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The Overland Mail
by
In St. Louis, the eastbound mail was an hour earlier. John Butterfield stepped from the Missouri Pacific train with the sacks, and a great procession was on hand to escort him to the post-office.
Bands and carriages and a tremendous display of red, white, and blue bunting enlivened the whole city. President Buchanan sent a telegram of congratulation.
It looked as if the northern route were out of it for good now, but it remained for the men to keep the southern line in operation. What had been done was only a beginning; the long grind of real accomplishment still lay ahead.
Storm and flood and Indian massacre were incidents; hold-ups and runaways mere matters of routine in carrying on the task. The stock was for the most part unbroken. At nearly every change the fresh team started off on a mad gallop, and if the driver had a wide plain where he could let them go careering through the mesquite or greasewood, while the stage followed, sometimes on two wheels, sometimes on one, he counted himself lucky. There was many a station from which the road led over broken country–along steep side hills, across high-banked washes, skirting the summits of rocky precipices; and on such stretches it was the rule rather than the exception for the coach to overturn.
The bronco stock was bad enough but the green mules were the worst. It was often found necessary to lash the stage to a tree–if one could be found near the station, and if not to the corral fence–while the long-eared brutes were being hooked up. When the last trace had been snapped into place the hostlers would very gingerly free the vehicle from its moorings and, as the ropes came slack, leap for their lives.
They called the route a road. As a matter of fact that term was a far-fetched euphemism. In some places approaches had been dug away to the beds of streams; and the absolutely impassable barriers of the living rock had been removed from the mountain passes. But that was all. What with the long climbs upgrade and the bad going through loose sand or mud, it was always necessary for the driver to keep his six animals at a swinging trot when they came to a level or a downhill pull. Often he had to whip them into a dead run for miles where most men would hesitate to drive a buckboard at a walk.
During the rainy seasons the rivers of that Southwestern land proceeded to demonstrate that they had a right to the name–to which they never pretended to live up at other times–by running bank full. These coffee-colored floods were underlaid by thick strata of quicksands. Occasionally one of them simply absorbed a coach; and, unless the driver was very swift in cutting the traces, it took unto itself two or three mules for good measure.
The Comanche Indians were on the war-path during these years in western Texas. On the great Staked Plain they swooped down on many a stage, and driver and passengers had to make a running fight of it to save their scalps. The Indians attacked the stations, two or three hundred of them in a band. The agents and stock-tenders, who were always on the lookout, usually saw them in time to retreat inside the thick adobe walls of the building, from which shelter they sometimes were able to stand them off without suffering any particular damage. But sometimes they were forced to watch the enemy go whooping away with the stampeded stock from the corral. And now and again there was a massacre.
Under Mangus Colorado, whom historians account their greatest war-chief, the Apaches were busy in New Mexico and Arizona. They worked more carefully than their Texan cousins, and there was a gorge along the line in that section which got the name of Doubtful canyon because the only thing a driver could count on there with any certainty was a fight before he got through to the other side.