And in the tale of this great struggle there is another motive in addition to the love of adventure––and like that love, unacknowledged by those whom it stirred,––the strong instinctive desire for a closer union which exists among all Americans.
In the beginning there was a frontier two hundred miles or so west of the Mississippi River. Behind that frontier wide-stacked wood-burning locomotives were drawing long trains on tracks of steel; steamers came sighing up and down the muddy rivers; cities smeared the sky with clouds of coal smoke; under those sooty palls men in high hats and women in enormous hoop-skirts passed in afternoon promenade down the sidewalks; 252 newspapers displayed the day’s tidings in black head-lines; the telegraph flashed messages from one end of that land to the other; and where the sharp church steeple of the most remote village cut the sky, the people read and thought and talked the same things which were being discussed in Delmonico’s at the same hour.
Beyond the Sierra Nevadas there was another civilization. In San Francisco hotel lobbies men and women passed and repassed one another dressed in Eastern fashions––some months late, but Eastern fashions none the less. Newspapers proclaimed the latest tidings from the East in large type. Men were falling out over the same political issues which embroiled men by the Atlantic seaboard; they were embarking in the same sort of business ventures.
But two thousand miles of wilderness separated these two portions of the nation. That vast expanse of prairies as level as the sea, of sage-brush plains, of snow-capped mountains and silent, deadly deserts, was made more difficult by bands of hostile Indians.
In Europe such an interval would have remained for centuries, to be spanned by the slow migration of those whom ill-fortune and bad government had driven from the more crowded communities on each side. During that time these two civilizations would have gone on in their own ways developing their own distinct customs, until in the end they would have become separate countries.
But the people east of the Mississippi and the people west of the Sierras were Americans, and the desire for a close union was strong within them. Their business 253 habits were such that they could not carry on commercial affairs without it. Their political beliefs and their social tendencies kept them chafing for it. And furthermore it was their characteristic not to acknowledge nature’s obstacles as permanent. Two thousand miles of wild prairie, mountain ranges, and deserts simply meant a task, the more blithely to be undertaken because it was made hazardous by the presence of hostile savages.
So now the East began to cry to the West and the West to the East, each voicing a desire for quicker communication, and to get letters from New York to San Francisco in fast time became one of the problems of the day.
The first step toward solution was the choice of a route, and while this was up to Washington, the proof on which it rested was up to the men of wealth and the men of action. Immediately two rival groups began striving, each to prove that its route was the quickest. Russel, Majors & Waddel, who held large freighting contracts on the northern road, from Independence, Missouri, via Salt Lake to Sacramento, bent their energies to demonstrating its practicability; the Wells-Butterfield coterie of stage and express men undertook to show that the longer pathway from St. Louis by way of the Southwestern territories to San Francisco was best.
In 1855 Senator W. M. Gwinn of California, who had conceived the idea with F. B. Ficklin, general-superintendent of the Russel, Majors & Waddel Co., introduced a bill in Congress for bringing the mails by horseback on the northern route, but the measure was pigeonholed. 254 Snow in the mountains was the main argument against it.
In 1857 James E. Birch got the contract for carrying a semimonthly mail from San Antonio, Texas, to San Diego, and the southern route’s champions had the opportunity to prove their contention.