The Mammoth Book of the West (17 page)

The first Butterfield Overland Mail coaches went into operation on 16 September 1858. That morning two coaches departed on a great journey, one westwards from Tipton, and one eastwards from San Francisco. For days they careered over dirt track, desert, and prairie – and both came in on time. President Buchanan was so pleased that he sent Butterfield a telegram which read: “I congratulate you on the result. It is a glorious triumph for civilisation and the Union.” For the next three years Butterfield’s coaches raced over the southern trail, two a week in each direction, through all weathers, with hardly a break in service. Marauding Apaches, Kiowas and Comanches were an occasional hazard, with one driver complaining to
writer Mark Twain that “he became so leaky with bullet holes” that “he couldn’t hold his vittels.”

Since the southern route had effectively become the official overland road, it fell to private enterprise to develop a direct overland trail. In 1855 the firm of Russell, Majors and Waddell started a freight wagon service from the railhead at St Joseph to San Francisco. The enterprise grew with astonishing rapidity to become the unchallenged giant of western freighting; by 1858 it employed 4,000 men and operated 3,500 covered wagons.

A prime cause of the company’s success was the efficient method that partner Alexander Majors devised for moving their massive cargoes overland. Each caravan of wagons sent out by Russell, Majors and Waddell contained 25 covered wagons, each carrying three tons of goods and pulled by mules or oxen. Alongside each wagon walked a teamster or “bullwhacker”, who controlled the animals by use of a 12-foot long whip. Tipped with a rawhide popper, the bullwhip could crack the air with a pop-pop that could be heard two miles away. Most drivers were rough and tough frontier types, who signed and then conveniently ignored the company pledge the pious Majors made them sign, promising not to swear, “nor to get drunk, nor to gamble . . . and not to do anything incompatible with the conduct of a gentleman.”

Unfortunately for Majors, his flamboyant New Englander associate William H. Russell was an inveterate financial gambler. When the company lost money in the so-called Mormon War, after the army reneged on payment, Russell hit on two fantastic ventures to refill the vaults. The first was a stagecoach line to Denver to cash in on the Pike’s Peak gold rush. Majors and Waddell, believing that such an enterprise was doomed without a government subsidy, refused to back it. Undeterred, Russell found a less cautious associate, John S. Jones, and began
operating the Leavenworth & Pike’s Peak Express Company in April 1859. The L&PP was admirably efficient. It was also, as Majors and Waddell had foreseen, completely unviable. The expenses were over $1,000 a day. Concerned that Russell’s impending bankruptcy would bring the freight company down, his partners were obliged to take over the stagecoach venture. Reorganized as the Central Overland, California and Pike’s Peak Express, the new company was soon known by all as “Clean Out of Cash and Poor Pay”.

More desperate than ever, Russell dreamt up another fantastic money-making scheme: a relay of fast horsemen which would take the mail between Missouri and California in ten days. And so was born one of the West’s most celebrated services – the Pony Express.

A chain of 190 waystations was built at ten-mile intervals on the most direct route between St Joseph and San Francisco. Five hundred fast horses were bought, and a team of dare-devil boy horsemen hired. Lightweight saddles, stirrups and a special leather-pocketed mail bag, a “mochila”, slung over the horn and cantle of the saddle, were devised. At each relay station the rider would dismount, throw the mochila on a fresh pony, jump up and be away.

To cheering crowds, the first relay rider of the Pony Express streaked west out of St Joseph, 49 letters in his mochila, on 3 April 1860. Only 19 months later, the last rider delivered the mail in San Francisco and was looking for gainful employment. The Pony Express had been instantly rendered obsolete by technology. The Pacific Telegraph Company and the Overland Telegraph Company of Hiram Sibley completed its transcontinental line on 24 October 1861. The Express’s record time for the trip was for the delivery of Lincoln’s inaugural address in March 1861: an astounding seven days and 17 hours. Yet the
telegraph took mere seconds to get a message from East to West and West to East.

If the Express was short-lived it was also glorious. Among those who rode for it was the 14-year-old Buffalo Bill Cody. When Cody later toured his Wild West show around the world, the Express regularly featured as one of the acts. There was much to dramatize. One Express rider, “Pony Bob” Haslam, was once attacked by Paiutes in Nevada, wounded in the face and arm, then escaped the attack to travel 120 miles in eight hours and 10 minutes, using 13 horses. Then he rested a few hours, and did the return trip.

The telegraph not only finished the Pony Express; it finally drove Russell, Majors and Waddell into bankruptcy. For some years, the firm had been taking infusions of capital from the stagecoach entrepreneur Ben Holladay. In 1862 he foreclosed and took over the assets of Russell, Majors and Waddell. Energetic and ruthless, Holladay then built a huge freight and coach operation out of the ruins, becoming the “stagecoach king” of the West and controlling 5,000 miles of stage routes. For “The Overland Stage Line”, Holladay bought new Concord coaches and fine animals. His staff were alternately bludgeoned and bribed (his general manager was paid an astonishing $10,000 per annum salary) into loyalty and efficiency. To travel on the Overland, however, was no more a pleasurable or comfortable experience than on any other line. The coaches were cramped, dusty, stiflingly hot in summer, bitterly cold in winter. Hold-ups became an increasing nuisance, with one company alone recording 313 robberies of its stages on the California line between 1870 and 1884, 27 of them by the notorious Black Bart. More irksome to passengers, however, were the poor meals they received at the waystations. The suffering traveller Mark Twain recorded the experience in
Roughing It
:

The station buildings were long, low huts, made of sun-dried, mud-colored bricks, laid up without mortar (
adobes
, the Spaniards call these bricks, and Americans shorten it to ’
dobies
). The roofs, which had no slant to them worth speaking of, were thatched and then sodded or covered with a thick layer of earth, and from this sprung a pretty rank growth of weeds and grass. It was the first time we had ever seen a man’s front yard on top of his house. The buildings consisted of barns, stable-room for twelve or fifteen horses, and a hut for an eating-room for passengers. This latter had bunks in it for the station-keeper and a hostler or two. You could rest your elbow on its eaves, and you had to bend in order to get in at the door. In place of a window there was a square hole about large enough for a man to crawl through, but this had no glass in it. There was no flooring, but the ground was packed hard. There was no stove, but the fireplace served all needful purposes. There were no shelves, no cupboards, no closets. In a corner stood an open sack of flour, and nestling against its base were a couple of black and venerable tin coffee-pots, a tin teapot, a little bag of salt, and a side of bacon.

By the door of the station-keeper’s den, outside, was a tin wash-basin, on the ground. Near it was a pail of water and a piece of yellow bar-soap, and from the eaves hung a hoary blue woolen shirt, significantly – but this latter was the station-keeper’s private towel, and only two persons in all the party might venture to use it – the stage-driver and the conductor. The latter would not, from a sense of decency; the former would not, because he did not choose to encourage the advances of a station-keeper. We had towels – in the valise; they might as well have been in Sodom and Gomorrah. We (and the conductor) used our handkerchiefs, and the driver his pantaloons and sleeves.
By the door, inside, was fastened a small old-fashioned looking-glass frame, with two little fragments of the original mirror lodged down in one corner of it. This arrangement afforded a pleasant double-barreled portrait of you when you looked into it, with one half of your head set up a couple of inches above the other half. From the glass frame hung the half of a comb by a string – but if I had to describe that patriarch or die, I believe I would order some sample coffins. It had come down from Esau and Samson, and had been accumulating hair ever since – along with certain impurities. In one corner of the room stood three or four rifles and muskets, together with horns and pouches of ammunition. The station-men wore pantaloons of coarse, country-woven stuff, and into the seat and the inside of the legs were sewed ample additions of buckskin, to do duty in place of leggings, when the man rode horseback – so the pants were half dull blue and half yellow and unspeakably picturesque. The pants were stuffed into the tops of high boots, the heels whereof were armed with great Spanish spurs, whose little iron clogs and chains jingled with every step. The man wore a huge beard and mustachios, an old slouch hat, a blue woolen shirt, no suspenders, no vest, no coat – in a leathern sheath in his belt, a great long “navy” revolver (slung on right side, hammer to the front), and projecting from his boot a horn-handled bowie-knife. The furniture of the hut was neither gorgeous nor much in the way. The rocking-chairs and sofas were not present, and never had been, but they were represented by two three-legged stools, a pine-board bench four feet long, and two empty candle-boxes. The table was a greasy board on stilts, and the table-cloth and napkins had not come – and they were not looking for them, either. A battered tin platter, a knife and fork, and a tin pint cup, were at each man’s place, and the driver had a queens-ware saucer that had seen better days. Of course, this duke
sat at the head of the table. There was one isolated piece of table furniture that bore about it a touching air of grandeur in misfortune. This was the caster. It was German silver, and crippled and rusty, but it was so preposterously out of place there that it was suggestive of a tattered exiled king among barbarians, and the majesty of its native position compelled respect even in its degradation. There was only one cruet left, and that was a stopperless, fly-specked, broken-necked thing, with two inches of vinegar in it, and a dozen preserved flies with their heels up and looking sorry they had invested there.

The station-keeper up-ended a disk of last week’s bread, of the shape and size of an old-time cheese, and carved some slabs from it which were as good as Nicholson pavement, and tenderer.

He sliced off a piece of bacon for each man, but only the experienced old hands made out to eat it, for it was condemned army bacon which the United States would not feed to its soldiers in the forts, and the stage company had bought it cheap for the sustenance of their passengers and employees. We may have found this condemned army bacon further out on the Plains than the section I am locating it in, but we
found
it – there is no gainsaying that.

Then he poured for us a beverage which he called “
Slumgullion
,” and it is hard to think he was not inspired when he named it. It really pretended to be tea, but there was too much dish-rag, and sand, and old bacon-rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler. He had no sugar and no milk – not even a spoon to stir the ingredients with.

We could not eat the bread or the meat, nor drink the “Slumgullion.” And when I looked at that melancholy vinegar-cruet, I thought of the anecdote (a very, very old one, even at that day) of the traveler who sat down to a table which had nothing on it but a mackerel and a pot of
mustard. He asked the landlord if this was all. The landlord said:

“
All!
Why, thunder and lightning, I should think there was mackerel enough there for six.”

“But I don’t like mackerel.”

“Oh – then help yourself to the mustard.”

In other days I had considered it a good, a very good, anecdote, but there was a dismal plausibility about it, here, that took all the humor out of it.

Our breakfast was before us, but our teeth were idle.

I tasted and smelt, and said I would take coffee, I believed. The station-boss stopped dead still, and glared at me speechless. At last, when he came to, he turned away and said, as one who communes with himself upon a matter too vast to grasp:

“
Coffee!
Well, if that don’t go clean ahead of me, I’m d—d!”

The poor facilities Holladay provided for his customers hardly mattered: he had a near monopoly on the lines in the West. But Ben Holladay was astute as well as arrogant. From the resolute spread of railroad tracks across the nation, he realized that the era of animal power was at its close, and in 1866 he sold out to the New York enterprise Wells, Fargo and Company for $1.8 million. He acted none too soon. Wells Fargo itself only survived the next decade by restructuring, running “feeder” coaches to railheads and concentrating on its express and bullion interests.

The dream of a transcontinental railroad had excited the imagination of the nation ever since the discovery of gold in California. A railroad could haul gold east by the
truckload. In 1861 the vision started to become reality, when four California-based merchants, Collis P. Huntington, Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins, sank eight and a half million dollars into founding the Central Pacific Railroad. A year later Congress granted them a charter. At the same time, the legislature approved federal funds for the Union Pacific in the East. The financial practices of both companies were dubious in the extreme, but they got the job done. By 1866 the Union Pacific was advancing through Nebraska at a remarkable mile a day.

Men flooded in to work on the iron road. Ten thousand Chinese “coolies” employed by Central Pacific (on the suggestion of Charles Crocker’s Chinese manservant, Ah Ling) struggled against the terrible geology and weather of the Sierra Nevada. They hung in baskets against sheer rock faces, drilling holes for dynamite; they died of heat exhaustion in mountain tunnels from which they did not emerge for months. When hundreds of coolies and miles of track were swept away by blizzards, the company was forced to build 40 miles of snow sheds. The Chinese endured, and got the Central Pacific over the hump of the Sierra Nevada and on the downgrade.