This week on Mailin’ It, we’re joined by special guest Cameron Blevins, Associate Professor of U.S. History and Digital Humanities at the University of Colorado Denver. Join us as we unpack the 1800s and the Postal Services' role in westward expansion. We’ll also talk about the impact of this growth on Indigenous populations and more!
In this episode, we discuss the U.S. westward expansion with Cameron Blevins, Associate Professor of U.S. History and Digital Humanities at the University of Colorado Denver. We’ll talk about the Postal Service's role, different ways Americans stayed connected, and the impact this growth had on Indigenous populations. Join us as we’ll learn more about how the Postal Service helped the United States grow into the country it is today!
Karla Kirby:
Hi everybody. Welcome to “Mailin’ It,” the official podcast of the United States Postal Service. I'm Karla Kirby. I think our listeners are really going to, like today's episode. We're going to switch things up a bit and talk about how the postal service helped the United States to grow into the country it is today. And I do mean literally, let's put it this way, halfway through the 19th century, the US basically went only as far west as the Mississippi River. Within less than 50 years, the postal service helped America stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific and settle most of the land in between. The postal service was the one and only communications network that could reach America's pioneers once they headed out west. It's a really interesting part of American history and here to take us through it in this episode is our guest, Cameron Blevins. Cameron is an associate professor of history at the University of Colorado Denver. He is also author of the book Paper Trails, the US Post and the Making of the American West. He's joining us today from Denver. Welcome, Cameron.
Cameron Blevins:
Hey, Karla, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be joining you today.
Karla Kirby:
A great place to start will be to tell us about yourself and your work.
Cameron Blevins:
So I teach US History and Digital Humanities at the University of Colorado Denver, and my research really focuses on the American West in the 1800’s and the American states. So the role of the federal government in American history.
Karla Kirby:
So what exactly do you mean by digital humanities?
Cameron Blevins:
That's a great question and I'll try to unpack some of the, the more academic side of this. So, at a really basic level, digital humanities focuses on how you can use computers and technology to better understand and explain topics like literature and languages, art classics, or in my case history. So using technology to research, teach, or communicate about the past. And a lot of my recent work using these kind of tools has been to study America's Western expansion during the second half of the 1800’s. In my case this is really focused on using a data set of around a hundred thousand post offices to map out on a year by year basis the expansion of the US Postal System across the Western United States. And it was through using these kinds of data, so maps and visualizations that I started to realize you really can't fully understand or appreciate how the United States grew into the nation that it is today without looking at the role that the US Postal Service played in the Western United States in particular during the 1800s.
Karla Kirby:
Well, one obvious reason for that is because there was no other way to communicate over that long distance at that time. So let's unpack what you said, what was happening in the Western US from the middle to the late 1800s?
Cameron Blevins:
I'll try and give you the cliff notes version here. So a good starting place would be 1848. This is a really pivotal moment in year in US history and history of the American West in particular. So in 1848, the US signed a treaty with Mexico that concluded a more than two year war where the United States basically invaded its southern neighbor. And in that treaty seized about half a million square miles of territory from Mexico, roughly the northern one third of Mexican territory. So this included places like Arizona, what would become Arizona, New Mexico, parts of Utah, Nevada, and most importantly, the entire state of California. Roughly one week after this treaty a man outside of Sacramento found gold in a stream. And this launched what would become the California gold rush, one of the largest global migrations. Up until that point in history, hundreds of thousands of people started to stream into California, and this included a lot of Americans from the Eastern third of the United States.
And this kind of kicks off what I think a lot of people tend to think of as the, you know, wild West era that you'll oftentimes see in Hollywood films and westerns. So from roughly speaking the 1850s through the 1880s and into the 1890s and this period in American history marked really what I would say one of the most dramatic reorganization of people land capital resources in American history. So farmers started moving onto Western land to start homesteads. You had the expansion of railroad lines into the west, mining industries, timber companies, irrigation projects. I mean, this was a roughly, you know, half century period in which the Western United States was completely transformed. And for Americans that were hoping to seek their fortunes out west, they needed some way to stay connected to the rest of the country, and in particular, the people, the family, the friends that they had left behind.
So if you think about moving out to California in the 1850s, you know, 2000 miles away from your family that you might have left behind in Ohio, let's say, or if you're moving to a distant mining camp in Idaho, the main way you communicated with the wider world was through the US Post. So between 1848 and 1895, the federal government established roughly 24,000 post offices in the Western United States. And these s sprouted up alongside towns, homesteads mines, mills, dams, railroads, there were spreading across this territory. And these post offices were really how you got your news, right, sending letters and postcards to friends and family or transmitting financial documents. So things like contracts, invoices, receipts, and all of this became the underlying circuitry for Western expansion during this era.
Karla Kirby:
So the postal service had already been around for many decades by then. Was there a plan to put a new post office out west in particular areas to create a formal network that connected the east and the west?
Cameron Blevins:
There was certainly the desire to do so, but the logistics of actually putting that into practice were something else entirely. And so if you think about this period in American history, right, the US at that point, claims territory that stretched from the west coast all the way back to the Mississippi River, but a lot of the western half the United States was still largely inhabited by Native American tribes during the 1850s and 1860s. And many of these tribes were quite powerful at the time. So you know, in the northern plains there was an alliance of Lakota and the Central Plains, the Arapahoe and Cheyenne stretching all the way down to the Comanche in Western Texas and New Mexico. And the US government really did not control a lot of this land at the time. This process of seizing that land kind of took place in two stages.
The first of these stages would be the US Army was moving in and waging war effectively against western tribes using violence to effectively seize these, this land, force them off of it and onto government reservations. And then the second stage of that became American settlers occupying that land. So I don't know if you've ever been out to the western United States, but there's a lot of areas out here that are quite far away from other parts of the country. And so is a real challenge for figuring out how Americans were actually going to occupy this giant swath of territory. And this is where the US Post came into play. So instead of creating this kind of formal network of post offices, the federal government wove together what I, what I've termed a gossamer network across the west. And instead of this top down structure this was much more of a bottom up kind of lightweight network.
So what does that look like? If you were a local community in the West and you wanted to get your mail, you would send in a petition to the federal government asking for a new post office, and the federal government would overwhelmingly approve those requests and they'd start to set up mail service to your location. So they would, you know, for instance, pay a local store owner a small commission to distribute letters out of their general store and then have a short-term contract with a stagecoach company to carry the mail to that post office. And this was a really sprawling and fast moving web of post offices and mail roots that started to weave together the Western United States into this more national system of communications.
Karla Kirby:
So Cameron, you mentioned that the postal network really couldn't be planned out. So how did they decide where to put these new post offices and how did those post offices operate?
Cameron Blevins:
There wasn't a whole lot of centralized planning behind it. Oftentimes it would be these local communities sending in petitions to their representative, their congressmen the post office department directly for a new post office and a mail route to serve them. And this meant that the network could expand really quickly into these places. And this was part of a larger infrastructure of the government and the federal government really encouraging settlers to move into Western territory. And they did this through a lot of different ways one of which was the Homestead Act. So essentially offering very cheaper free lands to settlers who promised to move on to that land and then live on it and improve it for five years. Other pieces of legislation, the Desert Land Act, the Timber Culture Act, all of these things really were trying to encourage Western expansion.
And I think one of the real forgotten ones though, is the idea of the postal system. And I think for me, one of the kind of compelling stories that I came across in my research in the archives was a story of a family from Ohio named the Curtis's. And these were four siblings. They were orphaned at a very young age, kind of sent to live with relatives in different parts of the country during the 1850s. And they used the posts to stay in contacts with each other throughout their lifetimes. And the youngest of these named Benjamin moved westward in the 1860s and in the 1870s and first set up, you know, as a store clerk in northern California, then tried to become an orchard farmer outside of San Diego, and then finally ended up in Arizona's territory to try to start a ranch. Throughout this time, he used the US Post to stay connected to his siblings, and in particular his two older sisters ended up moving out to California after him.
And the letters that survive from this family tell this incredible way in which they're using these networks of communication through the federal government to stay connected despite the fact that Benjamin himself is living in the Arizona backcountry trying to start a ranch. He's 30 miles away from the nearest major town. Despite that, he has two post offices within about a 20 minute walk from his front door, and he's using those post offices to send letters to his siblings to subscribe to half a dozen newspapers and magazines from across the country, stay current with news sending small items through the mail, conducting financial transactions. And then I think the part that really is touching, for me at least, was then sharing the news with his sisters that first he had gotten engaged, then he gets married, and then he has a child. And the ways in which he is telling and sharing that news with his siblings is through the mail. And none of that would've been possible again without this kind of expansive postal system and its ability to expand and move into these really remote areas of the west.
Karla Kirby:
So why would you say, based on all of those things that the postal service was so important to these new settlements, and why hasn't the postal service received more credit for its role?
Cameron Blevins:
So the postal services ability to extend out into these really distant places in fundamental ways kept settlers connected to the wider world. So this allowed them to exchange letters with friends and families. They could subscribe to newspapers and magazines at heavily subsidized rates. They could stay up to date on something like financial markets or politics in Washington dc they could conduct financial transactions, right, sending money to family members, they could file legal paperwork through the mail. And in a lot of ways, we still rely on the US Postal Service for many of these things when it comes to receiving credit. I think that there is an overwhelming idea of the Wild West narrative about this period in American history. So the idea of these kind of rugged individualists moving out west pioneers and covered wagons cowboys kind of moving westward and historians have only recently started to rewrite that narrative. So rather than just being a story about individuals, we've started to appreciate all the different ways in which the federal government played a huge role in Western expansion through things like setting up public lands providing farming subsidies, grazing permits, setting up military forts and bases, doling out defense contracts. And the US Post was a major, major part of this federal infrastructure in the West.
Karla Kirby:
So if I'm not mistaken, and also listening to what the postal service contributed to settlers back then the postal service was the biggest federal institution at that time. But what were the post offices like back then? You mentioned they were typically run out of local businesses, there wasn't actually a brick and mortar post office. So can you expand on that a little more?
Cameron Blevins:
Sure. So the US Post was absolutely the largest federal institution at the time in the 1800s. And just to give you a little bit of a sense for that, it employed more people than the entire rest of the executive legislative and judicial branches combined. It was far and away the largest postal system in the world. And if you compare it to something today in 1899, there are about five times as many post offices operating the United States as there are McDonald's restaurants today and outside of big cities. The postal service did not kind of set up its own standalone post office buildings. It didn't buy, you know, its own stage coaches. It didn't hire its own full-time staff. Instead, in the vast majority of locations, the United States, they would give these small commissions to a local business owner of some kinds to again, distribute mail out of their place of business.
And this meant that the local store owner, let's say, who managed to get a postmaster position had a steady stream of customers coming into their store to check their mail. So there's a really big incentive for local business owners to try to get these public positions through the US Post, but it also didn't cost the federal government very much. They might pay these store owners 50 bucks, a hundred bucks a year. And then same thing with stagecoach companies. So instead of operating, you know, their own giant fleet of stagecoach companies to carry the mail, they would contract with private stagecoach companies to toss a bag of mail in the back of the stagecoach alongside their passengers or freights. And this meant that the US Postal Service could rapidly expand into all these different places without having to build its own infrastructure from the bottom up.
Karla Kirby:
So when you think about it, if post offices were so important to people moving out west, why did so many end up closing only a few months or years after they opened?
Cameron Blevins:
This was one of the parts of my research that struck me the most. In looking at some of this data on post offices, I was really, really struck by just how many post offices would open up and then within a matter of months or years shut down. And this is very different from today when the, the post office is a much more stable kind of institution. And in the United States and in the West in particular, that was not necessarily the case. So these businesses would host a post office within their place of business. They'd distribute mail to the local community. But then if that local community started to dissolve, let's say a mining camp, for instance the silver mine next door starts to run dry, people start to move away, the federal government could shut down that post office very easily.
It didn't have, again, its own standalone building. It would just terminate the commission for that local store owner, withdraw the contract for the Stagecoach company, and then kind of shrink from that area. And so the Western United States had a tremendously dynamic fast moving population. People are moving into these distant places, they're leaving those distant places, they're constantly on the move. And the US Post is able to, in some ways go hand in hand with them as they both moved to those places, but then also left those places. And again, because the government relied on these local businesses to serve as post offices, this meant that they weren't building their own public infrastructure that they had to shut down.
Karla Kirby:
Okay, so great points. Good to know. So, you know, when we talk about all of this westward expansion, and as you mentioned there definitely were Native Americans that were living on some of the land, what was the overall impact to the Native American population? You know, many of them, as you said, were removed to reservations far from where they had been living. How did the growth of the postal service network also impact those tribes?
Cameron Blevins:
So once the federal government and the US Army in particular seized native lands and oftentimes kind of coerced native groups in signing these treaties, they would then often remove them onto government run reservations. And the US posts had a really interesting pattern as it related to these reservations across most of the country. It had a really dense network. Any town, any community you went to, you'd have a post office. Very close to you. This was not the case within government reservations in the west. Usually there are two, maybe three government reservations and these tended to be located at things like army forts or federal Indian agencies. So they're really there in some ways to serve the kind of government employees and military members that are stationed within these federal Indian reservations. But that didn't necessarily stop native people from figuring out ways to use the post to their own advantage.
Karla Kirby:
So does that mean that Native Americans didn't use - or weren't allowed to use - the postal service?
Cameron Blevins:
So even though there weren't that many post offices available to them, especially compared to white Americans living in other parts of the country, native Americans really did come to rely on the postal service. And so the federal government is also setting up schools on these reservations oftentimes as a means of kind of forced assimilation, trying to stamp out native language or customs and replace that with a more white American culture. But as a result of that, native American literacy rates started to skyrocket during the 1880s. And this is a story that's been told by the historian Justin Gage in a really wonderful recent book called We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us. And he shows that the US mail became a way for native people living on reservations to do things like petition government officials file lawsuits against the government stay connected to family and friends that have been separated on different reservations and even exchanging letters to spread things like the pann tribal ghost dance movement starting in 1889. So the US posts actually did become an important tool for these native communities living oftentimes in terrible conditions on government reservations.
Karla Kirby:
So all of this information has absolutely been very interesting. I'd like to wrap up our conversation by asking what you found the most surprising as you did your research for your book.
Cameron Blevins:
I think the most surprising thing for me was a pretty basic point, which is that the US Post was massive in the 1800s, and I hadn't fully appreciated that size until I started to look at the underlying data. And so this was a system that was operating in every single town and community, generally speaking, in the United States. And you can't really say that about almost any other institution at the time. And as a point of comparison, there are about two and a half times as many post offices operating in the late 1890s as there are in operation today, despite the United States having a population that's about one quarter the size. And that was really striking to me, and I think it opened up a larger set of findings, at least for me to reconceptualize this giant institution and the role it played in local communities and in American history. And to zoom out a little bit, I think it made me start to appreciate how much we tend to take for granted these kinds of big structures and networks that oftentimes play a huge role in our daily lives. We use them every day, but we rarely stop to think about how they worked and some of the implications behind that machinery. And so I think one of the big takeaways for me was just a better and a deeper appreciation for some of these hidden forces and systems that tend to structure our world today.
Karla Kirby:
I think that is a great point, Cameron. We have 650,000 brand ambassadors every day that are going to 163 million homes across the United States in our territories. So we are definitely a silent giant. So Cameron, I wanna thank you for joining us today. You provided some very great information - history I didn't know, you know, for me, and I think our listeners will be very excited to get this information. Again, thanks for joining us.
Cameron Blevins:
It was a real pleasure to join you, Karla. Thank you.
Karla Kirby:
Now we're ready for another “Did You Know” our segment that reveals some lesser known facts about the postal service these days. We can send a letter anywhere in the US without a second thought, just drop it in a mailbox and it'll reach the West coast within a few days. It wasn't always like that of course. Think about California. In the 1850s, the gold rush was on and the population was booming and mail was the one way to connect the country coast to coast. To do that, the postal service established the first post offices in California. Then came the really hard part getting the mail there. This was first done with the help of steamships passing mail across the isthmus of Panama. This was slow. In fact, in 1850 citizens in Los Angeles didn't hear that California had been admitted to the Union until six weeks after it had happened.
To address problems like that, the postal service opened the first overland mail route to California in 1851. Mail from the east made its way to Salt Lake City where riders would carry it on horse or mule back over a tough, dangerous route through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Over the next few years, mail contractors tried out different trails to find the least difficult route to the Golden State. The most famous of these was the Butterfield Overland Mail route, which began in 1858. The Butterfield Overland Mail was by far the longest route, stretching nearly 2,800 miles between the Mississippi River and California. Service operated twice a week and the first trip west was made in about 24 days. That might sound like a long wait today, but it was revolutionary for the time. Butterfield's Overland Mail also carried passengers. It aided westward expansion and was the precursor to the Transcontinental Railroad. And that wraps up this edition of Did You Know. And that's all for this episode of Mailin’ It. Don't forget to subscribe to Mailin’ It wherever you get your podcast to make sure you don't miss the next episode. And follow along on Instagram @US Postal Service, Twitter @usps, and on Facebook.