That the camps did not destroy themselves in their own frenzy is a tribute to the solid qualities which underlay the recklessness and shiftlessness of much of the population. In most of the camps there came a time when decency finally asserted itself in the only possible way to repress lawlessness. The rapidity with which these camps had drawn their hundreds and their thousands into the fastnesses of the territories carried them beyond the limits of ordinary law and regular institutions. Law and the politician followed fast enough, but there was generally an interval after the discovery during which such peace prevailed as the community itself demanded. In absence of sheriff and constable, and jail in which to incarcerate offenders, the vigilance committee was the only protection of the new camp. Such summary justice as these committees commonly executed is evidence of innate tendency toward law and order, not of their defiance. The typical camp passed through a period of peaceful exploitation at the start, then came an era of invasion by hordes of miners and disreputable hangers-on, with accompanying violence and crime. Following this, the vigilance committee, in its stern repression of a few of the crudest sins, marks the beginning of a reign of law.
The mining camps of the early sixties familiarized the United States with the whole area of the nation, and dispelled most of the remaining tradition of desert which hung over the mountain West. They attracted a large floating population, they secured the completion of the political map through the erection of new territories, and they emphasized loudly the need for national transportation on a larger scale than the trail and the stage coach could permit. But they did not directly secure the presence of permanent population in the new territories. Arizona and Nevada lost most of their inhabitants as soon as the first flush of discovery was over. Montana, Idaho, and Colorado declined rapidly to a fraction of their largest size. None of them was successful in securing a large permanent population until agriculture had gained firm foothold. Many indeed who came to mine remained to plough, but the permanent populating of the Far West was the work of railways and irrigation two decades later. Yet the mining camps had served their purpose in revealing the nature of the whole of the national domain.
[CHAPTER XI]
THE OVERLAND MAIL
Close upon the heels of the overland migrations came an organized traffic to supply their needs. Oregon, Salt Lake, California, and all the later gold fields, drew population away from the old Missouri border, scattered it in little groups over the face of the desert, and left it there crying for sustenance. Many of the new colonies were not self-supporting for a decade or more; few of them were independent within a year or two. In all there was a strong demand for necessities and luxuries which must be hauled from the states to the new market by the routes which the pioneers themselves had travelled. Greater than their need for material supplies was that for intellectual stimulus. Letters, newspapers, and the regular carriage of the mails were constantly demanded of the express companies and the post-office department. To meet this pressure there was organized in the fifties a great system of wagon traffic. In the years from 1858 to 1869 it reached its mighty culmination; while its possibilities of speed, order, and convenience had only just come to be realized when the continental railways brought this agency of transportation to an end.
The individual emigrant who had gathered together his family, his flocks, and his household goods, who had cut away from the life at home and staked everything on his new venture, was the unit in the great migrations. There was no regular provision for going unless one could form his own self-contained and self-supporting party. Various bands grouped easily into larger bodies for common defence, but the characteristic feature of the emigration was private initiative. The home-seekers had no power in themselves to maintain communication with the old country, yet they had no disposition to be forgotten or to forget. Professional freighting companies and carriers of mails appeared just as soon as the traffic promised a profit.
A water mail to California had been arranged even before the gold discovery lent a new interest to the Pacific Coast. From New York to the Isthmus, and thence to San Francisco, the mails were to be carried by boats of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which sent the nucleus of its fleet around Cape Horn to Pacific waters in 1848. The arrival of the first mail in San Francisco in February, 1849, commenced the regular public communication between the United States and the new colonies. For the places lying away from the coast, mails were hauled under contract as early as 1849. Oregon, Utah, New Mexico, and California were given a measure of irregular and unsatisfactory service.
There is little interest in the earlier phases of the overland mail service save in that they foreshadowed greater things. A stage line was started from Independence to Santa Fé in the summer of 1849; another contract was let to a man named Woodson for a monthly carriage to Salt Lake City. Neither of the carriers made a serious attempt to stock his route or open stations. Their stages advanced under the same conditions, and with little more rapidity than the ordinary emigrant or freighter. Mormon interests organized a Great Salt Lake Valley Carrying Company at about this time. For four or five years both government and private industry were experimenting with the problems of long-distance wagon traffic,—the roads, the vehicles, the stock, the stations, the supplies. Most picturesque was the effort made in 1856, by the War Department, to acclimate the Saharan camel on the American desert as a beast of burden. Congress had appropriated $30,000 for the experiment, in execution of which Secretary Davis sent Lieutenant H. C. Wayne to the Levant to purchase the animals. Some seventy-five camels were imported into Texas and tested near San Antonio. There is a long congressional document filled with the correspondence of this attempt and embellished with cuts of types of camels and equipment.
While the camels were yet browsing on the Texas plains, Congress made a more definite movement towards supplying the Pacific Slope with adequate service. It authorized the Postmaster-general in 1857 to call for bids for an overland mail which, in a single organization, should join the Missouri to Sacramento, and which should be subsidized to run at a high scheduled speed. The service which the Postmaster-general invited in his advertisement was to be semi-weekly, weekly, or semi-monthly at his discretion; it was to be for a term of six years; it was to carry through the mails in four-horse wagons in not more than twenty-five days. A long list of bidders, including most of the firms engaged in plains freighting, responded with their bids and itineraries; from them the department selected the offer of a company headed by one John Butterfield, and explained to the public in 1857 the reasons for its choice. The route to which the Butterfield contract was assigned began at St. Louis and Memphis, made a junction near the western border of Arkansas, and proceeded thence through Preston, Texas, El Paso, and Fort Yuma. For semi-weekly mails the company was to receive $600,000 a year. The choice of the most southern of routes required considerable explanation, since the best-known road ran by the Platte and South Pass. In criticising this latter route the Postmaster-general pointed out the cold and snow of winter, and claimed that the experience of the department during seven years proved the impossibility of maintaining a regular service here. A second available road had been revealed by the thirty-fifth parallel survey, across northern Texas and through Albuquerque, New Mexico; but this was likewise too long and too severe. The best route, in his mind—the one open all the year, through a temperate climate, suitable for migration as well as traffic—was this southern route, via El Paso. It is well to remember that the administration which made this choice was democratic and of strong southern sympathies, and that the Pacific railway was expected to follow the course of the overland mail.