Part 25 (1/2)

In Europe such an interval would have remained for centuries, to be spanned by the slow migration of those whom ill-fortune and bad government had driven from the more crowded communities on each side.

During that time these two civilizations would have gone on in their own ways developing their own distinct customs, until in the end they would have become separate countries.

But the people east of the Mississippi and the people west of the Sierras were Americans, and the desire for a close union was strong within them. Their business habits were such that they could not carry on commercial affairs without it. Their political beliefs and their social tendencies kept them chafing for it. And furthermore it was their characteristic not to acknowledge nature's obstacles as permanent. Two thousand miles of wild prairie, mountain ranges, and deserts simply meant a task, the more blithely to be undertaken because it was made hazardous by the presence of hostile savages.

So now the East began to cry to the West and the West to the East, each voicing a desire for quicker communication, and to get letters from New York to San Francisco in fast time became one of the problems of the day.

The first step toward solution was the choice of a route, and while this was up to Was.h.i.+ngton, the proof on which it rested was up to the men of wealth and the men of action. Immediately two rival groups began striving, each to prove that its route was the quickest. Russel, Majors & Waddel, who held large freighting contracts on the northern road, from Independence, Missouri, via Salt Lake to Sacramento, bent their energies to demonstrating its practicability; the Wells-b.u.t.terfield coterie of stage and express men undertook to show that the longer pathway from St. Louis by way of the Southwestern territories to San Francisco was best.

In 1855 Senator W. M. Gwinn of California, who had conceived the idea with F. B. Ficklin, general-superintendent of the Russel, Majors & Waddel Co., introduced a bill in Congress for bringing the mails by horseback on the northern route, but the measure was pigeonholed.

Snow in the mountains was the main argument against it.

In 1857 James E. Birch got the contract for carrying a semimonthly mail from San Antonio, Texas, to San Diego, and the southern route's champions had the opportunity to prove their contention.

Save for a few brief stretches in Texas and Arizona there was no wagon road. El Paso and Tucson were the only towns between the termini. A few far-flung military outposts, whose troops of dragoons were having a hard time of it to hold their own against the Comanches and Apaches, afforded the only semblance of protection from the Indians.

Hors.e.m.e.n carried the first mail-sacks across this wilderness of dark mountains and flaming deserts. On that initial trip Silas St. Johns and Charles Mason rode side by side over the stretch from Cariso Creek to Jaeger's Ferry, where Yuma stands to-day. That ride took them straight through the Imperial valley. The waters of the Colorado, which have made the region famous for its rich crops, had not been diverted in those days. It was the hottest desert in North America; sand hills and blinding alkali flats, and only one tepid spring in the whole distance. One hundred and ten miles and the two hors.e.m.e.n made it in thirty-two hours--without remounts.

The company now began to prepare the way for stage-coaches. During the latter part of November, St. Johns and two companions drove a herd of stock from Jaeger's Ferry to Maricopa Wells. The latter point had been selected for a relay station because of water and the presence of the friendly Pima and Maricopa Indians, who kept the Apaches at a distance. During that drive of something like two hundred miles the pack-mule lost his load one night in the desert. The men went without food for three days, and for thirty-six hours traveled without a drop of water in their canteens.

The first stage left San Diego for the East in December with six pa.s.sengers. Throughout the trip a hostler rode behind herding a relay team. The driver kept his six horses to their utmost for two hours; then stock and wearied pa.s.sengers were given a two hours' rest, after which the fresh team was hooked up and the journey resumed.

In this manner they made about fifty miles a day. Luck was with them.

There were several runaways along the route; at Port Davis, Texas, they found the garrison, whom they had expected to supply them with provisions according to orders from Was.h.i.+ngton, short of food, and they subsisted for the next five days on what barley they felt justified in taking away from the horses; they arrived at Camp Lancaster just after the departure of a Comanche war-party who had stolen all the stock, and were obliged to go two hundred miles further before they could get a relay. But these incidents, and a delay or two because of swollen rivers, were accounted only small mishaps. They came through with their scalps and the mail-sacks--only ten days behind the schedule.

Thereafter the Birch line continued its service; and letters came from San Francisco to St. Louis in about six weeks. Occasionally Indians ma.s.sacred a party of travelers; now and then renegade whites or Mexicans robbed the pa.s.sengers of their belongings and looted the mail-sacks. But such things were no more than any one expected. James Birch had proved his point. The southern route was practical, and in 1858 the government let a six years' contract for carrying letters twice a week between St. Louis and San Francisco, to John b.u.t.terfield of Utica, New York.

Thus the Wells-b.u.t.terfield interests scored the first decisive victory.

b.u.t.terfield's compensation was fixed at $600,000 a year and the schedule at twenty-five days. The route went by way of Fort Smith, Arkansas, El Paso, Tucson, and Jaeger's Ferry. Tie one end of a loose string to San Francisco and the other to St. Louis on your wall-map; allow the cord to droop in a semicircle to the Mexican boundary, and you will see the general direction of that road, whose length was 2760 miles. Of this nearly two thousand miles was in a hostile Indian country.

Twenty-seven hundred and sixty miles in twenty-five days, meant a fast clip for horses and a lumbering Concord coach over ungraded roads. And such a clip necessitated frequent relays. Which, in their turn, demanded stations at short intervals. While a road gang was removing the ugliest barriers in the different mountain pa.s.ses--which was all the smoothing away that highway ever got during the stage-coach era--a party went along the line erecting adobe houses.

These houses were little forts, well suited for withstanding the attacks of hostile Indians. The corrals beside them were walled like ancient castle-yards.

William Buckley of Watertown, New York, headed this party. Bands of mounted Comanches attacked them on the lonely Staked Plains of western Texas. Apaches crept upon them in the mountains of southwestern New Mexico. Of the battles which they fought history contains no record; but they went on driving the Mexican laborers to their toil under the hot sun, and the chain of low adobe buildings crept slowly westward.

In those days Mexican outlaws were drifting into Arizona and New Mexico from Chihuahua and Sonora; and these cutthroats, to whom murder was a means of livelihood, were almost as great a menace as the Indians. Three of them got jobs on the station building gang and awaited an opportunity to make money after their b.l.o.o.d.y fas.h.i.+on.

At Dragoon Springs they found their chance.

Here, where the Dragoon Mountains come out into the plain like a lofty granite promontory that faces the sea, the party had completed the walls of a stone corral, within which enclosure a storehouse and stage station were part.i.tioned off. The roofing of these two rooms and some ironwork on the gate remained to be completed. The main portion of the party moved on to the San Pedro River, leaving Silas St. Johns in charge of six men to attend to these details. The three Mexican bandits were members of this little detachment. The other three were Americans.

The place was right on the road which Apache war-parties took to Sonora. For this reason a guard was maintained from sunset to sunrise.

St. Johns always awoke at midnight to change the sentries. One starlight night when he had posted the picket who was to watch until dawn, St. Johns went back to his bed in the unroofed room that was to serve as station. He dropped off to sleep for an hour or so and was roused by a noise among the stock in the corral. The sound of blows and groans followed.

St. Johns leaped from his blankets just as the three Mexicans rushed into the room. Two of them were armed with axes and the third with a sledge.

The fight that followed lasted less than a minute.

St. Johns kicked the foremost murderer in the stomach, and as the man fell, sprang for a rifle which he kept in the room. The other two attacked him with their axes. He parried one blow, aimed at his head, and the blade buried itself in its hip. While the man was tugging to free the weapon St. Johns felled him with a blow on the jaw. The third Mexican struck downward at almost the same instant, severing St.