![]() ![]() By February 1860, when the line was extended from Salt Lake City across Utah and Nevada to California, efficiency had improved the mail delivery time to a respectable number of days. Initially the stage express line was comprised of fifty coaches and extended about eight hundred miles. While on a promotional trip to Washington to help his ailing freight line, Russell and Senator William Gwin of California discussed the possibilities of an Express Mail Company to deliver mail to California by the Central Route along the Oregon and California Trail. Russell owned a stage and freight company based in Leavenworth, Kansas (with partners A. The solution to this problem came from a businessman of vision, William Russell. News was very slow in reaching eager California readers, and a standing joke of the time was that events in the East had already been forgotten by the time they were known by those out West. With the discovery of gold in California in 1848, and the increasing political tensions of the 1850s which led to the Civil War, it became imperative to keep the far West in the Union by providing a more dependable source of information from the East. Prior to the Coach and Pony Express mail delivery, time from the east to the west-by ship down the Gulf of Mexico, across Panama by mule, then by ship again up to San Francisco-might take six weeks, and if the winds were off, eight weeks. The origins and the reason for a horse-and-rider mail delivery system between east and west can be summed up in two words: slow mail.
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