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The Overland Mail
by
Then the white man got his right hand on his rifle and the three murderers fled. They had killed one of the Americans who was sleeping in the enclosure, left another dying near him and the third gasping his last outside the gate.
St. Johns staunched the blood from his wounds and crawled to the top of a pile of grain-sacks whence he could see over the unroofed wall. Here he stayed for three days and three nights. With every sunrise the magpies and buzzards came in great flocks, to sit upon the wall after they had sated themselves in the corral, and watch him. With every nightfall the wolves slunk down from the mountains and fought over the body outside the gate. Night and day the thirst-tortured mules kept up a pandemonium.
A road-grading party came along on Sunday morning. They gave him such first aid as they could and sent a rider to Fort Buchanan for a surgeon. The doctor amputated the arm nine days after the wound had been inflicted. Three weeks later St. Johns was able to ride a horse to Tucson.
Silas St. Johns is offered as a sample of the men who built and operated the overland mail lines. Among the drivers, stock-tenders, and messengers there were many others like him. Iron men, it was not easy to kill them, and so long as there was breath in their bodies they kept on fighting.
John Butterfield and his associates were made of the same stuff as these employees.
How many hundred thousand dollars these pioneer investors put into their line before the turning of a single wheel is not known; it must have been somewhere near a cool million, and this was in a day when millions were not so common as they are now; a day, moreover, when nothing in the business was certain and everything remained to be proved.
They established more than a hundred stage-stations along that semicircle through the savage Southwest. They bought about fifteen hundred mules and horses, which were sent out along the route. To feed these animals, hay and grain were freighted, in some cases for two hundred miles, and the loads arrived at the corrals worth a goodly fraction of their weight in silver. There was a station in western Texas to which teamsters had to haul water for nine months of the year from twenty-two miles away. At every one of these lonely outposts there were an agent and a stock-tender, and at some it was necessary to maintain what amounted to a little garrison. Arms and ammunition were provided for defense against the savages; provisions were laid in to last for weeks. One hundred Concord coaches were purchased from the Abbot-Downing Co., who had been engaged in the manufacture of these vehicles in the New Hampshire town since 1813; they were built on the thorough-brace pattern, and were regarded as the best that money could buy. Seven hundred and fifty men, of whom a hundred and fifty were drivers, were put on the pay-roll and transported to their stations.
Nearly all this outlay was made before the beginning of the first trip. It was the greatest expenditure of money on a single transportation project of its kind up to this time in America. And there were a thousand hazards of the wilderness to be incurred, a thousand obstacles of nature to be overcome before the venture could be proved practical.
The men of money had done their part now. The line was ready for the opening of traffic. On September 15, 1853, the mail-sacks started from St. Louis and San Francisco. It was up to the men of action to get them through within the schedule.
Twenty-five days was the allowance for the 2760 miles. The westbound coach reached San Francisco about twenty-four hours inside of the limit. On that October evening crowds packed Montgomery Street; the booming of cannon and the crashing of anvils loaded with black powder, the blaring of brass bands and the voices of orators, all mingled in one glad uproar, to tell the world that the people by the Golden Gate appreciated the occasion.