The frontier fed ex.('Stagecoach: Wells Fargo and the American West')(Book Review)

Stagecoach: Wells Fargo and the American West By Philip L. Fradkin Simon and Schuster, 250 pages, $27.50

One of the certainties of American life is the perennial inefficiency of the U.S. Post Office. In the nineteenth-century West, mail delivery could take months. That left an opening for the private Wells Fargo delivery service, similar to the niches occupied by UPS and FedEx today. In Stagecoach, former Los Angeles Times reporter Philip Fradkin presents a history of the legendary express and banking enterprise.

Henry Wells and William Fargo became partners in 1845. Their delivery company started off servicing small cities and farm hamlets in upstate New York. As America's railroads spread through the East, the two entrepreneurs decided to seek virgin territory across the Mississippi. The 1849 California Gold Rush offered them a perfect opportunity. Wells Fargo stagecoaches delivered to mining camps scattered all across the Sierra Nevada mountains. The true mark of a new town's civic ascendancy in Gold Rush-era California was the opening of a Wells Fargo branch office.

Wells Fargo was also a partner with American Express in the ill-fated Pony Express, a mounted mail service that operated between St. Louis and Placerville, California for 18 months in 1860 and '61. A series of express riders covered the 2,000-mile route in 11 days. Fresh horses and men were provided at regular "way stations" though bandits and Indians occasionally harried the riders. At 15, William E Cody--later known as Buffalo Bill--got his start as a Pony Express rider.

Though the Pony Express lost money, it blazed routes later traveled by stagecoaches carrying passengers, freight, and bullion--Wells Fargo's bread and butter. The legendary Concord coaches manufactured in New Hampshire to ingenious Yankee designs were made specifically for speedy travel over rough roads. Rewards prompted drivers to break speed records, and tight logistics eventually permitted a traveler to go from St. Louis to San Francisco in 24 days.

The young Samuel Clemens traveled the route in 1861 in ...