Introduction

The Gossamer Network

“I had forgotten where I had left my overcoat,” wrote Clark Thompson on January 20, 1864. A regional supervisor for the federal government’s Office of Indian Affairs, Thompson had been visiting the Yankton Indian Reservation in Dakota Territory on official business when he lost his coat. Unwilling to delay his trip, Thompson found a replacement and pressed on with his winter journey. When he eventually reached his office in Saint Paul, Minnesota, he wrote a letter to one of his acquaintances back at the Yankton reservation telling him that his old coat was up for grabs. The entire letter was just four sentences long. There was no official business, no discussion of his trip, not even any complaints about the weather. It was just a few lines about an overcoat. Clark Thompson did not go on to alter the course of American history. Neither, presumably, did his overcoat. Clark’s letter was utterly unremarkable, the historical equivalent of a 21st-century text message. But it wasn’t the 21st century. It was the dead of winter in 1864, in the midst of the US Civil War, and on the outskirts of the nation. Despite this, Thompson was able to dash off a few lines about a misplaced overcoat seemingly without a second thought. The significance of Thompson’s letter has less to do with its contents than with the fact that he was able to send it at all.¹

Figure I.1. A Forgotten Coat

C. W. Thompson to Andrew Jackson Faulk, January 20, 1864, box 1, folder 1, Andrew Jackson Faulk Papers, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, Connecticut.

Roughly four hundred miles separated Clark Thompson’s office in Saint Paul from the Yankton Reservation in Dakota Territory. Just 18 months earlier, this area had descended into all-out warfare. In the summer of 1862, Dakota fighters had launched an insurgency that plunged southwestern Minnesota into chaos. The US Army quickly dispatched troops to the area to pursue them, and in December of 1862 troops hanged 38 men at the town of Mankato, in what remains the largest mass execution in American history. The following summer, Minnesota’s adjunct general organized volunteer squads to hunt down Dakota men, promising a $25 bounty for every scalp they brought to his office. Six months later, Thompson’s letter would have passed directly through Mankato and its execution site before eventually winding its way into Dakota Territory. The recently created federal territory was home to just a few thousand white Americans, most of whom clustered in its southeastern corner along the Missouri River. Thompson’s letter would have traversed this string of settlements before disembarking at the second-to-last stop on the stage line, at the Yankton Indian Reservation. Any farther west and Thompson’s letter would have crossed into an ocean of grassland controlled by the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne that unfurled across Dakota Territory and into present-day Wyoming and Montana.²

How was a government official able to send an utterly inconsequential letter hundreds of miles through occupied territory, in the middle of winter, and at the height of the Civil War? Clark Thompson’s letter was made possible by a network of post offices and mail routes that linked Saint Paul, Minnesota, to a remote government outpost in Dakota Territory. Like Thompson’s letter, this network is easy to overlook. And like Thompson’s letter, it shouldn’t be taken for granted. The infrastructure of the US Post is what allowed a half-page message about a misplaced overcoat to make its way to the very edge of the nation.

Figure I.2 The Outskirts of the Nation

Clark Thompson mailed his letter to the Yankton Indian Reservation, located at the end of a postal route and near the edge of Lakota territory. This map shows post offices, unceded Native land (light gray), and Indian reservations (dark gray) in 1864. For more information about the data used to create this map, refer to the Note on Methods.

Paper Trails is a history of the US Post’s expansion across the western United States. The spread of the nation’s postal system during the second half of the 19th century shaped the history of the region, knitting the American West into a national system of communications. It kept western settlers connected to the people and communities they left behind, shuttling millions of letters between family and friends. It carried newspapers, magazines, petitions, and pamphlets that allowed westerners to engage with national politics, culture, and social movements. It circulated the legal and financial instruments—money orders, checks, drafts, mortgages, property deeds, receipts, and invoices—that kept the region’s economy running. The US Post was the underlying spatial circuitry of western expansion.

When Clark Thompson mailed his letter to Dakota Territory in January of 1864, the future of the American West was very much up for debate. The United States may have laid claim to territory that stretched from coast to coast, but very little of this land was actually within its control. The western interior was still “Indian country,” occupied by powerful groups like the Lakotas in the northern plains and the Comanches in the Southwest. In many places, Native people exercised much more on-the-ground authority than the US government itself. The West’s rugged terrain was equally daunting for Americans—a remote and inhospitable landscape of treeless plains, deserts, and towering mountain ranges unlike anything in the eastern United States. Roads were few and far between, railroad construction was in its infancy, and navigable waterways were virtually nonexistent. Americans may have had grand visions for the West, but a healthy dose of caution was in order.³

It had taken Anglo-American settlers the better part of two hundred years to occupy the eastern half of the United States; they occupied the western half in the span of a single generation. Between the 1860s and 1890s the western United States was utterly transformed. Millions of people moved to the region, building homesteads, founding towns and cities, and incorporating new western states and territories. An influx of industry and capital poured westward into mines, mills, dams, and railroads, all of which accelerated the extraction of resources that fueled the nation’s meteoric rise as the world’s leading industrial economy. The mass movement of people and industry remade the western landscape, as new arrivals plowed farmland, raised herds, felled forests, redirected rivers, and blew apart mountains. All of these changes rested on a foundation of conquest and dispossession. Across the region, soldiers and settlers alike waged war against the West’s Native inhabitants, forcing the survivors to give up legal title to their land and move onto reservations. Western expansion unfurled across plundered Native territory. When the dust finally settled by the end of the 19th century, a once remote region had been conquered, occupied, and integrated into the nation.⁴

How did western expansion unfold so quickly and in the face of such daunting conditions? Despite the popular “Wild West” narrative of self-reliant cowboys and pioneers, the real history of the region is one of big government: public land and national parks, farming subsidies and grazing permits, military bases and defense contracts. Arguably no other part of the United States has been so profoundly shaped by “the state”—a term for the government, institutions, and policies that govern a society. Decades of historical scholarship has dispelled the myth of rugged individualism and replaced it with a story about state power. Yet for all of the attention that historians have paid to the role of the federal government in the West, they have written remarkably little about its largest organization, the US Post.⁵

This lack of attention is especially strange given that no other government entity left behind such an extensive paper trail. The 19th-century postal system transmitted billions of pieces of mail each year.⁶ Whether neatly filed away in the stacks of an archive or haphazardly piled up inside a shoebox in the corner of an attic, the historical record is littered with letters, newspapers, and postcards that traveled through the US Post. Historians spend countless hours riffling through these pieces of paper. So what explains the relative absence of the US Post in the annals of western history, despite its pervasive presence in the historical archive? When something is everywhere, it can start to become invisible. Historians read letters and quote them in their writings, but rarely pause to consider them as physical pieces of paper that had to travel from writer to recipient, from point A to point B. It is easy to take for granted both the journeys themselves and the infrastructure that made them possible. After all, large-scale networks, organizations, and institutions have a tendency to hide in plain sight, camouflaged by their own routine, ubiquitous presence. This book is an attempt to bring one of those networks into view.⁷

To see the postal network in its entirety requires a different approach: digital history, or the use of computational methods to study the past. The field of digital history first emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s as libraries and archives began to digitize historical sources and make them available online. A wealth of newly available electronic material enabled working with these sources in new ways, from curating virtual museum exhibits to applying statistical techniques to large collections of text.⁸ Some have complained that digital history has been long on flash and short on substance, a fancy way of showing patterns that we already know.⁹ This book is a rejoinder to that critique. Many of its core arguments and interpretations originate from a dataset created by the philatelist and postal historian Richard Helbock that contains information about every post office that ever existed in the United States—some 166,000 records in total. As detailed in the Note on Methods, Helbock’s work laid the groundwork for this book. Processing, analyzing, and visualizing the dataset casts light on a subject that otherwise fades from view, uncovering new patterns and insights that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.¹⁰ Mapping the expansion of the US Post on a year-by-year basis not only revealed the geography of this network but helped uncover how its machinery worked and the ways that it shaped the occupation and incorporation of western territory. Some of these findings were expected, while others were quite surprising. Four findings in particular about the US Post laid the foundation for this book’s larger interpretations about the history of the western United States and the nature of state power: the US Post was big, expansive, fast moving, and unstable.¹¹

The US Post was big. In 1889, John Wanamaker, the postmaster general of the United States, boasted that he managed “the largest business concern in the world.”¹² He wasn’t exaggerating. At that point, Wanamaker oversaw a network that encompassed some 59,000 post offices and 400,000 miles of mail routes. This was roughly two and a half times as many post offices and three times the mileage of mail routes as any other country in the world. The size of the US Post made it a global outlier during the 19th century. But numbers alone can be difficult to conceptualize. What, for instance, does 59,000 post offices actually mean? To put that figure in a modern context, it is roughly twice as many post offices as operate in the United States today. Fifty-nine thousand locations also dwarfs the number of Walmart retail stores (5,362), Wells Fargo banking branches (5,472), Walgreens pharmacies (9,560), and even McDonald’s restaurants (13,914) in the United States in 2019. In fact, if McDonald’s were to buy up every single Burger King, Wendy’s, Starbucks, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell restaurant in the country, this massive fast-food conglomerate would still have fewer combined locations than the number of post offices operating in 1889.¹³

Figure I.3 Global Outlier

The United States operated the largest postal infrastructure in the world, as measured by post offices, mail routes, and quantity of mail. Data was provided by John Gerring and Jon Rogowski and was transcribed from records of the Union Postale Universelle, Statistique Générale du Service Postal Publieé par le Bureau International, Année 1889 (Berne: Imprimerie Suter & Lierow, 1891).

The US Post was geographically expansive. The 19th-century postal network wasn’t just big; it was everywhere. Postmaster General Wanamaker’s 1889 report went on to proclaim that his department was “the only one that touches the local life, the social interests, and business concern of every neighborhood.”¹⁴ What seems like hyperbole starts to look much more literal when 59,000 post offices are laid out on a map like the one in Figure I.4. With some exceptions, there really was a post office in “every neighborhood” in the country, whether a mining camp in Idaho, a collection of homesteads in Nebraska, or a booming metropolis like New York City. The nation’s postal geography stemmed from the US government’s commitment to providing a universally accessible mail service. In an era before widespread residential mail delivery, Americans needed to have a post office nearby in order to send and receive their mail. And because Americans themselves were spread across a large area, the federal government had to maintain a similarly widespread infrastructure of post offices and mail routes to serve them. The sprawling spatial coverage of the 19th-century postal network was in many ways its defining feature.¹⁵

Figure I.4 Every Neighborhood

The Post Office Department operated around 59,000 post offices in 1889. Post offices are overlaid onto state and territory boundaries and Indian reservations (shaded in dark gray).

This book is filled with maps like the one in Figure I.4. They are foundational for its arguments, interpretations, and larger narrative structure. But, like all maps, they are incomplete. As described in the Note on Methods, from a technical standpoint the locations of roughly one-third of the post offices in Richard Helbock’s dataset are unknown. A smaller number of them may have been misidentified or placed in the wrong location.¹⁶ More importantly, areas on the maps that are devoid of post offices were not uninhabited. In fact, for much of the 19th century the absence of post offices signaled the presence of Native peoples who effectively blocked the expansion of American settlers and the federal government. When Clark Thompson wrote his letter in 1864, the “blank” areas of the western postal system corresponded to the negative spaces of state power, or territory that the US government did not actually control. In Figure I.5, for instance, much of the land officially designated as Dakota Territory was in fact the domain of the Lakota people. Twenty-five years later, the meaning of those blank areas had changed. By the time Postmaster General Wanamaker wrote his report in 1889, the US government had succeeded in forcing western tribes to cede much of their territory and relocate onto reservations. Within their borders, the US Post’s otherwise dense spatial coverage all but withered away. Blank areas of postal coverage like the ones shown in Figure I.6 had come to reflect the unequal distribution of public services and the federal government’s willful neglect of Native communities. These maps, then, must be approached with a healthy dose of caution.¹⁷

Figure I.5 Network Boundaries in 1864

The left map shows the boundaries of Dakota Territory and post offices operating in 1864. The right map shows the same area overlaid with unceded Native land (light gray) and government reservations (dark gray). In 1864, much of Dakota Territory was controlled by Native groups, primarily the Lakota, who blocked postal expansion into the interior.

Figure I.6 Network Boundaries in 1889

Indian Territory did not enjoy the same dense postal coverage as its neighboring states in 1889. Individual reservations are outlined in light gray, and Indian Territory is outlined in dark gray.

The US Post was fast moving. In the decades after the Civil War, the US Post spread like wildfire across the western United States. When Clark Thompson sat down to write his letter in 1864, there were just over 2,000 post offices operating in the region. When John Wanamaker sat down to write his report as postmaster general twenty-five years later, there were nearly 11,000 (see Figure I.7). The explosion of the western postal network was one of the most rapid and far-reaching spatial expansions of infrastructure in American history. For such a massive entity, the US Post was surprisingly nimble, capable of extending its infrastructure into remote places in a short period of time.¹⁸

Figure I.7 A Fast-Moving Network

These maps illustrate the rapid spread of the western postal network over a 25-year period. Each map shows post offices, unceded Native land in light gray, and reservations in dark gray for a given year.

The US Post was unstable. The US Post may have been capable of rapidly expanding its network, but not all of this new infrastructure was permanent. In his 1889 report, Postmaster General Wanamaker noted that in the past twelve months alone some 1,147 post offices across the country had shut down, and another 1,021 had changed names or locations. This was quite typical. Over the preceding twenty-five years a combined 48,000 US post offices had either closed, changed names, or moved locations—an average of roughly 1,900 of these changes every year (see Figure I.8). Instability was especially pronounced in the western half of the country, where post offices shut down at roughly two to three times the rate as their eastern counterparts. In the American West, postal expansion and postal contraction went hand in hand.¹⁹

Figure I.8 An Unstable Network

The map on the left shows western post offices that opened between 1864 and 1889. The map on the right shows western post offices that shut down or permanently changed names or locations during that same time period. Post offices for which exact locations could not be determined are randomly distributed within the county in which they operated and are displayed in a lighter, semi-transparent color to reflect their uncertainty (see the Note on Methods for more information).

The nation’s postal workforce was even more transitory than its infrastructure. In the late 19th century, roughly one out of every six postmasters was removed, resigned, or died in office each year.²⁰ This was partly due to the “spoils system” of electoral politics, in which the political party that controlled the executive branch doled out government jobs to party loyalists. Due to its size, the Post Office Department had more of these patronage positions than all other executive departments combined. Whenever the presidency changed between Republican and Democratic control, thousands of postmasters were swept out of office. In fact, when John Wanamaker took over as postmaster general in 1889, the Republican appointee immediately rescinded thousands of postmaster appointments made by his Democratic predecessor (see Figure I.9). New people constantly moved in and out of the nation’s postal workforce.²¹

Figure I.9 The Revolving Door

The authority to remove postmasters from office was often used by postmasters general for partisan purposes when the presidency changed from one political party to another. This chart displays the number of postmasters who were removed from office over the preceding fiscal year (July 1 to June 30) between 1865 and 1900. Numbers were transcribed from Annual Reports of the Postmaster General, 1865–1900.

The composite portrait that emerges from the US Post is what I’ve termed a “gossamer network,” a phrase that invokes the image of a gauzy web, rapidly spinning out new threads to distant locations. Its tendrils were light, even delicate, and apt to melt away at a moment’s notice. These gossamer features weren’t universally shared across the US Post. In more densely populated areas, the postal system was a much more stable entity. But across the American countryside the gossamer network reigned supreme, reaching a kind of apex in the western United States. There, the US Post was at its most sprawling, fast moving, and ephemeral. This might seem strange, given that words like “fast moving” and “ephemeral” aren’t typically associated with government institutions. Which raises the question: How did this federal network even work? How did it expand (and contract) so quickly and across such a large area?

The US Post forces a reconsideration of the American state and its history. Unlike today, most of the nation’s postal infrastructure was not publicly owned or operated in the 19th century. Outside of big cities, the US Post did not erect its own stand-alone post office buildings, buy its own fleet of horse-drawn vehicles, or hire its own staff of salaried civil servants. Instead, it appointed local private agents to act on its behalf. It contracted with stagecoach companies to shuttle bags of mail between post offices and paid merchants or other business owners to sell stamps and distribute letters from inside their stores or homes. These responsibilities were rarely a full-time pursuit, so contractors and postmasters simply added their mail duties on top of their primary occupation. These temporary, flexible arrangements help to explain the gossamer network’s rapid and unstable expansion across the western United States.

The rural postal system exemplified a larger organizational framework at the heart of Paper Trails: the agency model. Here, the term “agency” is not used as a synonym for “department” (as in “Environmental Protection Agency”), nor does it refer to an individual’s ability to take action. Instead, it represents a specific kind of institutional arrangement. In the agency model, large organizations delegate local individuals (agents) to carry out specific tasks on its behalf, each of whom is responsible for a particular geographical territory. These agents act with minimal direct oversight and are typically far removed from administrative headquarters. They are often part-time, temporary positions, and in the 19th century they were largely paid through commissions, fees, and contracts rather than a regular salary. The agency model was widespread across the private sector, as local sales agents would peddle books on behalf of distant publishing houses or life insurance policies for large financial companies. But the agency model also powered large swathes of the public sector, including the US Post.²²

In 21st-century terms, the agency model was like an algorithm for solving the problems of US geography. Even in an era of rapid urbanization, the majority of Americans lived in small towns and communities that were scattered across a huge area of land. How could the federal government provide mail service to all of these different places? Rather than starting from scratch, the Post Office Department grafted mail service onto a preexisting private infrastructure. This allowed it to extend its network to many more places and do so much more quickly than if it had built its own public infrastructure. It could then withdraw from those same distant places without having to dismantle or abandon anything in its wake. It simply terminated a storeowner’s appointment as postmaster or allowed a mail contract with a staging company to expire. The agency model was the machinery behind the US Post’s rural gossamer network.

The significance of the agency model within the American state has been overlooked, in part due to a different sort of organizational framework that has long defined government institutions: bureaucracy. Today, the words “government” and “bureaucracy” have become practically interchangeable. But a bureaucracy is a particular kind of government organization—a hierarchical institution marked by centralized oversight, organizational stability, and a workforce of professionalized, salaried civil servants. With its unstable infrastructure and part-time, semi-privatized workforce, the gossamer network was a far cry from a bureaucracy. It is tempting to see these contrasts with a bureaucracy as a sign of institutional weakness. But the rural mail system wasn’t effective in spite of its lack of bureaucratic features; it was effective because of them. It was precisely the absence of so many traditional hallmarks of bureaucratic strength that made the gossamer network such a crucial part of the American state’s efforts to incorporate the western United States.²³

***

Paper Trails is a work of spatial history. Many of its findings started with a one-word question: Where? Where was the US Post actually located in the West? Where and when did it spread? How did that happen? You cannot understand the significance of the US Post and its gossamer network without understanding its underlying geography. Spatial history involves more than just locating things on a map (although there are many maps in this book). Stopping to consider questions of space and geography opens up a host of broader historical insights about the pace and character of western expansion and integration, the organizational machinery of the American state, and the connections that knit the nation together.²⁴

Paper Trails begins with a conceptual overview of the US Post and the kind of power it exercised in the western United States. The first chapter situates the postal network and the agency model within the larger apparatus of the federal government, advancing a new framework for thinking about geography and state power. Chapter 2 concretizes how this power shaped everyday life in the West, following the story of a single family and the ways in which they relied on the US Post as they moved around the region. The remainder of the book presents a chronological narrative over five chapters about the network’s expansion and operations in the West from the 1860s through the early 1900s. In order to understand such a large and complex system, each of the five chapters zooms in on a particular piece of its machinery. It begins with the US Post’s breakneck expansion into new areas of the West in the 1860s and 1870s and chronicles the struggles of postal officials to oversee this growth, first through a new mapmaking initiative described in chapter 3 and then with the department’s mismanagement of western mail routes, as detailed in chapter 4. The story then transitions into the 1880s and 1890s, during which the US Post “thickened” its coverage in the region and integrated local communities into larger orbits of governance, politics, and commerce. Chapter 5 uncovers the central role of post offices and postmasters within these towns during the 1880s, while chapter 6 recovers the financial flows that connected them through the rise of a new service, the postal money order system. Chapter 7 draws the story to a close in the early 1900s with the rise of Rural Free Delivery, which ushered in a new era for the US Post and the rural geography of the western United States.

Many of the same characteristics that made the US Post so important in the 19th century also make it an unwieldly subject to narrate today. Telling this history requires following a vast, ever-shifting network over five decades, thousands of different locations, hundreds of thousands of workers, and some one million square miles of land. Several narrative strategies are used to convey this history across different spatial scales.²⁵ At the largest scale, the book’s maps, charts, and numbers help communicate the US Post and how it operated as a national and regional network, focusing on the area of the contiguous United States spanning from the Kansas-Missouri border in the east to California’s Pacific coast in the west. Although the US Post’s global connections were an important part of its history, Paper Trails stays mainly inside the nation’s borders in order to focus on the American state’s project of internal colonization and integration. For similar reasons, it excludes Alaska, Hawaii, and the United States’ overseas colonies, all of which involved a much different, primarily ocean-based model of postal expansion.²⁶ Finally, given that the US Post was a national institution, this book focuses on the federal government rather than the administrative machinery of individual states.²⁷

Even under these constraints, the static medium of the printed page makes it difficult to capture the full scope and dynamism of the postal network. To address this, I have created an online map-based visualization that charts the US Post’s successive stages of western expansion: http://gossamernetwork.com.²⁸ The major arguments in this book stand on their own, but the online visualization makes it easier to understand the network’s geography and its connections to other changes unfolding in the region. Of course, a digital medium comes with its own challenges. Websites from just 10 years ago already feel like relics from another era, and this visualization will doubtless show its age just as quickly. But in the meantime it allows readers to conceptualize the network’s spread across the western United States in a new light.²⁹

Maps of the postal network provide a bird’s-eye view of the network as a whole, but most 19th-century Americans didn’t interact with the US Post at thirty thousand feet. Paper Trails repeatedly descends to ground level in order to see the system through their eyes. Individuals make up the narrative heart of this book, and their stories unfold in two settings: at the Post Office Department’s headquarters in Washington, DC, and in the small towns and stage roads of the rural West. At the system’s center, government officials in the mapmaking (chapter 3), mail transportation (chapter 4), and money order divisions (chapter 6) attempted to administer the western postal network from their desks in Washington, often with uneven results. Their struggles tell a story about the enduring challenges to centralized administration during this period. On the postal system’s periphery, a very different cast of characters takes center stage. Without the stagecoach operators who carried the mail (chapter 4) or the shopkeepers and businessowners who served as part-time postmasters (chapter 5), the nation’s postal machinery would grind to a halt. These sorts of local private actors do not typically appear in histories of the American state, but they drove much of the federal postal network’s expansion and operations. Finally, even those westerners who weren’t employed by the US Post still felt its effects. The experiences of a western governor (chapter 1), a migrating family (chapter 2), and the women and men of a California mining town (chapters 5 and 6) reveal the structural power of the US Post to shape the conditions of everyday life in the western United States.

Paper Trails is a history of large structures and processes. It is a story about the 19th century’s most expansive communications network and the role it played within American society. It charts one of the most dramatic spatial reorganizations of people, land, capital, and resources in American history. And it reconsiders the history of the American state, how it functioned, and the ways in which it exercised power. Paper Trails is also filled with much smaller stories. A sister’s decision to join her brother in California. A federal clerk tracing a line on a government map. The cluttered shelves of a local general store. A half-page note about a misplaced overcoat. Ultimately, this is history defined by the intersection between these two scales, the ways in which large forces shape individual lives and how human experience gives meaning to the structures that define our world.