The Expressmen (Time-Life, The Old West Series).pdf

Pdf / English / 1974 / 240 pages / 44.2 MB

When President James Buchanan predicted in 1858 that the country would someday be bound east and west "by a chain of Americans which can never be broken," the links were already being forged by an army of entrepreneurs known as the Expressmen. Their freight and stagecoach services moved Eastern goods westward, Western ones eastward, and shuttled people, money and mail both ways. By 1860, Pony Express riders were relaying mail across more than half the country in the amazingly brief time of 10 days. Such labors, celebrated here and on the following pages in paintings by Western artists, were eventually to be supplanted by the railroads and the telegraph. But until then. the Expressmen persisted as though the fate of a fledgling civilization rested in their hands - and it did.

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