Benjamin Curtis gazed at his three-week-old daughter as she squirmed on the sofa, his wife Mary sewing in a rocking chair beside them. Benjamin was smitten with the newborn, who had her mother’s blue eyes along with tiny ears that were, in his words, “just too pretty for anything.” Although the baby had come down with a cold and Mary was still weak from her labor, both of them were steadily recovering. The hot Arizona air had even started to cool off in the evenings now that it was late September. Sitting with his family in the fall of 1886, Benjamin should have been at peace, but a quiet worry gnawed away at him. Since moving to the Arizona backcountry two years earlier, Benjamin had struggled with money. He had spent most of his savings trying to get his ranch off the ground, and while he was fond of the animals, they had yet to bring him any profit. Grass and feed were scarce, and irrigating his property had proven far more challenging than he had anticipated. There was precious little currency in circulation, and local merchants were wary of extending him credit. He couldn’t even buy the cloth Mary needed to sew a hood for their daughter that would shield her face from the sun. If only they could find a buyer for their land and livestock, Benjamin and Mary were ready to leave this harsh, dry corner of the country behind them.1
The story of how Benjamin Curtis ended up as a penniless new father on a ranch in central Arizona winds its way across 40 years and thousands of miles. This story begins with four orphans in a small town in Ohio and ends in the crashing surf of a California beach. It follows Benjamin and his three siblings, Sarah, Delia, and Jamie, as they joined a migratory wave of people that washed across the western United States during the late 19th century. It is a story about the Curtis family’s migrations along with the larger forces—colonial conquest, resource extraction, industrial capitalism—that propelled them. It is also a story about letters. On that warm September day in 1886, Benjamin Curtis was sitting at a table writing a letter to his two older sisters. It was one of several dozen surviving pieces of correspondence that the four Curtis siblings exchanged between the 1840s and the 1890s. Their letters offer intimate, if fleeting, snapshots of particular moments in time: what kind of chair Mary was sitting in, the state of Benjamin’s receding hairline, and the color of their newborn daughter’s eyes. But the letters also provide a window onto the era’s largest communications network and the ways in which it influenced how individual American lived, worked, and made decisions.
In a more literary style that departs from the rest of Paper Trails, this chapter tells the story of the Curtis family over four decades, showing the different ways, both big and small, in which the four siblings relied on the nation’s postal network. Although they rarely wrote about the postal system directly, their correspondence itself hints at how important it was in keeping them connected. The Curtis family was in constant motion, moving to dozens of combined locations over half a century. No matter where they moved and what they did, the US Post was always there, quietly humming away in the background. Shrinking the narrative scale to the level of individual people gives meaning to how the US Post’s institutional arrangements shaped everyday experiences and conditions in the 19th-century West. The story of the Curtis family, told through their letters, is a lens through which to glimpse the structural power of the US Post.
On April 3, 1847, 38-year-old Clarisa Curtis gave birth to an infant boy in the small town of Rossville, Ohio. Three years earlier she and her husband Henry had lost newborn twins, so it came as a relief when their new baby, who they named Benjamin, proved to be a “fine stout boy.”2 Relief was short-lived, however, as just three months later their oldest daughter Mary passed away at the age of fourteen. This left them with four surviving children: 12-year-old Sarah, the oldest, nine-year-old Jamie, six-year-old Delia, and Benjamin. Death would continue to stalk the Curtis family. Clarisa herself died in the summer of 1849, and three years later Henry followed his wife to the grave. In an especially cruel twist of fate, he died on Benjamin’s fifth birthday. Sarah, Jamie, Delia, and Benjamin were now orphans.3 The Curtis children suffered unimaginable loss, but they were fortunate to be part of a comfortably well-off extended family. A number of relatives volunteered to take them in, with each child going to a different family member. This was the moment at which the US Post entered their lives.
Rocked by the loss of their parents and scattered across Massachusetts, Tennessee, Ohio, and Illinois, the four orphans used the US Post to stay connected to each other as they grew up during the 1850s. The mail allowed the teenage Delia to write her brother Jamie in Tennessee with stories about their Massachusetts relatives, and Jamie to reply with descriptions of the girls in Memphis and to ask her how she was liking school in Boston.4 Delia and Jamie were paying just three cents per letter, the result of postage reforms passed in 1845 and 1851 that had dramatically lowered the cost of sending mail and fueled a flourishing national epistolary culture.5 The mail also helped Sarah, Jamie, and Delia to engage in their most common form of long-distance sibling bonding: worrying about Benjamin. A bright but troubled child, he had tried to run away from his uncle in Illinois at the age of nine and was apparently “rather backward in his studies.”6 Sarah, an aspiring schoolteacher, found this last part especially galling. She and Jamie hatched a plan to remove Benjamin from his caretakers and install Sarah as his guardian. Their plan apparently worked, because a year later Benjamin wrote his very first letter from his new home in Tennessee with Sarah.7 It was addressed to his sister Delia, and the letter itself was short, formal, and rather stiff—understandable, given that the 11-year-old Benjamin had not actually seen his older sister for several years. Over time, the two would develop a palpable affection and easy intimacy that Benjamin would never quite manage with either Sarah or Jamie. Notably, over the course of Benjamin and Delia’s lives their tight-knit bond would be an entirely long-distance one made possible by the US Post.
In April of 1861, fourteen-year-old Benjamin wrote a two-page letter to Delia telling her about his recent move back to Illinois and his new school. He closed with an ominous sentence: “We heard that Fort Sumtrie [Sumter] was taken today.”8 The US Civil War had officially begun. The Curtises, like so many American families, could not escape the reach of the war. One month after Benjamin’s letter, Jamie, then living in Tennessee, confessed to Delia that his loyalties were divided between “tender feelings” for friends and family members in the north and strong southern sympathies for his adopted state. With Tennessee on the brink of secession, Jamie wasn’t sure what to do. He was even more worried, however, about their brother: “I wish I could be satisfied that Ben will not take any part in the war. He is young, thoughtless, and easily led into almost anything.”9 Jamie’s worries were well founded. Shortly afterwards, Benjamin ran away from his guardians to enlist in the US Navy. Two years later, in 1863, his siblings learned that Benjamin’s ship, the Indianola, had been taken by Confederate forces. Their sixteen-year-old brother was either dead or a prisoner of war.10
While the Civil War raged, the US Post became the main vehicle that carried life-and-death information to millions of Americans, shuttling news about the fate of loved ones between battlefields and the home front.11 Sarah, Jamie, and Delia spent two anxious months awaiting word of Benjamin’s fate before a letter finally arrived, confirming that he had been captured after the battle but was alive and uninjured. Jamie quickly forwarded the letter to Delia, asking her to send it on to Sarah. One month later, in May of 1863, Benjamin sent a second brief letter to Jamie, informing his brother that he had been released from a military prison and was now in Washington, DC.12 Upon receiving the news, Jamie immediately sent letters to Delia and Sarah to share the good news and then mailed Benjamin paper and ink so that he could keep them updated on his condition. Benjamin was eventually discharged from the Navy, and for the remainder of the Civil War he would stay well way from the fighting. A few months later, Sarah wrote from Pennsylvania to her sister in Massachusetts with an orphan’s lament: “How pleasant it would be if we could all have a home together.”13 Scattered across three different states, the four of them had to rely on the next best thing to a shared home—the expansive coverage of the US Post.
As the Civil War wound down in 1865, a bloodied nation turned westward. Millions of people moved to western states and territories during the postwar years, fueling a demographic boom in the region. By 1880, the West’s population had increased fourfold in the span of just two decades.14 All four of the Curtis siblings would eventually join this westward surge of people during the 1860s and 1870s. Like so many migrations to the region during these years, theirs was made possible by the American state. Wartime mobilization had brought an unprecedented expansion of both the military arm of the American state and its civilian workforce. The Post Office Department, for instance, launched several new initiatives during the war. One of these, the Railway Mail Service, hired postal employees to sort mail inside dedicated railway cars while they were in transit, significantly cutting down travel time for the nation’s long-distance mail.15 This initiative continued after the war’s conclusion, and in the spring of 1865 the Railway Mail Service hired Benjamin Curtis to work as a mail agent. The new government job triggered the first of several westward moves for the Curtis family.
By the fall of 1868, Benjamin was working for the Railway Mail Service on a section of the transcontinental railroad that ran across the central plains from Omaha, Nebraska, to Green River in southwestern Wyoming. Although Benjamin found the work a little dull, he fell in love with the western landscape, writing to Delia about the “wild and rough looking mountains and valleys in every direction.” He confessed that he hoped to move even farther west, to either California or Mexico.16 Benjamin eventually left his job with the Railway Mail Service and by September of 1871 was making his way up California’s northern coast. From there, he traveled by wagon some three hundred miles to the rugged upper reaches of the state, less than 60 miles from the Oregon border. Benjamin had managed to purchase a tract of public land from the federal government and had grand plans for starting a ranch.17 In what would become a common theme for Benjamin, his ambitions ran ahead of his savings. In an attempt to cobble together enough money to purchase some livestock, he bounced between the towns of Burgettville and Adin working as a sales clerk.18
Benjamin’s experience in the small California towns of Burgettville and Adin offers a vantage point into what the agency model looked like along the postal network’s outer edges. In both places, he clerked for a store owner who doubled as the town’s postmaster. This meant that in addition to balancing the account books, answering correspondence, and peddling wares to customers, Benjamin also sorted, distributed, and processed the mail. A few years after leaving the Railway Mail Service, he had rejoined the US Post in a much less official capacity. Neither of his two employers were sticklers for following the Post Office Department’s rules, which were distributed to postmasters in a thick manual that ran to more than four hundred pages. One of these regulations stipulated that no person could handle the mail who had not submitted an official oath of office, while another required postmasters to actually live in the town in which they were appointed.19 Both of Benjamin’s employers ignored these regulations, leaving mail duties entirely in Benjamin’s hands despite the fact that he had not submitted an official oath to the department. The Adin postmaster, meanwhile, openly flaunted the department’s restriction on absentee officeholding, spending most of his time with his family in Yreka (125 miles away) or trying to open a branch store in Hot Spring Valley (50 miles away). This is how the agency model worked on the periphery: localized, informal affairs conducted with little administrative oversight.20
Benjamin would soon transition into a more official role within the US Post. In the fall of 1873, a banking panic plunged the nation into depression that reverberated all the way to northern California, where Benjamin’s boss in Burgettville watched sales plummet at his store. Benjamin decided to strike out on his own, relocating to the nearby mill town of Fall River Mills and opening up a merchandising store.21 It’s unclear how he managed to raise enough money to start this new venture, but it helped him secure an additional job as postmaster of Fall River Mills. When he filed his paperwork in the spring of 1875, Benjamin officially joined some 35,500 postmasters across the country.22 His tenure was typical, as he held this part-time and semi-privatized public position for just seven months, receiving a grand total of $36.09 in commissions before losing the job to a local hotel owner. Benjamin’s temporary forays into the postal workforce—both official and unofficial—are a reminder of just how many 19th-century Americans ended up working within the nation’s postal machinery.23
Benjamin’s move to northern California coincided with the end of a decades-long genocidal campaign against the state’s Indigenous peoples. Since the discovery of gold in 1848, roving mobs of white settlers attacked Indian camps and villages to drive them out and seize their land. California’s state militia led similarly brutal expeditions against Native groups, often supported with funds from the federal government. Finally, the US Army launched its own official campaigns of violence and dispossession. Shortly after Benjamin’s arrival in northern California, American soldiers embarked on what became known as the Modoc War. Just 50 miles away from his new home, a group of several hundred Modocs fled a government reservation in southern Oregon and returned to their homelands along the California border. Over several months in 1872–73, federal troops pursued and eventually captured them, executing two Modoc leaders, imprisoning several others, and forcibly transporting the remainder of the group some two thousand miles away to a reservation in Indian Territory. Through a harrowing combination of violence, removal, and disease, California’s Indigenous population plunged from roughly 150,000 in 1846 to some 30,000 people by 1870.24
Benjamin Curtis was not a direct participant in this process. He did not appear to call for the removal of Native peoples, join a local militia, or engage in vigilante attacks. But he was a colonizer, part of a wave of American settlers who were happy to move onto plundered Native land. His experience highlights some of the subtler ways in which the American state facilitated this process beyond its use of direct violence.25 Over the preceding years, government officials had forced the Achumawi and Atsugewi peoples to give up their claims to this part of California and move to a government-run reservation located hundreds of miles away.26 Another federal agency, the General Land Office, then surveyed and parceled out their newly seized land, including a tract of property that Benjamin purchased in 1874.27 Finally, Benjamin’s colonization of this remote area depended on the US Post’s ability to rapidly expand into distant western locales. As late as 1867, there wasn’t a single post office operating in the northeastern corner of California. If Benjamin Curtis had moved to the same location even a few years earlier, he would have had to travel some 70 miles to the nearest post office to mail a letter. By the time he found work in 1872, there were no fewer than three weekly postal routes shuttling sacks of mail between roughly a dozen new post offices.28
The decision to move to a distant location like Fall River Mills was as much an emotional process as it was a rational calculation of costs and incentives. For Benjamin and for many others settlers, the move westward was wrapped up with hopes, dreams, and ambitions but also loneliness, homesickness, and guilt. In Benjamin’s case, he repeatedly used the mail to process these emotions. In one letter to Sarah, he wrote, “I sometimes blame myself for straying so far away from all friends and going among strangers. . . . I can not think that either you or Jamie would attribute my actions to selfishness, although I sometimes think it must look like it to you if your love for me was not so great.”29 After he moved to the other side of the continent from his siblings, these kinds of letters were the only channel that Benjamin had to reaffirm his love for his family. From Massachusetts, Sarah and Delia Curtis were able to send their youngest brother letters, copies of Boston newspapers, and issues of Harper’s Weekly. Sarah even used the mail to send him a pair of wristlets as a Christmas present in late 1872. In reply, Benjamin thanked her for the present, recounted a recent wedding he had attended, and discussed his plans to develop his ranch before asking Sarah to give his love to Delia and Jamie. Benjamin Curtis may have sat down to his holiday dinner by himself in 1872, but the expansive reach of the US Post meant that he wasn’t truly alone.30
Figure 2.1 A Long-Distance Family
Benjamin and Sarah Curtis were able to exchange letters and gifts from opposite sides of the country. This map shows their locations, along with post offices, unceded Native land (light gray), and reservations (dark gray) in 1872.
In the most common migration pattern of the 19th century, family members and neighbors from a particular location would move to the same destination in staggered waves. The earliest arrivals would then report back on their experiences, answer questions from family and friends, and arrange for travel, lodging, and employment for those who wished to follow them. In short, the era’s long-distance migrations depended on long-distance communications, the vast majority of which unfolded through the mail.31 The Curtis family followed this pattern. Benjamin was the first of his siblings to move west. Almost immediately he began trying to persuade the others to join him. His letters from California detailed exactly what property was available and where it was located, the prices of different goods, precisely how they should ship their belongings, and the best way to travel from San Francisco to Fall River Mills.32 His efforts were at least partially successful, as Sarah moved to California sometime in the late 1870s. By 1878, she was working as an assistant at a school in San Rafael, just north of San Francisco, and by the following year she was running her own private school. The oldest of the Curtis siblings soon convinced Delia to leave her schoolteacher position in Massachusetts to join Sarah’s new business venture in San Rafael. From start to finish, the Curtis siblings coordinated their migrations using the US Post.33
A few years after Sarah and Delia’s move to California, Benjamin moved on to Arizona Territory. It’s unclear what spurred his move, but whatever it was had gone well. In 1881, he mailed his sisters a letter that included several postal money orders totaling $250, which he urged his sisters to spend on a vacation “somewhere where they will make you laugh every hour in the day.”34 Benjamin’s remittance joined 24 million dollars’ worth of money orders that were sent by westerners that year—yet another reminder of the range of material that traveled through the US Post.35 These financial flows facilitated the movement of both capital and settlers across the West, allowing someone like Benjamin to abandon his store near the California-Oregon border, pop up in southern Arizona Territory, and remit money to his sisters in San Rafael, California. A few months later, Benjamin himself returned to California, using some of his new earnings to buy an orange grove in San Diego. By the end of 1881, Sarah and Delia had sold their school in San Rafael and joined him in southern California. Within a few months, their brother Jamie had moved westward to join his siblings. Orphaned three decades earlier in Ohio, the four Curtis siblings had finally reunited as adults in the far southwestern corner of the country.36
The family reunion didn’t last long. Jamie was the last to arrive and the first to leave, retracing his younger brother’s footsteps to northeastern California and going into a joint business venture with one of his brother’s previous employers in Fall River Mills. Benjamin, meanwhile, struggled to turn a profit on his orange grove, so in 1884 he sold his California property and moved back to Arizona to try his luck at ranching.37 Sarah and Delia decided to stay in San Diego to work as schoolteachers, which proved to be a smart decision. When a new railroad line reached the city in 1885, its population more than doubled, and the two sisters found themselves awash with new clients. By 1886, they were buying and selling thousands of dollars’ worth of property in southern California, part a frenzied burst of land speculation that swept across Los Angeles and San Diego in the mid- to late 1880s. Delia and Sarah Curtis, ever the entrepreneurs, were at the forefront of this real-estate boom.38 Benjamin wasn’t nearly as successful. Hundreds of miles away, he was leading a lonely existence as he tried to start up his ranch in the Salt River Valley in Arizona’s rugged interior. Traveling to the nearest major town required a 60-mile roundtrip journey, which (as he ruefully noted to his sisters) left him with little more than his cows and horses for company.39
Yet even there, in the Arizona backcountry, Benjamin could still rely on the US Post. His experience in the Salt River Valley illustrates the importance of the network’s geographic coverage for westerners. Even though he lived in physical isolation, the mail remained surprisingly accessible to him. The very same year that Benjamin moved to Arizona, the Post Office Department opened a new post office just two miles away from his homestead in the ranch home of its newly minted postmaster, Lucinda Armer.40 Tiny as it was, the Armer Post Office immediately became the nexus point that linked Benjamin across deserts, mesas, mountains, and scrubland to his sisters in San Diego. Delia and Sarah not only wrote letters to their brother but also took advantage of discounted postage rates for periodicals to forward him “bundles” of California newspapers. In return, he penned them affectionate replies, asking about San Diego’s booming property market or teasing Delia that she should find herself a husband from Dakota to make her “Queen of a cattle ranch.”41
Less than a year after Sarah and Delia had bid farewell to their younger brother, an announcement appeared in their letterbox at the San Diego Post Office: Benjamin was engaged. He had been courting his neighbor’s 20-year-old-daughter, and the two were to be married the following month.42 The announcement kicked off a flurry of new correspondence between the Curtis siblings in the spring of 1885. Delia and Sarah wrote letters welcoming Mary Hocker, Benjamin’s fiancée, to the Curtis family. Benjamin, in turn, sent them a photograph of his betrothed along with requests for books to read on their honeymoon (“Fiction, but good. Send by mail”).43 In the weeks leading up to the wedding, registered letters and packages continued to pour into the Armer Post Office from San Diego—such a deluge that Benjamin joked it would overwhelm poor Lucinda Armer. When the wedding day arrived in June 1885, Mary said her vows while wearing a brooch that Sarah and Delia had mailed to her in the preceding weeks, delivered to the tiny post office on the Armer family ranch.44
The US Post’s extension into Arizona’s Salt River Valley exemplifies how it was able to expand in lockstep with the West’s growing settler population. The same year that Benjamin and Mary exchanged their vows, a man named P. C. Robertson bought land near them and began farming, raising livestock, and selling goods out of a small general store. In December of 1885, Robertson was appointed an official United States postmaster, and his storefront became the brand-new Catalpa Post Office. Given that the new office served such a small population and was located just three miles away from the Armer family’s post office, it’s hard to see how the expansion was warranted. But Benjamin and Mary weren’t complaining. Sitting between Robertson’s and Armer’s homesteads, they could choose between two post offices within a roughly two-mile radius of their home.45
From the vantage point of Benjamin and Mary’s front porch, the US Post really did seem to be everywhere. But its coverage was not universal. If either of them were to ride due east from their ranch, they would soon run up against the limits of this coverage at the border of the White Mountain Indian Reservation, just sixteen miles away. Also known as the San Carlos Reservation, it had been established in 1872 as part of a broader attempt by the federal government to conquer and subjugate Apache groups in Arizona and New Mexico. By the time Benjamin moved to the Salt River Valley the following decade, there were around three thousand Apache people living on the reservation.46 Despite this, there were just two post offices operating within the entire reservation—an area that was roughly the size of Delaware. As it did across the region, the US Post’s ubiquitous coverage withered away at the borders of the reservation.47 Moreover, the two post offices operating within the White Mountain Reservation were meant to serve the needs of government officials, not Native peoples. One was located at the government’s administrative headquarters at the San Carlos Agency, the other at Fort Apache, a US Army garrison of more than two hundred federal troops who were tasked with violently suppressing Apache resistance. If Native residents wanted to use the mail, they had to visit one of these two locations run by state actors who were tasked with surveilling, policing, and, if necessary, killing them.48
Figure 2.2 Benjamin and Mary Curtis’s Neighbors
Benjamin and Mary Curtis could access two post offices (Armer and Catalpa) within a short walk from their homestead, compared to the two post offices (Fort Apache and the San Carlos Agency) that served the entire White Mountain Indian Reservation. Terrain imagery comes from Stamen Maps (http://maps.stamen.com/terrain/), downloaded September 27, 2019.
Despite the US Post’s limited coverage within the borders of Indian reservations, Native peoples across the western United States actively used the mail. During the 1880s the federal government expanded schools on western Indian reservations as a means of eradicating Indigenous languages and customs and replacing them with the values of a white, Christian society. This produced a boom in literacy rates that Native peoples then deployed as a weapon of resistance, all through the long-distance channel of the US Post. Tribal leaders sent petitions to federal officials to try and address a range of issues, such as inadequate rations, shoddy buildings, or settlers illegally grazing on their land. By the end of the 1880s, the commissioner of Indian affairs in Washington, DC, was receiving hundreds upon hundreds of these petitions from reservations across the country. Native peoples also used the mail to maintain ties of family and kinship, exchanging letters with relatives or friends who had been split up across multiple reservations or forcibly sent to live in eastern boarding schools. They used the mail to foster political and cultural alliances across different tribes and in 1889 exchanged letters that helped spread the Ghost Dance, one of the era’s most influential pan-tribal movements. The expansion of the US Post may have facilitated Native dispossession and settler colonial expansion in the West, but Indigenous peoples across the region also marshaled its connective power to suit their own needs.49
Benjamin and Mary Curtis, meanwhile, were settling into married life on their ranch. Like many newlyweds, they seemed content to spend most of their time with each other. Apart from Mary’s nearby parents, Benjamin rarely mentioned other people in his letters, writing more about Tip, Nellie, and Colonel—their dog, mare, and new colt, respectively—than any of their friends or neighbors. Working on a remote ranch in the sparsely settled Arizona backcountry, Benjamin and Mary were living in physical isolation. But thanks to the US Post, they were not isolated. Between the two of them they subscribed to some half dozen periodicals, including the Delineator (a women’s magazine), the American Agriculturalist (a farming periodical), one regional paper from the nearby town of Globe, and national newspapers from San Francisco, Chicago, and New York.50 And, of course, they continued to correspond with Sarah and Delia in San Diego. Stacks of letters flowed between Benjamin and his two sister, filled with business advice and encouragement, stories about weather and excursions, and updates about friends and relatives. The Curtis sisters also sent small gifts with their letters, including a silk kerchief for Mary and a decades-old photograph of their deceased parents. A short walk to the Catalpa Post Office linked them to a dense web of connections that stretched far beyond the Salt River Valley.51
In the summer of 1886, the flow of mail arriving in the Catalpa Post Office ramped up considerably, as Delia and Sarah began sending their brother and sister-in-law packages of cloth, household supplies, and, finally, some “little shirts.”52 Those “little shirts” arrived just in time. In early September of 1886, Mary gave birth to a nine-pound baby girl in the midst of Arizona’s stifling hundred-degree heat. As his newborn daughter slept next to him, Benjamin sat down to write two letters—a separate one for each of his sisters. He recounted Mary’s labor, noted the infant’s healthy weight, and joked that the baby “doesn’t take after its father because it has plenty of hair on the top of its head.” Finally, he got around to her name. “Mary says she thinks Delia Henrietta would do nicely, and so do I.” Delia Henrietta Curtis was named after her two aunts, Delia Augusta and Sarah Henrietta. Benjamin dropped the two letters off at P. C. Robertson’s store on a Saturday, and they reached his sisters in San Diego just four days later. The orphaned Curtis siblings had spent the better part of three decades spinning together the threads of their family across the gossamer network of the US Post. It was here, in the euphoric scrawl of an exhausted new father, that those filaments wound their way through the next generation.53
The Curtis family’s correspondence offers a personalized glimpse into how the American state facilitated western occupation. The US Post’s expansionary network was part of a larger mosaic of federal policies attempting to direct the flow of settlers, capital, and industry westward during the 19th century. Arguably the most famous of these was the Homestead Act. Under this legislation, individual settlers moved onto plots of public land (typically 160 acres) and then had five years to plant crops, build a home, and otherwise “improve” the land. If they accomplished this, they received full title to the property.54 Other public land laws worked through similar mechanisms. When Benjamin Curtis had first moved to the Salt River Valley, for instance, he filed for his property under the Desert Land Act. This piece of legislation allowed people to buy public land from the federal government at a steep discount, so long as they managed to irrigate the land within three years. Benjamin’s particular tract of Arizona property had gone unclaimed because nobody thought it could be irrigated. Benjamin disagreed, claiming when he first moved to Arizona, “It will be an easy matter to get water onto it.”55 Yet after years of stalled schemes to build dams and ditches, he was unable to meet the Desert Land Act’s requirements to irrigate the property. Undeterred, Benjamin turned to yet another public land policy, the Timber Culture Act, which promised discounted land to settlers who successfully planted at least 10 new acres of trees on their property.56
Government policies like the Desert Land Act and Timber Culture Act helped produce a pattern of quixotic overexpansion into places like Arizona’s Salt River Valley. Benjamin’s initial and shortsighted claim about his land—“It will be an easy matter to get water onto it”—could have been a mantra for the region as a whole. Across the western United States, optimistic Americans rushed headlong into harsh environments that could not support them. Their decisions to move to these areas were facilitated by government policies aimed at encouraging exactly this kind of settlement. Nineteenth-century western boosters and policymakers believed that settlers like Benjamin could fundamentally transform the region’s underlying climate and environment. As Americans planted crops and set up homesteads, the thinking went, they would bring more rain and change the West’s arid and semi-arid landscapes into bountiful, productive farmland.57
Compared to the Desert Land and Timber Culture Acts, the US Post was a much less explicit channel through which the American state facilitated the over-expansion of settlers westward. But the ability of the gossamer network to rapidly expand and contract over unforgiving western environments was in many ways just as important. The agency model allowed the US Post to rapidly expand into the Salt River Valley, extending a new mail route through the valley and establishing new post offices at the Armer family ranch and P. C. Robertson’s storefront. The nature of these arrangements made the gossamer network sensitive to any changes in local conditions. And in central Arizona, local conditions had grown quite bad by the late 1880s. In letter after letter to his sisters, Benjamin Curtis described how the area was crippled by a scarcity of cash and credit. By 1887, he had run out of money, and local businesses were wary of extending him credit. He was forced to leave his beloved pocket watch behind as security at a local store in order to make purchases on credit. The storeowner’s generosity proved short-sighted, however, as later that year Benjamin reported that the man had sold too many goods to people who couldn’t pay him back and had subsequently defaulted on his mortgage. The man in question was P. C. Robertson, Benjamin’s neighbor and postmaster of the Catalpa Post Office.58 By early 1888, the county tax collector was threatening to seize and auction Robertson’s belongings for unpaid taxes.59 Facing bankruptcy, Robertson shuttered his store and abandoned his ranch. The Post Office Department officially discontinued his post office shortly after.60
The Catalpa Post Office had been in operation for less than three years. From a system-wide perspective, the costs of adding the Catalpa Post Office had been minimal. The office was already located on an existing mail route that ran once a week through the Salt River Valley. P. C. Robertson acted as the department’s local agent, distributing mail to Benjamin, Mary, and other local residents for a piddling annual commission of between $30 and 40 dollars a year.61 When Robertson’s luck turned, the larger network contracted with barely a ripple. The department simply rescinded the storeowner’s appointment, removed his ranch from the local mail contractor’s postal route, and diverted the small amount of mail he had been processing to surrounding offices. At Lucinda Armer’s post office, her postmaster commission nearly doubled the following year after her office absorbed some of the Catalpa Post Office’s rerouted mail.62 This was what the US Post’s gossamer network looked like on the ground: a fleeting entity capable of popping up and then quickly melting away along with the fortunes of a local business owner.
Benjamin and Mary Curtis weren’t faring much better than P. C. Robertson. Five months after the birth of their daughter, they were still struggling to make ends meet. Benjamin had poured all of his money into buying livestock, building a house, and improving his property. Unable to sell any of his animals in a cash-starved economy, he was in dire financial straits. With his livestock venture floundering, at one point he even considered leaving his wife and infant daughter behind to find temporary work as a railroad laborer. Benjamin’s sisters did what they could to help him. Delia sent several infusions of cash in 1887 (one of which quite literally reduced Benjamin to tears) along with a steady stream of hats, bibs, linen, shoes, and other small gifts to clothe her newborn niece.63 All of this left a grateful Benjamin chuckling in one letter to his sisters, “What you and [Sarah] have sent will give her a wardrobe fit for a little Queen, and she is only a little Country Girl you know.”64 Delia, in particular, provided Benjamin with much-needed encouragement, humor, and affection to buoy his spirits. Both materially and emotionally, the mail gave Delia and Sarah Curtis the ability to extend a long-distance lifeline to their brother and his family.65
Like most Americans, Benjamin Curtis took the US Post for granted. Outside of the times in which he was directly employed by the Post Office Department, first as a mail agent and then as a postmaster, he rarely mentioned it in his letters. For him, the nation’s postal network and its expansive coverage was simply a fact of life. Yet Benjamin’s ability to access this network no matter where he lived was not some natural condition. It’s worth imagining what his life would have looked like with a more geographically constrained postal system. In the Salt River Valley, for instance, the Post Office Department first established mail service sometime in late 1883 or early 1884, a year before Benjamin arrived. But none of the post offices along this new route processed very much mail.66 What if the department had instead decided to wait a few more years before providing service to this location? Would Benjamin still have moved there when he did? Even if the Post Office Department had forged ahead with the new route, it might have operated fewer post offices along it. In this alternate scenario, it’s unlikely that the tiny Catalpa and Armer post offices would have been established given the comparatively minuscule amount of mail that they processed. Instead of having two post offices within a two-mile radius of his front porch, Benjamin would have had to travel 20 miles to the Tonto Post Office or 30 miles back to the route’s terminus in Globe every time he wanted to pick up his mail. Either one of these journeys would have taken the better part of a day or more to complete.67
What if, even more radically, the Post Office Department hadn’t subsidized its rural mail service? After all, the two-cent postage it charged for letters did not cover the costs of transporting them to remote places like the Salt River Valley. Newspapers and periodicals traveled at an even steeper discount. What if settlers like Benjamin and Mary Curtis had to cover the true costs of maintaining all of their long-distance connections? In this case, they probably wouldn’t have subscribed to a half dozen periodicals from across the country. Delia and Sarah wouldn’t have sent them quite so many letters and gifts. In this alternate reality, life in the Salt River Valley would have been far more isolated and much more difficult. Under these circumstances, would Benjamin have been quite so willing to leave his sisters behind in San Diego in order to move to this harsh, remote location? The US Post’s expansive rural coverage meant that he was able to make that decision with the confidence that he could stay connected to his family and the wider world. It was a decision that would ultimately end in disaster.
In 1889, Mary Curtis gave birth to a second daughter, who she and Benjamin named Rena. Her birth coincided with the family’s improving fortunes, as the local economy rebounded and they were able to sell some of their livestock. By February of 1891, their homestead was thriving, with horses, milk cows, chickens, and a fledgling orchard grove that Benjamin had raised to comply with the Timber Culture Act. Mary was looking forward to planting a new garden and even had plans to start raising silkworms.68 The following month everything came crashing down around them. Heavy rains brought a massive flood through the Salt River Valley, uprooting all of their carefully planted trees and blanketing their entire property in one to two feet of sand that, in Benjamin’s words, “left it in such a shape that I can never use it.” With their property in ruins, they decided to sell what they could and leave Arizona for good. The family packed their meager belongings onto a wagon, appointed a local lawyer to try and sell their property on their behalf, and started on a journey northward to Boise, Idaho.69
Apart from his wife and children, Benjamin saw his time in the Salt River Valley as a series of personal failures: failure to irrigate his property, failure to raise livestock, failure to “prove up” his land claim, failure to provide for his family. A change of location failed to improve his luck. The Curtises arrived in Boise in October of 1891, one year after Idaho had gained statehood. Its capital city was bustling, but Benjamin couldn’t find steady work. He briefly tried his hand as a laborer in a sawmill before realizing that it was too taxing for his 44-year-old body. Two weeks after arriving, he was despondent. With a wife and two children to feed, he was facing down a long winter with no job and high rents, in an unfamiliar place where he felt like “a complete stranger.” Temporary relief came through the familiar channel of the US Post, when his brother Jamie mailed Benjamin a $10 postal money order to help them “wiggle through the winter.”70
Nine years Benjamin’s senior, Jamie had followed his younger brother’s footsteps by moving to northern California and going into business with one of Benjamin’s former employers in Fall River Mills. After a few years of running a store, Jamie even managed to secure Benjamin’s old job as the town’s postmaster. His experience in this position exemplified the agency model’s localized and ever-shifting administrative structure. The post office in Fall River Mills was constantly changing hands. Between Benjamin’s brief seven-month tenure as postmaster in 1875 and Jamie’s appointment fifteen years later, the town had no fewer than nine different postmasters. Jamie managed to secure the position only after fending off a rival storeowner, who promptly began scheming to take control of the office. He first offered to pay Jamie to relocate the post office into his own store and then started lobbying politicians at the county convention to try and remove Jamie from the position. All of this left a fed-up Jamie to complain to his sisters, “I am getting more tired of this slow-pokey place. . . . I would gladly give up here altogether.”71
In Boise, meanwhile, Benjamin was the one who was ready to “give up here altogether.” Unable to find work, he and his family made their way to San Francisco and boarded a steamer for San Diego in January of 1892. When they arrived, Delia was waiting with open arms to welcome them into her home.72 Aside from a brief period in the early 1880s, Benjamin and Delia had spent the entirety of their adulthood living far from one another. They had forged their relationship by exchanging countless letters across thousands of miles. For the first time since they were children in Ohio, they were living together under the same roof. Delia had dreamed of reuniting with her siblings ever since she had been sent to live with relatives as an 11-year-old orphan, and 40 years later it appeared as if her dream might finally come true. Delia wrote to Jamie shortly after Benjamin’s arrival: “Now if you will come down too, we will all be together and we can be very happy.” The 50-year-old schoolteacher loved children, although she never had a family of her own. Delia lavished her three- and five-year-old nieces with attention, buying them a monthly subscription to Babyland, a Boston children’s magazine, and recounting to Jamie all the new words she was teaching them. “It seems to put fresh life in us to have these little children around.”73
On May 30, 1892, Benjamin left his sister’s house and went for a morning walk on the beach in San Diego. He never came home. His body was found in the ocean surf several days later, drowned at the age of 45. Nobody knew for certain what happened that morning, but his ongoing financial struggles led some (including his wife) to suspect suicide.74 We can only speculate on his state of mind. Benjamin had always shown a melancholy streak in his letters, and in retrospect there were some warning signs in Delia’s letter to Jamie two months before. Benjamin was apparently finding it just as difficult to secure a job in San Diego as it had been in Boise. He had been making some half-hearted efforts to secure a veteran’s pension from the government, reaching out to a lawyer in Washington, DC, to send him the necessary paperwork. However, as Delia reported to Jamie, he “kept putting off” completing the forms to provide evidence of his wartime service. Instead, Benjamin largely helped Delia with chores and fixed up her yard. He adored his wife and daughters, and the fact that he had to rely on his sister to put a roof over their heads must have been difficult. At this point, he was a middle-aged father with no job, no money, and no prospects of finding either anytime soon. His childhood had been defined by the death of his parents and separation from his siblings. The story of his adult life had been one of restless migration, failed business ventures, and financial misfortune. Suicide or not, one thing was clear: Benjamin Curtis’s life had not gone the way he had hoped.
“I feel we have something to live for,” Delia had written to Jamie in March of 1892. As heartbreaking as these words seem in light of Benjamin’s death, the letter itself was an appropriate conclusion to some four decades of correspondence between the Curtis siblings. It had to travel roughly seven hundred miles between Delia and Jamie, departing from San Diego in a railway car and traveling almost the entire length of California before disembarking at Redding, near the border with Oregon. It covered the last 80 miles in the back of a stagecoach, up into the rugged northeastern corner of the state to Jamie’s post office and general store in Fall River Mills. The entire trip would have taken around six days. At eight pages, the letter was longer than most of the family’s surviving correspondence. But those pages contained a typical mix of news about family and friends interspersed with reminiscences about the past and speculation about the future. The letter also pointed to just how many different things traveled through the mail: a children’s magazine, official paperwork for Benjamin to apply for a pension, cartoons that Jamie had mailed to his nieces, and, finally, a drawing by Rena, Benjamin’s younger daughter. Just before Delia had sealed up the envelope, her niece had woken up from a nap and decided to make a picture for “Uncle Jamie.” As Delia explained in a hastily scribbled postscript across the top of her letter, Rena’s drawing was of a chair, a table, a lemon, and a pear, the last of which included a stem so that Jamie “could take hold of it.” It was the last surviving piece of correspondence between the Curtis siblings.75
Studying and mapping the US Post from a system-wide vantage point has its advantages. But for people like the Curtises, the postal system was woven into their lives in much more intimate ways, the meanings of which cannot be truly calculated. How do you put a number on a lonely young store clerk receiving a family Christmas present from across the country? How do you quantify a letter to two sisters announcing the birth of their niece? How do you measure the significance of a three-year-old’s drawing, sent through the mail to an uncle she’d never met? From the time they were orphaned as children, the postal network connected the Curtis siblings across space. For Benjamin in particular, the US Post was one of the few constants in an otherwise tumultuous life: an orphan in Ohio, an unhappy ward in Illinois, an underage navy sailor on the Mississippi River, a postal employee on the central plains, a store clerk in northern California, a merchant and postmaster in a new mill town, a fruit farmer in San Diego, a struggling rancher in Arizona, a migrant worker in Idaho, and, finally, an unemployed father walking alone on a beach. No matter where he moved, no matter his situation, he could always rely on the mail to stay connected to his siblings. Like so many Americans, the Curtises were a postal family.
The letters exchanged by Benjamin, Delia, Jamie, and Sarah were part of an ocean of correspondence that flowed between people and communities during the late 19th century. Those long-distance connections in turn depended on an underlying infrastructure of mail routes and post offices that, by Benjamin Curtis’s death in 1892, had spread across the western United States with remarkable speed. The growth of the postal network in the West tells its own story about the history of the American state and its efforts to remake the region. And that larger story of the US Post and its western expansion begins in 1860, with the nation on the precipice of war.