John Butterfield's Stage Line
Near Fayetteville, Arkansas
On September sixteenth, eighteen fifty-eight, the first Butterfield Overland Mail stagecoach rolled out of Tipton, Missouri, heading for San Francisco. Soon after, it crossed into Arkansas and reached Fayetteville. The United States had never seen anything quite like it: the longest stagecoach operation in the nation's history, connecting the Mississippi River system with the Pacific coast in roughly twenty-five days, hauling mail and fare-paying passengers across nearly three thousand miles of territory.
John Butterfield had won the mail contract over competing routes by proposing a southern arc through Arkansas and Texas rather than a direct crossing of the northern mountains. The route passed directly through Fayetteville, and the line kept a station there. Mules are said to have taken over for the steep Boston Mountains leg toward Fort Smith.
The line ran through northwest Arkansas from eighteen fifty-eight until eighteen sixty-one, when the approach of the Civil War pushed mail operations onto a more northerly route. Portions of the old road survive in parts of the region, and segments in Arkansas have been placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
