The Butterfield Overland Mail and the Crossing

In September of eighteen fifty-eight, the United States Post Office launched the most ambitious mail service in American history: a twice-weekly coach run from Saint Louis to San Francisco covering two thousand seven hundred miles in twenty-five days. The contract went to a New York entrepreneur named John Butterfield, and the southern route he chose cut directly through what is now Benson's backyard. The Butterfield Overland Mail crossed the San Pedro River about one mile north of where downtown Benson stands today.

It was a fortified stop, garrisoned by soldiers, because the surrounding country was Chiricahua Apache territory. The coaches used on the desert stretches were not the enclosed Concord stages of Western legend but lighter, open-sided celerity wagons that bounced passengers across unpaved desert tracks at whatever speed the terrain allowed. A through-ticket from Missouri to California cost one hundred dollars.

The route functioned for just over two years. Its end came not from Apache attack but from a confrontation at a Butterfield station in Apache Pass, about thirty miles from Benson. In February of eighteen sixty-one, Lieutenant George Bascom falsely accused the Apache leader Cochise of kidnapping and attempted to arrest him.

Cochise escaped but family members on both sides were later killed. The Apache Wars that followed made the desert corridor impassable, and when the Civil War broke out weeks later the mail route shifted north and the San Pedro crossing was abandoned. The Butterfield era lasted about thirty months.

It left a scatter of ruins, a handful of firsthand accounts, and the first regular American mail route through one of the most contested landscapes in the West.