1.The dataset was based on eight printed volumes produced by Richard Helbock: Richard W. Helbock, United States Post Offices, vol. 1, The West (Scappoose, OR: La Posta , 1998); Richard W. Helbock, United States Post Offices, vol. 2, The Great Plains (Scappoose, OR: La Posta, 1998); Richard W. Helbock, United States Post Offices, vol. 3, The Upper Midwest (Lake Oswego, OR: La Posta, 2001); Richard W. Helbock, United States Post Offices, vol. 4, The Northeast (Scappoose, OR: La Posta, 2001); Richard W. Helbock, United States Post Offices, vol. 5, The Ohio Valley (Scappoose, OR: La Posta, 2002); Richard W. Helbock, United States Post Offices, vol. 6, The Mid Atlantic (Scappoose, OR: La Posta, 2004); Richard W. Helbock, United States Post Offices, vol. 7, The Lower Mississippi Valley (Scappoose, OR: La Posta, 2005); Richard W. Helbock, United States Post Offices, vol. 8, The Southeast (Scappoose, OR: La Posta, 2007).
2.U.S. Geological Survey, “U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS)” (Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey), http://geonames.usgs.gov/, accessed March 3, 2020.
3.Lincoln A. Mullen and Jordan Bratt, “USAboundaries: Historical and Contemporary Boundaries of the United States of America,” Journal of Open Source Software 3, no. 23 (2018): 314, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00314; Claudio Saunt et al., “The Invasion of America: How the United States Took Over an Eighth of the World,” eHistory.org, http://invasionofamerica.ehistory.org/, accessed November 21, 2016; R Core Team, R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing (Vienna,: R Foundation for Statistical Computing, 2020), https://www.r-project.org/; Hadley Wickham et al., “Welcome to the Tidyverse,” Journal of Open Source Software 4, no. 43 (2019): 1686, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01686; Edzer Pebesma, “Simple Features for R: Standardized Support for Spatial Vector Data,” The R Journal 10, no. 1 (2018): 439–46, https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2018-009.
1.C. W. Thompson to Andrew Jackson Faulk, January 20, 1864, box 1, folder 1, in Andrew Jackson Faulk Papers, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT.
2.For the Dakota War, see Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 488–92; Carol Chomsky, “The United States-Dakota War Trials: A Study in Military Injustice,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 1 (1990): 13–98. For Minnesota’s bounty on scalps, see Colette Routel, “Minnesota Bounties on Dakota Men during the US-Dakota War,” William Mitchell Law Review 40 (2013): 1–77. For Dakota Territory’s geography and mail service, see US General Land Office, Dakota Territory, 1:1,250,000 (Washington, DC: Major & Knapp Eng. Mfg. & Lith. Co., 1866), https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/33ohal. E. D. Boyd and Walter L. Nicholson, Map of Part of the United States Exhibiting the Principal Mail Routes West of the Mississippi River (Washington, DC, 1867), National Archives II at College Park, Maryland, I, Record Group 77, Records of the War Department, Map 285.
3.For the challenges that the western United States posed for national expansion, see Susan Schulten, “The Civil War and the Origins of the Colorado Territory,” Western Historical Quarterly 44, no. 1 (2013): 21–46, https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.44.1.0021; Rachel St. John, “Contingent Continent: Spatial and Geographic Arguments in the Shaping of the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Pacific Historical Review 86, no. 1 (February 2017): 18–49, https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2017.86.1.18.
4.For industrialization, see William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 236–97; Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); Noam Maggor, Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 96–106, 158–79; Sven Beckert, “American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950,” American Historical Review 122, no. 4 (October 2017): 1149, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.4.1137. For the environment, see Mark Fiege, Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999); Sara Dant, Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 1–101. For the theme of conquest and war against Native peoples, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (W. W. Norton, 1987), 45–46, 91–96; Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 13–106; C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon, 2014), 133–61.
5.The West as a region of federal power was a central tenet of the “new western history” literature of the 1980s and 1990s. See Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, 58–60, 138–40, 191–96; White, It’s Your Misfortune, 87–93, 130, 137–54. For an alternative viewpoint on the role of the federal government in the West, see Karen R. Merrill, “In Search of the ‘Federal Presence’ in the American West,” Western Historical Quarterly 30, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 449–73. Major historical works on the 19th-century US Post include Richard B. Kielbowicz, News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700–1860s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989); Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America: A History (New York: Penguin, 2016).
6.John Joseph Wallis, “Table Dg181–189—U.S. Postal Service—Post Offices, Finances, Pieces Handled, and Items Issued: 1789–1999,” in Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present, ed. Susan B. Carter et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
7.For the invisibility of infrastructure see Shannon Mattern, “Infrastructural Tourism,” Places Journal, July 2013, https://doi.org/10.22269/130701; Paul N. Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems,” in Modernity and Technology, ed. Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 185–224. For discussions of information infrastructure specifically, see Paul N. Edwards et al., “AHR Conversation: Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information,” American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (December 2011): 1393–1435; Heidi J. S. Tworek, “Communicable Disease: Information, Health, and Globalization in the Interwar Period,” American Historical Review 124, no. 3 (June 1, 2019): 813–42, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz577. For the visibility of government institutions, see Suzanne Mettler, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Damon Maryl and Sarah Quinn, “Beyond the Hidden American State: Classification Struggles and the Politics of Recognition,” in The Many Hands of the State: Theorizing Political Authority and Social Control, ed. Kimberly J. Morgan and Ann Shola Orloff (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 58–80.
8.For an introduction to digital history and its origins, see Sheila Brennan, “Digital History,” The Inclusive Historian’s Handbook (blog), June 4, 2019, https://inclusivehistorian.com/digital-history/; Sharon M. Leon, “Complicating a ‘Great Man’ Narrative of Digital History in the United States,” in Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities, ed. Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-4e08b137-aec5-49a4-83c0-38258425f145/section/466311ae-d3dc-4d50-b616-8b5d1555d231; Stephen Robertson, “The Differences between Digital Humanities and Digital History,” in Debates in Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/76.
9.Joshua Sternfeld, “Harlem Crime, Soapbox Speeches, and Beauty Parlors: Digital Historical Context and the Challenge of Preserving Source Integrity,” American Historical Review 121, no. 1 (February 1, 2016): 143–55, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.1.143; Timothy Brennan, “The Digital-Humanities Bust,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 15, 2017, http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Digital-Humanities-Bust/241424.
10.For more information about Richard Helbock’s dataset, see the Notes on Methods. I purchased a CD-ROM of Richard Helbock’s dataset that was available for sale online, containing digitized versions of eight volumes that he had published on post offices in different regions of the country: Richard W. Helbock, United States Post Offices, vol. 1, The West (Scappoose, OR: La Posta, 1998); Richard W. Helbock, United States Post Offices, vol. 2, The Great Plains (Scappoose, OR: La Posta, 1998); Richard W. Helbock, United States Post Offices, vol. 3, The Upper Midwest (Lake Oswego, OR: La Posta, 2001); Richard W. Helbock, United States Post Offices, vol. 4, The Northeast (Scappoose, OR: La Posta, 2001); Richard W. Helbock, United States Post Offices, vol. 5, The Ohio Valley (Scappoose, OR: La Posta, 2002); Richard W. Helbock, United States Post Offices, vol. 6, The Mid Atlantic (Scappoose, OR: La Posta, 2004); Richard W. Helbock, United States Post Offices, vol. 7, The Lower Mississippi Valley (Scappoose, OR: La Posta, 2005); Richard W. Helbock, United States Post Offices, vol. 8, The Southeast (Scappoose, OR: La Posta, 2007).
11.Several projects have taken similar approaches to mapping post offices, but most of them have focused on relatively small areas. See John A. Alwin, “Post Office Locations and the Historical Geographer: A Montana Example,” Professional Geographer 26, no. 2 (1974): 183–86, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0033-0124.1974.00183.x; James R. Shortridge, “The Post Office Frontier in Kansas,” Journal of the West 13 (July 1974): 83–97; Morton D. Winsberg, “The Advance of Florida’s Frontier as Determined from Post Office Openings,” Florida Historical Quarterly 72, no. 2 (October 1993): 189–99; Kenneth E. Lewis, “Mapping Antebellum Euro-American Settlement Spread in Southern Lower Michigan,” Michigan Historical Review 30, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 105–34; Andrew Allen, “Post Offices as a Measure of Nebraska’s Settlement Frontier” (master’s thesis, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2011), http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/7835/Allen_ku_0099M_11532_DATA_1.pdf. Gustavo Velasco has conducted a similar study of the role of postal infrastructure in the context of western Canada in Gustavo Velasco, “Natural Resources, State Formation and the Institutions of Settler Capitalism: The Case of Western Canada, 1850–1914” (PhD diss., London School of Economics and Political Science, 2016), 149–221, http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3437/; Gustavo Velasco, “The Post, the Railroad, and the State: An HGIS Approach to Study Western Canada Settlement, 1850–1900,” in The Routledge Companion to Spatial History, ed. Ian Gregory, Don DeBats, and Don Lafreniere (London: Routledge, 2018), 375–94. Other examples of mapping postal systems include Zef Segal, “Communication and State Construction: The Postal Service in German States, 1815–1866,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 44, no. 4 (2014): 453–73, https://doi.org/10.1162/JINH_a_00610; Florian Ploeckl, “It’s All in the Mail: The Economic Geography of the German Empire,” School of Economics Working Paper (University of Adelaide, School of Economics, April 2015), https://ideas.repec.org/p/adl/wpaper/2015-12.html; Nicolas Verdier and Ludovic Chalonge, “The Issue of Scales in Geohistory. Post Offices from the 18th Century to the Present Day,” Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography, July 25, 2018, https://doi.org/10.4000/cybergeo.29197.
12.1889 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1889), 3.
13.Many thanks to John Gerring and Jon Rogowski for supplying international postal data from the Universal Postal Union. Gerring and Rogowski’s team transcribed data from Union Postale Universelle, Statistique Générale du Service Postal Publieé par le Bureau International: Année 1889 (Berne: Imprimerie Suter & Lierow, 1891). See also 1889 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 231, 254. There were 26,385 US post offices operating in 2018. United States Postal Service Historian, “Pieces of Mail Handled, Number of Post Offices, Income, and Expenses Since 1789,” United States Postal Service, February 2019, https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/pieces-of-mail-since-1789.pdf. Comparisons to private companies reflect numbers from 2019. “Location Facts: United States,” Walmart corporate website, https://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/locations/united-states, accessed September 15, 2019; Wells Fargo, “Wells Fargo Reports $6.2 Billion in Quarterly Net Income; Diluted EPS of $1.30,” July 16, 2019, https://newsroom.wf.com/press-release/corporate-and-financial/wells-fargo-reports-62-billion-quarterly-net-income-diluted; Walgreens Newsroom, “Facts & FAQs,” https://news.walgreens.com/fact-sheets/frequently-asked-questions.htm, accessed September 15, 2019; “Ranking the Top 50 Fast-Food Chains in America,” QSR Magazine, August 5, 2019, https://www.qsrmagazine.com/content/qsr50-2019-top-50-chart, accessed September 15, 2019.
14.1889 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 3.
15.Door-to-door mail delivery was first inaugurated in 1863, but through the end of the 19th century was only offered in large cities. 37th Congress, 3rd Session, “Ch. 71: An Act to Amend the Laws Relating to the Post-Office Department,” Statutes at Large, March 3, 1863.
16.The note on methods provides more documentation about the technical challenges of mapping post offices using this dataset.
17.As Alejandra Dubcovsky notes, communication networks are as much “about limits, boundaries, and exclusions” as they are about connections. Alejandra Dubcovsky, “Communication in Colonial North America,” History Compass 15, no. 9 (September 2017): 4, https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12408.
18.In 1864 there were 2,084 post offices west of the Kansas/Missouri border. In 1889, there were 10,777 post offices. 1864 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1864), 57; 1889 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 231.
19.1889 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 230–31. Figures calculated from the Annual Report of the Postmaster General between 1865–1889.
20.Calculated from yearly tallies of the Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 1865–1900. Between 1865 and 1900, the median percentage of postmasters who were removed, resigned, or died in office each year was 18.3 percent. The lowest annual percentage was 13.2 percent, and the highest was 36.9 percent. Over that same time there were some 325,000 combined changes to the nation’s workforce of postmasters.
21.William Dudley Foulke, Fighting the Spoilsmen: Reminiscences of the Civil Service Reform Movement (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1919), 54–64; Dorothy G. Fowler, The Cabinet Politician: The Postmasters General, 1829–1909 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943); Scott C. James, “Patronage Regimes and American Party Development from ‘The Age of Jackson’ to the Progressive Era,” British Journal of Political Science 36, no. 1 (2006): 39–60, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123406000032.
22.My thinking on the agency model has been influenced by the work of Natalie Marine-Street. Natalie Marine-Street, “Agents Wanted: Sales, Gender, and the Making of Consumer Markets in America, 1830–1930” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2016), https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/11616850. See also Sharon Ann Murphy, “Selecting Risks in an Anonymous World: The Agency System for Life Insurance in Antebellum America,” Business History Review 82, no. 1 (April 2008): 1–30.
23.Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 956–58. For an overview of Weber’s role in shaping conceptions of the state, see Ann Shola Orloff and Kimberly J. Morgan, “Introduction: The Many Hands of the State,” in The Many Hands of the State: Theorizing Political Authority and Social Control, ed. Kimberly J. Morgan and Ann Shola Orloff (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 5–7.
24.Richard White, “What Is Spatial History?,” The Spatial History Project, 2010, 1–36; Jo Guldi, “What Is the Spatial Turn?,” Spatial Humanities, Scholar’s Lab, University of Virginia, 2011, http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/.
25.On the role of scale in history, see Sebouh David Aslanian et al., “AHR Conversation How Size Matters: The Question of Scale in History,” American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (December 2013): 1431–72, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1431; Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris, and Jacques Revel, “Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History,” International History Review 33, no. 4 (December 1, 2011): 573–84, https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2011.620735. On the relationship between structure and individuals: Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 1–40; William H. Sewell, “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,” American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 1 (July 1992): 1–29, https://doi.org/10.2307/2781191; William Roy, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 13–14; Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (Autumn 2003): 116–18.
26.For the Pacific world during this period, see Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
27.For the power of individual states during this period, see William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). On federalism, see Kimberley S. Johnson, Governing the American State: Congress and the New Federalism, 1877–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
28.Cameron Blevins, Yan Wu, and Steven Braun, Paper Trails website, http://gossamernetwork.com.
29.For a discussion of digital history’s contributions to narrative form, see Arguing with Digital History working group, “Digital History and Argument” (White paper, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, November 13, 2017), https://rrchnm.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/digital-history-and-argument.RRCHNM.pdf.
1.I draw these observations from visits to the federal immigration court in Boston, Massachusetts, in September 2018 and from reflection essays written by my students after attending similar hearings. Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti, “Burgeoning Court Backlog of More than 850,000 Cases Undercuts Trump Immigration Agenda,” Washington Post, May 1, 2019, available online at https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/burgeoning-court-backlog-of-more-than-850000-cases-undercuts-trump-immigration-agenda/2019/05/01/09c0b84a-6b69-11e9-a66d-a82d3f3d96d5_story.html.
2.Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 956–58; Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 78. For an overview of Weber’s role in shaping conceptions of the state, see Ann Shola Orloff and Kimberly J. Morgan, “Introduction: The Many Hands of the State,” in The Many Hands of the State: Theorizing Political Authority and Social Control, ed. Kimberly J. Morgan and Ann Shola Orloff (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 5–7. Weber’s ideal type of bureaucracy was based on the early 20th-century Prussian civil service with which he was most familiar, but has since become something like a universal framework of bureaucracy.
3.William J. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (June 2008): 752–72, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.113.3.752.
4.For an overview of the state in the early republic, see Ariel Ron and Gautham Rao, “Introduction: Taking Stock of the State in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of the Early Republic 38, no. 1 (March 2018): 61–66, https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2018.0002. Max M. Edling, A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Hannah Farber, “State-Building after War’s End: A Government Financier Adjusts His Portfolio for Peace,” Journal of the Early Republic 38, no. 1 (March 2018): 67–76, https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2018.0003; Michele Landis Dauber, The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Gautham Rao, National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); David F. Ericson, Slavery in the American Republic: Developing the Federal Government, 1791–1861 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2011).
5.Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Stephen J. Rockwell, Indian Affairs and the Administrative State in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo, Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2017). For an overview of the American state during the postwar period, see Susan J. Pearson, “A New Birth of Regulation: The State of the State after the Civil War,” Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 3 (2015): 422–39.
6.Nicholas R. Parrillo, Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780–1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Bethel Saler, The Settlers’ Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America’s Old Northwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Lori J. Daggar, “The Mission Complex: Economic Development, ‘Civilization,’ and Empire in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 36, no. 3 (September 2016): 467–91, https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2016.0044.
7.For the relationship between metaphorical versus material treatments of space, see Karen Halttunen, “Groundwork: American Studies in Place—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 4, 2005,” American Quarterly 58, no. 1 (April 2006): 2–3. Geographers, not surprisingly, have thought much more critically and materially about the spatial dimensions of the state. See, for instance, John Agnew, “The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory,” Review of International Political Economy 1, no. 1 (1994): 53–80; Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden, “Henri Lefebvre on State, Space, Territory,” International Political Sociology 3, no. 4 (December 2009): 353–77, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2009.00081.x; Neil Brenner et al., “Introduction: State Space in Question,” in State/Space: A Reader, ed. Neil Brenner et al. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 1–26.; Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Major historical works that discuss the relationship between space and state power include Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Charles S. Maier, Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016); Vanessa Ogle, “Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money, and the State, 1950s–1970s,” American Historical Review 122, no. 5 (December 2017): 1431–58, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1431; Ruth Mostern, “The Spatial History of State Power: A View from Imperial China,” in The Routledge Companion to Spatial History, ed. Ian Gregory, Don DeBats, and Don Lafreniere (London: Routledge, 2018), 462–78. Exceptions to the lack of attention to space and geography specifically in the context of the 19th-century American state include Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Susan Schulten, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Downs, After Appomattox; Rao, National Duties; Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
8.James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer, introduction to Boundaries of the State in US History, ed. James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 4.
9.For the geographical challenges posed by the US West, see Susan Schulten, “The Civil War and the Origins of the Colorado Territory,” Western Historical Quarterly 44, no. 1 (2013): 21–46, https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.44.1.0021; Rachel St. John, “Contingent Continent: Spatial and Geographic Arguments in the Shaping of the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Pacific Historical Review 86, no. 1 (February 2017): 18–49, https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2017.86.1.18.
10.C. W. Thompson to Andrew Jackson Faulk, January 20, 1864, box 1, folder 1, Andrew Jackson Faulk Papers, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, Connecticut (henceforth AJFP).
11.The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 7 (New York: James T. White, 1897), 220–21; George Washington Kingsbury, History of Dakota Territory, ed. George Martin Smith (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1915), 448–49, available online at http://archive.org/details/historyofdakotaterr01king.
12.Roman J. Hoyos, “The People’s Privilege: The Franking Privilege, Constituent Correspondence, and Political Representation in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” Law and History Review 31, no. 1 (2013): 101–38, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248012000843; Matthew Glassman, Franking Privilege: Historical Development and Options for Change (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, April 22, 2015), https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34274.pdf; John, Spreading the News, 57–58, 240; Kathy J. Cooke, “Who Wants White Carrots?: Congressional Seed Distribution, 1862 to 1923,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 17, no. 3 (July 2018): 475–500, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781418000075.
13.The Pembina Post Office, then in Minnesota Territory, opened in 1851. 1851 Official Register of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1851), 605. 1862 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1862), 155. Telegraph construction in Dakota was plagued by a lack of trees to use for poles. James Schwoch, Wired into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 28–29.
14.D. N. Cooley to Andrew Jackson Faulk, August 9, 1866, box 1, folder 2, AJFP.
15.Alexander Delmar to Andrew Jackson Faulk, December 5, 1867, box 1, folder 5; Department of the Interior, General Land Office to Andrew Jackson Faulk, August 10, 1868, box 1, folder 7; Department of the State, State of Texas to Andrew Jackson Faulk, December 8, 1868, box 1, folder 7, AJFP. John H. Brodhead to Andrew Jackson Faulk, October 26, 1866, box 1, folder 2; George H. Merrill to Andrew Jackson Faulk, November 20, 1868, box 1, folder 7, AJFP.
16.Charles E. Hedges to Andrew Jackson Faulk, October 23, 1867, and John L. Jolley to Andrew Jackson Faulk, October 18, 1867, box 1, folder 5, AJFP.
17.Andrew Jackson Faulk to C. E. M., Chief Clerk for Office Indian Affairs, March 23, 1867, box 1, folder 3; Charles E. Hedges to A. J. Faulk, October 23, 1867, box 1, folder 5, AJFP.
18.Andrew Faulk to William Seward, August 9, 1866, box 1, folder 2, Andrew Jackson Faulk Letters and Speeches, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois, Ayer.MS.3070. For the larger context of “loyalty oaths,” see Anne Sarah Rubin, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 164–71.
19.Elliott West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Elliott West, “Reconstructing Race,” Western Historical Quarterly 34, no. 1 (April 2003): 6–26. See also Stacey L. Smith, “Beyond North and South: Putting the West in the Civil War and Reconstruction,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 4 (November 2016): 566–91, https://doi.org/10.1353/cwe.2016.0073.
20.Alfred Howe Terry to Andrew Faulk, June 3, 1868, box 1, folder 1, Andrew Jackson Faulk Letters and Speeches, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois, Ayer.MS.3070.
21.Andrew Jackson Faulk to N. G. Taylor, April 4, 1867, box 1, folder 4; S. L. Spink to Andrew Faulk, June 16, 1867, box 1, folder 4; Andrew Faulk to the Department of the Interior, Office of Indian Affairs, August 4, 1868, box 3, folder 41; Charles E. Mix to Andrew Faulk, June 5, 1868, box 3, folder 41,AJFP. See also Andrew Faulk to N. G. Taylor, August 15, 1868 in box 1, folder 2, Andrew Jackson Faulk Letters and Speeches, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois, Ayer.MS.3070.
22.P. H. Conger to Andrew Faulk, October 21, 1868, in box 1, folder 1, Andrew Jackson Faulk Letters and Speeches, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois, Ayer.MS.3070.
23.“Indians at the White House,” Washington (DC) Evening Star, February 23, 1867, 2, available online at: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1867-02-23/ed-1/seq-2/.
24.D. P. Bradford to Andrew Jackson Faulk, March 4, 1869, box 1, folder 9; Andrew Jackson Faulk to N. G. Taylor, April 29, 1867, box 1, folder 4; W. A. Burleigh to Andrew Jackson Faulk, January 13, 1866, box 1, folder 2, AJFP. For “civilizing” initiatives, see Linda M. Clemmons, “‘We Are Writing This Letter Seeking Your Help’: Dakotas, ABCFM Missionaries, and Their Uses of Literacy, 1863–1866,” Western Historical Quarterly 47, no. 2 (May 2016): 183–209, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whw071; Stephen Kantrowitz, “‘Citizen’s Clothing’: Reconstruction, Ho-Chunk Persistence, and the Politics of Dress,” in Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States, ed. Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 242–64.
25.Andrew Faulk to Charles E. Mix, March 23, 1867, box 1, folder 2, Andrew Jackson Faulk Letters and Speeches, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois, Ayer.MS.3070.
26.Andrew Jackson Faulk to Hon. D. M. Mills and Others, May 16, 1868, box 1, folder 6, AJFP.
27.Craig Howe, Lydia Whirlwind Soldier, and Lanniko L. Lee, eds., He Sapa Woihanble: Black Hills Dream (Saint Paul, MN: Living Justice, 2011).
28.General Alfred Howe Terry to Andrew Faulk, June 1, 1867, box 1, folder 1, Andrew Jackson Faulk Letters and Speeches, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois, Ayer.MS.3070.
29.“The Black Hills – Letters from Generals Sherman and Terry” Union and Dakotaian, June 15, 1867, box 1, folder 3, Andrew Jackson Faulk Letters and Speeches, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois, Ayer.MS.3070.
30.Charles H. Graves to Andrew Faulk, May 4, 1867, box 1, folder 1, Andrew Jackson Faulk Letters and Speeches, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois, Ayer.MS.3070.
31.The Official Register of the United States, 1867 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1867), 709; 1867 Annual Report of the Secretary of War, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1867), 442–43.
32.R. W. Taylor, Office of the First Comptroller of the Treasury Department to Andrew Jackson Faulk, box 1, folder 9, AJFP.
33.“History of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe,” Southern Ute Indian Tribe website, https://www.southernute-nsn.gov/history/, accessed September 10, 2019; Charles J. Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 990–95, available online at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.31210003349790; Jonathon C. Horn, “Brunot Agreement,” in Colorado Encyclopedia, May 18, 2016, https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/brunot-agreement.
34.Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409; Lorenzo Veracini, “‘Settler Colonialism’: Career of a Concept,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41, no. 2 (2013): 313–33.
35.Virginia Scharff, “Broadening the Battlefield: Conflict, Contingency, and the Mystery of Women’s Suffrage in Wyoming, 1869,” in Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States, ed. Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 206.
36.“SAN JUAN: Notes of a Georgetown Prospector,” Colorado Miner, July 18, 1874, 1, available online at https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=CLM18740718-01.2.3; “SAN JUAN: Something About its Mines,” Colorado Miner, August 22, 1874, 1, available online at https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=CLM18740822-01.2.2.
37.Andrew Gulliford, “Alferd Packer,” in Colorado Encyclopedia, September 3, 2019, https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/alferd-packer. See also “A Horrible Story,” Colorado Springs Gazette, June 6, 1874, 4, available online at https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=CSG18740606.2.103.
38.The Official Register of the United States, 1877 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1877), 545–46.
39.James Belich describes the postal system as one of the “vectors” that carried the “software” of settler expansion over the Anglo world. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 122–23, 184. Geographer Cole Harris similarly describes the underlying processes that underlay colonialism in the context of British Columbia in Cole Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94, no. 1 (March 2004): 165–82, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2004.09401009.x.
40.Two of the landmark books in the “new western history” emphasize these three organizations: Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (W. W. Norton, 1987), 58–60, 138–40, 191–96; White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own, 87–93, 130, 137–54.
41.Two sources were used to create Figure 1.2. Every two years, the US government published The Official Register of the United States for 1877, a directory listing the names and locations of every civilian who worked in the judicial, legislative, and executive branches of government. A separate dataset collected by historian Benjamin Brands provides additional data about the US Army and its personnel. Benjamin Brands, “Mapping the Army: Professionalization and 19th Century Army Posts,” Benjamin Brands Personal Website (blog), December 11, 2014, http://benjamindbrands.net/uncategorized/mapping-the-army-professionalization-and-19th-century-army-posts-final-project-blog/. Many thanks to Benjamin for sharing this dataset.
42.The Official Register of the United States, 1877 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1877), 123, 188, 283.
43.For discussions of the Treasury Department, see Parrillo, Against the Profit Motive, 221–88; Edling, A Hercules in the Cradle; Rao, National Duties. For the history of the Department of the Interior, see Megan Black, The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 16–50.
44.There were 5,096 postmasters, 440 clerks, and 47 letter carriers in the West in 1877. Figures compiled from The Official Register of the United States, 1877; 1877 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1877), 6–7.
45.The Official Register of the United States, 1877, 545–46; The Official Register of the United States, 1879, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1879), 164–65; Eric Twitty, Historic Mining Resources of San Juan County, Colorado (Denver: United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 2010), 49; Encyclopedia Staff, “Animas Forks,” in Colorado Encyclopedia, August 31, 2017, https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/animas-forks.
46.Natalie Marine-Street, “Agents Wanted: Sales, Gender, and the Making of Consumer Markets in America, 1830–1930” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University, 2016), available online at https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/11616850; Amy Sopcak-Joseph, “Reconstructing and Gendering the Distribution Networks of Godey’s Lady’s Book in the Nineteenth Century,” Book History 22, no. 1 (2019): 161–95, https://doi.org/10.1353/bh.2019.0005; Sharon Ann Murphy, “Selecting Risks in an Anonymous World: The Agency System for Life Insurance in Antebellum America,” Business History Review 82, no. 1 (April 2008): 1–30; James H. Madison, “The Evolution of Commercial Credit Reporting Agencies in Nineteenth-Century America,” Business History Review 48, no. 2 (July 1974): 164–86.
47.52nd Congress, 2d Session, “1893 Postal Laws and Regulations,” 177–80. This salary ranged from $1,000 to $8,000 at New York City, the largest post office in the country. 1887 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887), 98. Presidential postmasters oversaw offices that generated more than $1,900 in receipts each year, served four-year terms, and were appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by the Senate. These postmasters were broken into first-, second-, and third-class categories depending on the size of their post office.
48.In 1871, 96 percent of the post offices were fourth-class offices. In 1889, that number was 95.4 percent, and in 1899, it was 94.4 percent. 1871 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1871), 85; 1889 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1889), 230–31; 1889 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1899), 822–23. For postmasters earning less than one hundred dollars a year, see 1901 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 983.
49.1877 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1877), 8. In 1877, there were 8,178 star routes versus 958 railroad routes versus 98 steamboat routes.
50.Arthur Harry Bissell and Thomas B. Kirby, The Postal Laws and Regulations of the United States of America, Published in Accordance with the Act of Congress Approved March 3, 1879 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1879), 55–63, 92–93, 135–43.
51.The Official Register of the United States, 1877, 280–81; Colorado Business Directory and Annual Register for 1877 (Denver: J. A. Blake, 1877), 187, 190, 193, available online at http://archive.org/details/coloradostatebus00gaze. Colorado Springs Gazette, September 30, 1876, 2, available online at https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=CSG18760930.2.29. For more details on the commission and fee system of the General Land Office, see Parrillo, Against the Profit Motive, 162–78. Settlers who lived far away from a federal land office could go to their county court, where a clerk could process the application for an additional fee.
52.Charles A. Lindquist, “The Origin and Development of the United States Commissioner System,” American Journal of Legal History 14, no. 1 (January 1970): 1–16, https://doi.org/10.2307/844516.
53.The Official Register of the United States, 1877, 313. Annual Report of the Attorney General of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1877), available online at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000521490. The Official Register of the United States, 1879, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1879), 405.
54.The Official Register of the United States, 1877, 310–42.
55.Annual Report of the Commissioner of Pensions to the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1877), 12–14; The Official Register of the United States, 1877, 292. For more on pensions, see Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992); Dale Kretz, “Pensions and Protest: Former Slaves and the Reconstructed American State,” Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 3 (August 24, 2017): 425–45, https://doi.org/10.1353/cwe.2017.0061.
56.Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 7–82. Much like postmasters, enumerators were patronage appointments. By the 1900 census, there were 53,000 of these enumerator positions to distribute to party operatives. See Anderson, American Census, 83–115. For postmasters as enumerators, see “The Next Census,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 20, 1879, 6, available online at https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SDU18790920.2.58&srpos=1.
57.For the Railway Mail Service, see Daniel Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 76–83, 96–102.
58.Other examples of the agency model at work in the federal government include contractors for the US Army and Office of Indian Affairs, overseas consuls, the Weather Bureau, and immigration agents. See Nicole Phelps, “Looking for the National Dream,” Researching the US Consular Service (blog), August 17, 2017, https://blog.uvm.edu/nphelps/2017/08/07/looking-for-the-national-dream/; Jamie L. Pietruska, Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 108–55; Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 62–89.
59.Structural power has been extensively theorized across different disciplines, but I have found two approaches especially useful: Susan Strange, States and Markets (London: Pinter, 1988), 24–25; William Roy, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 13–14.
60.Geographers such as Alan Lester and Cole Harris have articulated similar frameworks for understanding the relationship between spatial networks and imperial power. Alan Lester, “Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire,” History Compass 4, no. 1 (January 2006): 124–41, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2005.00189.x; Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess?”
61.Charles Tilly, for instance, describes states as “centralized, differentiated, and autonomous structures,” while Michael Mann defines the state as “a territorially centralized form of organization.” Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, A.D. 990–1992 (Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1990), 5; Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results,” European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie 25, no. 2 (November 1984): 185, 189, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003975600004239; Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 5. For the way in which people conceive of states as vertical, top-down entities, see James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality,” American Ethnologist 29, no. 4 (2002): 981–1002.”
62.Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State,” 185.
63.Even some of the language used when discussing the state points toward an assumption of centralization, such as “central government” or “central state” being used as a synonym for “federal government” (rather than state or local governments). Prominent scholars of the state who actively employ Michael Mann’s definition of central government and phrases such as “central government” or “central state” include Novak, “Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” 763; Balogh, A Government Out of Sight, 3, 76, 155, 225; Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, 314; Saler, The Settlers’ Empire, 5, 7, 15; Kimberley S. Johnson, Governing the American State: Congress and the New Federalism, 1877–1929 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 1–14; Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (2000): 819–22, https://doi.org/10.2307/2651811.
64.Marshall Henry Cushing, Story of Our Post Office (A. M. Thayer, 1893), 277–81; 1882 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1882), xvi.
65.1889 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 7.
66.An increasing number of historians of the American state are emphasizing the power of local state actors on the periphery rather than centralized administrators. These include Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 131–59; Cathleen D. Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Saler, The Settlers’ Empire, 13–40; Alice L. Baumgartner, “The Line of Positive Safety: Borders and Boundaries in the Rio Grande Valley, 1848–1880,” Journal of American History 101, no. 4 (March 2015): 1106–22; Benjamin Hoy, “Uncertain Counts: The Struggle to Enumerate First Nations in Canada and the United States, 1870–1911,” Ethnohistory 62, no. 4 (October 2015): 729–50, https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-3135322; Honor Sachs, Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 13–40; Tracy L. Steffes, “Governing the Child: The State, the Family, and the Compulsory School in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Boundaries of the State in US History, ed. James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 157–82; Laura F. Edwards, “Reconstruction and the History of Governance,” in The World the Civil War Made, ed. Gregory Downs and Kate Masur (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 22–45; Hidetaka Hirota, “Exclusion on the Ground: Racism, Official Discretion, and the Quotidian Enforcement of General Immigration Law in the Pacific Northwest Borderland,” American Quarterly 69, no. 2 (June 26, 2017): 347–70, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2017.0031; Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go, 62–89; Stefan Link and Noam Maggor, “The United States as a Developing Nation: Revisiting the Peculiarities of American History,” Past and Present 246, no. 1 (February 2020): 31, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz032.
67.William Novak makes this point in Novak, “The Concept of the State in American History,” 338–39.
68.For examples of postal administrator’s frustrations and failures to regulate the periphery, see 1868 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1868), 30; 1874 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1874), 128; 1875 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1875), xxxiii; 1876 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1876), xxxii; 1877 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 165; 1881 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881), 31; 1868 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1868), 30; 1875 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1875), xxxiii; 1876 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1876), xxxii.
69.Sociologist Theda Skocpol describes this as a “Tocquevillian” model of state power. Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 21.
70.For the Canadian Post, see Chantal Amyot and John Willis, Country Post: Rural Postal Service in Canada, 1880 to 1945 (Gatineau, QC: Canadian Postal Museum, 2003), 47–48, 57–59; Velasco, “Natural Resources,” 152–55, 168–69. For the Japanese postal system see Patricia L. Maclachlan, “Post Office Politics in Modern Japan: The Postmasters, Iron Triangles, and the Limits of Reform,” Journal of Japanese Studies 30, no. 2 (July 30, 2004): 286, doi:10.1353/jjs.2004.0044; Janet Hunter, “Technology Transfer and the Gendering of Communications Work: Meiji Japan in Comparative Historical Perspective,” Social Science Japan Journal 14, no. 1 (January 2011): 1–12, doi:10.1093/ssjj/jyq005; Patricia L. Maclachlan, The People’s Post Office: The History and Politics of the Japanese Postal System, 1871–2010 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012), 46, 66–67. For the Russian Post, see K. V. Bazilevich, The Russian Posts in the XIX Century, trans. David M. Skipton (n.p.: Rossica Society of Russian Philately, 1987), 155.
71.State infrastructure does not follow deterministic rules of demography and geography. If it did, the Russian postal system would have been more than twice as large as the US Post. Instead, it was a fraction of the size. Statistics compiled by John Gerring and Jon Rogowski from Union Postale Universelle, Statistique Générale du Service Postal Publieé par le Bureau International: Année 1889 (Berne: Imprimerie Suter & Lierow, 1891). See also 1889 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 231, 254. A closer international state model to the gossamer network were the imperial networks of colonial powers. See Alan Lester, “Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire,” History Compass 4, no. 1 (January 2006): 124–41, doi:10.1111/j.1478-0542.2005.00189.x.
72.Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, 345.
73.Manu Karuka makes a similar observation about the importance of railroad infrastructure in the settler colonial project. Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 173. The Department of the Interior is another example of the less obvious ways in which federal organizations facilitated settler colonial expansion; see Black, The Global Interior, 5–6.
1.Benjamin Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, September 30, 1886; Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Henrietta Curtis, September 30, 1886, box 2, Curtis Family Correspondence, Huntington Library, San Marino, California (hereafter cited as CFC).
2.Henry J. Curtis to Mary Swift Tucker Curtis, April 7, 1847, box 1, CFC.
3.Philip A. Fisher, The Fisher Genealogy: A Record of the Descendants of Joshua, Anthony, and Cornelius Fisher, of Dedham, Mass., 1636–1640 (Everett, MA: Massachusetts Publishing Company, 1898), 218, available online at https://books.google.com/books?id=8kNMAAAAMAAJ. For more on the Curtis family, see Annette Atkins, We Grew Up Together: Brothers and Sisters in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 103–15.
4.Jamie Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, April 3, 1857, box 1, CFC.
5.Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 160–61; David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 15–41.
6.Jamie Curtis to Delia Curtis, July 9, 1857, box 1, CFC.
7.Benjamin Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, August 14, 1858, box 1, CFC.
8.Benjamin Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, April 15, 1861, box 1, CFC
9.Jamie Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, May 10, 1861, box 1, CFC.
10.Jamie Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, March 8, 1863, box 1, Curtis Family Correspondence, Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Atkins, We Grew Up Together, 108–9.
11.For the context of letter writing during the Civil War, see Henkin, The Postal Age, 137–46; Long B. Bui, “‘I Feel Impelled to Write’: Male Intimacy, Epistolary Privacy, and the Culture of Letter Writing during the American Civil War” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2016), available online at http://hdl.handle.net/2142/90815.
12.Letter written on May 24, 1863, referenced in Jamie Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, June 1, 1863, box 1, CFC.
13.Sarah Henrietta Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, January 7, 1864, box 1, CFC.
14.The regional category of “West” consists of all states and territories west of the Kansas/Missouri border. This region went from 1,357,593 people in the 1860 census to 4,943,121 people in the 1880 census. United States Census Office, 8th Census, Population of the United States in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior by Joseph C. G. Kennedy (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1864), available online at http://archive.org/details/populationofusin00kennrich; Charles Williams Seaton and Francis Amasa Walker, Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census (June 1, 1880) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883).
15.History of the Railway Mail Service: A Chapter in the History of Postal Affairs in the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1885), available online at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112118440061; Fred J. Romanski, “The ‘Fast Mail’: A History of the US Railway Mail Service,” Prologue Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2005): 12–21.
16.For Benjamin’s work as a mail agent, see Benjamin Curtis to Delia Curtis, June 29, 1865, box 1, CFC; The Official Register of the United States, 1867 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1867), 757. See also Benjamin Curtis to Delia Curtis, August 15, 1867, box 1, CFC. For Benjamin’s transfer West, see Benjamin Curtis to Delia Curtis, March 15, 1868, and Benjamin Curtis to Delia Curtis, October 31, 1868, CFC.
17.Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records, Accession No. AGS-0351-110, Document No. 1757, November 11, 1874, available online at https://glorecords.blm.gov/details/patent/default.aspx?accession=0351-110&docClass=AGS&sid=pegrp14u.zwm#patentDetailsTabIndex=1.
18.Benjamin Curtis to Delia Curtis, September 7, 1871; Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Curtis, July 25, 1872; Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Curtis, December 28, 1872, Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Curtis, December 28, 1872; Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Curtis, June 2, 1873; Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Curtis, October 24, 1873, box 1, CFC.
19.Sec. 441, “Who May Be Postmaster,” in US Post Office Department, The Postal Laws and Regulations of the United States of America, Comp., Rev., and Pub. in Accordance with the Act of Congress Approved March 30, 1886 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887). See also Marshall Henry Cushing, Story of Our Post Office (Boston, Mass: A. M. Thayer, 1893), 198.
20.Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Curtis, December 28, 1872, box 1, CFC.
21.Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Curtis, October 24, 1873, box 1, CFC. A credit agent for R. G. Dun & Co. reported that Benjamin’s boss was heavily in debt and making only $10–25 a day in sales. See entry for “J. E. Moore” in R.G. Dun & Co. Credit Report Volumes, Washington DC, vol. 24: Santa Cruz, Shasta, Sierra, Siskiyou, Page 185, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.
22.1875 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1875), 210.
23.The Official Register of the United States, 1875 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1875), 732. Benjamin was appointed on May 10, 1875, and replaced on December 27, 1875. United States Post Office Department, Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1871, M841 (Washington, DC: National Archives Microfilm Publication, 1873), Shasta County, California, p. 1232; “Domestic News,” Marysville Daily Appeal, May 18, 1875, 1, available online at http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=MDA18750518.2.2. “Postal Changes,” Sacramento Daily Union, January 3, 1876, 2, available online at http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SDU18760103.2.15.1. See also Henry G. Langley, The Pacific Coast Business Directory for the Pacific States and Territories, 1876–1878 (San Francisco: Henry G. Langley, 1875), 143, available online at http://archive.org/details/pacificcoastbusi187678lang.
24.Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846–1873 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012).
25.Megan Black makes a similar point about the role of the Department of the Interior in Megan Black, The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 5–6.
26.“Tribal History,” Official Home of the Pit River Tribe, http://pitrivertribe.org/tribal-history/, accessed September 15, 2019; Madley, An American Genocide, 243–76.
27.Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records, Accession No. AGS-0351-110, Document No. 1757, November 11, 1874, available online at https://glorecords.blm.gov/details/patent/default.aspx?accession=0351-110&docClass=AGS&sid=pegrp14u.zwm#patentDetailsTabIndex=1.
28.E. D. Boyd and Walter L. Nicholson, “Map of Part of the United States Exhibiting the Principal Mail Routes West of the Mississippi River” (Washington, DC, 1867), National Archives II, College Park, MD, I, Record Group 77, Records of the War Department, Map 285. For mail routes in 1872 see Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Curtis, December 27, 1872, box 1, CFC.
29.Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Curtis, October 24, 1873, box 1, CFC. Benjamin wrote Sarah from Burgettville, California, and addressed his letter to Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. For the broader context of homesickness during this period, see Susan J. Matt, “You Can’t Go Home Again: Homesickness and Nostalgia in U.S. History,” Journal of American History 94, no. 2 (2007): 469–97, doi:10.2307/25094961; Susan J. Matt, Homesickness: An American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). The Curtis correspondence is part of what David Henkin describes as the rise of a “postal intimacy” during the middle of the 19th century. David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 93–147.
30.Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Curtis, December 27, 1872, and Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Curtis, December 28, 1872, box 1, CFC.
31.Henry Yu and Stephanie Chan, “The Cantonese Pacific: Migration Networks and Mobility Across Space and Time,” in Trans-Pacific Mobilities: The Chinese and Canada, ed. Lloyd L. Wong (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017), 25–48; Elizabeth Sinn, “Pacific Ocean: Highway to Gold Mountain,” Pacific Historical Review 83, no. 2 (May 1, 2014): 220–37, doi:10.1525/phr.2014.83.2.220; Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 192–99.
32.Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Curtis, May 10, 1875, box 1, CFC.
33.“School Matters,” Marin Journal, July 11, 1878, 3, available online at https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=MJ18780711.2.25; “Our District Fair,” Marin Journal, July 24, 1879, 3, available online at https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=MJ18790724.2.24; “Miss Curtis’ School,” Marin Journal, 1 July 1880, page 3, available online at https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=MJ18800701.2.12.1.
34.Benjamin Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, June 15, 1881, box 1, CFC.
35.People west of the Kansas/Missouri border sent $24,369,434.92 between July 1880 and June 1881. 1881 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881), 678.
36.There are no surviving letters from the Curtis siblings documenting this move, but references appear in California newspapers. “Local Intelligence,” Marin Journal, December 1, 1881, 3, available online at https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=MJ18811201.2.24; “Local Intelligence,” Marin Journal, May 18, 1882, 3, available online at https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=MJ18820518.2.12.
37.For Benjamin’s struggles raising an orchard, see Delia Augusta Curtis to Jamie Curtis, June 20, 1883, box 1, CFC; Sarah Henrietta Curtis to Jamie Curtis, November 27, 1884, box 1, CFC.
38.Douglas L. Lowell, “The California Southern Railroad and the Growth of San Diego,” Journal of San Diego History 31, no. 4 (Fall 1985), available online at https://sandiegohistory.org/journal/1985/october/railroad-8/. Delia Curtis appears frequently as a buyer and seller of real estate in the Los Angeles Daily Herald. “Property Transfers,” Los Angeles Daily Herald, December 3, 1886, 3, available online at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042460/1886-12-03/ed-1/seq-3/; “Daily Real Estate Record,” Los Angeles Daily Herald, January 22, 1887, 7, available online at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042460/1887-01-22/ed-1/seq-7/; “Daily Real Estate Record,” Los Angeles Daily Herald, August 10, 1887, 3, available online at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042460/1887-08-10/ed-1/seq-3/.
39.Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Henrietta and Delia Augusta Curtis, February 12, 1885, box 2, CFC.
40.Alan H Patera and John S Gallagher, Arizona Post Offices (Lake Grove, OR: Depot, 1988), 63. The vast majority (96 percent) of Arizona’s 141 post offices were operated in a similar fashion by non-salaried postmasters who earned less than one thousand dollars a year in fees and commissions. United States Post Office Department, United States Official Postal Guide, January 1885, vol. 7, no. 1, 2nd (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1885), 770, available online at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924093025223.
41.Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Henrietta and Delia Augusta Curtis, April 21, 1885; Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Henrietta and Delia Augusta Curtis, August 10, 1886, box 2, CFC.
42.Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Henrietta and Delia Augusta Curtis, May 6, 1885, box 2, CFC.
43.Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Henrietta and Delia Augusta Curtis, May 20, 1885, box 2, CFC.
44.Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Henrietta and Delia Augusta Curtis, June 11, 1885, box 2, CFC.
45.Patera and Gallagher, Arizona Post Offices, 63. For details on Robertson, see Portrait and Biographical Record of Arizona (Chicago: Chapman, 1901), 183, available online at https://books.google.com/books?id=mgERAwAAQBAJ.
46.United States Office of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, for the Year 1886 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1886), 39–41, 381, available online at http://archive.org/details/usindianaffairs86usdorich.
47.Contemporaries remarked on the lack of postal coverage within reservations. One white reformer, for instance, criticized the fact that “the post office goes to the edge of [reservations] and stops” and called the mail a “Christianizing institution.” Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian (Philadelphia: Sherman, 1886), 52, available online at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100345799.
48.For a history of the reservation, see John Bret Harte, “The San Carlos Indian Reservation, 1872–1886: An Administrative History” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 1972). For the broader treatment of spatiality and state power on reservations, see Matthew G. Hannah, “Space and Social Control in the Administration of the Oglala Lakota (‘Sioux’), 1871–1879,” Journal of Historical Geography 19, no. 4 (October 1993): 412–32, https://doi.org/10.1006/jhge.1993.1026.
49.Justin Randolph Gage, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), 17–51. ; United States Office of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, for the Year 1886 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1886), 392, available online at http://archive.org/details/usindianaffairs86usdorich. For other instances of Native peoples using the mail as a tool of resistance, see Linda M. Clemmons, “‘We Are Writing This Letter Seeking Your Help’: Dakotas, ABCFM Missionaries, and Their Uses of Literacy, 1863–1866,” Western Historical Quarterly 47, no. 2 (May 1, 2016): 183–209, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whw071.
50.Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Curtis and Delia Curtis, April 10, 1885; Benjamin Curtis to Delia Curtis, February 2, 1887, box 2, CFC.
51.Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Curtis and Delia Curtis, April 22, 1886; Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Curtis and Delia Curtis, October 22, 1886, box 2, CFC.
52.Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Curtis and Delia Curtis, August 10, 1886; Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Curtis and Delia Curtis, September 3, 1886, box 2, CFC.
53.Benjamin Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, September 8, 1886; Benjamin Curtis to Sarah Henrietta Curtis, September 8, 1886, box 2, CFC.
54.Sara M. Gregg, “Imagining Opportunity: The 1909 Enlarged Homestead Act and the Promise of the Public Domain,” Western Historical Quarterly 50, no. 3 (July 1, 2019): 257–79, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whz044; Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo, Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017).
55.Sarah Henrietta Curtis to Jamie Curtis, November 27, 1884, box 1, CFC.
56.Benjamin Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, May 31, 1889, box 2, CFC. For more on public land policies, see Paul W. Gates, “Public Land Issues in the United States,” Western Historical Quarterly 2, no. 4 (1971): 363–76; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (W. W. Norton, 1987), 61; Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, “Land-Grab Universities,” High Country News, March 30, 2020, https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities.
57.Benjamin Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, May 31, 1889, box 2, CFC. For more on public land policies, see Gary D. Libecap and Zeynep Kocabiyik Hansen, “‘Rain Follows the Plow’ and Dryfarming Doctrine: The Climate Information Problem and Homestead Failure in the Upper Great Plains, 1890–1925,” Journal of Economic History 62, no. 1 (March 2002): 86–120, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050702044042.
58.Benjamin Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, April 20, 1887, box 2, CFC.
59.“Delinquent Tax List of Gila County, Arizona, For The Year Ending December 31 1887,” Arizona Silver Belt, March 24, 1888, 2, available online at http://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/cdm/ref/collection/sn84021913/id/810.
60.Patera and Gallagher, Arizona Post Offices, 63.
61.The Official Register of the United States, 1887, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887), 413.
62.The Official Register of the United States, 1889, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1889), 465.
63.Benjamin Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, February 2, 1887; Benjamin Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, April 20, 1887, box 2, CFC.
64.Benjamin Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, October 28, 1886, box 2, CFC.
65.Benjamin Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, February 2, 1887; Benjamin Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, February 16–17, 1887, box 2, CFC.
66.The Official Register of the United States, 1885, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1885), 397–98.
67.Charles Roeser Jr., Post Route Map of the Territories of New Mexico and Arizona: With Parts of Adjacent States and Territories, Showing Post Offices with the Intermediate Distances between Them and Mail Routes in Operation on 1st October 1883 (Washington, DC, 1883), 1:800,000, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, Connecticut, call number 842gmd 1883; W. L. Nicholson, Post Route Map of the Territories of New Mexico and Arizona with Parts of Adjacent States and Territories (Washington, DC, 1885), 1:760,320, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG28, Records of the Division of Topography, Regional Postal Route Maps Before 1894, folder VIII.
68.Mary Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, February 13, 1891, CFC.
69.Benjamin Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, March 22, 1891; Benjamin Curtis to Jamie Curtis, June 21, 1891; Benjamin Curtis to Jamie Curtis, July 19, 1891, box 2, CFC.
70.Benjamin Curtis to Jamie Curtis, November 8, 1891, Benjamin Curtis to Jamie Curtis, November 16, 1891, box 2, CFC.
71.United States Post Office Department, Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1871, M841 (Washington, DC: National Archives Microfilm Publication, 1873), Shasta County, California, 246–47. The Official Register of the United States, 1889 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1889), 476; The Official Register of the United States, 1891 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1891), 483. Jamie H. Curtis to Sarah Curtis and Delia Curtis, July 23, 1890; Jamie H. Curtis to Sarah Curtis and Delia Curtis, September 14, 1890, box 2, CFC.
72.Benjamin Curtis to Jamie Curtis, November 8, 1891; Benjamin Curtis to Jamie Curtis, November 16, 1891; Delia Augusta Curtis to Jamie Curtis, March 30, 1892; box 2, CFC.
73.Delia Augusta Curtis to Jamie Curtis, March 30, 1892; box 2, CFC.
74.For the suspicion of suicide, see Elizabeth MacPhail, “Ranching in Arizona, 1885–1891: Curtis Family Letters,” Mixed Brands, 187, box 2, CFC; “He Was Out of Work” San Francisco Call, July 1, 1892, 1, available online at https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SFC18920701.2.29.
75.Delia Augusta Curtis to Jamie Curtis, March 30, 1892, box 2, CFC. For the route of the letter, see Charles Roeser Jr., Post Route Map of the States of California and Nevada with Adjacent Parts of Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Arizona and of the Republic of Mexico: showing post offices with the intermediate distances and mail routes in operation on the 1st of October 1891 (Washington, DC, 1891), 1:750,000, Norman B. Leventhal Map Center Collection, Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts, call number G4361.P8 1891.U55x, available online at https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:cj82kj69r. For estimated travel times, see Jamie Curtis to Delia Augusta Curtis, October 19, 1890, and Jamie Curtis to Sarah and Delia Curtis, July 19, 1891, box 2, CFC.
1.For the importance of the American West during the Civil War, see Virginia Scharff, ed., Empire and Liberty: The Civil War and the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill, eds., Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Stacey L. Smith, “Beyond North and South: Putting the West in the Civil War and Reconstruction,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 4 (November 3, 2016): 566–91, https://doi.org/10.1353/cwe.2016.0073; Margaret A. Nash, “Entangled Pasts: Land-Grant Colleges and American Indian Dispossession,” History of Education Quarterly 59, no. 4 (November 2019): 437–67, https://doi.org/10.1017/heq.2019.31; Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, “Land-Grab Universities,” High Country News, March 30, 2020, https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities. For more on the Republican Party and the West, see Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 73, 155–58; Steven Hahn, A Nation without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York: Viking, 2016), 6, 284–85, 359, 391–400. For “Yankee Leviathan” see Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
2.1861 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1861), 38; 1880 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880), 56–57. Figures calculated from Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 1860–1880.
3.Susan Schulten, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 7.
4.1882 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1882), 539–40; 1884 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1884), 651–52.
5.James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
6.33rd Congress, 1st Session, “Ex. Doc. No. 121: The U.S. Naval Astronomical Expedition to the Southern Hemisphere, during the Years 1849-’50-’51–52. Volume VI. Magnetical and Meteorological Observations” (Washington, DC, July 13, 1854), 151; Edward Goodfellow, “Walter Lamb Nicholson, 1825–1895,” Bulletin of the Philosophical Society of Washington 13 (1900): 407–9.
7.Hugh Richard Slotten, Patronage, Practice, and the Culture of American Science: Alexander Dallas Bache and the U.S. Coast Survey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 145.
8.34th Congress, 3rd Session, “Ex. Doc. No. 17: Persons Employed in the Coast Survey” (Washington, DC, December 23, 1856), 6.
9.Schulten, Mapping the Nation, 142, 277. For more on the immense size and impact of the Coast Survey under Bache, see Slotten, Patronage, Practice, and the Culture of American Science. For Nicholson’s transfer, see Alexander Dallas Bache to W. L. Nicholson, May 1, 1863, Alexander Dallas Bache Collection, American Philosophical Society, box 1. Thanks to John Cloud and Albert E. Therberge at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for information about Nicholson’s time at the Coast Survey.
10.See Arthur Hecht, “The District of Columbia Staff of the Post Office Department Topographer, 1830–1899,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. 50 (January 1980): 95–96, https://doi.org/10.2307/40067810; Arthur Hecht, “Postal Maps of the U.S. Postal Service in the 18th and 19th Century,” American Philatelist 93 (November 1979): 981–86; Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 69–71, 101, 221–23. For the broader significance of the Bradley map, see Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 221–26.
11.37th Congress, 2d Session, “H. Ex. Doc. No. 83: Names of Persons Employed in the Coast Survey. Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury, Transmitting a List of the Number and Names of Persons Employed in the Coast Survey, and Expenditures, during the Year Ending June 30, 1861” (Washington, DC, March 25, 1862).
12.For the Coast Survey budget, see Hugh Richard Slotten, “The Dilemmas of Science in the United States: Alexander Dallas Bache and the U.S. Coast Survey,” Isis 84, no. 1 (March 1993): 26; 1864 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1864), 13, 27, 88.
13.For the launch of this new initiative, see 1864 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 13.
14.American Philosophical Society, “Stated Meeting, July 15, 1864,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge 9, no. 71 (1865): 403–4.
15.The same route does not appear on the subsequent 1869 map of the western postal system: E. D. Boyd and Walter L. Nicholson, “Map of that Portion of the United States of America West of the 102nd Meridian Exhibiting the Post Offices and Mail Routes” (1869), NARA II, Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Map 277.
16.For a timeline of the Topographer’s Office maps, see Finding Aid for Record Group 28, National Archives II at College Park, Maryland, RG28, Records of the Division of Topography, Appendix III: “Chronological List of Post Route Maps, 1866–1884. Filed in the Archives among Records of Agencies Other Than the Post Office Department.”
17.To this day, the National Archives stores both maps separately from other Post Office Department maps, in the War Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, respectively. E. D. Boyd, “Map of Part of the United States Exhibiting the Principal Mail Routes West of the Mississippi River” (1867), NARA II, Record Group 77, Records of the War Department, Map 285; E. D. Boyd and Walter L. Nicholson, “Map of that Portion of the United States of America West of the 102nd Meridian Exhibiting the Post Offices and Mail Routes” (1869), NARA II, Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Map 277–79; “Post Route Map of the States of California and Nevada,” (1876), NARA II, Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Map 278. A handful of non-western maps were similarly filed under the Bureau of Indian Affairs. See Finding Aid for Record Group 28, National Archives II at College Park, Maryland, RG 28, Records of the Division of Topography Appendix III: “Chronological List of Post Route Maps, 1866–1884. Filed in the Archives Among Records of Agencies other than the Post Office Department.”
18.Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (W. W. Norton, 1987), 59–60, 70; Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Mark W Summers, The Era of Good Stealings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 49–50, 105. For the western trope of a corrupt surveyor, see William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the America West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 573.
19.Paul Stuart, The Indian Office: Growth and Development of American Institution, 1865–1900 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1979), 17–20; Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 586–89. Stephen Rockwell offers a different take on the Bureau of Indian Affairs, arguing that it was a far more effective agency if envisioned in terms of advancing a project of national expansion. Stephen J. Rockwell, Indian Affairs and the Administrative State in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For the US Army in the West, see Kevin Adams, Class and Race in the Frontier Army: Military Life in the West, 1870–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), 20–24, 156–58.
20.As roving detectives, postal inspectors gave rise to a cottage industry of memoirs written in the vein of crime fiction, like the series of sketches published by the chief of the division detailing “the many means and complicated contrivances of the wily and unscrupulous to defraud the public.” Patrick Henry Woodward, The Secret Service of the Post-Office Department, as Exhibited in the Wonderful Exploits of Special Agents or Inspectors in the Detection, Pursuit, and Capture of Depredators upon the Mails (Columbus, OH: Estill, 1886). For other examples see James Holbrook, Ten Years among the Mail Bags (Philadelphia: H. Cowperthwait, 1855); Torrance Parker and David Bigelow Parker, A Chautauqua Boy in ’61 and Afterward Reminiscences by David B. Parker, Second Lieutenant, Seventy-Second New York, Detailed Superintendent of the Mails of the Army of the Potomac, United States Marshal, District of Virginia, Chief Post Office Inspector (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1912); James Rees, Foot-Prints of a Letter Carrier; Or, A History of the World’s Correspondence: Containing Biographies, Tales, Sketches, Incidents, and Statistics Connected with Postal History (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1866). For a discussion of this genre, see John, Spreading the News, 77.
21.Postmaster General David M. Key to Hon. Stanley Matthews, June 30, 1876, Parker Letterbook, David Parker Collection, University of Delaware. Many thanks to Richard R. John for lending his notes on this source.
22.Quincy Brooks to Postmaster General Alexander Randall, December 26, 1865; Quincy Brooks to Elisha Applegate, December 30, 1865; Quincy Brooks to Second Assistant Postmaster General George W. McLellan, June 4, 1866, in Alan Patera, ed., “Your Obedient Servant”: The Letters of Quincy A. Brooks, Special Agent of the Post Office Department, 1865–1867 (Lake Oswego, OR: Raven, 1986), 23, 24, 110. Brooks seems to have left the Post Office Department in 1869. Postal Railway-Car Service: Papers Relating to Postal Railway-Car Service (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1874), 40–41.
23.Letter from W. L. Nicholson to Henry H. Bingham on January 16, 1882, in HR 47A-F21.2, box 2, RG 233, National Archives.
24.1868 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1868), 10–11; 1871 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1871), xi; 1873 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1873), xiii; 1883 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883), 715.
25.Fred J. Romanski, “The ‘Fast Mail’: A History of the US Railway Mail Service,” Prologue Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2005): 12–21; William Jefferson Dennis, The Traveling Post Office: History and Incidents of the Railway Mail Service (Des Moines: Homestead, 1916); Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America: A History (New York: Penguin, 2016), 159–80. The Railway Mail Service was also an early pocket of bureaucratic reform. In 1881, two years before the federal government even began to adopt limited civil service exams, the Railway Mail Service administered more than three thousand exams that tested clerks on their ability to sort 3.6 million postal cards. Test takers were graded on speed as well as accuracy, and, to add to the pressure, officials broadcast the exam scores for each of the service’s nine geographic divisions in the Annual Report of the Postmaster General. See 1881 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881), 325, 340; Daniel Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 76–83.
26.As early as 1868 the postmaster general specifically highlighted the utility of postal maps “to the clerks of the traveling (railroad) post offices, in sorting and distributing letters.” 1868 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 10–11; 1880 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880), 294. 1881 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 454.
27.1882 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 538. For an example of this map, see W. L. Nicholson, Railway Postal Diagram of the State of Wisconsin Prepared for the Use of the Railway Mail Service, 1882, 1:700,000, 1882, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/item/98688570. Postal inspectors also started receiving maps upon their appointment in the early 1870s. See Charles Henry to James Garfield, December 27, 1873, in James D. Norris and Arthur H. Shaffer, eds., Politics and Patronage in the Gilded Age: The Correspondence of James A. Garfield and Charles E. Henry (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1970), 75.
28.Representative Garfield speaking on April 20, 1878, 45th Congress, 2nd Session, Congressional Record 7, part 3:2677.
29.Representative Dunnell on January 24, 1881, 46th Congress, 3rd Session, Congressional Record 11, part 1:894.
30.Representative Shallenberger on April 23, 1880, 46th Congress, 2nd Session, Congressional Record 10, part 3:2700.
31.1880 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 294.
32.1880 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 296.
33.Kansas State Historical Society, “First Biennial Report” 1 (1879): 29, available online at http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000547922; “Additions to Library and Map-Rooms of the Society during the Year 1878,” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York 10 (January 1878): liii; “Accessions to the Map-Room, from May 27th, 1872, to May 26th, 1873,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 43 (January 1873): cxxxvi; Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Report of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Connection with Harvard University, vol. 3 (Salem, MA: Salem Press, 1887), 38, available online at http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000058910; Catalogue of the State Library of the State of Louisiana, up to March 31, 1886 (New Orleans: E. A. Brandao, 1886), 126, available online at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101073752741; Finding List of Books in the Public Library of Cincinnati. (Cincinnati: Board of Managers, 1882), 166, available online at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015033601561; Finding List of the Chicago Public Library (Chicago: Public Library Rooms, City Hall, 1887), 23, available online at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112084969226; State Historical Society of Wisconsin, “Wisconsin Historical Society Annual Meeting,” no. 5 (1875): 12; George M. Wheeler, Report upon the Third International Geographical Congress and Exhibition at Venice, Italy, 1881 Accompanied by Data Concerning the Principal Government Land and Marine Surveys of the World (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1885), 47–50; 1880 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 538–39; 1881 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881), 4541880
34.44th Congress, 2nd Session, “Ex. Doc. No. 20: Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Showing the Operations, Expenditures, and Condition of the Institution for the Year 1876” (Washington, DC, 1877), 21–23.
35.United States Centennial Commission, International Exhibition, 1876: Official Catalogue, part 1, Main Building and Annexes (Cambridge, MA: John R. Nagle, 1876), available online at http://archive.org/details/internationalex00commgoog.
36.Bruno Giberti, Designing the Centennial: A History of the 1876 International Exhibition in Philadelphia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002). I borrow “mastery of territory” from Matthew G Hannah, Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See also Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), 113–36.
37.Richard A Bartlett, Great Surveys of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962); Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire; Mike Foster, Strange Genius: The Life of Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden (Niwot, CO: Roberts Rinehart, 1994); Donald Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Robert Wilson, The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax—Clarence King in the Old West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).
38.On the linear narrative of progress in the history of cartography, see Matthew H. Edney, “Theory and the History of Cartography,” Imago Mundi 48, no. 1 (1996): 185–91, https://doi.org/10.1080/03085699608592841; J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
39.1874 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1874), 7, 265.
40.One map of Colorado from 1862 bears the stamp of the Post Office Topographer’s Office, along with similar notations to other maps produced by the Walter Nicholson’s office. It is likely that this map was used to prepare the department’s early maps of the western United States. Many thanks to Susan Schulten for alerting me to this map. Federick J. Ebert, Map of Colorado Territory embracing the Central Gold Region drawn by Frederick J. Ebert, under direction of the Governor Wm. Gilpin, Philadelphia: Jacob Monk, 1862. 1:760,320. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, https://www.loc.gov/item/2003630493/, accessed May 20, 2015.
41.Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010); Schulten, Mapping the Nation, 28–34.
42.The maps themselves were labeled as “diagrams,” and employees in the Topographer’s Office often used “map” and “diagram” interchangeably when describing their work. 45th Congress, 2st Session, “H. Mis. Doc. No. 65: Testimony Taken by the Committee on Expenditures in the Post Office Department” (Washington, DC, May 11, 1878), 15, 21.
43.45th Congress, 2st Session, 15.
44.For salaries of the various employees of the office, see 45th Congress, 2st Session, 3–4. As the title “draughtsman” implies, mostly men performed this labor, although a few women eventually moved into their ranks. Two out of 14 draughtsmen listed in the 1885 Official Register were women: The Official Register of the United States, 1885, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1885), 9. At least two draughtsmen had started as engineers in the West employed on railroad surveys or for local municipal governments. E. D. Boyd served as Denver’s city surveyor from 1859–1862, while Charles H. Poole was previously a surveyor for San Diego County and had worked on a railroad survey in the 1850s. For Boyd, see Frank Hall and Rocky Mountain Historical Company, History of the State of Colorado, Embracing Accounts of the Pre-Historic Races and Their Remains: The Earliest Spanish, French and American Explorations (Chicago: Blakely, 1890), 523. For Poole, see Jean Louis Berlandier Papers, Smithsonian Institution Archives, box 5, folder 22, p. 5, 20–21.
45.45th Congress, 2st Session, “Testimony Taken by the Committee on Expenditures in the Post Office Department,” 3–4.
46.Data calculated from The Official Register of the United States, 1879, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1879), 8. Cindy Aron calculated that 16 percent of the Washington’s government workforce was female in 1870, and 23 percent was female in 1880. Cindy Aron, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle-Class Workers in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 5, 40–62; Cameron Blevins, “Women and Federal Officeholding in the Late Nineteenth-Century U.S.,” Current Research in Digital History 2 (2019), https://doi.org/10.31835/crdh.2019.08. The Official Register offers clues to the demographics of the Topographer’s Office, in which 11 out of 15 of its female employees bear the title “Miss” rather than “Mrs.” The Official Register of the United States, 1879, vol. 2, 8.
47.45th Congress, 2st Session, “Testimony Taken by the Committee on Expenditures in the Post Office Department,” 15.
48.1880 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 297. For post office applications and site reports, see examples in Post Office Department Records of Site Locations 1837–1950, M1126 (Washington, DC: National Archives Microfilm Publication).
49.“Ideal type” is from Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 956–58.
50.Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 3–13.
51.Nicholson’s budget was $10,000 in 1864 and $35,000 in 1874. 1864 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 13, 27, 88; 1874 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 31; 1870 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1870), 38.
52.Letter from W. L. Nicholson, October 1, 1869, House Committee on Appropriations, NARA I RG 233, 41A, F2.22, Papers Relating to the Post Office Department.
53.Letter from John Creswell, May 7, 1870, printed in Congressional Globe, 41st Congress, 2nd Session, May 23, 1870, 3710.
54.1876 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1876), ix; 1877 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1877), x. For employee tenures during this period, see Hecht, “The District of Columbia Staff of the Post Office Department Topographer.”
55.See, for instance: Senator Ingalls speaking on June 9, 1876, 44th Congress, 1st Session, Congressional Record 4, pt. 4:3710; Representative Blount on January 24, 1881, 46th Congress, 3rd Session, Congressional Record 11, Part 1:895.
56.45th Congress, 2st Session, “Testimony Taken by the Committee on Expenditures in the Post Office Department,” 5.
57.45th Congress, 2st Session, 8, 10, 11.
58.45th Congress, 2st Session, 16, 15, 5–6, 16. More cautious employees declined to comment, while a few others declared their outright support for Nicholson. See 45th Congress, 2st Session, 10, 11, 14, 23, 24.
59.Dorothy G. Fowler, The Cabinet Politician: The Postmasters General, 1829–1909 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 144–45.
60.Entries for June 19, 1872, May 15, 1873, June 7, 1873, in James A. Garfield, The Diary of James A. Garfield, ed. Brown Williams, vol. 2 (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1967), 65, 180, 190.
61.45th Congress, 2st Session, “Testimony Taken by the Committee on Expenditures in the Post Office Department,” 3, 6, 9–11, 13, 16–18.
62.Later, a woman named Jessie Tannahill was appointed to the Topographer’s Office specifically “by the Indiana delegation” of Congressmen. When she was eventually fired, she penned a letter to the postmaster general pleading with him to reinstate her and appealing to him both “as a kind-hearted gentleman” and as a fellow “Indianan.” Jessie Tannahill to Walter Q. Gresham, June 21, 1883, in Walter Quintin Gresham Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, MSS24117, box 10.
63.45th Congress, 2st Session, “Testimony Taken by the Committee on Expenditures in the Post Office Department,” 1–5, 21. For more on patronage during this period, see Aron, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service, 96–135; Sean M. Theriault, “Patronage, the Pendleton Act, and the Power of the People,” Journal of Politics 65, no. 1 (2003): 50–68, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2508.t01-1-00003; Scott C. James, “Patronage Regimes and American Party Development from ‘the Age of Jackson’ to the Progressive Era,” British Journal of Political Science 36, no. 1 (2006): 39–60, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123406000032; Kate Masur, “Patronage and Protest in Kate Brown’s Washington,” Journal of American History 99, no. 4 (March 2013): 1047–71, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jas650.
64.American Philosophical Society, “Stated Meeting, July 15, 1864.”
65.Senator Sargent speaking on June 9, 1876, 44th Congress, 1st Session, Congressional Record 4, pt. 4:3711.
66.See Prairie post office in microfilm reel for Yolo County, California, and Sonoma post office in microfilm reel for Humboldt County, Nevada, in United States Post Office Department, Record of Appointment of Postmasters, 1832–September 30, 1971, M841 (Washington, DC: National Archives Microfilm Publication, 1973).
67.1877 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 7.
68.1888 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1888), 94.
69.45th Congress, 2st Session, “Testimony Taken by the Committee on Expenditures in the Post Office Department,” 21.
70.Representative Garfield speaking on April 20, 1878, 45th Congress, 2nd Session, Congressional Record 7, part 3:2677.
71.For examples of postmasters leaving these forms blank, see site report for Graniteville Post Office (Nevada County) and post office application for Hot Spring Post Office (Mono County) in Roll 58, California, Mono—Nevada Counties, Post Office Department Records of Site Locations 1837–1950, M1126 (Washington, DC: National Archives Microfilm Publication).
72.Charles Burdett in 45th Congress, 2st Session, “Testimony Taken by the Committee on Expenditures in the Post Office Department,” 19.
73.1882 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 541.
74.The Official Register of the United States, 1879, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1879), iii.
75.Scott, Seeing Like a State; J. B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” in The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 51–81.
76.Historians who have emphasized the instability of the western economy include Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, 147, 248; William Wyckoff, How to Read the American West: A Field Guide (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), 398; Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 285. For broader discussions of the unstable capitalist expansion in the West, see William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (University Press of Kansas, 1994), 148. James Belich argues that the “settler revolution” across the Anglo world was fueled by a similarly cyclical pattern of boom, bust, and “export rescue” from a settler colony’s metropole. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5–8, 83–95, 182–209.
77.Jon K. Lauck, Prairie Republic: The Political Culture of Dakota Territory, 1879–1889 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 4–11.
78.Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 336–38; White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own, 222–23; Rodman Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848–1880, 2nd rd. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001).
79.Figures calculated from annual reports of the postmaster general from 1878–1883.
80.For an overview of the historical geography of the western interior, see Donald W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 3, Transcontinental America, 1850–1915 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 89–167.
81.“Lifespan” figures for post offices were calculated from Richard Helbock dataset. From 1878 to 1883, 5,657 post offices were established west of the Kansas/Missouri border, with 2,657 of those offices shutting down or changing names in less than 10 years from when they were established. Of those western post offices, 438 of them either shut down or changed names in the same calendar year they were established.
82.Pima County, Arizona Territory, in United States Post Office Department, Record of Appointment of Postmasters.
83.Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 53–89; Hidetaka Hirota, “Exclusion on the Ground: Racism, Official Discretion, and the Quotidian Enforcement of General Immigration Law in the Pacific Northwest Borderland,” American Quarterly 69, no. 2 (June 2017): 347–70, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2017.0031.
84.Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 122–29.
85.Proceedings in the Trial of the Case of the United States vs. John W. Dorsey, John R. Miner, John M. Peck, Stephen W. Dorsey, Harvey M. Vaile, Montfort C. Rerdell, Thomas J. Brady, and William H. Turner for Conspiracy, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1882), 505–11, available online at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044086291325.
1.Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 99–100; “The Romance of the Pony Express,” Joseph M. Adelman (blog), April 14, 2015, https://josephadelman.com/2015/04/14/the-romance-of-the-pony-express/; W. Turrentine Jackson, “A New Look at Wells Fargo, Stage-Coaches and the Pony Express,” California Historical Society Quarterly 45, no. 4 (December 1966): 291–324. For letter rates, see Steven C. Walske and Richard C. Frajola, Mails of the Westward Expansion, 1803 to 1861 (Western Cover Society, 2015), 218; Sam Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1774 to Present,” Measuring Worth, 2019, https://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/.
2.1879 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1879), 19, 60–61.
3.For communications and mail during the colonial era, see Katherine Grandjean, American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Alejandra Dubcovsky, Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Joseph M. Adelman, Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). For a map and data of major postal routes in 1839, see Laura Eckstein, “Post Roads 1839,” Laura Eckstein Personal Blog (blog), January 20, 2015, http://lauraneckstein.com/blog/1839postroads/; Laura Newman Eckstein, Post Roads 1839, 2015, https://github.com/lauraneckstein/postroads1839. The power to designate mail routes was part of Congress’s role as what Kimberley Johnson describes as “the linchpin of Gilded Age and Progressive Era politics.” Kimberley S. Johnson, Governing the American State: Congress and the New Federalism, 1877–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 16.
4.See, for instance, petition of the citizens of Oregon, July 16, 1869 (referred to committee January 10, 1870), House Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads, NARA I RG 233, 41A, F19.6, folder 3: December 9, 1869 to January 28, 1870.
5.For a history of petitioning, see John, Spreading the News, 49–51; Richard R. John and Christopher J. Young, “Rites of Passage: Postal Petitioning as a Tool of Governance in the Age of Federalism,” in The House and Senate in the 1790s: Petitioning, Lobbying, and Institutional Development, ed. Kenneth R. Bowling and Donald R. Kennon (Ohio University Press, 2002), 100–38.; Daniel Carpenter and Colin D. Moore, “When Canvassers Became Activists: Antislavery Petitioning and the Political Mobilization of American Women,” American Political Science Review 108, no. 3 (August 2014): 479–98, https://doi.org/10.1017/S000305541400029X; Maggie McKinley, “Petitioning and the Making of the Administrative State,” Yale Law Journal 127, no. 6 (April 2018): 1538–1637.
6.For an example of this legislative process, see discussion in HR 2628, March 3, 1883, 44th Congress, 2nd Session, Congressional Record 5, part 3:2222–23, 2224.
7.For the structure of the postal system during the Early Republic, see John, Spreading the News, 73–76.
8.John, Spreading the News, 160–61; US Postal Service Historian, “Rates for Domestic Letters, 1792–1863” (United States Postal Service, August 2008), https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/domestic-letter-rates-1792-1863.pdf; 37th Congress, 3rd Session, “Ch. 71: An Act to Amend the Laws Relating to the Post-Office Department,” Statutes at Large, March 3, 1863.
9.See David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 15–41.
10.1879 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 60–61. There were 2,846 miles of railway mail routes from Kansas westward in 1869 and 11,072 miles in 1879. For transit time, see United States Post Office Department, 1882 United States Official Postal Guide, vol. 4, no. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1882), 579–82.
11.There were 70,078 miles of star routes versus 11,072 miles of railway mail routes. 1879 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 60–61. Even by 1894, a quarter century after the transcontinental railroad was completed, the region’s star routes still outdistanced its railway mail routes by more than 34,000 miles. 1894 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1894), 180–81. Note that all of these figures reflect the mileage of the routes themselves rather than the total miles traveled each year along those routes. By this second measurement, railway mail routes far outstripped star routes due to the fact that the mail traveled much, much faster along these routes and could therefore make many, many more trips each year.
12.Budget figures for 1871 were calculated from 1871 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 116–17. Per capita figures were calculated using state and territory population figures from the 1870 census: “List of U.S. States by Historical Population,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, February 13, 2015, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_U.S._states_by_historical_population. Figures for 1880 were calculated from 1880 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880), 558–59; “1880 United States Census,” Wikipedia, July 7, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1880_United_States_Census&oldid=789443640. The regional definitions reflect those designated by the US Census: US Census Bureau, Geography Division, “2010 Geographic Terms and Concepts—Census Divisions and Census Regions,” 2010, https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/gtc/gtc_census_divreg.html.
13.1880 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 558–59; “1880 United States Census.” Letter-writing figures from 1880 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 87–89.
14.1871 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 16–17; 1880 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 87–88. Figures reflect mail transportation costs west of the Kansas-Colorado border.
15.For the various costs associated with stocking and operating a long star route, see Mae Helene Bacon Boggs, My Playhouse Was a Concord Coach: An Anthology of Newspaper Clippings and Documents Relating to Those Who Made California History During the Years 1822–1888 (Oakland, CA: Howell-North, 1942), 430–503. S. S. Huntley Company Records, folders 1–4, Montana Historical Society, Jared L. Sanderson, “The Memoirs of Jared L. Sanderson, ‘Stagecoach King,’ Part II,” Wagon Tracks (Santa Fe Trail Association Quarterly) 20, no. 2 (February 2006): 12–21; Wayne R. Austerman, Sharps Rifles and Spanish Mules: The San Antonio-El Paso Mail, 1851–1881 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985).
16.For grain prices, see Charles Mayhew to Henry Corbett, September 1, 1867, in Boggs, My Playhouse Was a Concord Coach, 501.
17.Arid conditions also left staging infrastructure vulnerable to fire. Silas Huntley to Charles Huntley, February 22, 1869, S. S. Huntley and Company Records, folder 1, Montana Historical Society; Yreka Journal, May 1, 1872, quoted in Boggs, My Playhouse Was a Concord Coach, 574.
18.Henry Corbett to John F. Sprague, September 24, 1866, quoted in Boggs, My Playhouse Was a Concord Coach, 459; Henry Corbett to W. H. Rhodehamel, November 7, 1866, quoted in Boggs, 467.
19.Henry Corbett to John Ferguson, September 25, 1866, quoted in Boggs, My Playhouse Was a Concord Coach, 460.
20.44th Congress, 1st Session, “H. Rpt. No. 814: Management of the Post Office Department” (Washington, DC, August 9, 1876), 545.
21.44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office,” 416.
22.44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office,” iii, 109. See extracts from Washington Daily Patriot January 8, 1872, printed in 44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office,” 400–409.
23.The Official Register of the United States, 1873 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1873), 454–554.
24.Prentiss Cutler Dodge, Encyclopedia Vermont Biography (Burlington, VT: Ullery, 1912), 75–76.
25.For C. W. Lewis, see “Colonel Charles W. Lewis (Obituary),” San Diego Union, February 9, 1871, California Genealogy and History Archives, available online at http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cagha/obits/obits1/lewis-charles.txt; 42nd Congress, 1st Session, “Sen. Ex. Doc. No. 5: Letter of the Postmaster General Communicating, in Compliance with the Resolution of the Senate of the 20th Instant, Information in Relation to the Mail-Letting on Route No. 17401, from Santa Fe to El Paso” (Washington, DC, March 23, 1871), 5. The mail route proved to be a goldmine: within eight months, the department increased the frequency of service on the route, doubling the staging firm’s compensation to $91,000 a year.
26.Charles Huntley wrote in one letter, “I shall without a doubt get [the contract], the service was let on a straw and I am the next bid to the straw. There is a big thing in either running or selling the contract; do not know which I will do yet.” Charles Huntley to Silas Huntley, July 22, 1870, S. S. Huntley and Company Records, folder 1, Montana Historical Society. See also Charles Huntley to Silas Huntley, July 11, 1870, 11, S. S. Huntley and Company Records, folder 1, Montana Historical Society. R.G. Dun & Co. Credit Report Volumes, Western Territories, vol. 3, p. 433, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.
27.44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office Department,” xciii–xcvi, 139, 176–78; 42nd Congress, 2nd Session, “Ex. Doc. No. 322: Offers of Land and Water Mail-Routes: Letter from the Postmaster General, Transmitting Abstracts of Offers Carrying the Mails Upon the Different Routes in the United States” (Washington, DC, May 17, 1872), 371–73; 43rd Congress, 1st Session, “H. Rpt. No. 738: Management of the Post-Office Department” (Washington, DC, June 22, 1874), 2. For more on Sawyer and his firm of Sawyer, Risher, and Hall, see Rex H. Stever, “Stagecoach Lines,” in Handbook of Texas Online, June 15, 2010, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/ers01; Austerman, Sharps Rifles and Spanish Mules; 44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office Department,” 139.
28.Charles Huntley to Silas Huntley, July 22, 1870. See also R. G. Dun & Co. Credit Report Volumes, Western Territories, vol. 3, p. 433, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.
29.For Barlow’s residence, see 44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office Department,” 337, and R. G. Dun & Co. Credit Report Volumes, Washington DC, vol. 5, p. 182, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School. For Sawyer’s residence in Georgetown, see 44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office,” 164. and R. G. Dun & Co. Credit Report Volumes, Washington, DC, vol. 4, p. 393, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School. For Kittle quote, 44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office Department,” 224.
30.Jared L. Sanderson, “The Memoirs of Jared L. Sanderson, ‘Stagecoach King,’ Part I,” Wagon Tracks (Santa Fe Trail Association Quarterly) 10, no. 1 (November 2005): 17; 44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office Department,” 326, 478–81.
31.In the words of one clerk, “A man that is present here at the Department can keep pressing a case. . . . He has an advantage of being better advised and better informed than a man who does not come here.” 44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office Department,” 193.
32.44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office,” 511–14.
33.44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office,” 384. John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 19, July 1, 1868–October 31, 1869 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994), 264–65.
34.See, for instance, the intensive in-person lobbying for a lucrative route running from Northern California to Oregon in 1870, one eventually won by Bradley Barlow: 44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office Department,” 596–610.
35.Yreka Journal, June 7, 1867, quoted in Boggs, My Playhouse Was a Concord Coach, 491. Sawyer, for instance, wheedled a six-thousand-dollar penalty down to two thousand dollars. See 44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office Department,” 188–90.
36.44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office Department,” 322, 480. For more on the Vermont Bank, see R. G. Dun & Co. Credit Report Volumes, Vermont, vol. 12, p. 40, 500. Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.
37.44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office,” 366–67, 382. Other contractors included Grant Taggart and the staging firm Gilmore and Salisbury. See 44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office,” 546–47.
38.44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office Department,” 366–69.
39.Appendix to the Congressional Globe: Laws of the United States, 41st Congress, 3rd Session, March 3, 1871, 390–91. Of course, straw bidders simply circumvented the 1871 legislation by either making bids that were less than five thousand dollars or submitting fraudulent drafts with their bid. So the following year, Congress tightened these regulations to require checks or drafts for bids on any routes whose compensation for the previous term (not just the amount of the bid) exceeded five thousand dollars. See “Chap CXXV: An Act Relating to Proposals and Contracts for Transportation of the Mails, and for Other Purposes,” Appendix to the Congressional Globe: Laws of the United States, 42nd Congress, 2nd Session, April 27, 1872, 702–3.
40.44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office Department,” 313. Congress further amended the legislation in 1872, including a suspicious amendment proposed by Senator George Edmunds, from Barlow’s home state of Vermont. Whereas the earlier 1871 legislation required the 5 percent check or draft accompanying bids to come from “some reliable banking house or banking institution,” that same check now had to come specifically from “some solvent national bank.” Say, the Vermont National Bank. See “Chap CXXV: An Act Relating to Proposals and Contracts for Transportation of the Mails, and for Other Purposes,” Appendix to the Congressional Globe: Laws of the United States, 42nd Congress, 2nd Session, April 27, 1872, 702–3. The amendment was introduced by George Edmunds (Republican, VT): Congressional Globe, 42nd Congress, 2nd Session, April 3, 1872, 2121; A. M. Gibson, “Report of the Attorney General on the Star Mail Service,” in Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881), 491–92.
41.Barlow profited in other ways from his position. As mail contractors congregated in Washington each winter to assemble and submit their bids to the department, Barlow offered them a financial service: he would issue checks to bidders and charge them interest. By 1876, he estimated that during each annual mail letting he issued anywhere from five hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand dollars in checks from the Vermont National Bank to various bidders. In doing so, Barlow managed to profit on mail contracts that he and his staging firm never even bid on. For the extent of Barlow’s involvement as a financier, see 45thCongress, 3rd Session, “H. Mis. Doc. No. 16: Testimony Taken by the Committee on the Post Offices and Post Roads on the Post Office Department” (Washington, DC, 1878), 51–54, 164–67, 175–79. For Barlow’s own recollection, see 44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office Department,” 341.
42.Jockeying for increased service was commonplace amongst all mail contractors, even ones on smaller routes. One experienced California contractor claimed one thousand dollars from a smaller Southern California stage firm to compensate him for paying “Washington parties” for assistance in getting one of their routes increased. Thomas Flint to William Edward Lovett, June 27, 1868, William Edward Lovett Papers, box 1, folder 24, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
43.Charles Huntley to Silas Huntley, July 22, 1870, S. S. Huntley and Company Records, folder 1, Montana Historical Society, Helena, Montana.
44.44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office Department,” 522–23.
45.44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office,” 303. For another case of fraudulent petitioning for increased service, see letter from F. C. Taylor dated August 9, 1875, quoted in “Notes from the Capitol,” New York Times, September 4, 1875. Taylor all but admitted to its illegitimacy, closing his letter with “It will be best not to mention my name in it.”
46.Petition of inhabitants of the Jeff County, New York, October 26, 1869, referred to committee on February 2, 1870, House Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads, NARA I RG 233, 41A, H9.2, folder 3.
47.44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office Department,” 250.
48.For one example, see 44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office,” 534, 643.
49.When a California Congressmen helped secure faster mail delivery he was lauded in the local paper as “deserving of unanimous thanks of the people of Northern California and Oregon.” Yreka Journal, July 24, 1872, quoted in Boggs, My Playhouse Was a Concord Coach, 577.
50.Routt was accused in 1871 of “openly interfering” in an Illinois senatorial election. See John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 21, November 1, 1870–May 31, 1871 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 119.
51.44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office Department,” 520–21, 561–63, 577.
52.44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office,” 527.
53.44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office,” 452–53, 584–85, 735. Between 1874 and 1876, four different men served as Postmaster General. See Annual Report of the Postmaster General from 1871 to 1875. President Grant’s original appointment, John Creswell resigned in 1874 after five years in service. For his resignation letter and Grant’s response, see The Papers of John A. J. Creswell, 1819–1887, vol. 17 (Library of Congress, 1931), A. C. 2410, Papers of John A. J. Creswell, Library of Congress, Washington, DC .
54.44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office Department,” 1–13, 28–36.
55.See “Abstract of Bids and Contracts for Carrying the Mail,” House Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads, NARA I RG 233, 42A, F20.1, folder 1: August 4, 1871, West Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas; 44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office,” 83–97, 710–22.
56.44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office,” 18–19, 26–27, 218–19, 576–79, 582–83, 738–45.
57.This is especially damning because one of the clerks was the brother-in-law of John French, who at the time was the chief clerk and de-facto second assistant postmaster general as John Routt transitioned to the Colorado governorship. 44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office,” 576.
58.The other mail contractor ended up being banned from bidding on mail contracts. See a letter from the Postmaster General to Jerome J. Hinds, July 14, 1875 in NARA I, RG 28, Letters Sent, Postmaster General, Volume 84, 121–23. 44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office,” 738–45.
59.42nd Congress, 2nd Session, “H. Rpt. No. 38: Contracts for the Transportation of the Mails” (Washington, DC, April 4, 1872); 43rd Congress, 1st Session, “H. Rpt. No. 738: Management of the Post-Office Department”; 43rd Congress, 1st Session, “H. Rpt. No. 775: Contracts for the Transportation of the Mails” (Washington, DC, June 20, 1874).
60.44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office Department.”
61.For Dorsey’s earlier life, see Mari Grana, On the Fringes of Power: The Life and Turbulent Career of Stephen Wallace Dorsey (Helena, MT: TwoDot, 2015), 1–19. For bidding by the “Dorsey ring,” see Sharon Lowry, “Portrait of an Age: The Political Career of Stephen W. Dorsey, 1868–1889” (PhD diss., University of North Texas, 1980), 253–65; Louise Horton, “The Star Route Conspiracies,” Texana 7, no. 3 (1969): 220–33; J. Martin Klotsche, “The Star Route Cases,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 22, no. 3 (1935): 407–8, https://doi.org/10.2307/1892626; Earl Leland Jr., “The Post Office and Politics, 1876–1884: The Star Route Frauds” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1964), 29–36.
62.“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; Leland, “The Post Office and Politics,” 45–51. For more information about the specific route, see46th Congress, 2nd Session, “H. Mis. Doc. No. 31: Testimony Before the Committee on Appropriations in Relation to the Post Office Department” (Washington, DC, March 25, 1880), 192–93, available online at https://archive.org/stream/unitedstatescon255offigoog. “A Complete Specimen,” New York Times, June 27, 1881, 4, available online at https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1881/06/27/102752281.html?pageNumber=4; “A Star Route Civil Suit,” New York Times, June 12, 1885, 4, available online at https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1885/06/12/103022566.html?pageNumber=4.
63.Lowry, “Portrait of an Age,” 266–67; Leland, “The Post Office and Politics,” 76–84.
64.“Indiana’s October Vote,” New York Times, February 12, 1881, 2, available online at https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1881/02/12/103398308.html?pageNumber=2; Leland, “The Post Office and Politics,” 108–20; Grana, On the Fringes of Power, 27–31.
65.See, for example, “The Star Routers,” Dallas Daily Herald, June 2, 1882, 1, available online at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025733/1882-06-02/ed-1/seq-1/; “The Star Route Trial,” Memphis Daily Appeal, August 4, 1882, 1, available online at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045160/1882-08-04/ed-1/seq-1/.
66.Lowry, “Portrait of an Age,” 292–324; Grana, On the Fringes of Power, 39–58; Klotsche, “The Star Route Cases,” 415–18.
67.For treatment of these corruption scandals during this era, see Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865–1905 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4, 30–31; Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 172–80, 255–66.
68.“Star Service Corruption,” New York Times, April 25, 1881, available online at http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9900EFDC133CEE3ABC4D51DFB266838A699FDE.
69.For the longer history of a statist developmental vision before the Civil War, see Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 53–110; Ariel Ron, “Summoning the State: Northern Farmers and the Transformation of American Politics in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Journal of American History 103, no. 2 (September 2016): 347–74, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaw316. For specifically the Republican Party, see Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 73, 155–58; Jay Sexton, “William H. Seward in the World,” Journal of the Civil War Era 4, no. 3 (August 2014): 398–430, https://doi.org/10.1353/cwe.2014.0066; Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York: Viking, 2016), 6, 284–85, 359, 391–400.
70.Karen Elizabeth Jenks, “Trading the Contract: The Roles of Entrepreneurs, Government, and Labor in the Formation of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company” (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2012), 215; John Haskell Kemble, “A Hundred Years of the Pacific Mail,” Neptune 10 (April 1950): 131.
71.1872 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), 183.
72.“Pacific Mail and its Wonderful Lamp – the Arabian Nights of Wall Street,” New York Herald, October 27, 1872, 8, available online at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030313/1872-10-27/ed-1/seq-8/; “The Pacific Mail Subsidy, An Investigation Pending,” Chicago Tribune, December 11, 1874, 1, available online at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84031492/1874-12-11/ed-1/seq-1/; Ryan Michael Stephens, “Tensions of Trade and Migration: The Origins of Transoceanic Steamship Companies and China-U.S. Exchange” (BA thesis, Pennsylvania State University, Schreyer Honors College, 2013), 25–29, https://honors.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/17816; 43rd Congress, 2nd Session, “H. R. Report No. 268: China Mail Service” (Washington, DC, February 27, 1875).
73.The tactics used by Republican congressmen to try and tack on commercial subsidies to the annual postal funding bill fits within what historian Gary Gerstle describes as a “surrogacy” strategy of using the relatively expansive powers of the post to enact unrelated policy. Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 6, 101–4.
74.Kemble, “A Hundred Years of the Pacific Mail,” 135; 1878 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1878), 371.
75.For an example of this legislative process, see discussion H.R. 2628, March 3, 1883, 44th Congress, 2nd Session, Congressional Record 5, part 3:2222–23, 2224.
76.Historian Nicolas Barreyre argues that sectionalism was one of the defining political divisions during this period. Nicolas Barreyre, Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 2–10.
77.Senator George Edmunds speaking on March 24, 1876, 44th Congress, 1st Session, Congressional Record 4, part 2:1932; Senator Aaron Sargent speaking on March 24, 1876, 44th Congress, 1st Session, Congressional Record 4, part 2:1933.
78.Representative Christopher Upson speaking on April 1, 1880, 46th Congress, 2nd Session, Congressional Record 10, part 3:2042.
79.Representative Dudley Haskell speaking on February 25, 1880, 46th Congress, 2nd Session, Congressional Record 10, part 2:1133.
80.Quoted in Leland, “The Post Office and Politics,” 55–56; Horton, “The Star Route Conspiracies,” 221.
81.Proceedings in the Trial of the Case of the United States vs. John W. Dorsey, John R. Miner, John M. Peck, Stephen W. Dorsey, Harvey M. Vaile, Montfort C. Rerdell, Thomas J. Brady, and William H. Turner for Conspiracy, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1882), 2051, available online at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044086291325.
82.Representative John Stone speaking on April 1, 1880, 46th Congress, 2nd Session, Congressional Record 10, part 3:2045.
83.Between July of 1877 and June of 1878, the Post Office Department established 447 new post offices west of the Kansas/Missouri border. Just two years later, that same number was 1,139 new post offices established over 1879–1880. Figures tallied from 1878 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 44–45; 1880 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 56–57.
84.Klotsche, “The Star Route Cases,” 409–10.
85.See, for instance, George Armstrong Custer, My Life on the Plains; Or, Personal Experiences with Indians (New York: Sheldon, 1876), 20–21; John Gregory Bourke, On the Border with Crook (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891), 102. See also newspaper accounts in Austerman, Sharps Rifles and Spanish Mules, 226–308.
86.Col. William R. Shafter to Assistant Adj. Gen., June 5, 1871, NARA I, RG 393, Letters Sent, Fort Davis, Texas, quoted in Austerman, Sharps Rifles and Spanish Mules, 258.
87.In 1867, the postmaster general warned that conflict on the Plains threatened to suspend overland mail service through the region. See Postmaster General Alexander Randall to Ulysses S. Grant, May 18, 1867 in John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 17, January 1–September 30, 1867 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991). See also Silas Huntley to M. Hershfield, December 11, 1867, S. S. Huntley and Company Records, folder 1, Montana Historical Society; 44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office Department,” 400.
88.44th Congress, 1st Session, “Management of the Post Office Department,” ii, xvii.
89.Mark W Summers, The Era of Good Stealings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 304–5; Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 211–36.
90.1881 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881), 31.
91.Richard R. John has shown how a robust national postal system produced tensions in the antebellum period, including deep schisms over whether or not to carry the mail on the Sabbath along with the success of slaveholders in banning abolitionist material from the mail. John, Spreading the News, 169–205, 257–80. Jo Guldi makes a similar point about the divisiveness of road building in Great Britain. Jo Guldi, Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 18–22. In the western United States, Richard White makes the case that transcontinental railroads were built far ahead of demand. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).
1.The network’s trademark instability continued unabated, as some 4,500 of the region’s post offices also shut down over the same decade. Figures calculated from the Annual Report of the Postmaster General from 1880 to 1890.
2.Sacramento sent 1,054,248 letters and 3,423,472 total mail items, which ranked 58th among American cities, just between Jersey City, New Jersey, and Fort Wayne, Indiana. 1880 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880), 87–89; “1880 United States Census,” Wikipedia, July 7, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1880_United_States_Census&oldid=789443640.
3.“The New City Post Office,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 16, 1881, 3, available online at http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SDU18810916.2.18. For the Sacramento Post Office’s employees, see The Official Register of the United States, 1881, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881), 368, 612.
4.The Malakoff Diggins State Park has re-created McKillican’s store and post office according to oral interviews conducted in the 1960s of old North Bloomfield residents. See State of California Department of Parks and Recreation, “Interpretive Prospectus and Interpretive Plan of the McKillican and Mobley Store, Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park,” June 1969, box 14-M, Searls Library, Nevada City. For Crandall’s salary, see The Official Register of the United States, 1881, vol. 2, 367.
5.Crandall listed his profession as “General Merchandise” in an 1880 census. Page no. 2, Supervisor’s District no. 3, Enumeration District no. 64, in United States, Bureau of the Census and United States, National Archives and Records Service, 1880 California Federal Population Census Schedules—Nevada, Placer, and Plumas Counties, vol. reel 0070, 10th Census, 1880, California [microform] (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Service, General Services Administration, 1965), available online at http://archive.org/details/10thcensus0070unit.
6.There were 6,202 clerks in 1881 Official Register of the United States, excluding staff at Washington, DC headquarters. The Official Register of the United States, 1881, vol. 2, 610–78. Letter carriers were even less common, employed at only 0.3 percent of the country’s more than 44,500 post offices. See 1881 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881), 48. For the importance of urban post offices, see David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 63–90.
7.Elisabeth Clemens makes a similar point in Elisabeth S. Clemens, “Lineages of the Rube Goldberg State: Building and Blurring Public Programs, 1900–1940,” in Rethinking Political Institutions: The Art of the State, ed. Ian Shapiro, Stephen Skowronek, and Daniel Galvin (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 187–215.
8.For a canonical example of this approach, see Daniel Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
9.James A. Garfield, The Diary of James A. Garfield, ed. Brown Williams, vol. 2 (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1967), 213.
10.Mari Sandoz, Old Jules (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), 181, 421.
11.For the relationship between politics and the US Post, see Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 219–27; Dorothy G. Fowler, The Cabinet Politician: The Postmasters General, 1829–1909 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943).
12.John Joseph Wallis, “Table Ea894-903—Federal Government Employees, by Government Branch and Location Relative to the Capital: 1816–1992,” in Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present, ed. Susan B. Carter et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
13.Scott C. James, “Patronage Regimes and American Party Development from ‘The Age of Jackson’ to the Progressive Era,” British Journal of Political Science 36, no. 1 (2006): 39, 49, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123406000032.
14.In 1871, 96 percent of the post offices were fourth-class offices that didn’t require Senate confirmation. 1871 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1871), 85. In 1899, that figure was 94.4 percent of post offices. 1899 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1899), 822–23.
15.For more on the relationship between patronage and post offices, see Jon C. Rogowski, “Presidential Influence in an Era of Congressional Dominance,” American Political Science Review 110, no. 2 (May 2016): 325–41, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055416000125. There is no way to have an exact count of the number of different postmasters who served in office. One back-of-the-envelope calculation, however, is to add up all of the postmasters that were removed, resigned, or died each year between 1865 and 1900, given that each of them needed to be replaced in office. This adds up to around 344,000 people. Some people may have been reinstated and then removed again, counting twice, but this number is almost certainly balanced out by the number of newly appointed postmasters for new post offices (more than 90,000 of which opened between 1867 and 1900).
16.Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 162; Nicholas R. Parrillo, Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780–1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 124; Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 74. For contemporary coverage of assessments, see “A Joseph Surface President,” Los Angeles Herald, July 13, 1878, 2, available online at https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=LAH18780713.2.4&srpos=379.
17.For the cost of elections and the role of political parties in organizing them, see Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, 159–68.
18.By the late 19th century, presidential postmasters had been moved entirely to a salary system, whereas before they could keep their letterbox rents. See, for instance, 52nd Congress, 2d Session, “H. Mis. Doc. No. 90: The Postal Laws and Regulations of the United States of America” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893), 178–80. Isaac V. Fowler served as grand sachem of Tammany Hall and New York City’s postmaster. He was accused of absconding with more than $150,000 in post office funds in 1863. David E. Meerse, “Buchanan, Corruption and the Election of 1860,” Civil War History 12, no. 2 (1966): 122.
19.“A Memorial From Postmasters,” written at Postmaster’s Convention in Chicago, signed March 26, 1888. Senate Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads, NARA I RG 46, 49A, H20.1, box 97, folder: Various Subjects.
20.This was less than $2,600 in 2017 dollars, calculated using Sam Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1774 to Present,” Measuring Worth, 2017, www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/; 1887 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887), 89–98. Even in 1901, around 50 percent of postmasters received less than a hundred dollars in annual commissions. 1901 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 983.
21.Postmaster McKillican’s quarterly commissions for 1889 were $110.44 on $150.88, $110.11 on $150.23, $105.29 on $142.15, and $120.31 on $170.62. Postal Account Book, 1887–1892, box 32, Malkoff Diggins State Park Historical Collection, California State Library, Sacramento, California. Once a postmaster’s annual compensation reached $1,000 (the equivalent of $1,900 in receipts), their post office was reclassified from a “fourth-class” office to a “Presidential” office. Postmasters at these larger offices served four-year terms, were appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by the Senate, and were broken into first-, second-, and third-class categories depending on the size of their post office. 52nd Congress, 2d Session, “1893 Postal Laws and Regulations,” 177–80. This salary ranged from one thousand to eight thousand at New York City, the largest post office in the country. 1887 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 98.
22.Sandoz, Old Jules, 181.
23.For examples of “twelve dollar post office,” see Cape Girardeau Democrat, January 21, 1893, 2, available online at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89066818/1893-01-21/ed-1/seq-2/; John Gregory Bourke, On the Border with Crook (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891), 70.
24.Walter M. Ferris, “Obstacles to Civil Service Reform,” ed. Lorretus S. Metcalf, The Forum 9 (1889): 514.
25.It wasn’t until the 20th century that most politicians began serving for longer tenures. By the 114th Congress in 2015–17, the average service time was almost nine years. Matthew Glassman and Amber Wilhelm, Congressional Careers: Service Tenure and Patterns of Member Service, 1789–2015 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, January 3, 2015), 2–4, available online at http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/key_workplace/1373.
26.The median time in office was 764 days. Varun Vijay calculated these figures while working as an undergraduate research assistant at the Stanford Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis during the spring of 2015. The larger dataset comes from 38,526 postmasters transcribed by Jim Wheat in Jim Wheat, “Postmasters and Post Offices of Texas, 1846–1930,” December 28, 2006, http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~txpost/postmasters.html, accessed January 10, 2013.
27.“Crossroads Post Office” was a recognizable phrase from the 19th century. See, for instance, Frank G. Carpenter, “The Fate of the Party . . . Lies in the Crossroads Post Office” in The Gilded Age, ed. Ari Arthur Hoogenboom and Olive Hoogenboom (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 166.
28.Residential mail delivery was only available in larger cities during this period. Even there, post offices were gathering places. Historian David Henkin argues that postage reductions made urban post offices some of “the most intensely promiscuous public spaces in nineteenth-century America.” Richard R. John similarly remarks, “The local post office was far more than the place where you went to pick up your mail.” Henkin, The Postal Age, 88; John, Spreading the News, 163.
29.Charles E. Henry to James Garfield, February 16, 1878 in James D. Norris and Arthur H. Shaffer, eds., Politics and Patronage in the Gilded Age: The Correspondence of James A. Garfield and Charles E. Henry (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1970), 204.
30.All data comes from Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and Arizona Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1884–1885 (R. L. Polk & Co. and A. C. Danser, 1884). “General Store” was listed 224 times for postmasters in this directory.
31.For connections between western general stores and post offices, see Linda English, By All Accounts: General Stores and Community Life in Texas and Indian Territory (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), 8, 45, 72–73, 160.
32.Wayne F. Fuller, American Mail: Enlarger of the Common Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 295–96.
33.Regulations stated: “No post-office shall be located in a bar-room or in any room directly connected with one.” Arthur Harry Bissell and Thomas B. Kirby, The Postal Laws and Regulations of the United States of America, Published in Accordance with the Act of Congress Approved March 3, 1879 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1879), 125. All data comes from Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and Arizona Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1884–1885 (R. L. Polk & Co. and A. C. Danser, 1884).
34.US Statutes at Large, 42nd Congress, 2nd Session, ch. 335, p. 286.
35.John, Spreading the News, 58–59, 123–24; Roman J. Hoyos, “The People’s Privilege: The Franking Privilege, Constituent Correspondence, and Political Representation in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” Law and History Review 31, no. 1 (2013): 101–38, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248012000843; Matthew Glassman, Franking Privilege: Historical Development and Options for Change (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, April 22, 2015), https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34274.pdf.
36.Report for C. H. Pyle in R. G. Dun & Co. Credit Report Volumes, Washington DC, vol. 24: Santa Cruz, Shasta, Sierra, Siskiyou, p. 198, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School. See also the report for R. S. Weston, of Forest City, on p. 281.
37.Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and Arizona Gazetteer and Business Directory.
38.For 19th-century companies reaching out to postmasters for information, see Andrew Brown to Office of Wells, Fargo & Co’s Express, April 20, 1893, and April 22, 1893, Andrew Brown Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. For government agencies, see A. F. [Lucy] Hawley to Andrew Jackson Faulk, April 16, 1877, box 2, folder 15, in Andrew Jackson Faulk Papers, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, Connecticut; Jamie L. Pietruska, Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 85–90; United States Pension Bureau, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Pensions to the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), 7.
39.Several years after an Ohio man moved to northern California, for instance, his family grew worried after they hadn’t heard from him in more than 18 months. Fearing the worst, one of them sent a letter from Ohio to the man’s last known location asking for whereabouts and “whether he be dead or alive.” Without knowing the name of a single person in the distant town, the family member simply addressed the letter to “Post Master, Orleans Bar, Klamath Co[unty] Cal[ifornia].” A month later, the family got a reply: the postmaster reported that the man had indeed left the previous year to chase gold in Washington Territory, and the postmaster had forwarded their inquiry to the Walla Walla Post Office. After one more back-and-forth exchange, the Ohio family was eventually able to track down the wayward gold seeker. Jonathan Warner Jr. to Postmaster at Orleans Bar, January 5, 1863, folder 36; Bella Whipple Jenks to Jonathan Warner Jr., February 22, 1863, folder 37; Jonathan Warner Jr. to Postmaster at Orleans Bar, March 20, 1864, folder 38; Bella Whipple Jenks to George Washington Warner, May 12, 1864, folder 39; George Washington Warner to Jonathan Warner Jr., March 13, 1865, folder 40, box 1, Jonathan Warner Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, Connecticut.
40.Examples from different cities include: “List of Letters,” Sacramento Daily Union, November 11, 1881, p. 4, available online at https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SDU18811111.2.27.1&srpos=2; “Unclaimed Letters,” Waco Evening News, March 25, 1893, p. 5, available online at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86088201/1893-03-25/ed-1/seq-5/; “List of Letters,” Daily Republican, May 25, 1885, p. 1, available online at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84038114/1885-05-25/ed-1/seq-1/.
41.Henkin, The Postal Age, 72–81; John, Spreading the News, 152, 164–67; Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America: A History (New York: Penguin, 2016), 94–96.
42.Sec. 524, “Loungers in Post Offices” in Bissell and Kirby, The Postal Laws and Regulations of the United States of America, 125.
43.“Brief Reference,” Sacramento Daily Union, October 21, 1875, p. 3, available online at https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SDU18751021.2.20&srpos=23.
44.“List of Letters,” Sacramento Daily Union, November 11, 1881, p. 4, available online at https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SDU18811111.2.27.1&srpos=2. See also Los Angeles, “Advertised Letters Remaining in the Los Angeles Post-office, Feb. 26, 1882,” Los Angeles Daily Times, February 26, 1882.
45.Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 17–89.
46.In Sierra Nevada logging camps, for instance, Chinese laborers made up some 90 percent of the workforce. Sue Fawn Chung, Chinese in the Woods: Logging and Lumbering in the American West (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 1–16; Sue Fawn Chung, In Pursuit of Gold: Chinese American Miners and Merchants in the American West (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011).
47.Mae M. Ngai, “Chinese Gold Miners and the ‘Chinese Question’ in Nineteenth-Century California and Victoria,” Journal of American History 101, no. 4 (March 2015): 1094, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav112; Ping Chiu, Chinese Labor in California, 1850-1880: An Economic Study (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1967), 36–38. For the “Chinese quarter” in North Bloomfield: Charles Gaus Interview by Eric Leffingwell, 1967, California State Historic Parks Archives, p. 10, supplied to the author by Lola Aguilar; Sanborn Map Company, North Bloomfield, California, 1905, scale not given, 1905, Digital Sanborn Maps, 1867–1970, http://sanborn.umi.com.
48.“Scissors and Pen,” Grass Valley Daily, December 12, 1882, p. 2, available online at https://www.mynevadacounty.com/DocumentCenter/View/6928/December-12-1882-The-Grass-Valley-Daily-Union-Newspaper-PDF_001.
49.“Chinese Sluice-Robber Killed,” Sacramento Daily News, January 27, 1883, p. 1, available online at http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SDU18830127.2.5.1.
50.Nevada City Transcript, January 24, 1884, cited in Michel Janicot, A History of Nevada County Post Offices, 1850–1994 (Nevada City, CA: Nevada County Historical Society, 1994), 28–29.
51.For episodes of anti-Chinese violence, see Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (New York: Random House, 2007); Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go, 91-186.
52.See Record of Registered Letters Received and Delivered—1893, box 30, folder 5, and Money Order Applications, January–March 1895, box 6, folder 12, in Malakoff Diggins State Park Historical Collection, California Department of Parks and Recreation, Sacramento, California.
53.These are post office and postmaster names taken from a single year (1884) and a single state (Colorado). Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and Arizona Gazetteer and Business Directory, 43–280.
54.James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
55.Sec. 441, “Who May Be Postmaster” in US Post Office Department, The Postal Laws and Regulations of the United States of America, Comp., Rev., and Pub. in Accordance with the Act of Congress Approved March 30, 1886 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887). See also Marshall Henry Cushing, Story of Our Post Office (Boston: A. M. Thayer, 1893), 198.
56.For women’s growing activity in public life during this period see Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era (W. W. Norton, 1987), 62–64, 231–35; Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 12–58; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 31–60. Women also joined the Post Office Department’s workforce in Washington, DC, in increasing numbers, especially in the Dead Letter Office and Topographer’s Office. For more on female employees in the Dead Letter Office, see Cushing, Story of Our Post Office, 265–67. For more on women’s entrance into the federal workforce, see Cindy Aron, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle-Class Workers in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
57.I used the Gender package in R (https://github.com/ropensci/gender) to infer the gender of presidential appointees from Scott James’s dataset in James, “Patronage Regimes and American Party Development.”
58.All of the percentages listed in this paragraph undercount the number of female postmasters. I used the Gender package in R (https://github.com/ropensci/gender) and assumed that any names the program could not associate with a gender were male. Oregon data came from a manual tabulation of female postmasters from Oregon using The Official Register of the United States, published every odd year.
59.Calculated from a list of 38,526 postmasters transcribed by Jim Wheat in Wheat, “Postmasters and Post Offices of Texas.” I wrote a program to scrape data from Wheat’s website and then used the Gender package in R (https://github.com/ropensci/gender) to infer the gender of postmasters. This analysis showed a similar growth in the overall percentage of female postmasters, from 1.67 percent in 1873 to 8.60 percent in 1893. An analysis of Scott James’s dataset of presidential appointments in the Post Office Department between 1865 and 1900 shows a less pronounced increase, but an increase nonetheless in female postmasters at larger post offices.
60.Data from Chronicling America was generated on October 15, 2018, using the Bookworm interface developed by Benjamin Schmidt, Matt Nicklay, Neva Cherniavsky Durand, Martin Camacho, and Erez Lieberman Aiden at the Cultural Observatory: http://benschmidt.org/ChronAm/-?%7B”words_collation”%3A”Case_Insensitive”,”search_limits”%3A%5B%7B”word”%3A%5B”postmistress”%5D,”publish_year”%3A%7B”%24gte”%3A1836,”%24lte”%3A1922%7D%7D%5D%7D. Data from HathiTrust was generated on October 15, 2018, using the Bookworm interface developed by Benjamin Schmidt, Matt Nicklay, Neva Cherniavsky Durand, Martin Camacho, and Erez Lieberman Aiden at the Cultural Observatory: https://bookworm.htrc.illinois.edu/develop/#?%7B%22search_limits%22:%5B%7B%22word%22:%5B%22postmistress%22%5D,%22date_year%22:%7B%22$gte%22:1840,%22$lte%22:1900%7D,%22language__id%22:%5B%221%22%5D,%22publication_country__id%22:%5B%221%22%5D%7D%5D,%22counttype%22:%22WordsPerMillion%22%7D. Data from Google Books was generated using the Google Books Ngram Viewer on October 15, 2018: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=postmistress&year_start=1840&year_end=1900&corpus=17&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cpostmistress%3B%2Cc0. Google Ngrams are not without problems, not least of which is the “black box” quality of what exactly is in its corpus. I use it cautiously as a supplement to other kinds of evidence. See Eitan Adam Pechenick, Christopher M. Danforth, and Peter Sheridan Dodds, “Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Evolution,” PLoS ONE 10, no. 10 (October 2015): e0137041, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0137041.
61.Sam Walter Foss, “The Postmistress of Pokumville,” in Dreams in Homespun (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1898), 180–82, available online at http://books.google.com/books?id=YiQ-AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA180. For “mails/males” jokes, see Trinity Journal (Yreka, CA), March 22, 1873, quoted in Mae Helene Bacon Boggs, My Playhouse Was a Concord Coach: An Anthology of Newspaper Clippings and Documents Relating to Those Who Made California History During the Years 1822–1888 (Oakland, CA: Howell-North, 1942), 584; “Males and Mails,” United States Mail 3, no. 33 (June 1887): 122.
62.“Fighting for a Post-Office,” Rocky Mountain News, August 4, 1883, available online at http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark/724/82/3675w16/purl=rc1_NCNP_0_GT3010049737&dyn=59!xrn_108_0_GT3010049737&hst_1?sw_aep=stan90222 For other complaints about postmistresses, see “A Woman Against the World,” United States Mail, February 1887.
63.Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and Arizona Gazetteer and Business Directory, 163, 498.
64.Cushing, Story of Our Post Office, 442.
65.The blurring of different kinds of work space and the opportunities this has provided for women can be seen especially clearly during times of war. See, for instance, Edwards, Angels in the Machinery, 12–38; Maurine Weiner Greenwald, “Working-Class Feminism and the Family Wage Ideal: The Seattle Debate on Married Women’s Right to Work, 1914–1920,” Journal of American History 76, no. 1 (1989): 118–49, https://doi.org/10.2307/1908346.
66.Patrick Henry Woodward, The Secret Service of the Post-Office Department, as Exhibited in the Wonderful Exploits of Special Agents Or Inspectors in the Detection, Pursuit, and Capture of Depredators Upon the Mails (Columbus, OH: Estill, 1886), 86, 438.
67.I explore this theme in more depth in Cameron Blevins, “Women and Federal Officeholding in the Late Nineteenth-Century U.S.,” Current Research in Digital History 2 (2019), https://doi.org/10.31835/crdh.2019.08.
68.Opinion delivered by Augustus Garland on April 21, 1885. Augustus H. Garland, “Appointment of an Indian as Postmaster,” in Official Opinions of the Attorneys-General of the United States, vol. 18 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1890), 181–85. Bluejacket earned $29.39 in 1883 and $61.51 in 1885. The Official Register of the United States, 1883, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1883), 430; The Official Register of the United States, 1885, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1885), 459. For more on the town of Bluejacket, see Craig County Genealogical Society, “Bluejacket,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=BL015, accessed July 20, 2017.
69.Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction, repr. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 149–59; Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 134–63; Norman L. Crockett, The Black Towns (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1979), 174–77. Fletcher was a formerly enslaved person and Union Army veteran.
70.For Black political mobilization see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1988), ch. 6; Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 163–264. For paramilitary violence, see Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, 265–314.
71.Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction, rev. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), xiv; Willard B. Gatewood Jr., “Sunnyside: The Evolution of an Arkansas Plantation, 1840–1945,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 50, no. 1 (April 1991): 5–29, https://doi.org/10.2307/40022326. Few African American postmasters, if any, held office outside of the South’s majority-Black communities and the handful of all-Black towns in the Great Plains. Deanna Boyd and Kendra Chen, “The History and Experience of African Americans in America’s Postal Service,” Smithsonian National Postal Museum, http://postalmuseum.si.edu/AfricanAmericanHistory/p2.html, accessed October 29, 2014.
72.Periodically communities would take collective action against postmasters. See, for example, 1885 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1885), 60.
73.John Roy Lynch, The Facts of Reconstruction (New York: Neale, 1913), 28–29.
74.US Post Office Department, The Postal Laws and Regulations of the United States of America. See also Wilking B. Cooley, The Postmasters’ Manual and Clerks’ Assistant (Washington, DC: C. R. Brodix, 1888), 12, available online at https://books.google.com/books?id=x8A_AAAAYAAJ; Cushing, Story of Our Post Office, 300–302. For more on the challenges of finding sureties in the South, see Cushing, Story of Our Post Office, 305.
75.Jennifer Lynch, “African-American Postal Workers in the 19th Century,” United States Postal Service, January 2011, https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/african-american-workers-19thc-2011.rtf; Historian of the United States Postal Service, “List of Known African-American Postmasters, 1800s,” United States Postal Service, July 2010, https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/african-american-postmasters-19thc-2010.pdf. See also Boyd and Chen, “The History and Experience of African Americans in America’s Postal Service.” There is no way to have an exact count of the number of different postmasters who served in office. One back-of-the-envelope calculation, however, is to add up all of the postmasters that were removed, resigned, or died each year between 1865 and 1900, given that each of them needed to be replaced in office. This adds up to around 344,000 people. Some people may be reinstated and then removed again, but this is almost certainly balanced out by the number of newly appointed postmasters for new post offices (more than 90,000 of which opened between 1867 and 1900).
76.The Official Register of the United States, 1885, vol. 2, 549; Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and Arizona Gazetteer and Business Directory, 513–14.
77.Walter A. Friedman, Birth of a Salesman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 56–87.
78.United States Post Office Department, 1882 United States Official Postal Guide, vol. 4, no. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1882), 56–87.
79.United States Post Office Department, 1882 United States Official Postal Guide, vol. 4, no. 1, p. 2. For the role of postmasters as book agents, see Natalie Marine-Street, “Agents Wanted: Sales, Gender, and the Making of Consumer Markets in America, 1830–1930” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2016), 154–56, 163–64, available online at https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/11616850.
80.The phrase “universal service” was not widely used in the 19th century. Richard B. Kielbowicz, Universal Postal Service: A Policy History, 1790–1970 (Postal Rate Commission, November 15, 2002), https://www.prc.gov/sites/default/files/papers/paper_0.pdf, 1.
81.For an overview of the tension between private and public mail delivery, see Richard R. John, “Private Mail Delivery in the United States during the Nineteenth Century: A Sketch,” Business and Economic History 15 (1986): 135–47; Richard B. Kielbowicz, “Government Goes into Business: Parcel Post in the Nation’s Political Economy, 1880–1915,” Studies in American Political Development 8, no. 1 (1994): 150–72, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898588X00000109.
82.Jesse L. Coburn, Letters of Gold: California Postal History Through 1869 (Canton, OH: Philatelic Foundation, 1984). The Post Office Department even contracted with the company to transport the mail on its behalf, awarding a $1.75 million contract to run an overland mail route during the 1860s. 1868 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1868), 5–7.
83.For the lionization of Wells, Fargo & Co., see W. Turrentine Jackson, “A New Look at Wells Fargo, Stage-Coaches and the Pony Express,” California Historical Society Quarterly 45, no. 4 (December 1, 1966): 291–324; W. Turrentine Jackson, “Wells Fargo: Symbol of the Wild West?,” Western Historical Quarterly 3, no. 2 (April 1972): 179–96, https://doi.org/10.2307/967112; Philip L. Fradkin, Stagecoach: Wells Fargo and the American West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 24, 50, 145.
84.Quoted in John, “Private Mail Delivery in the United States,” 139. Postal letters calculated from 1881 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 88–89.
85.There were 547 Wells, Fargo & Co. offices listed on July 1, 1880. Wells, Fargo & Co., “List of Offices, Agents, and Correspondents,” July 1, 1880, in Pamphlets on California, Bancroft Library, F858.C18 v.3x. As of June 30, 1880, there were 2,023 post offices in Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. Calculated from 1880 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 57.
86.“The Parcels Post,” Harper’s Weekly, December 7, 1889, 970.
87.B. K. Sharretts, “The Legality of Wells Fargo’s Letter-Carrying Business: Post Office Department, Wells, Fargo & Co’s Letter-Express” (1880) in Richard John, The American Postal Network, vol. 2 (London: Pickering & Chatto), 284–87. . For other examples of postmasters acting as Wells, Fargo & Co. express agents, see B. B. Redding, S. K. Throckmorton, and J. D. Farwell, Report of the Commissioner of Fisheries of the State of California, for the Years 1878 and 1879 (Sacramento: Legislature of the State of California, 1879), 5–6; Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and Arizona Gazetteer and Business Directory, 505.
88.An Illustrated History of Sonoma County, California: Containing a History of the County of Sonoma from the Earliest Period of Its Occupancy to the Present Time (Chicago: Lewis, 1889), 725–26. For another example of the overlap between California postmasters and Wells, Fargo & Co., see Andrew Brown to Office of Wells, Fargo & Co.’s Express, April 22, 1893, Andrew Brown Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
89.Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Richard R. John, “Robber Barons Redux: Antimonopoly Reconsidered,” Enterprise and Society 13, no. 1 (March 2012): 1–38, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1467222700010910.
90.Postel, The Populist Vision, 143–45; Richard R. John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 18–23, 121–22, 175–76, 395–405.
91.For the rural dimensions of the US Post, see Postel, The Populist Vision, 143–45. For the relationship between democratic politics and patronage, see Richard R. John, “Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian Zelizer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 50–84.
92.Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 447–53.
93.1887 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 16. For other examples of Vilas’s attitudes regarding efficiency and organization, see Roy N. Lokken, “William F. Vilas as a Businessman,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 45, no. 1 (October 1961): 32–39; 1887 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 20–25, 36–37. For an overview of this attitude, see Alfred Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).
94.Fuller, American Mail, 256; Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 83–93, 102–12.
95.1887 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 36–37; 1888 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1888), viii, 39.
96.For the circular, see “Mr. Vilas’s Circular,” New York Times, May 15, 1885, 4, available online at https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1885/05/15/103015113.html?pageNumber=4; “Postmaster General’s Circular,” Comet, May 23, 1885, 2, available online at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89058128/1885-05-23/ed-1/seq-2/. For figures on removals under Vilas, see Fred. Perry Powers, “The Reform of the Federal Service,” Political Science Quarterly 3, no. 2 (1888): 269, https://doi.org/10.2307/2139033.
97.Fowler, The Cabinet Politician.
98.Ari Arthur Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865–1883 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961); Ari Hoogenboom, “The Pendleton Act and the Civil Service,” American Historical Review 64, no. 2 (January 1959): 305, https://doi.org/10.2307/1845445; Skowronek, Building a New American State, 179.
99.1888 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, ix, 23–48. Inspector totals tabulated from The Official Register of the United States, 1887, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887), 11–12. For more on inspectors, see Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 102–12. For the Comstock laws, see Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and Conflict over Sex in the United States in the 1870s,” Journal of American History 87, no. 2 (September 2000): 403–34, https://doi.org/10.2307/2568758.
100.United States Postal Service Historian, “Pieces of Mail Handled, Number of Post Offices, Income, and Expenses Since 1789,” United States Postal Service, January 2017, https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/pieces-of-mail-since-1789.pdf.
101.Cushing, Story of Our Post Office, 280–81. For one example of politicians’ involvement with new post offices and their role as go-betweens, see L. Bradford Prince to C. W. Wildenstein, March 18, 1891, box 2, folder 1, L. Bradford Prince Papers, University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research, Albuquerque, New Mexico. See also petition from citizens of Frio County, Texas, and accompany letter from L. S. White to S. B. Maxey, January 14, 1878, in Senate Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads, NARA I RG 46, 45A, H17.1, box 209, folder: Mail Routes, January 21–March 18, 1878.
102.Garfield, The Diary of James A. Garfield, 2:213.
103.Elisabeth Clemens makes this point in Clemens, “Lineages of the Rube Goldberg State.” For the modern aversion to the “profit motive” for public servants, see Parrillo, Against the Profit Motive, 1–10. For “bureaucratic autonomy,” see Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 66–73.
104.For Mobley’s background, see Elaine Mobley, Oral History of the McKillican and Mobley General Store, interview by David A. Tucker, May 1, 1969, box 14-M, Searls Library, Nevada City. For Crandall, see Harry Laurenz Wells, History of Nevada County, California; with Illustrations Descriptive of Its Scenery, Residences, Public Buildings, Fine Blocks, and Manufactories. (Oakland, CA: Thompson & West, 1880), 215, available online at https://archive.org/stream/historyofnevadac00well. For Mobley’s sureties, see George W. Reed to Fred Brown, June 17th, 1892, in W. H. Taylor Collection, box 1, folder 3, Stanford University Special Collections. At the time, Robert McKillican was sheriff in Oakland: “McKillican’s Men,” San Francisco Call, December 18, 1892, 7, available online at http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SFC18921218.2.52.
105.Elaine Mobley, Oral History of the McKillican and Mobley General Store, 61–62.
106.This was especially true in the case of postal money orders, in which the department explicitly tasked postmasters with positively identifying the recipient of a money order. See United States Post Office Department, 1880 United States Official Postal Guide, vol. 2, no. 1 (Washington, DC Government Printing Office, 1880), 555.
107.United States Post Office Department, 1892 United States Official Postal Guide, vol. 14, no. 1 (Washington, DC Government Printing Office, 1892), 759.
108.Record of Registered Letters Received and Delivered–1893, box 30, folder 5, Malakoff Diggins State Park Historical Collection, California Department of Parks and Recreation, Sacramento, California.
1.For weather and news see Sacramento Daily Union, February 11, 1895, 1, 3, available online at http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SDU18950211; “With Snow and Ice,” San Francisco Morning Call, February 9, 1895, 2, available online at https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SFC18950209.
2.For a detailed recount of the store and its space, see Elaine Mobley, Oral History of the McKillican and Mobley General Store, interview by David A. Tucker, May 1, 1969, box 14-M, Searls Library, Nevada City; State of California Department of Parks and Recreation, “Interpretive Prospectus and Interpretive Plan of the McKillican and Mobley Store, Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park,” June 1969, box 14-M, Searls Library, Nevada City. Money order data from Money Order Applications, January–March 1895, box 6, folder 12, Malakoff Diggins State Park Historical Collection, California Department of Parks and Recreation, Sacramento, California. For money order fees, see United States Post Office Department, 1896 United States Official Postal Guide (Philadelphia: George F. Lasher, 1896), 901.
3.This includes both domestic and international money orders. 1895 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895), 384–85, 601, 745. For details on the operations of the money order system, see Wilking B. Cooley, The Postmasters’ Manual and Clerks’ Assistant (Chicago: C. R. Brodix, 1888), 12–22, available online at https://books.google.com/books?id=x8A_AAAAYAAJ. Dollar values for 2019 were calculated using Sam Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1774 to Present,” Measuring Worth, 2019, https://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/. By consumer price index (CPI), the 2019 equivalent of $169 million was $5.39 billion in 2019.
4.Marshall Henry Cushing, Story of Our Post Office (Boston: A. M. Thayer, 1893), 217.
5.For a general history of the system, see United States Post Office Department, The United States Postal Money-Order System: A Survey of the System for the Purpose of Ascertaining Its Condition and Advancing Its Efficiency and Economical Administration (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1915); Tom Velk and Terence Hines, “The United States Post Office Domestic Postal Money Order System In The 19th Century: A Nascient Banking System,” (Departmental Working Papers McGill University, Department of Economics, May 2009), https://ideas.repec.org/p/mcl/mclwop/2009-11.html; Terrence Hines and Thomas Velk, “The United States Post Office Domestic Money Order System in the 19th Century” (Blount Postal History Symposium, American Philatelic Center, Bellefonte, PA, 2011), http://www.postalmuseum.si.edu/symposium2011/papers/Hines_velk_2011_stamps.pdf; Terrence Hines and Thomas Velk, “Economic Activity Following the Civil War Indexed by Postal Money Order Data” (Blount Postal History Symposium, American Philatelic Center, Bellefonte, PA, 2012), http://www.postalmuseum.si.edu/symposium2011/papers/Hines_velk_2011_stamps.pdf.
6.Seven years after the system was launched, Americans were transmitting $41.7 million in money orders domestically. 1871 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1871), 126–27.
7.“News of the Morning,” Sacramento Daily Union, July 10, 1871, 2, available online at http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SDU18710710.2.8.
8.“Japanese Postal System,” Daily Alta California, February 2, 1880, 1, available online at https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=DAC18800202.2.8&srpos=596; Patricia L. Maclachlan, The People’s Post Office: The History and Politics of the Japanese Postal System, 1871–2010 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012), 36–40.
9.For the transatlantic dimensions of this network, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998). Foreign money orders were also part of a global turn within the Post Office Department that started in the 1860s. Richard R. John, “Projecting Power Overseas: U.S. Postal Policy and International Standard-Setting at the 1863 Paris Postal Conference,” Journal of Policy History 27, no. 3 (July 2015): 416–38, doi:10.1017/S0898030615000172. By the end of the 19th century, Americans could mail a letter from San Francisco to some 50 different nations and colonies across six different continents, all for the price of a single five-cent stamp. 1899 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1899), 719; United States Post Office Department, 1899 United States Official Postal Guide (New York: Metropolitan Job Print, January 1899), 1060.
10.The Hamilton postmaster’s compensation in 1871 was $1,200, or the fifth-highest compensation in the state. The Official Register of the United States, 1871 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1871), 682–83; “Nevada Items,” Daily Alta California, October 5, 1872, 1, available online at https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=DAC18721005.2.27; Walter Nettleton Frickstad and Edward W. Thrall, A Century of Nevada Post Offices, 1852–1957 (Oakland, CA: Philatelic Research Society, 1958), 12.
11.All figures and calculations for Hamilton come from Register of Money Orders Issued at the Post Office of Hamilton, White Pine County, Nevada, MSS 2011/175 v.1, Bancroft Library, University of Berkeley, California. $19,718 was worth $529,996.19 by percentage increase in the consumer price index (CPI) between 1878 and 2019. Williamson, “Measuring Worth.”
12.Figures reflect domestic, not international, money orders and were calculated for the fiscal year July 1880–June 1881 using 1881 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1881), 678–83; “1880 United States Census,” Wikipedia, July 7, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1880_United_States_Census&oldid=789443640.
13.John Joseph Giblin, Record of the Fargo Family (New York: American Bank Note Company, 1907), 22–23, available online at http://archive.org/details/recordoffargofam00lcgibl. The company started offering its own private money orders in 1882, almost two decades after the Post Office Department first launched the service.
14.As one financial textbook from the period reminded its readers, “Banks do not like to issue drafts for sums less than $5. Henry Thomas Loomis, Spelling and Letter Writing: A Textbook for Use in Commercial Schools, Normal Schools, Colleges, Academies, and High Schools ([Cleveland]: Spencer, Felton & Loomis, 1889), 158. The average order of a postal money order, meanwhile, was less than five dollars. 1880 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880), 401.
15.Casting a wider net to include state banks, savings banks, trust companies, and private bankers increases the total number of financial institutions in the Far West to 259, still slightly fewer than the number of money order post offices operating in the same region. Like national banks, these institutions were located in a much smaller range of places. United States Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Annual Report of the Comptroller of the Currency (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880), cliv, cxviii; 1880 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 572. See also Richard H. Timberlake Jr., The Origins of Central Banking in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 87–88. Economic historians have since found that proximity to a national bank produced long-lasting increases in both agricultural production and manufacturing outputs. Matthew Jaremski, “National Banking’s Role in U.S. Industrialization, 1850–1900,” Journal of Economic History 74, no. 1 (March 2014): 109–40, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050714000047; Scott L. Fulford, “How Important Are Banks for Development? National Banks in the United States, 1870–1900,” Review of Economics and Statistics 97, no. 5 (October 2015): 921–38, https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_00546.
16.For the creation of a national currency, see Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 305–59. For the currency issue, see Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 281–84, 831–36; Nicolas Barreyre, Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015).
17.Marshall Gramm and Phil Gramm, “The Free Silver Movement in America: A Reinterpretation,” Journal of Economic History 64, no. 4 (2004): 1116.
18.For examples of paying in postage stamps, see advertisement for Red House Trade Union in Sacramento Daily Union, June 15, 1883, 1, available online at http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SDU18830615.2.5.2; Natalie Marine-Street, “Agents Wanted: Sales, Gender, and the Making of Consumer Markets in America, 1830–1930” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2016), 187–88, available online at https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/11616850. For the problems this posed for the Post Office Department, see 1876 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1876), xxiv; 1877 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1877), xxiv, 170.
19.For the introduction of postal notes, see 47th Congress, 2nd Session, “Ch. 123: An act to modify the postal money-order system, and for other purposes,” Statutes at Large, March 3, 1883; Cushing, Story of Our Post Office, 214; 1884 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1884), 737.
20.Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 143.
21.United States Postal Service Historian, “Pieces of Mail Handled, Number of Post Offices, Income, and Expenses Since 1789,” United States Postal Service, February 2020, https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/pieces-of-mail-since-1789.htm. For a review of the annual finances of the Money Order Division from 1865–1892, see 1892 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1892), 240.
22.For Charles Macdonald’s departure, see “Consul Macdonald’s Services,” New York Times, June 23, 1893, 4, available online at http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1893/06/23/109701938.html.
23.1893 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893), 93, 688–89.
24.United States Post Office Department, The United States Postal Money-Order System, 10; “Legacy to Post Office Money Order Office,” New York Times, September 25, 1902, 5, available online at https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1902/09/25/101287474.html?pageNumber=5.
25.1893 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 688-89; United States Postal Service Historian, “Pieces of Mail Handled, Number of Post Offices, Income, and Expenses Since 1789,” United States Postal Service, February 2020, https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/pieces-of-mail-since-1789.htm.
26.For the number of periodicals as a percentage of total mail matter, see 1890 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1890), 50-54; 1899 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 4–5; United States Postal Service Historian, “Pieces of Mail Handled, Number of Post Offices, Income, and Expenses Since 1789,” United States Postal Service, February 2020, https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/pieces-of-mail-since-1789.htm. For more on periodicals in the mail, see Richard B. Kielbowicz, “Postal Subsidies for the Press and the Business of Mass Culture, 1880–1920,” Business History Review 64, no. 3 (October 1990): 458, https://doi.org/10.2307/3115736.
27.US Post Office Department, The Postal Laws and Regulations of the United States of America, Comp., Rev., and Pub. in Accordance with the Act of Congress Approved March 30, 1886 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1887), 174–82; United States Post Office Department, 1892 United States Official Postal Guide, vol. 14, no. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1892), 822–23.
28.1893 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, xxxi, 688-91. For seed samples, see Kathy J. Cooke, “Who Wants White Carrots?: Congressional Seed Distribution, 1862 to 1923,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 17, no. 3 (July 2018): 475–500, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781418000075.
29.“City Items,” Daily Alta California, February 5, 1866, 1, available online at https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=DAC18660205.2.2&srpos=1.
30.For a history of departmental requirements for money order offices, see Cushing, Story of Our Post Office, 217–19. See also 1892 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 240.
31.Figures for June 30, 1880. United States Post Office Department, 1880 United States Official Postal Guide, vol. 2, no. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880). The Far West includes states and territories west of the Kansas/Colorado border.
32.Dina Hassan in the Stanford Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis conducted analysis of money order accessibility. Money order office data was transcribed from United States Post Office Department, 1880 United States Official Postal Guide. Hassan classified the zones as follows: Zone 1 was the highest degree of accessibility—post offices that either were themselves money order offices or fell within 0–3 miles of a money order office. Zone 2 consisted of post offices that fell within 3–10 miles of a money order office. Westerners living in Zone 2 could presumably access the money order system within a single day by making between a round-trip journey on foot or horseback. Zone 3 consisted of post offices that fell within 10–20 miles of a money order office. These areas could technically access the money order system, but it would have required at least a full day or overnight round-trip journey. Finally, Zone 4 was made up of post offices that were effectively cut off from the money order system—those post offices that were more than 20 miles away from a money order office. An important caveat to note is that these distances reflect straight-line distances, not the actual routes that people would travel. This exaggerates the degree of accessibility within each zone, but it does serve as a rough proxy.
33.“Cisco,” Sacramento Daily Union, February 5, 1867, 4, available online at https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SDU18670205.2.8&srpos=1. In 1871 Cisco’s annual postmaster compensation was $12—the minimum amount disbursed by the Post Office Department. The Official Register of the United States, 1871, 508.
34.“Philipsburg Postal Matters,” New North-West, November 9, 1877, 3, available online at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84038125/1877-11-09/ed-1/seq-3/. The Montana delegate was nothing if not persistent. Five years later, Macdonald found himself refusing yet another request from Maginnis for money order facilities at yet another small post office in his territory. “Money Order Business,” Rocky Mountain Husbandman, April 20, 1882, 6, available online at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025309/1882-04-20/ed-1/seq-6/.
35.Representative Poindexter Dunn (AR), Congressional Record, 47th Congress, 1st Session, July 7, 1882, S. 6335.
36.Temple Bodley, “The Post Office Department as Common Carrier and Bank,” American Law Review, 1884, 224.
37.1882 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1882), xvi.
38.L. L. Fairchild, “The Money Order Business: A Public Convenience That Is a Heavy Tax on the Country Postmaster,” United States Mail, March 1887; Cooley, The Postmasters’ Manual and Clerks’ Assistant, 12–22.
39.52nd Congress, 2d Session, “H. Mis. Doc. No. 90: The Postal Laws and Regulations of the United States of America” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893), 420.The 1893 Postal Laws and regulations are on page 420.
40.“A Memorial From Postmasters,” written by Postmaster’s Convention in Chicago, signed March 26, 1888; Senate Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads, NARA I RG 46, 49A, H20.1, box 97, folder: Various Subjects; James H. Curtis to Sarah Curtis and Delia Curtis, October 19, 1890, box 2, Curtis Family Correspondence, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
41.Cushing, Story of Our Post Office, 218–19. 1893 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 69; 1892 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 240. For Wanamaker’s role as a social reformer, see Nicole C. Kirk, Wanamaker’s Temple: The Business of Religion in an Iconic Department Store (New York: NYU Press, 2018).
42.1892 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 226–27; 1893 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 69.
43.For surrounding geography, see A von Haake, Post Route Map of the States of California and Nevada, Showing Post Offices with the Intermediate Distances and Mail Routes in Operation on the 1st of June, 1896, Pocket Map, 1:696,960 (Washington, DC: United States Post Office Department, June 1, 1896), available online at the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/522v69. For more on the hydraulic mining court case and the famous “Sawyer decision,” see Robert L. Kelley, “Forgotten Giant: The Hydraulic Gold Mining Industry in California,” Pacific Historical Review 23, no. 4 (November 1954): 343–56, https://doi.org/10.2307/3634653. For information about North Bloomfield in the 1890s, see United States Census Office, Report on the Population of the Eleventh Census: 1890; Part 1 (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1895), 71; Harry Laurenz Wells, History of Nevada County, California; with Illustrations Descriptive of Its Scenery, Residences, Public Buildings, Fine Blocks, and Manufactories (Oakland, CA: Thompson & West, 1880), 58–59, available online at https://archive.org/stream/historyofnevadac00well; John Edmund Poingdestre, Nevada County Mining and Business Directory, 1895 (Oakland, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Company, 1895), 20, 26.
44.For the establishment of money order facilities at North Bloomfield, see C. F. Macdonald to Postmaster at North Bloomfield, California, October 3, 1892, box 14, folder 25, Malakoff Diggins State Park Historical Collection, California Department of Parks and Recreation, Sacramento, California, “Postal Matters,” Sacramento Daily Union, October 18, 1892, 7, available online at http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SDU18921018.2.46. In California alone the number of money order offices expanded by two-thirds over the course of a single year, from 322 to 540. Thank you to Terrence Hines for providing data related to the number of money order offices.
45.United States Post Office Department, United States Official Postal Guide (1876) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1876), 364; United States Post Office Department, 1882 United States Official Postal Guide, vol. 4, no. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1882), 524; United States Post Office Department, 1892 United States Official Postal Guide, vol. 14, no. 1: 506; W. L. Nicholson, Post Route Map of the States of California and Nevada (Washington, DC: United States Post Office Department, 1885), National Archives and Records Association II (College Park).
46.Money order data was transcribed by Stanford research assistants Jenny Barin and Alex Ramsey from Money Order Applications—January–December 1895, box 6, folders 12–15, Malakoff Diggins State Park Historical Collection, California Department of Parks and Recreation, Sacramento, California. The months in this dataset include: February, March, April, June, August, September, October, and December of 1895. All future figures of money order information from North Bloomfield come from this source unless otherwise noticed.
47.For traditional large-scale economic histories of this era, see Richard Sylla, “Federal Policy, Banking Market Structure, and Capital Mobilization in the United States, 1863–1913,” Journal of Economic History 29, no. 4 (December 1969): 657–86; John A. James, Money and Capital Markets in Postbellum America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Naomi R. Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); John J. Binder and David T. Brown, “Bank Rates of Return and Entry Restrictions, 1869–1914,” Journal of Economic History 51, no. 1 (March 1991): 47–66, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050700038353. For the importance of smaller scales of analysis in economic history, see Emma Rothschild, “Isolation and Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century France,” American Historical Review 119, no. 4 (October 2014): 1080, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/119.4.1055. For thoughts on the relationship between historians and economic history, see William H. Sewell, “A Strange Career: The Historical Study of Economic Life,” History and Theory 49, no. 4 (December 2010): 146–66, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2010.00564.x.
48.Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 203–51; Lizabeth Cohen, “The Mass in Mass Consumption,” Reviews in American History 18, no. 4 (December 1990): 548–55, https://doi.org/10.2307/2703053; Richard S. Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1996).
49.One industry manual described the Post Office Department’s monthly postal guide as “the mail-order man’s Bible.” Samuel Sawyer, Secrets of the Mail-Order Trade: A Practical Manual for Those Embarking in the Business of Advertising and Selling Goods by Mail (New York: Sawyer, 1900), 20.
50.Grace Fairchild, Frontier Woman: The Life of a Woman Homesteader on the Dakota Frontier, ed. Walker Demarquis Wyman (River Falls: University of Wisconsin—River Falls Press, 1972), 19.
51.For an introduction to the literature on national consumer culture and the role of mail-order catalogs, see Cohen, “The Mass in Mass Consumption.” For the standard account of mail-order houses and commercial integration, see Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967), 206; Alfred Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 224–39; Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed, 211–21; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 333–40; Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age: 1865–1905 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 114.
52.Annette Kassis, Weinstock’s: Sacramento’s Finest Department Store (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2012).
53.Chandler, The Visible Hand, 224–39; Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed, 20–22; Howard R. Stanger, “The Larkin Clubs of Ten: Consumer Buying Clubs and Mail-Order Commerce, 1890–1940,” Enterprise and Society 9, no. 1 (2008): 129. For a western exception, see Henry C. Klassen, “T. C. Power & Bro.: The Rise of a Small Western Department Store, 1870–1902,” Business History Review 66, no. 4 (December 1992): 671–722, https://doi.org/10.2307/3116844.
54.“The Mechanic’s Store,” Sacramento Daily Union, May 29, 1878, 1, available online at http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SDU18780529.2.6.2.
55.Advertisement, Eugene City Guard, March 2, 1891, 3, available online at http://oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/sn84022653/1891-05-02/ed-1/seq-3/. The number is almost certainly an exaggeration; the far larger Sears, Roebuck & Co. boasted a catalog circulation of 318,000 in 1897. John E. Jeuck and Boris Emmet, Catalogues and Counters: A History of Sears, Roebuck & Co (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 92. See also Kassis, Weinstock’s, 22. “Trying to Find It,” Pacific Rural Press, March 20, 1886, 274, available online at http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=PRP18860320.2.32.1.
56.Kassis, Weinstock’s, 22–23; Olivia Rossetti Agresti, David Lubin: A Study in Practical Idealism (Little, Brown, 1922), 53. John Wannamaker, founder of Wannamaker’s Department Store, also served as postmaster general from 1889 to 1893. For an analysis of another regional western department store, see Klassen, “T. C. Power & Bro.” The 1900 census counted 29,282 people in Sacramento and 59,364 people in Hoboken, New Jersey. >>>“Sacramento, California,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, May 23, 2015, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sacramento,_California&oldid=663727740.
57.For examples of Weinstock, Lubin & Co. advertisements, see Eugene City Guard, March 2, 1891, 3, available online at http://oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/sn84022653/1891-05-02/ed-1/seq-3/; “Trying to Find It.” For second-class postage see United States Post Office Department, 1892 United States Official Postal Guide, vol. 14, no. 1: 816–20; Kielbowicz, “Postal Subsidies for the Press”; Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 57–100. My own research on one contemporary newspaper in Houston found that fully 29 percent of newspaper page space was dedicated to advertising. See Cameron Blevins, “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston,” Journal of American History 101, no. 1 (June 2014): 139–40.
58.United States Post Office Department, 1892 United States Official Postal Guide, vol. 14, no. 1: 816–20. Weinstock, Lubin & Co. offered to send their catalogs for free, whereas Sears, Roebuck & Co. charged between five and 15 cents for their catalog. See “Getting Their Catalogues,” Pacific Rural Press, April 25, 1891, 403, available online at http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=PRP18910425.2.22.1; Jeuck and Emmet, Catalogues and Counters, 92.
59.Weinstock, Lubin & Co., Weinstock, Lubin & Co. Catalogue—Spring and Summer 1891, No. 31 (repr.; Sacramento, CA: Sacramento American Revolution Bicentennial Committee, 1975), 64, 76.
60.“Getting Their Catalogues.”.
61.Weinstock, Lubin & Co., Weinstock, Lubin & Co. Catalogue—Spring and Summer 1900 (Sacramento, CA: Weinstock, Lubin & Co., 1900), 4, 6, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
62.Weinstock, Lubin & Co., Weinstock, Lubin & Co. Catalogue - Spring and Summer 1891, No. 31, 23.
63.Women were far more likely than men to use money orders for commercial purposes in North Bloomfield. Around three-quarters of their orders went to companies or other organizations rather than individual recipients, whereas men split their money orders evenly between the two.
64.Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 38–47, 289; Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 139–62; Emily A. Remus, “Tippling Ladies and the Making of Consumer Culture: Gender and Public Space in Fin-de-Siècle Chicago,” Journal of American History 101, no. 3 (December 2014): 751–77, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau650.
65.“A Business Maker,” Arizona Weekly Journal-Miner, September 25, 1895, 3, available online at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85032938/1895-09-25/ed-1/seq-3/.
66.Weinstock, Lubin & Co., “Weinstock, Lubin & Co. Catalogue—Spring and Summer 1900,” 6.
67.United States Post Office Department, 1892 United States Official Postal Guide, vol. 14, no. 1: 817. Fourth-class mail made up a minuscule amount of the nation’s mail. In both 1880 and 1890 it was estimated at less than 1 percent of all mailed items. See 1880 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 87–89; 1890 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1890), 52. 1880 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 87–89.
68.Richard B. Kielbowicz, “Government Goes into Business: Parcel Post in the Nation’s Political Economy, 1880–1915,” Studies in American Political Development 8, no. 1 (1994): 150–72, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898588X00000109.
69.The Sacramento store had one additional advantage. Montgomery Ward refused to ship orders for less than five dollars, because “the cost of transportation would consume your saving,” whereas Weinstock, Lubin & Co. actively encouraged these small-sized orders. In fact, the median size of a postal money order sent to the store from North Bloomfield was $4.20—a size that would have been too small for Montgomery Ward to fill. Weinstock, Lubin & Co., Weinstock, Lubin & Co. Catalogue—Spring and Summer 1891, No. 31, 64, 76, 80; Montgomery Ward, Montgomery Ward & Co. Catalogue and Buyers’ Guide—Spring and Summer 1895, 2nd ed., vol. 57, 1895, 1.
70.Sven Beckert writes, “By 1900, no other recently captured region had been as thoroughly integrated into the national and global economy as the territory of the United States.” Sven Beckert, “American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950,” American Historical Review 122, no. 4 (October 2017): 1149, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.4.1137. For the integration of language, see Rosina Lozano, An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 27–28, 39. For industrial integration, see Noam Maggor, Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).
71.1878 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1878), 17; 1895 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 132.
72.United States Post Office Department, 1878 United States Official Postal Guide, vol. 16 (New York.: Houghton, Osgood, 1878), 29; United States Post Office Department, 1896 United States Official Postal Guide, 901.
73.The nearest data available for mail transit times is from 1882 and 1894. The likely drop in transit time between 1878 and 1895 is almost certainly larger. United States Post Office Department, 1882 United States Official Postal Guide, vol. 4, no. 1: 579; United States Post Office Department, 1894 United States Official Postal Guide (Philadelphia: George F. Lasher, 1894), 779.
74.The Hamilton Post Office sent 571 money orders over February, March, April, June, August, September, October, and December, while the North Bloomfield Post Office sent 876 money orders over this same time frame.
75.Noam Maggor makes a similar point about the assumptions historians make regarding capitalist integration and political integration in Maggor, Brahmin Capitalism, 158, 177.
76.For more on the standardization of news, see Gerald J. Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). I explore this theme in more depth in Blevins, “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region.” Thomas Bender discusses how nationalism can enhance regionalism in Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978), 87–89.
77.The Official Register of the United States, 1875 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1875), 965; The Official Register of the United States, 1895, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895), 219; Frickstad and Thrall, A Century of Nevada Post Offices, 8, 9, 19, 22, 29, 30.
1.United States Postal Service Historian, “Pieces of Mail Handled, Number of Post Offices, Income, and Expenses Since 1789,” United States Postal Service, February 2020, https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/pieces-of-mail-since-1789.pdf, accessed April 23, 2020.
2.37th Congress, 3rd Session, “Ch. 71: An Act to Amend the Laws Relating to the Post-Office Department,” Statutes at Large, March 3, 1863.
3.The postmaster general’s annual report lists 454 offices with City Free Delivery for the fiscal year ending 1889–1890. 1890 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1890), 255.
4.1891 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1891), 82–88.
5.Wayne Edison Fuller, RFD: The Changing Face of Rural America (Bloomington, 1964); Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America: A History (New York: Penguin, 2016), 188–92, 204–7.
6.For RFD’s impact on newspaper circulation, see Elisabeth Ruth Perlman and Steven Sprick Schuster, “Delivering the Vote: The Political Effect of Free Mail Delivery in Early Twentieth Century America,” Journal of Economic History 76, no. 3 (September 2016): 791, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050716000784. For commercial and political effects of Rural Free Delivery, see Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 45–68; Fuller, RFD, 293–95. Rural residents could also purchase postal money orders from RFD mail carriers. See 1901 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 128–30; “Postal Wagons for the Country,” San Francisco Call, November 2, 1898, 9, available online at http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SFC18981102.2.114.
7.William R. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 182–84; Mary Beth Norton et al., A People and a Nation: A History of the United States, Brief Edition (Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2014), 453; Christopher W. Wells, “The Changing Nature of Country Roads: Farmers, Reformers, and the Shifting Uses of Rural Space, 1880–1905,” Agricultural History 80, no. 2 (April 2006): 143–66; Fuller, RFD.
8.Daniel P. Carpenter, “State Building through Reputation Building: Coalitions of Esteem and Program Innovation in the National Postal System, 1883–1913,” Studies in American Political Development 14, no. 2 (2000): 121–55, https://doi.org/null; Daniel Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 94–143; Samuel Kernell and Michael P. McDonald, “Congress and America’s Political Development: The Transformation of the Post Office from Patronage to Service,” American Journal of Political Science 43, no. 3 (July 1999): 792–811, https://doi.org/10.2307/2991835.
9.Postel, The Populist Vision, 143–45; Wayne E. Fuller, “The Populists and the Post Office,” Agricultural History 65, no. 1 (January 1991): 1–16. “The Omaha Platform: Launching the Populist Party,” George Mason University, History Matters, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5361/, accessed September 19, 2019.
10.1890 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 40. For one example of Wanamaker’s lobbying efforts, see his widely reprinted editorial in “Postal Delivery for County Districts,” Farmer’s Review, November 11, 1891, 714, available online at http://idnc.library.illinois.edu/cgi-bin/illinois?a=d&d=FFR18911111.2.8. For wider lobbying efforts conducted by both Wanamaker and agrarian reformers, see Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 123–31; Leach, Land of Desire, 182–85. For “country boy” see 1891 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 6.
11.Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 88–93, 96–98; 1889 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1889), 7; 1891 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 42–46.
12.William Dudley Foulke, Fighting the Spoilsmen: Reminiscences of the Civil Service Reform Movement (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1919), 54–64.
13.1893 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893), ix; Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 131.
14.Fuller, RFD, 54–56.
15.For the growth of the Railway Mail Service as a bureaucratic beachhead within the US Post and its relationship to Rural Free Delivery, see Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 76–83, 98–102, 135.
16.1880 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880), 87–88; 1900 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900), 264–65.
17.Fuller, RFD, 54–56.
18.The Official Register of the United States, 1891, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1891), 666.
19.Charles Roeser Jr. and R. A. Rock, Post Route Map of the Territories of New Mexico and Arizona, 1:833,000 (Washington, DC: United States Post Office Department, October 1, 1891), G4321.P8 1891.U55x, Norman B. Leventhal Map Center Collection, Boston Public Library, available online at https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:cj82kj99g. For more on Bell Ranch, see David Remley, Bell Ranch: Cattle Ranching in the Southwest, 1824–1947, Revised edition (Las Cruces, NM: Yucca Tree, 2000).
20.George A. Howard, Office of the Auditor of the Post Office Department, to A. J. Tisdall, August 26, 1896; Second Assistant Postmaster General to Postmaster at Bell Ranch, San Miguel County, New Mexico, September 22, 1897; box 56, Red River Valley Co. Records, University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
21.A. von Haake, Topographer of the Post Office Department to Postmaster at Bell Ranch, San Miguel County, New Mexico, October 7, 1897, box 56, Red River Valley Co. Records, University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
22.C. W. Allen to A. J. Tisdall, May 20, 1897, box 56, Red River Valley Co. Records, University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
23.1898 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1898), 155; 1900 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 116.
24.1899 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1899), 203; 1903 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1903), 608.
25.Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 123–43.
26.For the longer history of post roads, see John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 46–48; Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 25–63.
27.Senator Davis speaking on February 9, 1883, 47th Congress, 2nd Session, Congressional Record 14, part 3:2334.
28.For “farce” see Senator Beck speaking on March 3, 1883, 47th Congress, 2nd Session, Congressional Record 14, part 4:3686. The legislation was passed with little fanfare or coverage. 48th Congress, 1st Session, “Ch. 9: An act making all public roads and highways post routes,” Statutes at Large, March 1, 1884.
29.1900 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 4.
30.For this and other letters from postmasters, see 1899 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 209–11.
31.Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, 188–92; Fuller, RFD.
32.1900 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 114. 1910 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1910), 342.
33.Daniel Carpenter, “From Patronage to Policy: The Centralization Campaign in Iowa Post Offices 1880–1910,” Annals of Iowa 58, no. 3 (1999): 273–309; Fuller, RFD, 81–105; Judith Littlejohn, “The Political, Socioeconomic, and Cultural Impact of the Implementation of Rural Free Delivery in Late 1890s US” (master’s thesis, The College at Brockport, State University of New York, 2013), 14, available online at http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/hst_theses/10.
34.Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, 206–7; Richard B. Kielbowicz, “Government Goes into Business: Parcel Post in the Nation’s Political Economy, 1880–1915,” Studies in American Political Development 8, no. 1 (1994): 150–72, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898588X00000109; Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, 204–7; Carpenter, “State Building through Reputation Building,” 149–53; R. B. Kielbowicz, Postal Enterprise: Post Office Innovations with Congressional Constraints, 1789–1970 (Washington, DC: Postal Rate Commission, 2000), 41–50.
35.Elisabeth S. Clemens, The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 41–99; Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 212–325; Brian Balogh, The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 41–65, 89–138.
36.1903 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 610; 1904 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 583–84; 1902 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1902), 110–36. As of June 30, 1904, there were 24,566 RFD routes in operation across the United States.
37.Varun Vijay compiled spatial data about Rural Free Delivery routes established between 1896–1904 while working as an undergraduate research assistant at the Stanford Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis during the spring of 2015. The data was taken from US Postal Service Historian, “First Rural Routes by State” (United States Postal Service, April 2008), https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/first-rural-routes.htm. The data only includes the originating post office (terminus) from which an RFD route operated, so multiple routes may have operated out of the same office.
38.In the words of political scientist Daniel Carpenter, “A triangular flow of information developed between the RFD inspector, the congressional representative, and department officials.” Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 136. Brian Balogh makes a similar point about the US Forest Service under Gifford Pinchot, whose technocratic, scientific management was also defined by a personal patronage network centered on the Yale Forestry School. Balogh, The Associational State, 41–65.
39.Kernell and McDonald, “Congress and America’s Political Development.”
40.Representative Maddox speaking on March 3, 1903, 58th Congress, 2nd Session, Congressional Record 38, part 1:262.
41.There were 456 routes in Georgia at the time. 1903 Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 610. For more on the rollout of Rural Free Delivery in the South, see Wayne E. Fuller, “The South and the Rural Free Delivery of Mail,” Journal of Southern History 25, no. 4 (November 1959): 499–521. For examples of the prevalence of political and partisan issues at the local level regarding new Rural Free Delivery routes, see papers, letters, and petitions in folder 693: Woodbury, CT Rural Free Delivery and folder 696: Rural Free Delivery, 1902–1904, box 54: Series II, Ebenezer J. Hill Papers (MS 279), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
42.For the geography of Paloma and Palomas, see Rand McNally & Co., Rand McNally & Co.’s Enlarged Business Atlas and Shippers’ Guide, 1903 (Rand McNally & Co., 1903), 216–17, 227, 352–53, available online at http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/cqm5i9; Harry L. Wilkey, The Story of a Little Town: A History of Paloma, Illinois ([n.p.]: W. A. Shanholtzer, 1934), 70–71, available online at http://archive.org/details/storyoflittletow00wilk. As late as 1916 there was one RFD route in the entire county of Yuma, Arizona (in which Palomas was located). United States Official Postal Guide (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916), 517–18. For the closure of the Palomas Post Office, see Alan H Patera and John S Gallagher, Arizona Post Offices (Lake Grove, OR: Depot, 1988), 226.
43.Wayne E. Fuller, “Good Roads and Rural Free Delivery of Mail,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 42, no. 1 (June 1955): 79–83, https://doi.org/10.2307/1898624; Wells, “The Changing Nature of Country Roads,” 153–54, 157–58.
44.“Surrogacy strategy” is from Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 6, 101–4. More infamous instances of this surrogacy strategy and the Post Office Department include the banning of abolitionist material from the mail and the anti-vice “Comstock Laws”. John, Spreading the News, 257–80; Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and Conflict over Sex in the United States in the 1870s,” Journal of American History 87, no. 2 (September 2000): 403–34, https://doi.org/10.2307/2568758.
45.Maurice O. Elridge, Public-Road Mileage, Revenues, and Expenditures in the United States in 1904 (Washington, DC: Department of Agriculture, Office of Public Roads, 1907), 8–9.
46.Elridge, Public-Road Mileage, 8–9.
47.Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 66, 69, 73.
48.The total number of rural “fourth-class” post offices shrunk from 67,801 to 54,311 between 1898 and 1908. United States Post Office Department, United States Official Postal Guide, 1898 (New York: Metropolitan Job, 1898), 1037, available online at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000003071618; United States Post Office Department, United States Official Postal Guide, 1908 (Albany, NY: J. B. Lyon, 1908), 707, available online at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b2919443.
49.Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 178–79; “Executive Order 982: Amending Civil Service Rules to Limit Exceptions from Examination for Certain Postmasters,” November 30, 1908, available online at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_982.
50.Thomas B. Catron to B. F. Pankey, April 16, 1912, box 1, Thomas B. Catron Papers, University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
51.B. F. Pankey to Thomas B. Catron, April 11, 1912, box 1, Thomas B. Catron Papers, University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
52.Thomas B. Catron to B. F. Pankey, April 16, 1912, box 1, Thomas B. Catron Papers, University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
53.Alfredo Lucero to Thomas B. Catron, May 10, 1912, box 1; Thomas B. Catron to George Curry, June 1, 1912, box 1; C. P. Grandfield, Office of First Assistant Postmaster General to Thomas B. Catron, June 6, 1912, box 1, Thomas B. Catron Papers, University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
54.José Salazar to Thomas B. Catron, June 28, 1912, box 1, Thomas B. Catron Papers, University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
55.C. P. Grandfield, Office of First Assistant Postmaster General, to Thomas B. Catron, June 25, 1912, box 1, Thomas B. Catron Papers, University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
56.Alfredo Lucero to Thomas B. Catron, July 6, 1912, box 1, Thomas B. Catron Papers, University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
57.The Official Register of the United States, 1911, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911), 324, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t4qj8681h.
58.James A. Garfield, The Diary of James A. Garfield, ed. Brown Williams, vol. 2 (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1967), 213.
59.1912 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912), 87–88; Ari Hoogenboom, “The Pendleton Act and the Civil Service,” American Historical Review 64, no. 2 (January 1959): 305, https://doi.org/10.2307/1845445; Skowronek, Building a New American State, 193–94. For contemporary coverage, see “Fourth Class Post Office,” Press Democrat, May 30, 1913, available online at https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SRPD19130530.2.48; “Executive Order 1624: Amending Civil Service Rules to Limit Exceptions from Examination for Certain Postmasters,” October 15, 1912, available online at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_1624; “Executive Order 1776: Amending Civil Service Rules Regarding Competitive Status for Fourth Class Postmasters,” May 7, 1913, available online at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_1776.
1.Daniel Calhoun Roper, The United States Post Office: Its Past Record, Present Condition, and Potential Relation to the New World Era (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1917), 312–14.
2.Roper, The United States Post Office, 312-14, 320.
3.Elisabeth Clemens forcefully make this point in Elisabeth S. Clemens, “Lineages of the Rube Goldberg State: Building and Blurring Public Programs, 1900–1940,” in Rethinking Political Institutions: The Art of the State, ed. Ian Shapiro, Stephen Skowronek, and Daniel Galvin (New York: NYU Press, 2006), 188. See also Stephen W. Sawyer, “A Fiscal Revolution: Statecraft in France’s Early Third Republic,” American Historical Review 121, no. 4 (October 2016): 1144, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.4.1141.
4.Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America: A History (New York: Penguin, 2016), 221–36.
5.For the history of this period, see Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, 239–54. For “rural allowance,” see President’s Commission on Postal Organization, Towards Postal Excellence: The Report of the President’s Commission on Postal Organization (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1968), 137–38. For star route history, see United States Postal Service Historian, “Star Routes,” May 2007, https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/star-routes.pdf.
6.President’s Commission on Postal Organization, Towards Postal Excellence, v, 24.
7.“Public Law 91-375, 91 Congress, Session 2, An Act: To Improve and Modernize the Postal Service, to Reorganize the Post Office Department, and for Other Purposes.,” U.S. Statutes at Large, August 12, 1970, 719.
8.Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, 256. For the wider shift from service to business, see Richard R. John, “History of Universal Service and the Postal Monopoly,” Study on Universal Postal Service and the Postal Monopoly (School of Public Policy, George Mason University, November 2008).
9.“Public Law 91-375,” 719.
10.United States Postal Service Historian, “First-Class Mail Volume since 1926,” United States Postal Service, February 2020, https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/first-class-mail-since-1926.htm.
11.“A Postal Primer: The Basics and Pivotal Issues Affecting the Future of the United States Postal Service,” April 16, 2019, i–iii, 10–12, https://postalcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/C21-Postal-Primer-2019.pdf.
12.Outside the Box: Reforming and Renewing the Postal Service, Part II: Hearings before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, 113th Cong. (September 26, 2013) (testimony of Dean Baker), available online at https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Testimony-Baker-2013-09-26.pdf.
13.“United States Postal Service FY2019 Annual Report to Congress” (United States Postal Service, 2020), https://about.usps.com/what/financials/annual-reports/fy2019.pdf.
14.Lisa Rein, “Postal Service Names 3,700 Post Offices That Could Be Closed,” Washington Post, July 26, 2011, available online at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/postal-service-names-3700-post-offices-that-could-be-closed/2011/07/26/gIQARk3tbI_story.html; “Statement on Delay of Closing or Consolidation of Post Offices and Mail Processing Facilities,” United States Postal Service, December 13, 2011, https://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2011/pr11_1213closings.htm.
15.“Tester Blasts Postmaster General for ‘Lack of Transparency,’ ” U.S. Senator for Montana Jon Tester, October 12, 2011, https://www.tester.senate.govp=press_release&id=1542.
16.“Management and Oversight of Highway Contract Routes” (Office of Inspector General: United States Postal Service, September 30, 2016), 1–2, https://www.oversight.gov/sites/default/files/oig-reports/NL-AR-16-006.pdf.
17.“New Strategy to Preserve the Nation’s Smallest Post Offices,” United States Postal Service, May 9, 2012, https://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2012/pr12_054.htm; “A Postal Primer\.”
18.Jennifer Collins, “First Village Post Office Debuts in Malone,” Marketplace (blog), August 10, 2011, https://www.marketplace.org/2011/08/10/first-village-post-office-debuts-malone/; Patrick Oppmann, “The New Face of the U.S. Post Office,” CNN News, September 12, 2011, https://www.cnn.com/2011/US/09/12/mini.mart.post.office/index.html.
19.Brian Balogh, The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 128–99.
20.Gareth Davies and Martha Derthick, “Race and Social Welfare Policy: The Social Security Act of 1935,” Political Science Quarterly 112, no. 2 (1997): 232–35, https://doi.org/10.2307/2657939; Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 243–45; C. Lowell Harriss, History and Policies of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1951), 140, available online at https://www.nber.org/books/harr51-1.
21.Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 222–35, 296–345; Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, 253–55, 262–65.
22.Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 14–17.
23.Matthew Glassman, Laura A. Hanson, and Carla N. Argueta, Federal Land Ownership: Overview and Data (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, March 3, 2017), https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42346.pdf; “Public Land Statistics 2018” (U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, August 2019), https://www.blm.gov/sites/blm.gov/files/PublicLandStatistics2018.pdf.
24.James R. Skillen, The Nation’s Largest Landlord: The Bureau of Land Management in the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), ix. The BLM continues to face geographical challenges to regulation and enforcement: V. William Scarpato, “Don’t Tread on Me: Increasing Compliance with Off-Road Vehicle Regulations at Least Cost,” Environs: Environmental Law and Policy Journal 36, no. 2 (May 2013): 135–69; Brian C. Steed, “Collaboration with State and Local Partners,” (information bulletin, Washington, DC: United States Department of the Interior: Bureau of Land Management, March 2, 2018), https://www.blm.gov/policy/ib-2018-037.
25.“First Inaugural Address of Ronald Reagan,” January 20, 1981, available online at the Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/reagan1.asp.
26.In 2017, there were 4.1 million people categorized as contractors and another 1.2 million as “grant employees,” compared to the roughly 3.8 million direct government employees or active-duty military personnel. Paul Light, The Government-Industrial Complex: The True Size of the Federal Government, 1984–2018 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 36–42. For literature on government contracting, see Jody Freeman and Martha Minow, eds., Government by Contract: Outsourcing and American Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Jocelyn M. Johnston and Barbara S. Romzek, “The Promises, Performance, and Pitfalls of Government Contracting,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Bureaucracy, ed. Robert F. Durant (Oxford University Press, 2010), 396–420, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199238958.001.0001; Suzanne Mettler, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
27.Manan Ahmed et al., “Textures,” Torn Apart / Separados 1 (June 25, 2018), http://xpmethod.plaintext.in/torn-apart/volume/1/textures.html; “Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Budget Overview: Fiscal Year 2018” (Washington, DC: Department of Homeland Security, 2018), https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/ICE%20FY18%20Budget.pdf.
28.Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General, “ICE Does Not Fully Use Contracting Tools to Hold Detention Facility Contractors Accountable for Failing to Meet Performance Standards” (Washington, DC: Department of Homeland Security, January 29, 2019), 7, https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2019-02/OIG-19-18-Jan19.pdf.
29.Office of Management and Budget, “Analytical Perspectives, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2019,” Analytical Perspectives (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Publishing Office, 2018), 65, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/spec-fy2019.pdf.
30.Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Crown, 2016); Lee Raine and Janna Anderson, “Code-Dependent: Pros and Cons of the Algorithm Age” (Pew Research Center, February 8, 2017), https://www.pewinternet.org/2017/02/08/code-dependent-pros-and-cons-of-the-algorithm-age/. For Facebook altering user attitudes, see Adam D. I. Kramer, Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock, “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 24 (June 17, 2014): 8788–90, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1320040111; Elise Hu, “Facebook Manipulates Our Moods for Science and Commerce: A Roundup,” All Tech Considered (NPR blog), June 30, 2014, https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/06/30/326929138/facebook-manipulates-our-moods-for-science-and-commerce-a-roundup.
31.“1889 Annual Report of the Postmaster General” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1889), 7; O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction; Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018); Julia Angwin et al., “Machine Bias: There’s Software Used Across the Country to Predict Future Criminals. And It’s Biased against Blacks.,” ProPublica, May 23, 2016, https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing; Pauline Kim, “Data-Driven Discrimination at Work” (SSRN Scholarly Paper, Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, April 19, 2017), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2801251; Miranda Bogen, “All the Ways Hiring Algorithms Can Introduce Bias,” Harvard Business Review, May 6, 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/05/all-the-ways-hiring-algorithms-can-introduce-bias; Rachel Courtland, “Bias Detectives: The Researchers Striving to Make Algorithms Fair,” Nature 558 (June 20, 2018): 357–60, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05469-3; Dillon Reisman et al., “Algorithmic Impact Assessments: A Practical Framework for Public Agency Accountability” (AI Now Institute, April 2018), https://ainowinstitute.org/aiareport2018.pdf.