On a trip to Texas a few years back, I got to see the ruins of one of the "stations" of the Butterfield Overland Mail, an early stagecoach service that connected St. Louis and San Francisco between 1858 and 1861. The trip was scheduled to take 600 hours (about 25 days), which should be considered when one complains when the California Zephyr's 40-odd hour run is 8 hours late. The stations were spaced every 30 miles or so to allow the company to swap out drivers and horses/mules. I had always thought that at night time the stages stayed in the station and let the passengers get some sleep. But that's not the case. When I read the wikipedia article about this service, it was pointed out that the coaches went right through and people slept on board. Having sat in a reconstructed stagecoach cabin at the museum in the Well Fargo Bank in San Francisco, I salute anybody would actually make this trip. The article wasn't clear, but they must have provided food at the station stops while they were changing horses. I suspect that the passengers would have been tickled pink if they were served Amtrak's flex dining, given what I've read about the usual 19th century trail diet.
The one thing I don't understand is how they were able to reliably operate stagecoaches at night. The coaches didn't have headlights, and the roads weren't paved and probably weren't even well-graded macadamized gravel. Rolling along in a stagecoach at full speed in the dark on an unpaved road without headlights being pulled by unbroken wild mustangs seems to me to be the perfect prelude to the NTSB investigation of a major stagecoach crash, except, of course, the NTSB didn't exist in 1858. I certainly wouldn't have been able to sleep very well. And this is without considering the possibility of attacks from the Apaches and other native groups who were understandably annoyed at these interlopers from the east rolling through their territory. Apparently, the stagecoach employees were not armed; fortunately (I guess) most of the passengers were.
Anyway, after reading about what it was like to travel overland to the west coast back in the day, I'm never going to complain about being crammed into a middle seat for a 6-hour flight or a late Amtrak trip where the Flex dining food runs out. And I want to find this publication, which was an account by a newspaper reporter who was on the first trip:
Waterman L. Ormsby, The Butterfield Overland Mail, Only Through Passenger on the First Westbound Stage, Edited by Lyle H. Wright and Johnson M. Bynum, The Huntington Library, San Marino California, 1991,
The one thing I don't understand is how they were able to reliably operate stagecoaches at night. The coaches didn't have headlights, and the roads weren't paved and probably weren't even well-graded macadamized gravel. Rolling along in a stagecoach at full speed in the dark on an unpaved road without headlights being pulled by unbroken wild mustangs seems to me to be the perfect prelude to the NTSB investigation of a major stagecoach crash, except, of course, the NTSB didn't exist in 1858. I certainly wouldn't have been able to sleep very well. And this is without considering the possibility of attacks from the Apaches and other native groups who were understandably annoyed at these interlopers from the east rolling through their territory. Apparently, the stagecoach employees were not armed; fortunately (I guess) most of the passengers were.
Anyway, after reading about what it was like to travel overland to the west coast back in the day, I'm never going to complain about being crammed into a middle seat for a 6-hour flight or a late Amtrak trip where the Flex dining food runs out. And I want to find this publication, which was an account by a newspaper reporter who was on the first trip:
Waterman L. Ormsby, The Butterfield Overland Mail, Only Through Passenger on the First Westbound Stage, Edited by Lyle H. Wright and Johnson M. Bynum, The Huntington Library, San Marino California, 1991,