In the 1850s mail delivery to the West was problematic. The most efficient route was the ocean route from New York down the Eastern seaboard, into the Caribbean Sea to Panama, overland to the Pacific, and up the Western seaboard to San Francisco. U.S. postmaster Aaron Brown, who took office in 1857, decided there had to be a better way. He stipulated two overland routes from east to west (later replaced by a single route) and awarded a contract to the private Overland Mail Company to deliver mail by stagecoach. The trip from Saint Louis to San Francisco took twenty-five days; the coaches carried between five hundred and six hundred pounds of mail plus as many as four passengers, and horses had to be changed every ten or fifteen miles. Overland Mail operated successfully until the Civil War.
In 1860 a private...