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So now the East began to cry to the West and the West to the East, each voicing a desire for quicker communication, and to get letters from New York to San Francisco in fast time became one of the problems of the day.

The first step toward solution was the choice of a route, and while this was up to Washington, the proof on which it rested was up to the men of wealth and the men of action. Immediately two rival groups began striving, each to prove that its route was the quickest. Russel, Majors & Waddel, who held large freighting contracts on the northern road, from Independence, Missouri, via Salt Lake to Sacramento, bent their energies to demonstrating its practicability; the Wells-Butterfield coterie of stage and express men undertook to show that the longer pathway from St. Louis by way of the Southwestern territories to San Francisco was best.

In 1855 Senator W. M. Gwinn of California, who had conceived the idea with F. B. Ficklin, general-superintendent of the Russel, Majors & Waddel Co., introduced a bill in Congress for bringing the mails by horseback on the northern route, but the measure was pigeonholed. Snow in the mountains was the main argument against it.

In 1857 James E. Birch got the contract for carrying a semimonthly mail from San Antonio, Texas, to San Diego, and the southern route’s champions had the opportunity to prove their contention.

Save for a few brief stretches in Texas and Arizona there was no wagon road. El Paso and Tucson were the only towns between the termini. A few far-flung military outposts, whose troops of dragoons were having a hard time of it to hold their own against the Comanches and Apaches, afforded the only semblance of protection from the Indians.

Horsemen carried the first mail-sacks across this wilderness of dark mountains and flaming deserts. On that initial trip Silas St. Johns and Charles Mason rode side by side over the stretch from Cariso Creek to Jaeger’s Ferry, where Yuma stands to-day. That ride took them straight through the Imperial valley. The waters of the Colorado, which have made the region famous for its rich crops, had not been diverted in those days. It was the hottest desert in North America; sand hills and blinding alkali flats, and only one tepid spring in the whole distance. One hundred and ten miles and the two horsemen made it in thirty-two hours–without remounts.

The company now began to prepare the way for stage-coaches. During the latter part of November, St. Johns and two companions drove a herd of stock from Jaeger’s Ferry to Maricopa Wells. The latter point had been selected for a relay station because of water and the presence of the friendly Pima and Maricopa Indians, who kept the Apaches at a distance. During that drive of something like two hundred miles the pack-mule lost his load one night in the desert. The men went without food for three days, and for thirty-six hours traveled without a drop of water in their canteens.

The first stage left San Diego for the East in December with six passengers. Throughout the trip a hostler rode behind herding a relay team. The driver kept his six horses to their utmost for two hours; then stock and wearied passengers were given a two hours’ rest, after which the fresh team was hooked up and the journey resumed.

In this manner they made about fifty miles a day. Luck was with them. There were several runaways along the route; at Port Davis, Texas, they found the garrison, whom they had expected to supply them with provisions according to orders from Washington, short of food, and they subsisted for the next five days on what barley they felt justified in taking away from the horses; they arrived at Camp Lancaster just after the departure of a Comanche war-party who had stolen all the stock, and were obliged to go two hundred miles further before they could get a relay. But these incidents, and a delay or two because of swollen rivers, were accounted only small mishaps. They came through with their scalps and the mail-sacks–only ten days behind the schedule.