We’re helping the Southern Arizona Transportation Museum celebrate Owney, the railway mail dog. Please join us there on Saturday, September 8th. Click on the image below for a pdf of the flyer. Hope to see you there!
Join us at the Southern Arizona Transportation Museum! Read More »
Congratulations, Serena Hsu, grand prize winner of our 11th annual Tucson Birthday Stamp Design Contest!
Bienvenidos a la casa con la bonita puerta roja! Read More »
Most prospectors didn’t “strike it rich,” and some turned to other industries that supported others’ mining efforts. Camps and towns grew and spread out. Mercantile stores, saloons, restaurants, churches, and schools were established as the population grew. The most important of these industries, and which all the others were dependent on, was mail delivery. “Prospectors
Prospectors and Postmen Read More »
Kids from K-12th are encouraged to drop by with their parents to write Letters to Santa or create holiday cards for those they love. All supplies needed are in our Slusser Library here. These are available Monday – Friday starting December 1st – 22nd – 10am to 2 pm. If you want to mail the
The drawings of fifteen children, five from each age group, were selected from nearly one-hundred entries as the top designs of our tenth-annual Tucson Birthday Stamp Design Contest. The top five winners from three age groups were given awards and prizes today at the ceremony. Every student was given a Bookmans gift certificate (donated by
Celebrating Tucson’s 242nd Birthday! Read More »
The Slusser Library joins in the celebration of the USPS’s August 3, 2017 stamp issue, “Protect the Pollinators” with an exhibit featuring philatelic bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, bats, and moths. Pollinators are responsible for one-third of our food and drink and $20 BILLION (with a BEE) in products annually in the United States. We hope you’ll be able
What’s all the buzz about? Read More »
Click image to enlarge.
Click image to enlarge.
Click image to enlarge.
“Another week gone and no newsman yet. These months—years perhaps—will to a certain extent be a blank to us. We know nothing of what is going on the states, nothing of the political maneuvers. President’s messages, doings of Congress, elections of senators and assemblymen and the thousand and one maneuvers of the day, riots, mobs, fires, rail-road accidents—in fact I shall be a kind of Rip van Winkle & it will require the first ten years after returning to learn what has taken place while away.”
–Letter from A.W. Genung in Curtissville, San Joaquin District to “Woodward,” Dec 16, 1849, from James W. Milgram’s The Western Mails.
Imagine leaving everything and everyone you know and moving across the country to live in the wilderness, hoping to make your fortune in gold, silver, or copper. Living 1000 miles or more away from home, the only way to talk to your family and friends, and the only way to know what was happening outside your immediate vicinity, was through letters and newspapers: the mail.
Mail, including letters, supplies, and goods, was often freighted in by steamship from San Francisco to the port of Yuma. From there, items either continued up river or were loaded onto wagons, coaches, and pack animals and taken out to towns and camps.
The stage lines and buckboard lines that carried mail and supplies also transported passengers on a regular basis between towns, sometimes requiring at least one overnight stay. These vehicles were extraordinarily uncomfortable, however. After making the much longer overland (cross-country) trip on stagecoach, journalist Waterman L. Ormsby famously said, “I NOW KNOW WHAT HELL IS LIKE. I’VE JUST HAD 24 DAYS OF IT.”
Steamers left San Francisco for the Gulf of California every 20 days and then traveled up the Colorado River. The port at Yuma was a major artery in the delivery of supplies to Arizona.
The steamboats transported not only mail and goods, but also people. In 1874 Martha Summerhayes traveled on the steamboat Gila from Fort Yuma to Fort Mohave. In her book Vanished Arizona, she describes the conditions:
The staterooms “were always stuffy and noisy, and in the summer they were so suffocatingly hot.” In the dining room, “the metal handles of the knives were uncomfortably warm to the touch; and even the wooden arms of the chairs felt as if they were slowly igniting… A siesta was out of the question, as the staterooms were insufferable; and so we dragged out the weary days.”
Entrepreneurs from the Tucson area, such as Pinchney Tully, Estevan Ochoa, Pedro Aguirre, Mariano Samaniego, J.D. Kinnear, and William “Curly” Neal, provided much- needed services between short distances.
Tuffy Peach delivered mail on horseback three times a week between Camp Verde and Payson from 1910-1914. His route was 52 miles long, lasted 11 hours, and required one change of horse. When interviewed by the Arizona Philatelist in 1968, he described his work:
“I often had mail piled so high in front of me that I could hardly see where my horse was treading… “But, gosh, those horses knew the mail route better than the dispatch riders. We couldn’t get lost if we tried. Our horses wouldn’t let us.”
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