From gold rush boomtowns to transcontinental railroads, the U.S. Postal Service played a pivotal role in connecting a rapidly expanding nation. In this episode of Mailin' It, hosts Karla Kirby and Jeff Marino welcome USPS Historian Steve Kochersperger to explore the remarkable stories behind mail delivery during America's westward expansion. Discover how postal employees once disguised themselves as passengers to outsmart railroad companies, how the California Gold Rush transformed mail delivery and helped launch companies like Wells Fargo and American Express, and why the Pony Express became one of history's most misunderstood mail services. The conversation also uncovers the dramatic story of the "Silk Train," the infamous Tunnel 13 mail robbery, and how those events helped shape modern federal forensic investigations and mail security. Along the way, the hosts also share a fascinating look at the unique Texarkana Post Office, where one building serves two states at once.
How did the U.S. Postal Service help build the American West?
In this episode of Mailin' It, USPS Historian Steve Kochersperger takes us on a journey through 250 years of postal history, revealing how the movement of the mail helped shape the nation's growth, transportation systems, commerce, and even criminal investigations.
You'll hear incredible stories about:
Plus, stick around for a fun "Did You Know?" segment about the one-of-a-kind Texarkana Post Office, where you can stand in both Texas and Arkansas at the same time.
Join us for an unforgettable look at the people, innovations, and remarkable moments that helped the Postal Service connect—and protect—a growing nation.
Karla Kirby:
Hello, and welcome to Mailin' It, the official podcast of United States Postal Service. I'm Karla Kirby.
Jeff Marino:
And I'm Jeff Marino. Karla, when most people think of the American frontier, they picture dusty trails, panning for gold, steam locomotives, but behind almost every major milestone in our nation's westward expansion, there's a Postal Service story chronicling that moment in time.
Karla Kirby:
That's right, Jeff. Today, we're taking a look at how the Postal Service helped connect a growing nation over the past 250 years. The stories we'll share all have something in common. They're about the challenge and sometimes the danger of moving the mail across an enormous country. Along the way, those efforts didn't just deliver letters. They helped shape America's geography, build its transportation networks, and even change the way the federal government fights crime.
Jeff Marino:
And to help us tell these incredible stories, we're very happy to welcome Steve Kochersperger back to the studio. Steve, of course, is our USPS historian and corporate information services manager. So it goes without saying that he's well qualified to take us on this journey. Steve, welcome back to Mailin' It.
Steve Kochersperger:
Thanks, Jeff. Great to be here again.
Jeff Marino:
So let's start today with the railroads. You know, back in the 1830s when both the Postal Service and the railroads themselves were still pretty young, the relationship was, well, let's just call it a bit complicated. I understand that back then, the post offices sometimes had to get creative in order to take advantage of the long distance trains that could actually move the nation's mail. So tell us about that story, Steve.
Steve Kochersperger:
Okay. In the early days of railroading, 1830s, the railroads were short. They were regional, highly expensive to build, and they were not interconnected. And they wanted to charge the post office very high rates to carry the mail. The post office, in order to keep the mail on schedule, needed to have the mail, transport at specific times. The railroads had their own agenda and they were not cooperative. <Laugh> To bypass the high rates, the postmaster general at the time authorized the postal employees to just dress as normal travelers and fill their luggage with mail. <Laugh>
Jeff Marino:
That's kind of sneaky. And very clever, but, how did the railroads take that?
Steve Kochersperger:
They were a bit outraged. When they complained to Congress about it, the lawmakers actually cited with the Postal Service, and they told the railroads to accept the more reasonable rates and coordinate the schedules if they wanted the post office to stop smuggling mail through the trains.
Karla Kirby:
So that relationship between the Postal Service and the railroads was an important one, especially as the country's Western population was about to see a dramatic growth spurt. So, Steve, moving ahead to 1848, gold is discovered at Sutter's Mill, and California becomes the place to be. As people flooded into San Francisco and other places, they really had only one way to communicate with people living in the East. How did the Postal Service bridge that gap?
Steve Kochersperger:
Right. So the only way you could really communicate with the West Coast was through the mail. And before the Transcontinental Railroad was finished in 1869, there were three primary routes to get to the West Coast. The Overland route that most people think of going across the prairies, that was a difficult way of traveling through mountains and deserts. Then there was the route around Cape Horn, the southern tip of South America, which was about a five-month sea voyage of 16,000 miles. For heavy equipment, that was the only way to get to the West Coast. The more popular route was, taking a steamship to Panama, crossing the isthmus to the Pacific Coast, and then another steamship from there up to the California coast. That involved a hike through the jungle of about 47 miles, which was not all that pleasant.
Karla Kirby:
So whichever way you choose, it sounds like you were in for a very difficult time. What made people endure that kind of travel?
Steve Kochersperger:
Well, they wanted to get rich. There was a fortune to be made on the West Coast. The reports were there was just gold laying on the ground. You could just scoop it up. Of course, those were exaggerated reports. But once people were there, they desperately needed to communicate with the people back east. The Postal Service, Postmaster General Cave Johnson dispatched a special agent, William Vorhees, in 1848. And his job was to establish post offices, appoint postmasters, and make sure that the postal revenue was being secured.
Jeff Marino:
So, Steve, with San Francisco growing very, very quickly from a small village to a chaotic city of 30,000 people, the local post office must have been completely overwhelmed by this. So how did the miners in those remote camps actually get their mail?
Steve Kochersperger:
You're right about that, Jeff. When the mail would arrive, the ship would pull in, the post office would be mobbed. There'd be thousands and thousands of people waiting, just with the hope that they might have a letter. And it was not possible to transport that mail out to the more and more remote mining camps. Private express companies such as Adams Express or Wells Fargo stepped in and they charged a premium - fees as high as, one to $16 just to bring mail from the local distribution centers out to the camps. To send a letter from the camp, they would charge 50 cents.
Jeff Marino:
And miners had to pay for that mail delivery, right? How did they come up with the money?
Steve Kochersperger:
Money is a bit of a stretch. Currency in the the gold region basically was gold dust or gold nuggets. There was a shortage of bank notes. But, they paid expressmen in gold dust. Wells Fargo started setting up secure accounts to hold these deposits of gold, which is how they transitioned from a mail delivery company into a banking giant. Purchases and mail fees were often paid with a pinch of gold dust, whatever, amount of gold the expressmen could physically squeeze between his thumb and fingers from the miner's pouch.
Karla Kirby:
So Steve, you mentioned the pinch of gold that was used to pay for the transport of local mail to the camps. Was a pinch of mail ever sent through, I guess, postal? Like, you could put it in a letter and send it to a family member? Was that a regular interval of currency, a pinch of gold dust?
Steve Kochersperger:
It was a very subjective measurement. A pinch of gold. The interesting thing is that because gold was so abundant and it became the primary currency in the gold region on the West Coast, inflation, really took off. Basic commodities were in short supply, and there was accounts of dentists in the gold region who would extract your tooth for one ounce of gold. You know, you can imagine what an ounce of gold is worth today. To buy one egg would cost a dollar, maybe $5. They were in such short supply. But people had their pockets were bursting with gold, so.
Jeff Marino:
During the gold rush, how did the miners... Did they ship their gold? Or did they carry it? Like, did the gold wind up in the mail at all?
Steve Kochersperger:
There were express companies that would visit the mining camps. And you can imagine if gold was the coin of the realm, walking around with bags of gold or gold nuggets made you a target. So the express companies would take that gold and basically put it on account. Instead of carrying that gold around, you had money in the bank and made it very profitable for some of these early express companies who are still around today. American Express, Wells Fargo, still with us. To get the gold from the gold fields in California back to the East Coast, this would be before the silk train was the, the job of the Postal Service. The mail would be, it would be shipped as registered mail, aboard a steamer to Panama, and then transport it over the isthmus, and then on another steamer up to the East Coast.
So there was a, a postal presence. And those ships were established. They became passenger ships, but they were really created to be for transporting the mail, just as we saw in the later evolution of the of the airmail service. What started out as strictly airmail service became air passenger service.
Karla Kirby:
Steve, so as California grew, the need for a railroad connection became an absolute necessity to keep the state aligned with the union. But politics stood in the way for years. How did the Civil War finally break that political deadlock so the Postal Service and railroads could then focus on the logistics of coast to coast mail delivery?
Steve Kochersperger:
Great question. There had been talk of a West, railroad to the West Coast for decades. But there was political deadlock. The Southern Congressman wanted a route that would go from the Southern states, and the Northern Congressman wanted a more central route. It wasn't until the South seceded from the Union that the North had enough votes to move ahead with their plan. Congress easily passed the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 and was signed into law by President Lincoln. The physical and engineering challenges were formidable and unprecedented. Building a railroad over the Rockies had never been attempted.
Jeff Marino:
And then eventually, the golden spike was driven in 1869, signaling the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. But right about that same time, there was a brief and highly romanticized period of mail delivery called the Pony Express. There's a lot of myths surrounding the Pony Express, but Steve, can you set us straight on what it was and then how the railroad eventually took over for it?
Steve Kochersperger:
The Pony Express was started as a private venture to transport mail from where the railroads ended in St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California. It lasted all of 18 months, and it never made a cent. It was, it went bankrupt. It didn't carry mail until the very last few months. So when people think of the Postal Service and the Pony Express, they're actually conflating things that were very loosely related. What eventually put it out of business was the Transcontinental Telegraph. The Express was able to transport mail that distance in as quickly as 10 days, which would have previously taken maybe three weeks to a month to go by the Panama route.
Jeff Marino:
Okay. So the Transcontinental Telegraph put the Pony Express out of business. But now you've got the Transcontinental Railroad established. So I know there's something they called “mail on the fly.” Tell me about that.
Steve Kochersperger:
So stopping a train at every station, not very efficient. They would sometimes slow down to drop off messages. And many post offices were located adjacent to the rail depot. So mail on the fly was developed so that the, postmaster could hang up a sack of mail right next to the railroad tracks, and a speeding train could come by and snag that mailbag without stopping. And at the same time they could drop off the mail for that post office right onto the platform.
Jeff Marino:
So previously, somebody just grabbed the mail as the train went by?
Steve Kochersperger:
Sometimes they would do it that way.
Karla Kirby:
Okay. I need a little bit more information on this one, Steve. So we dropped the mail off and picked the mail up as a train did not stop. What happened to the mail on the train?
Steve Kochersperger:
Great question. The train, the railway mail cars were fitted out as post offices so that there were clerks working on the train sorting mail. So as soon as they picked up the mail, they could, start immediately sorting it for their next destination or preparing their dispatch for the upcoming post offices. It was a very efficient way of processing mail.
Karla Kirby:
Steve, you also have a really good story from the late 19th century about a railway mail operation called the Silk Train that most people probably don't know. Why was it called that?
Steve Kochersperger:
In the 1890s, the East Coast of the United States had a severe shortage of coinage and gold dollars. And the West Coast had an abundance of gold. To prevent an economic panic, the government needed to transport millions and gold coins across the country. They didn't want train robbers catching wind of the massive shipment. So the post office called it a silk train, kind of as a red herring. The thinking was that no self-respecting bandit would waste time trying to hijack and pawn bulk bolts of silk.
Karla Kirby:
Okay. So they gave it a different name to throw the robbers off. So how did they secure these trains?
Steve Kochersperger:
The Postmaster General recruited Union Army veterans working in the railway mail service, armed them and ordered them to sleep in the cars and to shoot to kill anyone who tried to stop the train. The train safely reached New York without incident.
Jeff Marino:
Okay. So code name silk train and shoot to kill. That made the trains get through. Interesting. But train robberies themselves were a persistent problem for all railroads and for the US mail for decades. So a lot of measures were taken to put a stop to them. And by the 20th century, I understand steel rail cars wound up replacing the wooden ones, and train robberies were supposed to be extinct at that point. But it turns out that wasn't the case because in October of 1923, the DeAutremont brothers attempted an audacious train heist in Tunnel 13 in Oregon. What happened at that robbery?
Steve Kochersperger:
Great story. The trains had been made more secure and the railroads had gotten much better at tracking down and preventing robberies. But there were always valuables being transported in the mail. So these DeAutremont brothers, there was actually three of them. Twin brothers, Roy and Ray, along with their younger brother, Hugh. They had a bunch of odd jobs, worked as lumberjacks in Oregon, but they were looking for a big break. And they had erroneously thought that this Pacific train number, Southern Pacific Train Number 13 was carrying $40,000 in gold. And there was a point on the border between California and Oregon at the Siskiyou Pass, Tunnel 13, where the train had to slow down and test the brakes before descending. And they though this was an ideal place to hold up the train. It didn't work out so well.
The railway mail clerk, Elvin Dougherty, refused to open the door to the mail car.
Jeff Marino:
From what I know about the story, it got a lot worse from there. So tell me what happened next.
Steve Kochersperger:
Well, the brothers, did not have a lot of the essential skills of most criminals. They didn't know how to crack a safe. But they had stolen a box of dynamite from a construction site and they figured that that would be a good way to get the safe open. When the clerk refused to open the door, they put some dynamite underneath the rail car hoping they would blow the door open. But because of their inexperience, they used basically a whole crate of dynamite. And instead of blowing the door open, they blew the train to pieces and killed the poor clerk. The brothers panicked and shot the conductor, the fireman, and the engineers so there would be no witnesses, and they fled the scene completely empty-handed. The response to the murder of the mail clerk and the railway employees was taken very seriously.
And it launched a manhunt that went worldwide, and tremendous rewards were offered for the capture of these brothers. They were eventually identified through forensic evidence. One of the first cases of a federal investigation relied on forensic evidence from some of the evidence found at the scene. Eventually, one of the brothers was identified in the Philippines. He had joined the army under an assumed name. When he was brought to justice the other two brothers turned themselves in and they were all sentenced to long penitentiary terms.
Jeff Marino:
So you said they were eventually covered, but there was a lot of forensic evidence that was processed to track these guys down. Can you tell me about all the little details that they found?
Steve Kochersperger:
So they tapped the skills of Dr. Edward Heinrich who was also known as the Wizard of Berkeley. And he revolutionized forensic science by analyzing a pair of discarded overalls that were found at the scene. And he found Douglas Fir needles and pine pitch in the pockets, which led him to conclude that the wearer was a lumberjack, not a railroad mechanic. The wear patterns on the left pocket flap proved that the suspect was left-handed. The size and fit pinpointed a man roughly 25 years old, 5'8", weighing about 165 pounds. He also found clipped fingernails inside the pocket suggesting someone with fastidious habits. And the big clue was a registered mail receipt in the pencil pocket officially identifying Roy DeAutremont. And that's what led to the massive four-year global manhunt led by the inspection service.
Jeff Marino:
So after that, the Postmaster General had to respond to some of these train robberies. So at a bigger level, what did, what kind of actions were taken by the Postmaster General to help secure the mail?
Steve Kochersperger:
Following that tragedy and a series of other high profile mail robberies, the Postmaster General turned to the Secretary of the Navy, Edwin Dembe, a former Marine, for help. The US Marines were deployed to guard mail trains, trucks, and post office lobbies with explicit shoot to kill orders. The Marines took their orders very seriously, which occasionally led to a tragic accident. One includes shooting a hobo running to catch a train, and a passenger running back for a forgotten suitcase, and a farmer who refused to move when ordered.
Jeff Marino:
Well, that's a really intense story and an intense time. And it brings up another interesting piece of history. Even though the mail car at Tunnel 13 was almost completely destroyed, the Postal Service was able to recover and deliver some of the mail from the train. So what's the policy regarding damaged mail and trying to deliver that?
Steve Kochersperger:
The policy of the Postal Service has always been that if mail is damaged in an accident, train wreck, robbery, postal workers will recover whatever is legible, place it in a protective envelope, and attach an official apology or explanation and deliver it anyway. These recovered charred envelopes are known as crash covers, and they're highly prized and incredibly valuable among stamp collectors. The National Postal Museum even houses charred mail recovered from the historic Hindenburg disaster in 1937, which still smells of soot today.
Karla Kirby:
Well, Steve, thanks so much for joining us. It's always very informative when you join us on Mailin’ It, and great stories that you share today.
Steve Kochersperger:
Thank you. I'll be happy to come back again.
Jeff Marino:
It's time for another edition of Did You Know. Karla, your turn today. What interesting fact do you have for us?
Karla Kirby:
Well, Jeff, have you ever wished you can be in two places at once?
Jeff Marino:
Yeah, on days when I have back-to-back meetings, so sure.
Karla Kirby:
Well, you really can be in two places simultaneously. Just visit the Texarkana Post Office on State Line Avenue, where you can actually be in Texas and Arkansas at the same time. One foot in zip code 71854, and the other in 75501. That might not help you with your meeting schedule, but it still is pretty cool.
Jeff Marino:
Wait, really? So which state does the post office actually belong to?
Karla Kirby:
Well, actually, both. But there are some interesting operational divisions. A little background. Texarkana, Texas and Texarkana, Arkansas were both founded in 1873 and share a lot of things like a chamber of commerce and a water department. But they have their own mayors and police departments.
Jeff Marino:
So I guess that makes sense since the states have different laws, right?
Karla Kirby:
Yes, but they've reconciled some of them. For example, Texas doesn't have an income tax, and Arkansas does. So the residents on the Arkansas side of town are exempted.
Jeff Marino:
Well, I guess they had to, or everyone would just move over to the Texas side.
Karla Kirby:
That makes sense. Exactly. And similarly, the post office, with a physical state line running down the center of its floor, operates a single delivery unit. But the staff runs two mail sorting operations, one for Texas and one for Arkansas.
Jeff Marino:
That sounds complicated, but it also makes sense.
Karla Kirby:
Yeah, it's just one of those quirks of American history and a great example of operational harmony.
Jeff Marino:
Absolutely.
Karla Kirby:
So Jeff, definitely Steve always comes with the great stories. But the silk train and the robbery, those are definitely ones I had never heard before.
Jeff Marino:
Before. I hadn't heard of that either. You know, Operation Silk Train <laugh> and the tragedy, the robbery just, it's two points in time that you, you almost just can't imagine these days.
Karla Kirby:
Right. That and then the forensic follow-up. Mm-Hmm. So the inspection service, I'm wondering if that was one of their first forensic cases.
Jeff Marino:
I don't know, but, it certainly is interesting that going back to the early 1900s, they were thinking about forensics and being able to track down people years later.. Very interesting.
Karla Kirby:
Definitely very interesting. We'll definitely have to have him back.
So 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 @USPostal Service, X@USPS, Facebook, and youtube.com/usps.