The Birth of the Western Stagecoach

While Alexander Todd was making money playing postman, others began to organize stagecoach lines for profit.  By 1853 there were a dozen small companies running stages between Sacramento, Stockton, and the mining camps.  In 1854 the companies merged into the California Stage Company and grew to be the controlling coach business in California, even into Oregon Country.  By 1856 just two years later, it was the largest stage line in the United States with almost 2,000 miles of routes.

These western mail routes didn't do anything to solve the connection with the East, however.  That would require large subsidies from the government and United States Post Office.   Neither Congress nor the Post Office was listening.  Finally in 1856 when 75,000 Californians signed a petition, Congress agreed to act.  Of course there were disputes to solve first.

Northern politicians wanted a direct route from St. Joseph, Missouri to San Francisco via the South Pass.  This route would carry passengers as well as U.S. mail, financed by a governmental mail subsidy.  Southerners, on the other hand, demanded a southern route from St. Louis, longer but minus the winter snows. 

In 1857 Congress was unable to resolve the dispute and turned it over to the postmaster general who was a southerner.  He awarded the $600,000 mail subsidy to John Butterfield.  Butterfield was a veteran express man and had proposed a service with twice weekly departures between San Francisco (via Los Angeles, Fort Yuma, El Paso, and Fort Smith), and Tipton, Missouri where the railroad ended from St. Louis.

The North and Far West angrily objected at the use of this 2800 mile long trail - a huge semi-circle named the "Oxbow Route".  Skeptics doubted that Butterfield could ever come close to meeting those terms - Tipton to San Francisco in just 25 days.  Could he achieve what he promised??

Next time...From San Francisco to Missouri and back
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Today in Pioneer History:  "On August 17, 1862, Minnesota erupts in violence as desperate Dakota Indians attack white settlements along the Minnesota River. The Dakota were eventually overwhelmed by the U.S. military six weeks later.