The Butterfield Overland Mail

On September sixteenth of eighteen fifty-eight, a Concord stagecoach rolled out of Tipton, Missouri, carrying the first mail on the Butterfield Overland Mail route. John Butterfield had won a six-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year government contract to carry mail from Missouri to San Francisco in twenty-five days or less, a proposition that most people considered optimistic to the point of delusion. The southern route he chose swung down through Fort Smith, across the breadth of Indian Territory and Texas, through the Guadalupe Pass and across the Sonoran Desert, a curve of almost three thousand miles.

Fort Smith was the first significant town on the route west of the Missouri terminus. The Butterfield station here handled the relay of horses, the change of drivers, the pickup of local mail, and the brief stop that allowed passengers to eat something before the coaches resumed their pace. The route west of Fort Smith followed the military road into the Cherokee and Choctaw nations, the same corridor that would later carry telegraph lines and then railroad track.

Butterfield made his deadline. The first westbound coach reached San Francisco in twenty-three days and twenty-three and a half hours. The postmaster general at the time, Aaron V.

Brown, had been among the skeptics who doubted the schedule could be met. Butterfield ran his line for two and a half years. The outbreak of the Civil War in eighteen sixty-one forced the abandonment of the southern route, and the Butterfield operation was folded into the central overland route.

The stations along the Fort Smith corridor were left to weather and repurpose. The route's legacy in this part of the country was the road itself. It laid down the alignment that would become one of the primary axes of westward movement through Indian Territory, a path that commerce and migration would follow for the rest of the century and into the next.