorious triumph for civilization and the Union. Settlements will soon follow the course of the road, and the East and West will be bound together by a chain of living Americans, which can never be broken.”
The service, however, never came close to breaking even. And it was discontinued in 1861 because it passed through several states that had seceded from the union. It was subsumed into a new service that didn’t pass through the Confederacy. And that service and others came to be controlled Wells Fargo, which continued to carry mail by stagecoach until the transcontinental railroad was finished in 1869.
So how should we judge all this? Was the first overland mail a failure or a mistake because it didn’t come close to covering its costs? Or should we view it as a success because, as Postmaster Brown noted in his 1858 report to Congress, it was established to further national goals – “the extension of our commerce, the spread of our population, and the development of the various resources of our country.” Those gains, he claimed, meant the US had been “remunerated a thousand fold” for it investments. This isn’t an just an academic question. Rather, even though we no longer send mail by stagecoach, bizarrely we’re again discussing the function and value of the Post Office. Strange how these old stamps can help raise and illuminate these questions.
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.