Western Expresses Articles
Submitted by: The Red Cloud Collection
Western Expresses were private individuals or companies that operated west of the Mississippi River and carried letter mail between cities, mining camps, and other settlements. This group of companies became prominent after 1849. Letter mail was handled by them to areas and towns that did not have established post offices and hence the carriage did not contravene any postal laws that prohibited mail carried privately on postal routes.
Submitted by: Michael Perlman
The private express companies operating on the West coast were the pioneers in the rapid transport of mails in the period before the completion of the trans-continental rail road in 1869. This exhibit is limited to private mail usages of the ten cent stamps and ten cent postal entires between 1855 and 1862. The usage of ten cent stamps and entires was very limited because the domestic postal rates in effect only required ten cent rates for letters sent over 3,000 miles and for some foreign rates. Private mails were required to be enclosed in government stamped entires.
Submitted by: Dale Foster
This article attempts to list and analyze those often confusing British Columbia and Vancouver Island instructional markings. The Gerald Wellburn collection is available for study, including write-ups on his album pages, in the coffee-table book on his collection edited by Daniel Eaton and Jack Wallace. Also available is another group of Wellburn covers illustrated with their album pages in an undated, spiral-bound price list produced by Eaton. Wellburn published a December 1948 article in the Bulletin of the Postal History Society entitled “The Handstruck Postage Stamps of British Columbia and Vancouver Island,” reprinted in 1950 in BNA Topics.
Submitted by: Steven C. Walske
The Cariboo gold mining region lies 200 miles northeast of New Westminster, the former capital of British Columbia (BC) and today a suburb of Vancouver. The region itself stretches another 350 miles in a northeasterly direction from Lillooet to Williams Creek (near what is now Barkerville). This remote region of BC was opened by gold miners in 1859. By 1862, major gold strikes had been made along Williams Creek in the northern-most part of the Cariboo region.
Submitted by: Ken Stach
Mitchell was born of the railroad’s westward expansion. In 1879, two railroads were headed into Davison County: one from Yankton, Dakota Territory, and one from Sanborn, Iowa. Railroad officials preferred directing the construction toward existing settlements; however, Firesteel (at the time, the county seat of Davison County) was deemed flood-prone. Several enterprizing businessmen quickly siezed the opportunity, platting a town some two miles west of Firesteel. Mitchell was established as the new railroad junction town, named in honor of then-president of the Milwaukee railroad, Alexander Mitchell.