How the Post Office Created America by Winifred Gallagher

How the Post Office Created America by Winifred Gallagher

Author:Winifred Gallagher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-06-15T14:00:14+00:00


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STEAM POWER HAD IMPROVED postal service for most Americans by the late nineteenth century, but others, particularly in the western outback, remained beyond the pale. Letters that arrived at the nearest regional postal hub or train station in these remote places still had to be transported, usually on a weekly basis, to small rural post offices to await retrieval by recipients on foot or horseback. The need for Star Route carriers who could get this tough job done as cheaply as possible by whatever means necessary had increased with the nation’s rapid western expansion following the Civil War.

Star Route contractors usually took on the difficult work to help cover the costs of their main businesses. They were obliged to function regardless of conditions that often ranged from inclement to hazardous. A carrier recorded only as “Stringer” set out on horseback one spring day to carry the mail from Buffalo, Wyoming, to the hamlet of Ten Sleep. When the snow became too deep, he switched to snowshoes and a toboggan. After one of his snowshoes broke, he staggered and fell for twelve miles back to his ranch, made a new snowshoe, and finally got the mail delivered in a week. Something of what even much later Star Route contractors experienced comes across in recollections from the 1930s by Harry Elfers, who transported the mail by boat from Sandusky, Ohio, to Kelleys Island in Lake Erie, some ten miles away. He wrote that just sailing one four-mile leg of the trip could take twenty minutes or eight hours, depending on the weather, particularly in winter:

As soon as the ice begins to form, I feel eager to get out one of the “ironclads” and fight my way across. An “ironclad” is a flat-bottomed skiff. There’s a sail in the bow to carry us through the water or over the ice when conditions are right. There are two iron-shod runners on the bottom so the boat may be used as a sled. The sides are sheathed with galvanized iron. This is very important, because thin ice will cut a boat like a knife.

The Star Route system was plagued with the problems endemic to transportation contracts, starting with the objective measurement of actual mail-related costs, especially in rural regions. The post tried to exert some control over the process with very detailed contracts, which in turn generated Talmudic arguments over interpretation. (In 1900, the economist H. T. Newcomb estimated that the cost of sending a letter bearing a two-cent stamp from New York City to Circle City, Alaska, was $450.) In the 1880s, the “Star Route Scandal” focused the nation on a florid example of collusion between corrupt officials and contractors. Assistant Postmaster General Thomas J. Brady and other department bureaucrats conspired with equally venal carriers and politicians, including former Arkansas senator Stephen Dorsey, to get rich by exploiting the difficulty of monitoring transportation costs in remote areas. The contractors falsely claimed the need for faster or more frequent mail service in their regions and, in exchange for kickbacks, were awarded exorbitantly inflated sums.



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