During 2010 and 2011, writer and researcher Kirby Sanders was selected by the National Park Service to prepare a series of maps and reports outlining the routes and stations used by the iconic old west stagecoaches for the first overland transcontinental mail service from 1858 until 1861. The study was mandated by Act of the United States Congressunder the Omnibus Public Lands Act of 2009.Based upon over a decade of research, contained herein are those reports as supplied to the National Park Service. Part of a series that includes the states of Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California; this volume includes both the railroad and stagecoach routes from St. Louis, Missouri into Arkansas.Original routes and modern driving equivalents are mapped and stage station locations are identified as nearly as possible by latitude and longitude. The study and these reports were designed as a field guide to facilitate further in-depth local research to establish the exact route and station locations ofthis historically significant but rapidly vanishing trail.

This is the classic firsthand account by Waterman L. Ormsby, a reporter who in 1858 crossed the western states as the sole through passenger of the Butterfield Overland Mail stage on its first trip from St. Louis to San Francisco. Ormsby’s reports, which soon appeared in the New York Herald, are lively and exciting. He describes the journey in close detail, giving full accounts of the accommodations, the other passengers, the country through which they passed, the dangers to which they were exposed, and the constant necessity for speed. “A most interesting account of the first westbound trip of an overland mail stage.”—Southern California Historical Society Quarterly “The best narrative of the trip and one of the best accounts of western travel by stage.”—Pacific Historical Review “If other travelers had been as careful and observant as Ormsby we should know vastly more about our country and the ways of our fathers than we do...The book is fascinating. It will prove interesting to all who care for travelogues, the history of the West, and particularly to those interested in our economic history.”—Journal of Economic History