CHAPTER TWENTY THE OVERLAND STAGE
Just before the soldiers left Camp Floyd, the Overland Stage line was opened from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California. Shortly afterward the telegraph line was completed across the continent. This ended the work of the Pony Express. Instead of the pony riders dashing on their wiry horses over prairies and mountain and desert, now came the stage drivers with their sturdy horses, four or six-in-hand, rolling along in their great Concord coaches, loaded with passengers, mail, and express.
The stations, as before, were scattered along the trail from eight to sixteen miles apart, according to the water. These stations were mainly low dirt-roofed structures, built of logs or adobe or rock. After Johnston’s army had decamped, the lumber left by them at Camp Floyd was used for some stations. They were large enough to accommodate six to eight horses, and had, partitioned from the stalls, one room for the stable keepers and another for provisions. Grain was hauled to them from the fields of Utah and California. Native hay was supplied from the grassy valleys through which the route lay. Traveling blacksmiths kept the horses shod, and the stages in repair.
As a few of the stations had to be built where there was no spring or stream, it was necessary to haul water to them. This was my first work in connection with the Overland Stage. I had a good four-horse team and was given the job of supplying Canyon station with water.
An overland stage ready for a trip.
One day while I was unloading the water the stage came into this station. Major Howard Egan, who had charge of this division of the route, had the lines. The stage driver lay dead in “the boot” and one passenger was wounded. They had been shot by stage robbers, or “road agents,” as we called them. Another driver must be had. The station keepers said they couldn’t drive four horses, so Major Egan called on me. I hadn’t had any experience handling the stage, but I tried it. The Major seemed to think I drove all right, for he didn’t send any man to relieve me as he promised to do, so I kept on driving. Finally I sold my team and water outfit and became a regular stage driver. For about two years I kept on swinging over the rough and heavy roads through the deserts of Nevada in the “boot” of the Concord stage.
The “boot” was the place where the driver sat perched in front. It was big enough to hold two passengers besides the driver; and a thousand pounds or more of mail could be packed in the “boot” also. Behind this was the body of the coach, big enough to hold six passengers. They sat three on each seat, facing each other. It was hard on those not used to it to sit day and night through clouds of alkali dust or sand, through rain and slush, or snow and cold, cramped up in that stage. If we had to crowd more than six in, as we did occasionally, it was rather rough riding. When few passengers were along, or the mail was lighter, we made up our load with grain or other provisions to be distributed along at the various stations. So we were nearly always well loaded. Often we carried more than a ton of mail in the “boot,” and strapped on the back platform.
Some pictures I have seen of the Overland Stage have passengers on top. This is a mistake. There was no place on the rounded top for passengers. Some of the boys occasionally lashed packages there. The passengers would have had to be strapped on too, if they had tried the top, for they would have got pitched off in a hurry, the stage rocked so. The body of the stage was hung on great leather springs, and it swung with a kind of cradle motion as we dashed along. When a fellow learned how to swing with it, things went all right; if he didn’t, it was hard riding.
The road was not only rough and wearisome; it was dangerous. For a time the Indians were so troublesome that a soldier was sent with every stage. We should have felt safer without these soldiers though, for we knew how the Indians hated soldiers. The worst danger, however, was not from Indians; they got lots of blame that didn’t belong to them. It was the “road agents” that infested the country during those days that gave us most trouble.
Two Gosiute braves of Overland Stage days.
Many a time these desperadoes would hold up the stage on some lonely place on the road. They would spring out before the horses and order the driver to stop, or would shoot down a horse to stop the stage; then after robbing the passengers and rifling the mail bags of their valuables, they would dash away with their plunder to their hiding places in the hills.
Some drivers, when these outlaws came upon them, would put the whip to their horses and try to dash by them to safety. At times the boys managed to give the robbers the slip, but oftener the driver would be shot down in the attempt to escape. Then the horses, mad with fright, if no passenger was aboard to grab the lines, would run away, upset the coach, perhaps, and string things along the trail in great shape. Sometimes they have dashed into a station with nothing but the front wheels dragging behind them.
I was lucky enough to escape such mishaps. The robbers never held me up; but one day I did have one of my wheel horses shot down, by some skulking desperado or Indian, we never knew which. I was swinging along a dugway down hill about two miles west of Canyon station when it happened. Three passengers—two men and a woman—were in the stage. A shot rang out and my off wheel horse dropped dead.
Antelope Jake, an aged Gosiute Indian who won his name by killing antelope for Overland Stage stations.
I flung off the brake, knowing what was up, cracked my whip and away we went plunging down the hill, dragging the dead horse with us till I thought we were out of gunshot. No more shots came, so I stopped the team, jumped down and began to unhitch. The man inside the coach jumped out too, but instead of helping me, he grabbed the whip and begun to lash the team, yelling to me to go on. He was so scared he acted like a crazy man till his wife jumped out, grabbed the whip from his hand, and told him to behave himself. Then he cooled down a little; and with the help of the other passenger, I got the dead horse out of the harness, hitched one of the leaders in his place, and drove on to the next station, without any more trouble. I never found out who did that devilish trick, but I don’t believe it was stage robbers, though, for they would have followed us up and finished their mischief. Other drivers, however, were not so lucky. Three different times Major Egan brought in the stage with the driver dead in the boot and the stage shot full of holes. At one time a driver who had been wounded by outlaws was loaded into my stage. We were trying to get him through to Salt Lake, but the poor fellow died while he was with me. No other passenger was along at the time. I couldn’t help the sufferer much. It was a terrible experience, I tell you, for him and me too, that long night on the lonely Nevada desert.
Antelope on the desert. Pictures of this kind were often seen by Pony Express riders.
Afterwards I was changed to another division, driving in Nevada from Austin to Sand Wells. Jim Clift was division agent here. It was a heavy road,—full of sand; but it wasn’t so hard and heavy as another stretch that Ben Halliday, our big chief, gave me later. When he heard I was careful with the horses, that I didn’t use them up as did some of the drivers they brought in from the East, who didn’t know mountain life, he set me to driving from the Sink of Carson to Fort Churchill. I drove there that summer and winter and the next spring I was sent to drive from Carson City to Virginia City, Nevada.
Howard R. Driggs
Old stage station at Fort Hall or Ross’s Fork, Idaho.
I arrived at Carson City about ten o’clock one very fine morning in June. The mail agent met me just as I entered the town, and told me to drive to Tim Smith’s big rock stable and put up my horses. He told me that the line I was driving on was in dispute, and he would have to go to Salt Lake City to see who had the right of way. “Stay here until you hear from me,” he said, “and board in that hotel across the street.” With that he left me alone, seven hundred miles from home and among strangers. If he had left me in an Indian camp, I should have felt all right; but to be left away out here among a lot of strange white folks was more than I could bear.
I put my horses up, and while I was sitting out by the side of the stable, I saw a man come out of the hotel. He had on a white cap, and a white apron that reached from his chin to his feet. In each hand he had a big, round, brass thing. He pounded these together and made a fearful racket. I had never seen a hotel before, to say nothing of being in one, and as the men that worked in the barn came rushing past me, I asked one of them what was up. “Dinner,” he said. I got up and went over to the hotel, and when I went in, I never saw such a sight before. They had tables all over the house, and people were rushing in and sitting down to them.
I slipped in and took off my hat and stood by the side of the door waiting for some one to come up and ask me to sit down at a table, but nobody came. I stood there a while longer, and saw others come in and sit down at the tables without being asked, so I went sneaking up to a table and stood there, and as nobody asked me to sit down, I sat down anyhow. A waiter came up and began to mutter something to me. I asked, “What?” He got it off again. I told him that I did not know what he said, so he went out and brought me something to eat. I went over to the stable and sat down, and then I began thinking of home. I didn’t go back to the hotel that night for any supper, and when I went to bed, the fleas were so bad I didn’t sleep a wink that night, and when morning came I was hungry, sleepy, tired, and homesick.
Next morning I met one of the stable men. He asked me if I had been to breakfast. I told him I had not. “Come right on in,” he said, taking me by the arm. The waiter came up and got off the same thing that he said the day before, and the man that was with me told him to fetch it along. I told the waiter to bring me the same. Well, I ate two or three breakfasts that morning to make up. Then I felt much better.
After breakfast we went back to the stable, and pretty soon Tim Smith came in and said, “Young man, it may be three weeks before the right of way is settled, but if you want to go to work in the stable I will give you three dollars a day.” I agreed and began to work. Tim Smith was a one-armed man, and he had fourteen hostlers and a clerk that worked in the stable. The office was in one corner of the stable and a young man by the name of Billy Green was the clerk. He had charge of the men and was very kind and good to me.
I was afraid to go out at night, so I stayed in the stable and helped Billy. It was a very large stable, holding over one hundred horses, and there was a good deal of work to do after dark.
At that time Virginia City was booming. Two or three men were killed every day. I had not driven here very long before I saw a man hanged at what they called the Golden Gate. I don’t remember what he had done, but I saw him hanged, anyway.
Those were rough, wild days, and this was one of the roughest spots in the savage West. I was glad enough to leave it. After a few months of staging here, I quit the job and returned home.
Spring at Rockwell’s stage station, Salt Lake County, Utah.
“All of us but the driver would walk ahead of the team.”