The Butterfield Overland Stagecoach Route

dawna

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Feb 20, 2005
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In 1858 John Butterfield of Utica, N.Y. won a government contract of $600,000 a year for six years to carry mail from St Louis to San Francisco twice a week. Butterfield spent more than a million dollars getting the company started. He ran between 100 and 250 coaches, 1000 horses, 500 mules and had about 800 employees. The large, high quality coaches were manufactured in Concord, New Hampshire, weighed about 2,500 pounds and cost $1,300 at that time.

The Butterfield Overland Mail Company initially followed a route between St. Louis and San Francisco which skirted the Rocky Mountains and avoided the heavy winter mountain snows by traveling through Texas, southern New Mexico Territory and southern California. The trip, about 2,800 miles, was made in twenty-five days and sometimes less. Lack of water and hostile Indians plagued the route throughout its existence.

Though the coaches had the mail as their first priority they also accepted as passengers any hardy souls who were game for the adventure. Passage for the whole route cost $200, and a passenger was allowed twenty-five pounds of baggage, two blankets and a canteen. The coaches traveled at breakneck speed twenty-four hours a day; there were no stops for bed and breakfast--only the hurried intervals at the station houses when they changed horses. Travelers were then offered meals of bread, coffee, cured meat and, on occasion, beans. Coaches passed through southeast Arizona twice a week on Sundays and Wednesdays. The route through southeastern Arizona from 1858 to 1861 crossed into what is now Arizona from Mesilla, New Mexico Territory at Stein's Pass, then headed west/southwest to San Simon, through Apache Pass, Ewell Springs, and Dragoon Springs (about twenty miles north of Tombstone). It crossed the San Pedro River just north of the present Benson and then veered slightly north to pass Cienega and head up to Tucson and on to San Francisco via Yuma and Los Angeles.

The outbreak of the Civil War caused the hasty withdrawal of almost all Federal troops from the frontier territory, leaving the area unprotected. In February 1861, when the citizens of Texas, voted to secede from the Union, the southern mail route was discontinued in favor of a more northerly route through Nebraska, Wyoming and Utah, but the old Butterfield Road was later used by both the Confederate and the Union armies. During the Civil War Arizona territory was virtually cut off from adequate communication with the outside world. The next public mail to reach Tucson came from California on horseback September 1, 1865. The first through mail from the east arrived August 25, 1866, but it was not until the coming of the miners and the railroads in the 1870s and 1880s that regular contact with the States was restored
 
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