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Butterfield Overland Mail (officially Overland Mail Company) [1] was a stagecoach service in the United States operating from 1858 to 1861. It carried passengers and U.S. Mail from two eastern termini, Memphis, Tennessee , and St. Louis , Missouri, to San Francisco , California.
The Butterfield Overland Mail route was a stagecoach route chosen to be snow-free unlike the more northern but shorter routes in place at the time. [2] It ran from St. Louis, Missouri to San Francisco, California beginning in 1858.
He stated “Wells Fargo may have run a ‘trunk route’ off the Butterfield [Trail] in LA [Los Angeles] but it was NOT Butterfield per se.” [9] The line was very expensive and cost $3,500,000 to build and maintain. [10] Some of the money was borrowed from the banks of express companies such as Adams Express and Wells, Fargo & Co. Express.
In 1858, hearing of the overland route, the U.S. Army sent an expedition led by Captain James H. Simpson to survey it for a military road to get supplies to the Army's Camp Floyd in Utah. Simpson came back with a surveyed route that was also about 280 miles (450 km) shorter than the "standard" California Trail route along the Humboldt River.
Today, the road running in front of Fitzgerald Station is called Old Wire Road, paying homage to the telegraph lines that eventually supplanted the horse-powered mail delivery of the Butterfield Trail. Highway 265 runs along Old Wire Road near the property, and roughly follows the original stage route of the 1850s. [5]
The Butterfield Overland Mail route in Baja California was created as a result of an act by the United States Congress on March 3, 1857, and operated until June 30, 1861 as part of the Second Division of the route. Subsequently other stage lines operated along the route until the Southern Pacific Railroad arrived in Yuma, Arizona.
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The Butterfield Overland Mail in Arkansas and Missouri was created by the United States Congress on March 3, 1857, and operated until March 30, 1861. The route that was operated extended from San Francisco, California to Los Angeles, then across the Colorado Desert to Fort Yuma, then across New Mexico Territory via, Tucson and Mesilla, New Mexico to Franklin, Texas, midpoint on the route.