900 Miles on the Butterfield Trail

A New Look

A New Look Although much has been written about the Butterfield Overland Mail service, there are five eyewitness accounts on which a good part of the sum total has been based. The first, to which every subsequent western historian is indebted, is the account by Waterman Lily Ormsby, Jr.,I of his adventures as the only through passenger on the first Southern Overland Mail trip westward from Missouri to San Francisco in 1858. Butterfield was paying the fare for twenty-three-year-old Ormsby, a reporter for the New York Herald. His stories ran in that newspaper as he wrote them on the move and mailed them back east. He was not only a good writer-few reporters of any age have bettered his clear, humorous, style-but also a fine observer.2 His eyewitness account of the journey and the country he traveled holds up almost point by point nearly 140 years later. As for accuracy and interpretation, the years have proved him also to be a good historian. Writing at a time when national tempers were on edge, when sectionalism was racing toward its disastrous Civil War climax, he is impartial and appreciative of human individuality-guilty of neither editorializing nor factionalism . In addition to his other virtues, he uses a modern tone, his prose free from the orotund verbiage and mawkishness of so much of that period's writing. His Butterfield Trail reports have been reprinted twice, but the best version of The Butterfield Overland Mail was edited by Lyle H. Wright and Josephine M. Bynum and published by the Huntington Library in 1955. A second volume involving Ormsby's work, plus three more accounts written by Butterfield travelers, is Walter B. Lang's 1940 publication , The First Overland Mail: Butterfield Trail. Mr. Lang includes the reports of an early (October-November 1858) eastbound trip by J. M. Farwell, of the Daily Alta California newspaper of San Francisco ; the shorter, less detailed official report of Mr. G. (Goddard) Bailey, a special agent of the Post Office Department,l after an inspection of both the steamship mail service (via Isthmus of Panama) and overland mail service in October 1858; and the 1860 record of a trip by the Reverend William Tallack, returning from Australia to England eastward across the United States, by way of the Butterfield stage. In September of 1859 another eastern newspaper correspondent, Albert D. Richardson, made the east-west Butterfield passage and wrote a reliable account of it in a book titled Beyond the Mississippi, which was published in ,867. However, the work that stands out most magnificently in the study of the Butterfield Overland Mail is the three volume set by Roscoe P. and Margaret B. Conkling, titled with typical Conklingian simplicity, The Butterfield Overland Mail 1857-1869; Its organization and operation over the Southern Route to 1861; subsequently over the Central Route to 1866; and under Wells, Fargo and Company in 1869. Published in 1947, after twenty years of the Conklings' travels and investigations, its thoroughness (the husband and wife lived in EI Paso, Texas, to be as near the center of the old route as possible) and the waving of time's eroding hand over the trail forfend the possibility of there ever being anything to match it. Attacking every recognized facet of interest in the Butterfield stage line, it gives a detailed biography of John Butterfield, briefer biographies of the officers of the company, a mile-by-mile study of the location and history of every station along the route-not just in Texas but from Missouri through California to San Francisco, and even dimensions of the various coaches and wagons used, as well as a condensed history of the coach makers. Volume I takes you from Tipton, Missouri-where the Butterfield stagecoach started its westward run-to Franklin (now El Paso), Texas. Volume II carries the traveler over the second (,859) Davis Mountain route to EI Paso, on to San Francisco, and Volume III includes maps, illustrations, and layouts of many stations. There 2 are errors here and there, but niggly ones, most ofwhich should have been caught by a proofreader-for example, Denison, Texas is misspelled Dennison; and there are a few details of Texas history that are not correct, but you can't come up with very many questions about the Butterfield operation for which the Conklings don't supply an answer. Some ask, then, why...