How the Post Office Created America
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That such a fine young lady could and would make the grueling trip, sometimes even astride a horse like an Amazon, was a powerful advertisement for western settlement. Solitary men could explore, trap, and mine, but farmers needed families to work the land if they were to prosper. Writing good-naturedly about the rigors of fording streams, Narcissa confessed, “There is one manner of crossing which husband has tried but I have not, neither do I wish to. Take an elk skin and stretch it over you, spreading yourself out as much as possible. Then let the Indian women carefully put you on the water and with a cord in the mouth they will swim and draw you over.”
The Whitmans set about establishing their mission among the Cayuse Indians as soon as they arrived in the Walla Walla Valley. Marcus had medical training, and along with conducting religious services, he treated the sick and delivered babies. The pregnant Narcissa ran their home and taught in their school, but whatever romantic ideas they had cherished regarding the “noble savages” they had hoped to evangelize were short-lived. The couple couldn’t adjust to the Indians’ seminomadic, communal way of life, and Narcissa also struggled with their Nez Perce language. For their part, the Cayuse weren’t particularly interested in being saved, at least by the Whitmans, whose complex dogma and obsessions with privacy, ablutions, and the extermination of the ubiquitous lice and fleas they found puzzling. This culture clash often surfaces in priggish comments in Narcissa’s letters: “We must clean after them, for we have come to elevate them and not to suffer ourselves to sink down to their standard.” (Not all missionaries shared this unchristian view. Samuel Parker, a Congregationalist minister who lived with the more congenial Nez Perce nearby, thought that the effort to uplift the Indians would be “fraught with as much promise and encouragement as it was in earlier days to elevate our ancestors.”)
Narcissa’s poignant letters home bespeak the pioneer’s pain of being cut off from all that was familiar: “My dear Mother, I have been thinking of my beloved parents this evening; of the parting scene, and of the probability that I shall never see those dear faces again while I live.” It would be more than a decade before the West’s first post offices were established, and transporting mail past Missouri was an informal business that depended on kindly travelers and private couriers. The resulting delays and uncertainties of correspondence caused her much anxiety: “I do not know how many of my letters reach home or whether any of them. . . . I hope all who write will be careful to mention the reception of all our letters, so then we shall know what ones fail and what reach you.” After Alice, her two-year-old daughter and only biological child, drowned in 1839, Narcissa fell into a depression, which was increased by her isolation: “My Dear Mother, I cannot describe how much I have longed to see you of late. . . . One reason doubtless is it has been so long since I have received a single letter from any one of the dear friends at home. Could they know how I feel and how much good their letters do me, they would all of them write a great deal and write often, too, at least every month or two.”
The Whitmans were more successful in ministering to fellow pioneers and in encouraging more to follow; indeed, Marcus even helped to lead a wagon train of a thousand settlers up the Oregon Trail. Narcissa got some solace from caring for the couple’s adopted children, including seven white orphans and three of mixed Indian blood, and despite her travails, she, too, continued to encourage migration: “This country is destined to be filled, and we desire greatly to have good people come, and ministers and Christians, that it may be saved from being a sink of wickedness and prostitution.” If her own dear mother would but make the trip, she wrote, “once here I think there would be no cause of regret. Families can come quite comfortable and easy in wagons all the way.”
In 1847, Henry Spalding, the Whitmans’ longtime colleague, had the dismal duty of writing the saddest kind of pioneer letter to Narcissa’s family in New York. Measles brought by the settlers had killed about half of the Cayuse, and some survivors had reacted by murdering the couple and twelve others at the mission and burning it down. “Can the aged mother read and live?” Spalding wrote. “I thought to withhold the worst facts, but then they would go to you from other sources, and the uncertainty would be worse than the reality. Pardon me if I have erred.” Following what was hailed as her martyrdom, Narcissa’s story, gleaned from her letters, many of which were published, made her a posthumous celebrity and role model for the girls and women who followed her hard road west.
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THREE MOMENTOUS EVENTS in the 1840s spiked both migration to the Far West and the pressure to link the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific. After the easier route over the Rockies through Wyoming’s South Pass became common knowledge, the surge of pioneers into the Oregon Territory lent ballast to America’s claim to all the land up to the latitude line of 54 degrees, 40 minutes north. The United States also won the Mexican-American War and, with it, a vast territory stretching from Texas to California and parts of Wyoming and Colorado. Finally, gold was discovered in California. Opportunities abounded, and many Americans heeded the advice, later popularized by Horace Greeley but purportedly first given by John Babson Lane Soule, an Indiana journalist, in an 1851 editorial in the Terre Haute Express: “Go west young man, and grow up with the country.”
The Gold Rush of 1848 to 1856 was one of the nineteenth century’s most important events, and it enthralled the public with California, which came under U.S. control after the war with Mexico ended in 1848. (Ten years later, the discovery of major silver deposits in the part of the Utah Territory that’s now Nevada would send another surge of miners to the West.) The prospect of getting rich quick caused thousands of Americans to mortgage their homes or spend their life savings to try their luck in the Sacramento Valley’s streams. California’s white population climbed from about 2,000 in 1848 to 100,000 by 1858. The tiny village of San Francisco, which had 200 residents in 1846, became the official port of entry, and by 1852, it was a boomtown of 36,000.
California was desperate for fast, efficient mail. Miners wanted to correspond with the folks back home, perhaps on the new illustrated stationery that predated picture postcards. Businessmen needed to transfer bank drafts and contracts. In 1848, Postmaster General Cave Johnson authorized its first post offices, in San Francisco and Sacramento, but service remained so poor that, in 1850, irate residents didn’t get the news that they had achieved statehood until six weeks after the fact.
There was still no reliable overland way to get people or the mail from coast to coast, and even after the advent of oceangoing steamships in the 1840s, the trip by sea was extraordinarily onerous. The worst of the two bad options was a thirteen-thousand-mile, six-month trip around the tip of South America. The shorter, costlier alternative consisted of two voyages broken by a tedious stop at the Isthmus of Panama, a fifty-mile-wide strip of land separating the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; there, the mail was unloaded from one ship and hauled to the opposite coast, where another waited to transport it eastward or westward. This risky, expensive, semimonthly service supposedly took about a month but often dragged on much longer. Nor did the postal problems stop once the mail finally arrived in California. Miners had to leave their digs prey to claim jumpers and spend weeks traveling to and from a chaotic, overwhelmed post office, where they waited in line for hours to pick up their letters or paid a bribe to get a better spot. In short, mail service didn’t remotely meet the booming state’s urgent economic, political, and social needs, and in 1856, seventy-five thousand fed-up residents signed a petition of protest to the federal government.
Private carriers known as “expressmen,” who began to haul freight, people, and mail across the West before the transcontinental railroad’s completion, quickly stepped in to fill the communications and transportation void. In 1849, Alexander Todd, a bookkeeper turned failed miner, sensed an opportunity and began to carry letters by horse and boat between San Francisco and the prospectors’ camps for an ounce of gold dust per delive
ry—an impressive measure of mail’s value. He soon expanded his business to include bringing the isolated miners’ hoards back to the safety of the city’s vaults and even selling them necessarily outdated New York newspapers. On one occasion, Todd carried $150,000 worth of gold dust disguised in a butter keg for seventy miles without a gun or a bodyguard.
Much like the East’s James Hale and Lysander Spooner, Henry L. Goodwin, a public-spirited, Connecticut-born ’49er, disliked monopolies, especially the post’s. In 1855, he established the California Penny Post Company, which offered low-priced services such as carrying letters to and from the post office and making after-hours express deliveries in several towns. (Outraged by San Francisco’s poor supply of drinking water and the exorbitant prices it commanded, he also dug a deep well in his own lot, installed a free drinking fountain for the public, and charged low prices for commercial use of the well, such as watering stock.) However, his antimonopolist postal system—to say nothing of the post box rental fees his service’s boxes siphoned from the city’s irate postmaster—attracted the attention of the government’s lawyers, who pummeled Goodwin, as they had Hale and Spooner, with lengthy litigation.
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IF CALIFORNIA’S MAIL SERVICE remained poor, the more remote Oregon Territory’s was worse. As conflict increased between the North and the South, its settlers’ rallying cry of “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight”—a reference to Oregon’s contested northern boundary—resonated with the northeastern proponents of Manifest Destiny, who were eager to claim Oregon as an antislavery “free state.” Their southern counterparts instead wanted to annex Texas as a slave state. President Polk was more inclined to grab Texas from the Mexicans than to risk a third war with England, but Oregon’s champions won the day. In 1846, the United States and Great Britain compromised, making the forty-ninth parallel the border between British Columbia and America, and two years later, the wild Oregon Territory officially became part of the United States.
The federal government had been quick to use the post to strengthen its new stake in the Pacific Northwest, at least in theory, by authorizing the first post offices west of the Rockies in 1847: one at Astoria, a deepwater port on the Columbia River, and the other at Oregon City, on the outskirts of today’s Portland. By 1851, the region also had eighteen postal routes. However, mail from the outside world still had to reach San Francisco first, then travel north by bimonthly steamers to Astoria, where the portion destined for Oregon City was dispatched. Hopeful recipients had to travel to an often distant post office to fetch their letters in person or wait for an obliging traveler to bring them into the outback.
In 1853, the northern section of the Oregon Territory split off to become the Washington Territory. The tiny village of Seattle, founded in what’s now the Elliott Bay neighborhood, boasted a log post office as well as a church, a brothel, and two blockhouses used for protection during Indian attacks. Nevertheless, one of the few things on which its fifty or so white, Indian, Hawaiian, and Cape Verdean residents could agree was that postal service was worse on their side of the Columbia River.
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THE WEST’S SETTLERS WERE desperate to maintain their links to what they called “the States” and could be counted on to badger Congress for postal service regardless of the huge effort and cost. Those near the Pacific coast could receive mail by sea, albeit slowly and infrequently. Transporting it overland past Missouri through wild territory still mostly known only to Native Americans and the military was much more difficult. Some mail was carried by wagon trains under postal inspectors’ supervision, but most other attempts had been highly unsatisfactory. One wagon operation run by Samuel Woodson and Feramorz Little was so unreliable that the Mormon leader Brigham Young complained to the Utah Territory’s official delegate: “So little confidence have we in the present mail arrangement that we feel considerable dubiety of your receiving this or any other communication from us.” The inadequate service became even more critical when developing the fertile Great Plains became a national priority, later encouraged by the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave 160 acres of land to any farmer willing to relocate there.
Increasingly powerful and vocal Californians demanded a communications upgrade: a reputable, regularly scheduled, twice-weekly stagecoach service that would carry both mail and travelers. Skeptics ridiculed the idea of a route that proceeded from no place through nothing to nowhere, but in 1857, Congress bowed to pressure and authorized an overland mail coach service from a point to be determined on the Mississippi River to San Francisco that would take no more than twenty-five days. To encourage the spirit of enterprise, the government offered an eye-popping $600,000 annual contract to the transportation company that would take on the daunting challenge. This impressive subsidy wasn’t just an investment in better short-term postal service; it was a down payment on the expansionist dream. As Congress correctly bet, the costly mail route would also become the developmental spine from which would spring settlements, industries, and the future transcontinental telegraph and railroad.
For enterprising private carriers, the prospect of the lucrative federal contract turned what would otherwise be a quixotic public service into an attractive business proposition, particularly because, like their eastern predecessors, they would also pocket the revenue from the mail coaches’ passengers. However, antebellum politics immediately complicated the overland mail service’s birth. The northerners who controlled the House wanted a northerly route from the railroad’s Missouri terminus. The southerners who ruled the Senate favored a more circuitous southerly path down through Texas—a much easier trip in terms of terrain, weather, and avoiding hostile Indians but also 900 miles longer, thus slower. As regional hostilities worsened, the prospect of a southerly route heartened nascent Confederates and worried Yankees for the same reason. If war broke out, rebel troops in slaveholding Texas could easily cut off communications between the Union and rich, powerful California.
Despite outraged protests from the eastern and Californian press, in 1857, Postmaster General Aaron Brown, not coincidentally a Tennessean, awarded the stagecoach contract to the Butterfield Overland Mail Company, which would operate on the southerly route. The firm’s stagecoaches, each bearing up to 1,200 letters, would travel twice weekly on the so-called Oxbow Route (named for its swooping curves). The vehicles would depart from Tipton, Missouri, and Memphis, Tennessee, dip south and southwest across Texas and parts of New Mexico and Arizona, then head north to end in San Francisco, all in twenty-five days or less. President James Buchanan hailed the new transcontinental mail service as “a glorious triumph for civilization and the Union.”
John Butterfield was just the fellow to take on a project of such staggering complexity and scale. He was one of the resourceful western and midwestern expressmen who saw transportation’s potential in a rapidly expanding nation that had far too little of it. They grasped that every bucket and axe, boot and sewing needle that the settlers needed would have to be hauled to them over vast, forbidding terrain from a depot town on the Missouri River, and they created an industry to meet the need. Observing expressmen at work in Leavenworth, Kansas, the greenhorn Horace Greeley exclaimed over their huge wagon trains powered by horses, mules, or oxen—the preferred beasts—the pyramids of supplies, and the regiments of drivers: “No one who has not seen can realize how vast a business this is, nor how immense are its outlays as well as its income.”
Born into a blue-collar family in rugged upstate New York, Butterfield had had little formal schooling, but he was a natural businessman. As a teenaged stagecoach driver, he had developed a firsthand understanding of the transportation industry, then went on to establish coach, steamer, and rail lines, as well as telegraph services. (He and his wife, Malinda, had nine children, including Daniel Butterfield, who became a celebrated Union general in the Civil War.) By 1850, he was the head of the American Express Company, then the nation’s largest private carrier, which was formed when his But
terfield, Wasson & Company merged with Livingston, Fargo & Company and Wells & Company. In addition to transporting passengers and freight, this ambitious new enterprise also offered the financial services, from delivering payrolls to collecting bills, that the expanding economy also desperately needed.
Butterfield had his faults, but the failure to think big was not one of them. His Overland Mail Company’s state-of-the-art operation called for relay stations spaced every ten to fifteen miles across a vast area, herds of horses and mules, and a fleet of stagecoaches, the best of which were the “Concords.” These BMWs of their day were manufactured by the Abbot-Downing company in Concord, New Hampshire, and were so well built that it was said they didn’t break down but just wore out. In his 1872 travel book Roughing It, Mark Twain called the Concord “an imposing cradle on wheels.”
Twain’s encomium notwithstanding, the experience of most of the settlers, businessmen, miners, and other passengers who paid the hefty $200 one-way coach fare to California left much to be desired. As Tocqueville had discovered to his chagrin, the post subsidized stagecoach service but not the roads on which it operated. The comfortable Concords were mostly used early and late in the journey, in more settled areas that had better roads. Elsewhere, conditions often called for rugged, rough-riding “celerity wagons” designed to withstand travel over rocks, ruts, and rivers. (The San Antonio−San Diego Mail Line, which followed part of Butterfield’s route, was better known as the “Jackass Mail,” because its brutal final stretch had to be covered by mule.)