The Pony Express is one of the most recognizable brands in American history. It has been the subject of books, dime novels, comic books, movies, and television shows, capturing all of the drama and danger associated with the American West: the image of a young man galloping across a rugged western landscape, his satchel of precious letters at his side and with highwaymen or Indians in hot pursuit. Like so many western symbols, the Pony Express is based largely in myth. Established in 1860 by a large freighting firm, the horse relay was a private mail service that promised to carry letters from Missouri to California in under two weeks, during a time when the official US mail took the better part of a month to make the same trip. It was an expensive operation, requiring scores of riders, hundreds of horses, and more than 150 relay stations scattered across some 1,900 miles of prairies, plains, and mountains. The company subsequently charged its customers astronomical rates (the equivalent of roughly $60 to $160 per letter today). Even so, the company knew it would never be able to turn a profit without a key source of income: a government contract. The Pony Express was one giant publicity stunt aimed at trying to secure a lucrative contract from the Post Office Department to carry the mail. The government contract never came, and without it the company racked up massive losses. In the end, the vaunted Pony Express operated for a grand total of 19 months before selling off its operations to a rival firm in 1861. From a business perspective, it was an abject failure.1
The struggles of the Pony Express highlighted a broader challenge from this period: how should the United States transport mail to western states and territories? What was the best way to extend lines of communications across the region’s sparsely settled and rugged terrain? Once again, the agency model provided the federal government with its answer. The vast majority of the nation’s mail routes consisted of so-called star routes, or any form of transportation that was not via railroad or a steamship, most often using stagecoaches or on horseback. If star routes were the filaments of the gossamer network, government mail contracts were what wove them together. Unlike today, full-time, salaried mail carriers did not transport the mail along these routes. Instead, the Post Office Department paid private companies to carry the mail on its behalf. Fixed-term contracts, most often for four years or less, lent the federal government the ability to rapidly expand and withdraw mail service without having to build or maintain its own public infrastructure of roads, drivers, and vehicles. These arrangements underlay the breakneck expansion of the 1860s and 1870s, leading to some 70,000 combined miles worth of star routes crisscrossing the western United States by 1879 .2
The expansion of the western star route system came with a hefty price tag. As the proprietors of the Pony Express discovered, transportation in the sparsely settled West was often disastrously expensive. The difference between success and failure for a western staging company often hinged on whether or not it could win a government mail contract. This turned the US Post and its contracting division into an arena of fierce competition, one in which the stakes were high and not everyone played by the rules. Starting in the late 1860s, a small group of powerful businessmen began using an array of fraudulent tactics to win bloated government contracts. By the end of the 1870s, the situation had devolved into a full-fledged institutional crisis. This episode was not just another example of the era’s notorious political corruption. It is a story about the American state and the ways it went about implementing a grand developmental vision for the western United States. The decentralized agency model allowed the US Post to rapidly extend across the western countryside. In some ways, this was a highly democratic project driven by local demands and a broader commitment to provide a universal public service. But the agency model and the churning style of expansion it produced also left the US Post vulnerable to abuse. It was in the deserts, mountains, and canyons of the West that the costs of territorial expansion came into focus.
Mail service was enshrined in the US Constitution through the “postal power,” a clause that specifically granted the federal government the right “to establish post offices and post roads.” The Post Office Act of 1792 subsequently formalized the position of postmaster general within the executive branch and gave them the authority to enter into contracts to carry the nation’s mail. Congress, however, retained control over designating which routes qualified as “post roads.” As Americans pushed into the nation’s interior over the coming decades, a small army of stagecoaches and post riders carried the mail to them along congressionally approved routes. By the close of the 1830s, a transportation boom of canals, roads, turnpikes, and railroads had led to a web of post roads in the eastern United States, with a handful of tendrils snaking out past the Mississippi River and into Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana.3
The expansion of mail routes flowed through the channels of representative democracy. In order to get a new mail route established, a community would write a petition that detailed how far they currently had to travel to fetch their mail and then propose details for a new mail route, including all of the different places it should stop along with its total mileage.4 After gathering signatures, petitioners would mail the letter to either the Post Office Department or one of their elected officials.5 Postal administrators, however, could not establish new mail service along the route until Congress officially designated it as a “post road.” So, during each legislative session, representatives and senators would duly submit a list of new routes in their district or state to each chamber’s Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, which would then roll them together into a single bill spelling out hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of newly established official mail routes.6 After both houses passed the annual post route bill and the president signed it into law, the Post Office Department was free to start transporting the mail along the new routes.
To do so, the Post Office Department solicited bids each year from private companies to carry the mail for a different batch of new mail routes, advertising where the routes ran, which post offices were on them, the speed of the trips, and how many times a week the company was required to make them. Once they had collected bids, postal officials awarded a contract to the lowest bidder (usually for a term of four years), who would then start delivering mail along the route as an official contractor for the Post Office Department. This contracting system worked fairly well when most Americans lived in the eastern third of the country. Most mail routes were relatively short and could be operated at a low cost, especially after the transportation revolution of the 1820s and 1830s improved the density and quality of eastern routes.7 Beginning in the mid-1840s, however, two new developments would radically change the geographical calculus of the nation’s communications network: territorial expansion and universal postage.
The United States added an enormous amount of land in the span of just a few years through the annexation of Texas in 1845, the Oregon Treaty of 1846, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which seized the northern third of Mexico. All of this new territory came with new challenges for the Post Office Department. How was it going to transport the mail across millions of acres of land, much of it occupied and controlled by Native people? What kind of service should it offer, and how much was it willing to pay for that service? To further complicate matters, the territorial seizures of the 1840s coincided with the rise of a postage reform movement that dramatically lowered the price that people had to pay to send the mail. Until the 1840s, the Post Office Department factored distance into its postage rates—the farther a piece of mail traveled, the more it cost. But beginning in 1845, Congress passed a series of laws that dramatically lowered postage rates while simultaneously severing the relationship between price and geography for an individual piece of mail. These policies culminated in 1863 when Congress instituted a universal postage rate of three cents for all letters, regardless of their origin or destination. Whether in Albany or Albuquerque, Peoria or Portland, every American could send mail for the same low price no matter where that mail traveled. The new universal postage rate had effectively abolished distance from the calculus of American letter writing.8
Postage reforms helped cement the US Post as a fundamentally progressive institution by making long-distance communications possible for many more Americans. They were part of the federal government’s broader commitment to provide an accessible, reliable, and affordable public mail service to its citizens.9 But these democratizing impulses ran headlong into the realities of territorial expansion. Making the mail accessible and affordable in the context of the western United States was no easy task. One solution was to take advantage of a rapidly expanding railway network by contracting with private railroad companies to carry mail. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 accelerated the growth of the region’s railway mail system. By the end of the 1870s, the Post Office Department counted more than 11,000 combined miles of railroad mail routes in the West, a nearly fourfold increase in the span of a single decade. A cross-country letter that used to take the better part of a month to travel from New York to San Francisco could now reach its destination in a little more than six days.10
Much like the Pony Express, the symbolic power of the railroad—with its industrial muscle and steam-powered speed—obscures a basic fact: most places in the western United States weren’t actually near a railroad line. Railroads made up the trunk lines of the western postal network, shuttling correspondence between east and west and linking together the region’s urban centers. But across most of the western countryside, the mail had to reach its final destination in the back of a stagecoach, buggy, wagon, or other animal-drawn vehicle. This was the classic “last mile” problem of supply chain management, in which the final leg of a trip (such as a home delivery) is often the most costly. The 19th-century American West embodied the “last mile” problem writ large, with its relatively small population separated by long distances and daunting terrain. This geography shaped the region’s postal network: in 1879, 10 years after the completion of the transcontinental railroad, there were still more than six times as many miles of star routes as railway routes. The spatial coverage of its star route service dwarfed that of its railway mail service.11
The combination of new territory, universal postage, and the “last mile” problem skewed the Post Office Department’s balance sheet. Unlike most federal agencies, the Post Office Department was expected to generate revenue in order to offset the costs of its operations. The sale of stamps and postage made up most of this revenue, while its operational costs consisted mainly of paying its workforce, buying supplies, and contracting with companies to carry the mail. In 1871, the annual costs of mail service in the Far West outweighed its postal revenue by $1.5 million, and by the end of the decade that deficit had ballooned to $2.6 million. On a per capita basis, the numbers were especially stark: even as the northeastern United States generated a modest postal surplus of 22 cents per person in 1880, those Americans living in the Far West generated an average deficit of $1.43 per person. As Figure 4.1 makes clear, eastern letter writers ended up subsidizing their western peers.12
Figure 4.1 The Costs of Mail Service in the West
Mail service was costlier in the western United States on a per capita basis than in any other region of the country. Data calculated from 1880 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880), 558–59; “List of U.S. States by Historical Population,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_U.S._states_by_historical_population, accessed February 15, 2015.
Transportation costs were the main culprit for the West’s postal deficits. The more remote and sparsely settled the area, the higher these costs. In densely settled New England and mid-Atlantic states, mail transportation made up around 35 percent of total postal expenses in 1880, with the rest going toward things like renting post office buildings and paying the salaries of postmasters, clerks, and city letter carriers. In the western United States, that ratio was flipped, with 75 percent of the region’s expenditures going toward mail transportation. The problem was not that westerners didn’t generate any revenue for the department. On the contrary, westerners were some of the nation’s most prolific letter writers; residents of the Mountain West bought more stamps and postage, per person, than any other part of the country. The problem lay in the confluence of geography and universal postage. When a washerwoman mailed a letter from an Idaho lumber camp to her cousin in Pennsylvania, she paid the same three cents in postage as a Manhattan merchant sending a brank draft across the river to Brooklyn. No matter how many three-cent stamps westerners bought, they were not going to cover the true costs of bringing them their mail.13
Star route mail contracts made up the single largest annual expenditure for the western postal network, which in turn funneled millions of dollars each year into the region’s stagecoach industry.14 Stagecoaches played a vital part in the western economy, shuttling goods and freight for local merchants, currency and parcels on behalf of express companies, and passengers who wished to travel anywhere that was not directly on a railroad line. Western staging firms were expensive business ventures. Compared to the dense pattern of towns and cities that blanketed the eastern United States, western settlements were separated by longer distances and, in some parts of the region, dangerously arid deserts or towering mountain ranges that were virtually impassable during the winter months. The region’s geography required mammoth start-up costs for staging companies. A new firm first needed to “stock the road” before it could begin carrying passengers or freight, which involved building or importing vehicles and assembling a herd of animals to pull them. Horses, mules, and oxen required loads of hay and grain, along with barns and stables to house the animals and their feed. A firm then had to hire new route agents, drivers, and hostlers and arrange for their room and board at hotels and way stations. Once a stage firm had set up the route, it required constant infusions of capital to cover salaries, repairs and maintenance, rent for buildings, room and board, feed and supplies, and local taxes and road tolls.15 Then there was the chronic volatility that plagued the western economy. Along one long route, for instance, the price of grain doubled in the span of a single year.16 The completion of a nearby railroad line or the shuttering of a local mine had the potential to render an entire route (along with its stations, barns, and stables) all but obsolete.17 Capital-intensive western staging required ready access to cash and credit in a region where both were in short supply, especially given the West’s skeletal banking system and steep interest rates.
Figure 4.2 Carrying the Mail
The staging firm Barlow, Sanderson & Co. was one of the largest mail contractors in the western United States. Detail from [G.?] Holderting, and Woodward, Tiernan, and Hale, “Overland Mail Company: Bradley Barlow & J. L. Sanderson, proprietors,” print on paper: lithograph, [18--], BANC PIC 1963.002:1404--D, (The Robert B. Honeyman Jr. Collection of Early Californian and Western American Pictorial Material, UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library, Berkeley), available online at Calisphere, https://calisphere.org/item/ark:/13030/tf1q2nb4bs/, accessed May 5, 2020.
In this context, a government mail contract acted like a lifeline for western stagecoach companies. Quarterly payments gave companies direct, reliable infusions of cash to cover their expenses. In 1866, for instance, Henry Corbett won a large contract to carry the mail from northern California to southern Oregon. Almost immediately, he began exhorting his employees to promptly fill out the paperwork that the department needed in order to disburse its quarterly payments. Corbett went so far as to instruct route managers to submit duplicates of these forms: one to the Post Office Department and a backup to the company’s agent in Washington, DC, who acted as the company’s liaison to the department.18 One reason why he was so anxious to get paid on time was that he had recently drawn a $20,000 bank draft to temporarily cover costs “in anticipation of the mail money being paid promptly.”19 This underscores a less obvious benefit from winning a government contract: the public mail contract helped secure private lines of credit. There was no better way to prove creditworthiness than to obtain a lucrative four-year mail contract from the US government. Unlike fickle passengers or other customers, the government guaranteed a staging company four years of guaranteed revenue. One Texas stage man explained that when his company first began operating, “We would have to show that we had the money ready to pay for anything we wanted, and would have to pay in advance, and all that sort of thing.” Everything changed once they received a mail contract: “Texas now all over is our friend. We have established credit and have established a name, and my draft, or [my partner’s] draft is good anywhere in any town in Texas.”20 The specific amount of a mail contract mattered less than the fact that it established the firm’s financial soundness for lenders. As one experienced mail carrier succinctly explained, “The contract itself is credit.”21
If stagecoach lines were the West’s economic arteries, government mail contracts kept them pumping. This created a codependent relationship between the federal government and the stagecoach industry. The Post Office Department used contractors to solve the “last mile” problem in the West, grafting public functions onto their private infrastructure. Those same companies were no less dependent on the government for their survival. This entanglement between public and private was a defining feature of the agency model. It proved quite effective at extending the gossamer network’s coverage over new territory during the 1860s and 1870s. But this codependency—and the decentralized, ever-changing geography of the network itself—began to collapse under the weight of fraud.
Cries of conspiracy echoed down the halls of the US Capitol building during the late 1860s and early 1870s. Congressmen spoke darkly of a shadowy ring of powerful men known as the “Forty Thieves” who were perpetrating a “vicious system for the purposes of plunder and corruption” on the American government. The locus of this “monstrous robbery” was the Post Office Department, where western stagecoach companies stood accused of bribing officials and forging documents in order to win hundreds of thousands of dollars of government mail contracts.22 By 1872, a handful of businessmen had managed to gain control over a number of high-paying western star routes. The most powerful of these was Bradley Barlow, proprietor of the staging firm Barlow, Sanderson & Co. who also held an interest in the Southern Overland Mail Company, the California Stage Company, and the Northwestern Stage Company. His combined star routes crisscrossed every state and territory in the Far West and paid out more than one million dollars a year in government mail contracts.23 Barlow didn’t fit the profile of a bare-knuckle western stage man from a dime novel. He was an eastern patrician, a banker who hailed from St. Albans, Vermont, and reportedly never set foot on any of his mail routes.24 Just how did a New England banker become the West’s wealthiest mail contractor?
Each year the Post Office Department solicited bids from private companies to carry the mail on specified routes, at which point it awarded the contract the lowest bidder. Postal officials received bids on thousands of routes every year. Most bids were quite small, perhaps a few hundred dollars to carry the mail along a few miles of road. But in the western states and territories, the longest post routes could stretch for hundreds of miles and command an annual mail contract of more than one hundred thousand dollars. By the 1860s and early 1870s, a fraudulent system of “straw bidding” upended the bidding process for these lucrative western mail contracts. A “straw bid” was an artificially low bid submitted by someone who colluded with a higher bidder and had no intention of ever providing service on the mail route. The only goal of a straw bidder was to disrupt the normal bidding process by winning the contract at any price. They would then either withdraw their bid or renege on their contract just before service was scheduled to commence. Soliciting a new round of bidding might take many weeks or even months, during which the mail would go undelivered. This left postal officials scrambling to find a temporary replacement. At this point the straw bidder’s backer stepped in. Freed from the official procedure of the bidding process, a mail contractor like Bradley Barlow would lobby and outright bribe officials to award them the contract at an exorbitant price.
Straw bidding was in full bloom when the department solicited bids for hundreds of western mail routes in the spring of 1870. One of the longer routes was a 356-mile thoroughfare running along the Rio Grande Valley from El Paso, Texas, to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Contractors submitted 55 bids for the route, ranging from $9,000 to $100,000. The list of bidders included Bradley Barlow’s daughter, son-in-law, two business partners, an employee, and the brother of one of his associates. These were his straw bidders. As required by law, the department awarded the contract to the lowest bidder, C. W. Lewis. Although Lewis’s link to Barlow is unclear, one thing is certain: the Arizona politician had little experience with staging and even less intention of ever carrying the mail along the route. Two weeks before the scheduled start date for the contract, the department declared Lewis a failed bidder. Bradley Barlow promptly went to work. After some suspicious decisions, postal officials awarded the contract to a new bidder: Jared L. Sanderson, a partner in the staging firm Barlow, Sanderson & Co. Barlow had won by stacking the deck.25
Bradley Barlow wasn’t alone. In the northwest, the Huntley Express Company relied on straw bidding to win routes that crisscrossed Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho.26 A veteran mail contractor named Francis P. Sawyer used similar tactics to secure dozens of routes in Texas, Kansas, Indian Territory, and New Mexico that were worth more than four hundred thousand dollars a year in aggregate.27 These western contractors spent surprisingly little time in the western United States. Charles Huntley of the Huntley Express Company bounced between hotels in Washington, DC, during bidding seasons and left his cousin Silas Huntley in Helena, Montana, to supervise their western stage routes.28 Francis Sawyer bought a house in the Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood and only rarely traveled back to his company’s headquarters in Texas.29 And Bradley Barlow—the most successful of the bunch—reportedly “never saw a horse or wheel owned by the company.” He left the operations entirely to his partner, Jared L. Sanderson, and split his time between Washington, DC, and his official residence in Vermont.30 For contractors like Huntley, Sawyer, and Barlow, the success of their firms depended less on the day-to-day management of the mail routes than on a shadowy world of lobbying, finance, and fraud in the nation’s capital.
Ironically, face-to-face interactions played an outsized role in shaping the nation’s largest long-distance communications network.31 Mail contractors went out of their way to cultivate personal relationships with clerks and administrators in Washington, DC. Bradley Barlow proved to be especially adroit at this kind of maneuvering. In the late 1860s he hired a lobbyist named Thomas Hood, whose main qualification for the job seemed to be that he hailed from the same Wisconsin town as then–Postmaster General Alexander Randall.32 Barlow invited other postal officials to dinner, shared wine and cigars with them, and distributed other gifts far and wide—even sending two packages of Vermont maple sugar to President Ulysses S. Grant.33 These personal relationships gave contractors an edge on competitors who didn’t have a presence in Washington. Mail contractors quite literally roamed the halls of the Post Office Department headquarters on a daily basis. When a winning bidder reneged on their contract, they were able to appear within the hour at the Postmaster General’s office to offer up their company’s services.34 Even after they won a contract, mail contractors still wheedled postal clerks to try and expedite their quarterly payments or haggled with them over the docked pay that the department levied for lost letters, late deliveries, or missed trips.35
Bradley Barlow had one additional advantage over his rivals: he wasn’t just a mail contractor; he was also the president of the Vermont National Bank. This turned the bank, in essence, into the financial arm of Barlow, Sanderson & Co.36 Barlow used personal checks and drafts to channel money to his firm’s agents from thousands of miles away. He also extended a “loan” to a man named Morgan L. Smith.37 When pressed for details, Barlow admitted that he couldn’t remember the exact amount of the loan, never recorded the transaction, couldn’t specify what the money was in exchange for, and did not expect Smith to repay it. Smith’s brother, of course, just happened to be in charge of the Post Office Department’s mail contract division.38 It was even alleged that Barlow had been behind a piece of congressional legislation that required bidders on large mail contracts to include a check or draft from a national bank for 5 percent of the value of their bid.39 This was an ostensible attempt to halt the practice of straw bidding, but it also disqualified those contractors who weren’t able to secure thousands of dollars’ worth of checks or drafts from a national bank.40 Barlow had no such problems as the president of a bank.41
Once a contractor secured a star route, they would then try to convince postal officials to increase their compensation by bumping up mail service along the route. Service increases could take the form of adding more trips each week (say, delivering the mail twice a week rather than once a week) or speeding up the rate of deliveries (taking 36 hours rather than 48 hours to traverse a route). The compensation for these increases were calculated on a linear basis: if mail service increased from once a week to twice a week, the department would pay a contractor twice as much. This calculation had little basis in reality. A stage line didn’t suddenly have to build twice as many barns along a route just because it carried the mail twice as often. And the arrangements of the agency model meant that oftentimes contractors were already making these additional trips as they shuttled passengers and freight through their private stage business. By throwing a few bags of mail onto each departing stagecoach, they could double or even triple their annual compensation.42
Crooked western mail contractors took full advantage of the decentralized agency model that powered the gossamer network. The network’s periphery drove its expansion with little administrative oversight from postal officials in Washington. The postal petition, a classic tool of representative democracy, became a tool that contractors wielded to inflate their profits. Montana contractor Charles Huntley, for instance, pressed his cousin in Helena to “send petitions at once to me to have service extended. . . . Have the postmaster at Missoula write a letter recommending the service [and] have all the county officers sign the letters” assuring him that “we will have a big thing . . . when all our routes are increased.”43 Another western contractor went even further by doctoring the content of a postal petition after he had already collected its signatures.44 As one crooked contractor explained, “It was an easy thing to cook up petitions by the yard, to order, on any such subject.”45 These petitions were even more effective because of the murky administrative authority surrounding the nation’s mail routes. Although the Post Office Department operated mail routes, it was Congress that established them. This split responsibility led to endless confusion. For one, even legitimate petitioners never seemed to know who had authority over what, as they addressed their requests to the postmaster general, the second assistant postmaster general, their own representatives and senators, the chairman of the Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, or “Members of Congress” generally. Some petitions even had to be hastily revised before mailing them: “To the Post Master General House of Representatives U.S.”46 With responsibility divided between two separate branches of government, it was easier for contractors to “cook up” falsified petitions in order to increase their pay.
Moreover, postal officials didn’t have an effective system for evaluating whether or not these petitions were valid. Again and again, postal officials struggled even to gather basic information about the conditions along western star routes, much less regulate the contractors who operated them. One postal inspector based in Portland, Oregon, for instance, didn’t even know how many post offices were on one route because it ran across multiple states and territories: “When the route got to Spokane Bridge it was out of my district, and I paid very little attention to it.”47 Without an effective regulatory apparatus, postal officials ended up relying on politicians to act as intermediaries to evaluate postal petitions that came from their districts.48 Of course, Congressmen were only too happy to get new mail routes, faster mail service, and more frequent trips as a form of political pork to carry home to their constituents.49
Crooked mail contractors also benefited from instability and patronage appointees that dotted the Post Office Department’s upper ranks, in particular the second assistant postmaster general, who oversaw the nation’s mail transportation. In 1871, John L. Routt stepped into this position. Routt was a Republican partisan from Illinois who showed little interest in actually managing his division.50 When called in front of a congressional committee, Routt struggled to recall basic details about how his office operated and spent most of his testimony complaining about his workload.51 He did, however, enjoy one particular part of his job: receiving barrels of oranges, boxes of cigars, cases of wine and mineral water, and other gifts and favors from mail contractors.52 By the end of his tenure, Routt was abandoning most of his responsibilities to his chief clerk, a man who moonlighted as a life insurance agent and used his position to sell insurance policies to the very contractors he was tasked with policing.53
Not surprisingly, mail contractor fraud grew bolder under Routt’s administration (or lack thereof). A contractor named William D. Kittle exemplified the lack of regulatory oversight under Routt’s division. Kittle engaged in the usual chicanery by plying officials with gifts and buying life insurance from the division’s chief clerk. But he went even further by falsifying and intercepting what would have been damning official reports about his mail routes in Arkansas, Florida, and Texas.54 Then, during a new round of bidding for mail contracts, Kittle bribed three clerks and a mentally handicapped messenger to show him the lowest bids for selected routes. He then composed lower bids, used a counterfeit seal to backdate them, and paid the clerks to refile them alongside the legitimate bids.55 After postal officials noticed a single bidder winning so many routes by a narrow margin, they launched an investigation that was either incompetent or corrupt.56 Government prosecutors inexplicably decided to grant Kittle and the bribed clerks immunity in exchange for testifying against another mail contractor (which ultimately failed to produce any conviction). The clerks who had accepted bribes were dismissed from office, but otherwise faced no criminal charges.57 And Kittle, a man who admitted to colluding with postmasters, composing counterfeit documents, and bribing government officials, walked away cleanly. Months after his admission of guilt, William Kittle was once again bidding on a new round of mail contracts.58
As abuses in the contracting division piled up, Congress started looking into the star route frauds. In 1872 and 1874 the House of Representatives held two different investigations. Predictably, in both cases Republican majorities absolved the Republican appointees in the Post Office Department of any wrongdoing.59 It wasn’t until 1876, after Democrats won control of Congress, that legislators embarked on a real investigation. The postal committee called scores of witnesses, including Bradley Barlow, over the course of several months in 1876 and issued a blistering report that skewered the Post Office Department’s management under Republican leadership.60 President Ulysses S. Grant promptly removed the acting postmaster general and appointed his deputy to replace him. With a presidential election just four months away, reformers might have hoped for a fresh start for the federal government’s largest executive department. Instead, the star route frauds began an audacious new chapter.
During the late 1870s two new characters stepped onto center stage in the Post Office Department’s star route saga: Stephen Dorsey and Thomas Brady. Dorsey was a caricature of a corrupt carpetbagger. He had moved from Ohio to Arkansas after the Civil War in order to head up the Arkansas Central Railroad Company, which he and his associates used to enrich themselves while doing little to build a functioning railroad. Amidst allegations of embezzlement and bribery, Dorsey managed to win (or buy) enough votes from the Arkansas legislature to elect him as the state’s US senator in 1872. Dorsey spent much of his time in Washington figuring out how to get rich from his position. Many of his schemes focused on the American West, such as when he used his new political connections to purchase land in New Mexico or invest in Colorado mines. Near the end of his time in office, the West provided him with one more opportunity for profit: star route mail contracts. When the Post Office Department solicited bids for western mail routes in 1877, Dorsey marshalled a group of business associates and family members to bid on them (as a sitting congressman, Dorsey himself could not participate in the bidding). He then used his influence to secure certificates, bonds, and sureties on behalf of the cabal of bidders. Dorsey’s group submitted thousands of bids, many illegally, and won some two dozen lengthy western mail routes. At this point, Dorsey crossed paths with the second character in this drama, Thomas Brady.61
Brady was a deep-pocketed Republican businessman who had been appointed second assistant postmaster general in July of 1876 as part of President Grant’s shake-up of the Post Office Department. When Republican Rutherford B. Hayes narrowly won the presidential election a few months later, Hayes decided to keep Brady in office. This put Brady in position to oversee the nation’s star route contracts. Whereas his predecessors had been indifferent or incompetent, Brady was actively corrupt. Western star route frauds took different forms under his administration. Whereas earlier contractors like Bradley Barlow had used straw bidding to win their routes, a growing number of contractors (the Dorsey ring included) focused on winning a route with a laughably low bid and then extracting extravagant payment increases on their contract. The strategy itself wasn’t new, but it reached new heights under Brady’s management.
Over the course of 1878–79, Thomas Brady approved two million dollars in payment increases for just 93 western star routes—at a time when the nation’s entire star route service had a budget of less than six million dollars to cover some nine thousand routes. The most egregious of these payment increases was for a route that ran more than seven hundred miles across Indian Territory and the Texas Panhandle and into New Mexico Territory. When the route was first advertised, the lowest bidder agreed to carry the mail once a week and complete the journey in 10 days, all in exchange for a minuscule $6,330. Over the following months, Brady approved a series of changes to the route: extending the route to include new post offices, shortening each trip from 10 to seven days, and increasing the frequency of those trips from once a week to twice a week, then three times a week, and eventually to seven times a week. Altogether, the contractor’s pay on the route leapt from his initial bid of $6,330 to more than $150,000 a year. By the time Brady was finished, the route was providing daily mail service across some of the most sparsely settled land in the nation.62
Ballooning star route contracts took their toll on the Post Office Department’s finances. In December of 1879, Thomas Brady asked Congress for a temporary appropriation to cover the two-million-dollar deficiency in his division. Instead of showing contrition, he went on the offensive. Brady threatened that if he didn’t receive the extra funds, he would be forced to curtail mail service on every star route in the country (and in every congressman’s district). It was an audacious strategy. It was also an effective one. Any interruptions to the nation’s mail service would have infuriated constituents from both parties. With a presidential election just a few months away, Congress capitulated by passing a stopgap funding measure for $1.1 million in the spring of 1880.
At this point, Stephen Dorsey had left the Senate with his own version of a golden parachute. Dorsey’s ring of family members and business associates had managed to secure more than four hundred thousand dollars in extra compensation from Thomas Brady on just 19 western mail routes.63 Despite a cloud of allegations that followed Dorsey like a swarm of mosquitos, he continued to stay active in Republican politics and was nominated as the secretary of the Republican National Convention in the summer of 1880 to help with the upcoming presidential election. Dorsey was a clever and unscrupulous campaign strategist. He poured campaign funds into the swing state of Indiana, which was widely expected to vote for the Democratic candidate. Dorsey’s gamble paid off, as the Republican candidate, James Garfield, eked out a victory in Indiana and then went on to win one of the closest presidential elections in American history. Indiana had made the difference, which made Dorsey the savior of the Republican Party. In February of 1881, a month before Garfield’s inauguration, party luminaries held a banquet in Dorsey’s honor in New York City. None other than Ulysses S. Grant introduced Dorsey to an audience that included John Jacob Astor, J. Pierpont Morgan, and Vice President Elect Chester A. Arthur. At one point, attendees made a veiled reference to the “soap” (bribes, vote buying, and other shenanigans) that had tipped Indiana in their favor. It’s not clear where the money had come from, but newspapers speculated that Dorsey and Brady—himself an Indianan—had funneled profits from the fraudulent star route contracts into the state’s presidential campaign.64
The New York banquet for Stephen Dorsey was the high point in a political career that was about to fall to pieces. Newly inaugurated President Garfield installed a reformer as the new postmaster general and instructed him to begin looking into the star route frauds. In April of 1881, Thomas Brady was removed from office—the government’s opening salvo against Stephen Dorsey and other crooked mail contractors. The investigation was abruptly put on hold in July of 1881 when an assassin shot President Garfield. Two months later he succumbed to his wounds. His successor, Chester Arthur, was widely seen as a partisan hack, but to everyone’s surprise he promptly took up the mantle of reform and resumed the star route investigations. By early 1882, government investigators felt they had enough evidence to charge Stephen Dorsey, Thomas Brady, and seven others with conspiracy to defraud the government.
Lawyers called more than one hundred witnesses to testify over three summer months in 1882. Newspapers splashed details from the “star route trial” across their front pages as more and more evidence piled up against Dorsey, Brady, and the rest of the ring.65 In September the jury issued a surprise verdict. They convicted two of the defendants, acquitted two others, and were unable to reach a consensus on the remaining defendants (including Dorsey and Brady). Several of the jurors admitted that they had been approached with offers of bribes, leading the flabbergasted judge to order a retrial for all the defendants. The second “star route trial” took place in 1883 and was largely a rerun of the first. Despite overwhelming evidence, the jury returned an even more shocking verdict: not guilty for every single defendant. Accusations of bribery flew fast and thick, but the verdict was final. The major perpetrators of the star route frauds walked away unpunished. Thomas Brady and Stephen Dorsey may have avoided jail, but the star route trials effectively ended their political careers. Brady retired and moved to Virginia, while Dorsey retreated to a ranch in New Mexico and spent the remainder of his life battling financial troubles, alcoholism, and legal suits over fraudulent land dealings.66
Despite receiving extensive news coverage at the time, the star route frauds have since faded into obscurity. The machinations of Thomas Brady, Stephen Dorsey, and other crooked postal officials and mail contractors have become simply one minor episode in a litany of government corruption scandals during the post–Civil War years such as the Credit Mobilier affair and the graft machine of William “Boss” Tweed’s Tammany Hall.67 But framing the star route frauds as a purely political story about corruption misses an important point: they were, at their core, a story about western expansion. In 1881, the New York Times published damning details from ninety-three star route contracts that Thomas Brady had approved for extravagant payment increases. Every single one of these routes was located west of the Mississippi River. The political drama of these route frauds may have unfolded in Washington, DC, but they were made possible by the American state’s larger developmental project in the western United States.68
Figure 4.3 The Costs of Western Expansion
This map shows the start and end points of 93 star routes where mail contractors were suspected of fraud in 1881. Each route is sized according to how much the contract increased from its original terms. Data transcribed from “Star Service Corruption,” New York Times, April 25, 1881, 1, available online at https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1881/04/25/98553855.html?pageNumber=1.
During the 1860s and 1870s the federal government took an interventionist role within the national economy. Under the Republican Party, the federal government used tariffs and subsidies to bolster manufacturers, financiers, and transportation companies. This activist vision for the American state flourished in the western half of the country, where mail contracts were part of a larger constellation of federal policies that funneled public resources toward the private sector. The Republican Party’s state-backed developmental agenda didn’t stop at the shores of the Pacific. With enough government support, the West would also become a commercial gateway to international markets in Asia and the Pacific, turning the United States into a global imperial power through the expansion of shipping, commerce, and trade. Once again, the US Post provided officials with an ideal vehicle for this expansion.69
In 1865, a Republican Congress passed an appropriation to establish the country’s first transpacific mail service. The following year, the Post Office Department awarded a giant contract to the Pacific Mail Steamship Company to inaugurate this service. Beginning in 1867, the company’s steamers started carrying the mail once a month between San Francisco and ports in China and Japan. Although the transpacific mail route unfolded in a different physical environment than western star routes, the two types of mail service shared similarities. Like stagecoach companies, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company wasn’t starting from scratch. It was already operating a fleet of steamers that plied the waters between ports in Valparaiso, Callao (present-day Lima), Guayaquil, Canton, Shanghai, Manila, and Honolulu. When the company won the department’s transpacific mail contract, it simply grafted the public service of carrying the mail onto its existing passenger and freight business.70
And like western mail contractors, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company also drained the government’s coffers. At five hundred thousand dollars a year, the company held the nation’s largest single mail contract, even though the service generated a paltry amount of postal revenue for the department (just $15,000 over 12 months).71 And, like western mail contractors, the company inflated its profits through fraud. In 1872 postal officials approved an increase in service that doubled the company’s pay, bringing its compensation to a tidy sum of one million dollars a year. Subsequent investigations found that the company had engineered this increase through illegal lobbying and bribes that totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars. One can imagine Bradley Barlow and other crooked western mail contractors tipping their caps to the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s lobbyists as they passed each other in the halls of the Post Office Department’s headquarters in Washington, DC.72
The Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s million-dollar mail contract in the early 1870s represented the high-water (or low-water) mark for a Republican-led vision of state-backed commercial expansion in the Pacific. Its defenders argued that the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s mail contract wasn’t some corporate handout; it was simply a means of putting American shipping on a more competitive footing with its international rivals. After all, the letters that Americans sent overseas largely traveled in the holds of European ships, like the ones operated by the British-owned Cunard steamship company. Most of these foreign companies were subsidized by their home governments, so why shouldn’t the United States do the same?73 As details continued to surface regarding the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s bribery campaign, however, this imperial commercial project fell apart. In early 1875, Congress voted to repeal the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s recent five-hundred-thousand-dollar increase in compensation. The following year, it declined to renew the company’s 10-year mail contract. By 1878, the Post Office Department’s expenditures for transpacific mail service had dwindled to just a few thousand dollars a year. Republican dreams of a state-backed commercial empire in the Pacific were in full-scale retreat.74
The timeline of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s decline presents a puzzle: why did the US Post withdraw mail service from the Pacific in the mid-1870s, just as it was ramping up its star route service in the western interior to dizzying new heights? Why did one state-backed expansion project wither away even as the other accelerated? After all, both were marred by ballooning costs and corruption, providing juicy targets for pro-retrenchment Democrats seeking to rein in the excesses of the Republican-controlled presidency. The difference between transpacific mail contracts and star route contracts revolved around who benefited from these arrangements. The transpacific mail subsidy served the interests of a core constituency within the Republican Party: merchants and other businessmen interested in gaining a foothold in Asian markets. Star routes had a wider base of support. After all, Republicans and Democrats alike had an interest in expanding mail service within their districts. In one of the most partisan eras in American history, the annual post route bill was arguably Congress’s least controversial piece of legislation, typically passing with widespread support and minimal debate.75
When it came to the nation’s star routes, sectionalism trumped partisan loyalties.76 In one 1876 debate over postal appropriations, for instance, a Republican senator from Vermont delicately questioned whether just because “I choose to go and set up a camp for fishing or shooting in some vastness of the mountains . . . that all other people of the United States are to be taxed forthwith in order that I may get my daily papers every morning.” A member of his own party from California immediately retorted, “The old States and the overgrown cities enjoy all the luxury of the Post-Office Department. . . . I think they are not the ones to complain and to begrudge the service which is for the benefit of the more sparsely settled States and Territories.” Three years later, even as the full extent of the star route frauds started to come to light, a western bloc of politicians from both sides of the aisle repeatedly closed ranks to defend them.77
One of the most loquacious defenders of the star route service was Christopher Columbus Upson, a Democratic congressman from Texas. In the midst of one appropriations debate, he harangued “if, in the line of ‘economy and reform,’ we are to strike at the mail privileges of the sun-bronzed cheek, labor-calloused hand, and brave heart of the frontiersman, in the name of common justice let the blow fall with equal severity upon the kid-gloved gentry, codfish aristocracy, chicken-hearted millionaire, and bloated gormandizer of the populous cities.”78 Upson then handed the baton across the aisle to Dudley Haskell, a Republican from Kansas: “You eastern men, with your railway lines by almost every farm, have no use for star service. . . . My friend from Connecticut has not a post-route in his State twenty-five miles long.”79 In the Senate, meanwhile, Texas Democrat Samuel B. Maxey was the primary champion of the star route service. Maxey even defended the notorious route on which Thomas Brady had approved an increase in compensation from $6,330 to more than $150,000 a year. In fact, Maxey had been one of the people most responsible for the route’s increase when he marshalled petitions and testimonials from postmasters, politicians, businessmen, and army officers – even obtaining a letter from the famed western general Tecumseh Sherman that described western star routes as “the skirmish line of civilization.”80 Two years later, Maxey would take the witness stand in order to defend Brady, Dorsey, and other prominent Republicans during the star route trials, despite ongoing rumors that their fraudulent gains may have swung the 1880 election against Maxey’s own party.81
One Congressman tried to justify the breakneck expansion of western star routes as simply the byproduct of “the ‘boom,’ as we have been pleased to call it in this country.”82 He wasn’t wrong, at least not entirely. The most egregious of the star route frauds under Thomas Brady and Stephen Dorsey did coincide with the western postal network’s frenetic, churning expansion during the late 1870s. Between 1878 and 1880, for instance, the annual tally of new post offices in the West jumped from 447 to 1,139. It was the largest two-year jump in the history of the western postal network. This larger pattern of postal growth may have been reckless, but it wasn’t necessarily fraudulent.83 When Congress called in Thomas Brady to explain the two-million-dollar deficiency in his division’s star route service, he pointed out that it was Congress, not the Post Office Department, that had established some two thousand new mail routes over the preceding years through their annual post road bills. He was just putting these routes into operation and trying to meet the needs of a rapidly growing region.84 Although Brady’s reasoning was disingenuous, it points to a fundamental truth: fraudulent and corrupt mail contractors were not responsible for the churning overexpansion in the West during the 1870s; they simply took advantage of it.
The American state’s larger project of colonizing and occupying the West came with high costs. Some of these costs came from corruption, but others were simply the result of ideology crashing headlong into western geography. The federal government had committed itself to making the mail accessible for all of its citizens, even when those citizens moved to a distant region with sky-high transportation costs. The corrupt machinations of contractors may have cost the federal government millions of dollars, but so too did westerners who demanded mail service no matter how remote their location. The federal government had committed itself to making the mail affordable for all of its citizens through universal postage, which meant that the rest of the country ended up covering the costs of that service for western residents. Rural mail was—and remains—a subsidized public service. Finally, the federal government’s use of the agency model meant that it relied on private companies operating in an unstable regional economy. In the West, the line separating fraudulent from legitimate costs was often a blurry one.
Other costs extended beyond the Post Office Department’s balance sheet. Western mail routes were entangled with the federal government’s larger campaign of conquest, extermination, and dispossession against the West’s Native peoples. Again and again, the protection of transportation corridors provided a pretext for military action. Western newspapers printed blood-soaked reports of Indian attacks on mail stages to call for military escorts along these routes.85 Already beset by disease, desertion, and low morale, soldiers resented having to relocate to remote garrisons and risk their lives in order to protect the property of private stagecoach companies and their passengers. As one western officer grumbled: “Except to guard the El Paso Mail I am unable to discover the necessity for a single soldier at this post.”86 The expansion of western star routes did not cause the era’s violent wars of conquest, but the two federal initiatives often went hand in hand.87
As the mail contract frauds came to light, they contributed to a wider loss of faith in the federal government in the 1870s. Faced with high-profile corruption scandals, Americans grew disenchanted with an activist national state they saw as serving the interests of private companies rather than the general public. Although politicians and newspaper editors expressed moral outrage over the frauds sweeping through the Post Office Department and its contracting division, they just as often harped on waste, bemoaning the “extravagance of expenditures” or “schemes against the public Treasury.”88 In this context, fraudulent western mail contracts were part of a larger “corruption issue” that Democrats wielded as a cudgel to beat back the gains made under Republicans during the Civil War and its aftermath. This spasm of retrenchment proved disastrous for the millions of freedpeople in the former Confederacy who depended on the federal government to safeguard the gains that had been made during Reconstruction.89 The corrosive effects of government corruption rippled far and wide.
In November of 1881, Postmaster General Thomas James penned his annual report to Congress, detailing his first year at the helm of the Post Office Department. In it, James offered his own take on who was to blame for the star route frauds that were then under investigation. In addition to corrupt mail contractors, he pointed the finger at a different kind of culprit: western expansion. “The extension of the mail service was unquestionably far in advance of the actual needs of the country. . . . It is questionable whether the good accomplished in the remote regions of the West compensated for the positive evil which resulted.”90 James was highlighting a larger tension at the heart of the US Post and its history. In some ways the US Post was a progressive force in the 19th century, a democratic institution committed to providing an accessible and affordable public service to all of its citizens, no matter where they lived. Nowhere was this commitment to universal mail service clearer than in the western United States, where the US Post used the agency model to rapidly extend its gossamer network in order to meet the needs of an expanding population. But this solution created new problems. Western star routes expanded faster than the department’s own administrative capacity to oversee them, giving rise to a morass of mismanagement and fraud during the 1870s. The ability to rapidly extend new lines of communication, regardless of their expense, facilitated a particularly unstable and churning settler colonial occupation of the western interior. In the end, westerners got their mail. But at what cost?91