All livelinks in this post are 'internal', i.e. they will take you to other reviews on this blog.
Oh, the Deadwood Stage is a-rollin' on over the plains
In a scene early in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962),
Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) who has come back as an old man to the
town of his youth, Shinbone, somewhere in the West, enters a barn and sees an
old stagecoach, cobwebbed and up on blocks. The railroad has come to town now
and stages are obsolete. It was perhaps the very coach he first came to
Shinbone in, all those years ago, the one held up and robbed by the outlaw
Liberty Valance, and he looks at it with nostalgic regret. Of course, it was
too clearly a reference to another John Ford Western, also from a time long
before.
It was an Overland
Europeans may think of stagecoaches as an
essentially eighteenth-century mode of transport but stages were an integral part
of the late nineteenth-century Western movie and Western myth. In the Old West
there were three ways of getting around: mount up, take the stage or, later,
ride the cars. And as travel is so vital to the stories – for example, the lone
stranger coming in to town, righting wrongs and then leaving again - horses,
stages and trains are bound to loom large in the tales.
Ship of
fools
The ‘ship of fools’ plot dated back much
further that the 1965 Stanley Kramer film of that name. Putting very different
characters together in a confined space (it might be a railroad car, a lifeboat
or even a stagecoach) and letting them interact is as old as literature. In the
case of stagecoaches we might think of Guy de Maupassant’s Boule de Suif (1880), in which during the Franco-Prussian War ten residents
of Rouen, including two nuns, a bourgeois shop-owning couple, a wealthy factory
owner and a count and his wife, as well as a prostitute, travel by stage to Le
Havre. It is a tale of hypocrisy and snobbery.
Guy was already writing stagecoach stories in 1880
If it sounds a mite familiar, that could be
because Ernest Haycox used it as a model for his 1937 Saturday Evening Post short story Stage to Lordsburg, and it was that tale which served as the basis
(though much altered) for John Ford when he made his famous Western Stagecoach, released by United Artists
in 1939.
Stagecoach
Stagecoach
is, of course, the Western stagecoach
movie. An alcoholic doctor, a crooked banker, a Southern gambler, an Army
officer’s wife, a whiskey drummer, the Ringo Kid just out of the pen and of
course the prostitute Dallas are all aboard a coach which is attacked by
Geronimo’s Apaches.
The stagecoach Western
The picture was remade twice. The 1966 one was
OK, I guess, directed by Gordon Douglas, though Ann-Margret as Dallas and Alex
Cord as Ringo weren’t up to the task. In 1986 CBS screened a ‘country singer’ version with Kris Kristofferson (aged 50) as the Ringo Kid and Willie Nelson as
Doc Holliday (what Doc Holliday was doing aboard it’s better not to ask). It
was pretty bad, I’m afraid.
But Stagecoach
wasn’t the only Western movie that featured the conveyance. Far from it. In
fact just off the top of my head I can think of dozens, such as Overland Stage Raiders, Stagecoach Kid, Stagecoach to Denver,
Stagecoach to Fury, Convict Stage, and
so on, ad pretty well infinitum. The first one that I know of
was The Old Stagecoach in 1912, so
stagecoach Westerns went right back.
Endless stagecoach movies
And then there were all the Westerns without stage or stagecoach in the title necessarily but still about them, such as Westbound, Riding Shotgun, Dakota Incident,
Hombre, and many, many more. We have grown entirely used to stagecoaches
with no side so that the camera can peer in and show us the passengers, static coaches which
stage hands in the studio rock to simulate the rolling movement.
In Hombre it was a mudwagon
On TV we got the ABC series Stagecoach West in 1960, about two
partners running a stage line. Every
imaginable event happens to them (and quite a few things you wouldn’t guess)
during the show. Running a stage line was evidently an exciting business.
They ran the stage to Timberline
And how many stages have you seen held up? It
would be impossible to count. In fact it might be quicker to count the Westerns
where that doesn’t happen.
Stand and
deliver!
Were stage robberies really that common? Marshall Trimble, “Arizona’s
official historian” and vice president of the Wild West History Association,
writing in True West magazine, says,
“My home state, Arizona, had 129 stage robberies between 1875 and 1903,
with the worst cases occurring in the area around Tombstone and the Black
Canyon Stage Line, from Phoenix to Prescott, which roughly follows Interstate
17 today. Of the roughly 200 stage robbers, 80 have been identified—79 men and
one woman.” He adds, “Wells Fargo stages were robbed nearly 350
times between 1870 and 1884. In California alone, the express company
was the victim of 74 stage robberies, as reported by Wells Fargo detective John
N. Thacker. The last holdup of a horse-drawn stage out West took place near
Jarbidge, Nevada, on December 5, 1916.”
So yes, I reckon we’d have to say
robberies were not rare.
Stage Robbery by Phil Lear
Black Bart
One of the most successful stage robbers was
Black Bart, who operated in northern California and southern Oregon in the
1870s and 80s, with considerable success. In 1849 Charles Boles, with his
brothers, joined the California gold rush. Charles fought in the Civil War on
the Union side and became a sergeant within a year, but was badly wounded at
Vicksburg. In 1867, he went prospecting for gold in
Idaho and Montana. In a surviving letter to his wife back in Illinois from
August 1871, he told her of an unpleasant encounter with some Wells, Fargo
& Company agents and vowed to exact revenge. His wife never heard from him
again, and in time she presumed he had died.
But he had not. In fact he is
thought to have robbed Wells, Fargo stagecoaches at least 28 times between 1875
and 1883. He left poems at some of the robbery sites, taunting his pursuers and
calling himself Black Bart. He worked on foot and never fired a gun during his
whole career (he brandished a shotgun, but never used it). He was polite and
well-spoken. He wore a long duster and over his head a flour sack with eyeholes
cut out. A short man, he wore a bowler hat beneath the hood, making him seem
taller. He was eventually tracked down becaiuse of good detective work by
Wells, Fargo man James B Hume, but he was only charged with his last robbery,
sentenced to six years but released after four because of good behavior. On his
release in 1888, he simply vanished, and no one knows where and when he died.
Charles Boles, aka Black Bart
Dan Duryea was a very
fictional version in Black Bart
(1948), and the outlaw appeared twice on TV, both in 1954, in Stories of the Century (Arthur Space),
when of course it was detective Matt Clark who caught him in the end, just as
he caught every other outlaw in the West, and also in an episode of Death Valley Days (Don Beddoe).
In the
West the stage comes into its own
Back East and in the Midwest, the days of the
stagecoach were already numbered by the 1850s, as canals and
the fast-growing network of railroads rendered them obsolete. But west of the
Mississippi it was a different story. There were no such replacements for many
years, and in the classic ‘Western’ period, which we normally reckon to be in
the three decades or so after the end of the Civil War, stages were an
essential, and often the only practicable means of transport.
West of the Missouri, stage lines, i.e. companies offering regular
services, started in the late 1840s. The first stagecoach
to arrive (by sea) in California was in 1850. Gradually, all over the West, a network of
waystations was established which held livestock as replacement teams, Morgans
being the most favored for their sturdiness.
Many lines carried the US mail - which made
robberies a federal offence. For example, in 1851 the firm of Hall &
Crandall was awarded a four-year contract to carry the US mail three times a
week between San Francisco and San Jose, and the compensation was a healthy
$6000 a year. This enabled the line to reduce the passenger fare to $16, then
to $10, and undercut all competition. Other stage lines provided a private mail
service, for example to the mining camps.
Ben
Holladay
Benjamin Holladay (1819 to 1887), pictured right, was one the
extraordinary figures of the old West. He created a transportation empire and he is known as the
"Stagecoach King”. Holladay moved to California in 1852 where he was to
operate 2,670 miles (4,300 km) of stage routes. In 1861 he won a postal
contract for mail service to Salt Lake City, Utah, and established the Overland
Stage Route along the Overland Trail to avoid confrontations with American
Indians on the northern Oregon Trail. In 1862 he
acquired the short-lived Pony Express from Russell, Majors and Waddell. Between
the Overland Trail and six other routes, Holladay received government subsidies
totaling nearly $6 million over a four-year period, and became an enormously
wealthy man (though he would eventually lose most of his fortune in the crash
of 1873).
He saw the way the wind was blowing and sold out to Wells, Fargo in
1866 for $1.5m, moving north to Oregon to build railroads. There he became the
model for such wicked railroad barons in Westerns as Morton in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).
People who knew him described him as “illiterate, coarse, boastful, false, and
cunning” and “wholly destitute of fixed principles of honesty, morality, or
common decency”. Sounds a nice chap.
James E
Birch
There were so many small stage lines set up in
California that consolidation was inevitable. For example, in 1853 many
different companies merged into the California Stage Company, put together by
James E Birch, pictured left, another California stagecoach magnate (though less unscrupulous)
and this combined five-sixths of all stage lines in the state. In the absence
of federal or state construction of roads, the company built and improved more
than fifteen hundred miles of routes. By 1856 the California Stage Company was operating 28
daily departures, over nearly 2000 miles of road, and owned 1500 horses and 205
Concords and mudwagons. It was a massive enterprise.
But Birch had even greater ambitions. Like Holladay, he
wanted to set up a transcontinental stage line. He was well-connected in
Washington DC and lobbied hard. Finally, early in 1857, he was awarded the contract for overland service on the
so-called Southern Route, and he set up the San Antonio–San Diego Mail Line.
This involved a twice-a-month service in four-mule coaches, scheduled to leave San
Antonio and San Diego on the ninth and the 24th of each month, with 30 days
allowed for each trip. Water holes were mapped out at 30-mile (48 km)
intervals, though many were unmanned and actual waystations could be separated
by as much as 100 miles (160 km). The line was popularly known as the
Jackass Mail, and it is this that features in Fox’s excellent 1951 Western Rawhide, with Tyrone Power and Susan
Hayward, in which one of the stations is besieged by bandits wanting to rob the
stage. It was also the subject of an earlier comedy Western with Wallace Beery,
Jackass Mail (1942).
Birch died in the fall of
’57 and his line did not survive long. Only about 40 trips were ever made over
the entire route before the service was curtailed. Starting in September of
1858 it was the Butterfield line that took over.
Butterfield
The Overland Mail Company of John Butterfield, pictured right, had two eastern termini, St Louis and Memphis. By pure
coincidence, the Postmaster-General who awarded the contract was a Tennessee
senator from Memphis, Aaron V Brown. The route, known as the Oxbow Route
because of its long curving path through the southwest, was 600 miles
(970 km) longer than Holladay's Central Overland route, but had the advantage of
being snow free. There were 139 waystations at the start but these gradually
increased with the addition of thirty-six more for a total of 175. The company
also built bridges.
Butterfield himself already
had 37 years of experience driving for and running stage lines, and he was
clearly an extremely competent and visionary manager.
In October 1858 President
James Buchanan wrote to Butterfield, congratulating him. “It is a glorious
triumph for civilization and the Union. Settlements will soon follow the course
of the road, and the East and West will be bound together by a chain of living
Americans, which can never be broken.”
Contrary to what was
shown in movies, no one on a Butterfield stage was ever killed by outlaws or
Indians (though some died in accidents). This was because Butterfield’s
instructions were clear: "No money, jewelry, bank notes, or valuables of
any nature, will be allowed to be carried under any circumstances whatever.”
There was, accordingly, no shotgun guard. However, John M Farwell, a passenger
in 1859, wrote, "After leaving this station [Arizona's San Pedro River
Stage Station], the conductor asked 'how many of us were armed', and requested
that those who had arms should have them ready for use, as we now were in the
Apache country. Guns and pistols were produced, and we rode all night with them
in our hands."
Butterfield's
‘celerity wagons’ were partly designed by himself. Sixty-six were employed on
the route. For the 25-day trip, the
stages did not stop for the passengers to sleep. They had to nod off aboard.
Butterfield's celerity wagon
The Civil War put an end
to the southern route. The last Overland mail bag left St Louis, Missouri on
March 18, 1861 and arrived in San Francisco on April 13.
Elmore Leonard stories
featured Butterfield stages, as we see in the first 3:10 to Yuma (1957), in which Butterfield was played by Robert
Ernhardt. The 2007 remake was more of a railroad story and Mr. Butterfield
(Dallas Roberts) became a railroad man, ‘Grayson Butterfield.’ It’s also a
Butterfield stage in the more recent The Hateful Eight (2015) but this isn’t very authentic because it’s set up in
Wyoming. In any case, in reality the coaches never featured Butterfield’s name; simply
Overland Mail Company was painted on
the sides.
Not very authentic
Wells Fargo
Two of the directors of the Overland Mail
Company had been fellow-New York staters Henry Wells and William G Fargo. They were the Overland Mail's bankers and primary
lenders. Back in 1845 they had founded the Western Express, linking
Buffalo with Detroit, rapidly then
Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. In 1850 Wells went into partnership with
John Butterfield and they founded the American Express Company. When Wells
retired in 1866 Fargo took over as president of American Express, which he
remained until his death in 1881.
The august founders, Wells and Fargo
In 1861 Butterfield’s
operation was in financial difficulties and he fell out with Wells and Fargo,
and resigned. Wells and Fargo reorganized the Overland Mail. Now that
the southern route was no longer practicable, coaches branded Wells, Fargo
& Co. took the central route, from Nebraska to California via Denver and Salt Lake City. From
Denver, coaches served the mining towns of the Rockies, and from Salt Lake City
they carried mail and passengers to Montana and Idaho.
Wells Fargo coaches are
perhaps the quintessential Western stages, and there are countless Westerns
featuring them. The enterprise certainly grew, opening many new routes in the 1860s. The
‘grand consolidation' of 1866 occurred when
Wells, Fargo bought out Holladay, and reorganized the ownership and operation of the entire overland
mail route from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean and many stagecoach
lines in the western states.
A Wells Fargo Concord
Paramount’s big picture Wells Fargo (1937) with Joel McCrea and Barbara
Stanwyck describes the building of the Wells Fargo empire in ‘manifest destiny’
nation-building terms.
The stage arrives amid great excitement in Wells Fargo
NBC’s Tales of Wells Fargo was one of my
favorite shows as a boy. The Left-Handed Gun wasn’t Billy the Kid for me but
Jim Hardie (he was always Jim Hardie, never Dale Robertson, even when he
appeared in other Westerns). I thought he was really cool, and I imitated his
flip of a wave for years. Wells Fargo detective extraordinaire, Hardie solved
every crime, and local marshals and sheriffs, even US marshals, bowed to his
authority.
Hardie was based on real-life Fred J Dodge (1854 to 1938), cattleman,
Tombstone lawman (and friend of Wyatt Earp) and detective. He worked as
undercover agent for Wells, Fargo in California, Nevada and Arizona. He helped
track the Dalton and Doolin gangs. His diaries describe dozens of his cases,
including stage robberies, train holdups, long pursuits across the badlands,
even a law suit against Wells Fargo for "delay to a corpse".
Wells Fargo detectives. That's Fred on the right.
Concords
and mudwagons
Although many Western movies which feature
stagecoaches use a fine Concord, the emblematic stage, the vast majority of
coaches (such as those used on the Jackass Mail) were in fact ruder mudwagons. More like wagons than coaches, and in fact often used for
transporting freight, mudwagons had open sides, maybe with canvas flaps, which
gave passengers little protection from the dirt of the road. Mudwagon wheels
and their iron tires were wider than those of
conventional stagecoaches. Many such wagons had rigid steel ‘springs’ or were even
not sprung at all, and they offered a bone-jarring ride. But they were cheap,
sturdy (which was vital on the rough roads of the time) and ubiquitous.
An Abbot Downing 'Overland wagon', a snip at $500
The 1820s produced a revolution in stagecoach
design, when the Abbot, Downing Company
in Concord, New Hampshire made a coach which used long leather straps called thoroughbraces under the body which made the
ride far smoother and more comfortable (though it also produced a swinging
motion which made some passengers seasick). These coaches weighed more than two
thousand pounds and were very expensive, costing between $1200 and
$1500, a great sum in 1840s values, so Abbot, Downing also sold a lighter,
cheaper affair, called the Overland Wagon, similar to a mudwagon but better
sprung, with thoroughbraces, and this sold for $500.
Driving
the stage
It took skill to drive a Concord, especially a
six-up (that is, pulled by a team of six horses, the ‘wheelers’ nearest the
coach, the ‘swing team’ in the middle and the ‘leads’). Not everyone could do
it. On vacation a few years ago in Colorado, I paid a visit to the Mancos
Valley Stage Line, a fascinating experience, and driver Eric Bartels let me
ride up on the box and explained the art.
In his interesting book Stagecoach West (University of Nebraska
Press, 1967) Ralph Moody describes the manual dexterity need to handle a
six-up. He says it was similar to that of a concert pianist. I don’t know about
that but it was certainly a highly skilled affair. “Each rein was manipulated
by ‘climbing’ it – gathering it in by alternately drawing with the finger on
each side of it – and by separating the fingers just enough to let it slip out
the desired amount.” Moody adds, “Try to climb one between the third and little
fingers of your left hand while holding another stationary between the third
and middle fingers and at the same time letting still another slip an exact
distance between the middle and fore fingers.”
Hank Monk aristocrat of the road
Then there’s the brake to be managed on descents, which
was operated by the right foot (these vehicles were right-hand-drive, in the
English fashion) and the whip too. Drivers were often called ‘whips’. Many drivers
were inordinately proud of their whipping skills, placing the scourge with
complete precision just over the horse’s back but not actually touching it. In The Silver Whip (1953) the eponymous expensive lash is presented to young stage
driver Robert Wagner by his role-model Dale Robertson (I mean Jim Hardie).
Mr. Bartels also had a sack of little pebbles
which he would throw at the rump of any recalcitrant member of the team (e.g. the mare named Mabel).
The driver sat high on the box because height
gave more purchase on the brake and also allowed all-round vision. But of
course it also exposed the reinsman to the worst of the weather.
Drivers were aristocrats of the road and well
paid. In addition to $300 a month salary, typically, they also received $1 of
the passenger fare, 25¢ per letter carried and 1% of money, as well as free
drinks and cigars at each stop. Not bad!
One-Eyed Charley
One of the most skilled and remarkable of the
old drivers was Charley Parkhurst, also known as One-Eyed Charley (after losing the
use of one eye because of a kick from a horse) or Six-Horse Charley, for the skill in handling a six-up team, who worked
as a stable hand in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and early developed a
talent as a driver for handling horses. Aged about 30, Charley moved out West
at the time of the gold rush, and became one of the most noted stage drivers in
California. It was a dangerous occupation but Charley was one of the toughest
drivers there was. As the railroads drove the stage lines out of business and
age began to take its toll, Charley retired, and eventually died, aged about
65, in 1879, when it was discovered finally that Charley was in fact a woman, Charlotte Darkey Parkhurst. No one ever knew
until then. Charley had always signed letters and documents simply CD
Parkhurst.
One-Eyed Charley, knight of the road
The number of Western character actors who
could manage a stage like that was also limited. Andy Devine was one, which is
how he got the job as Buck in Stagecoach
(though much of the ‘driving’ is faked in the studio, not all is) and you can
also see him deftly handle the reins as the rascally Ozark in When the Daltons Rode the year after.
Roughing It
We learn a lot about long rides in these
coaches from Mark Twain. In 1861, Samuel Clemens’s
brother Orion was appointed secretary to James W Nye, Governor of Nevada
Territory, and Sam, 25, accompanied him as the secretary’s secretary. From St
Joseph, in those pre-transcontinental railroad days, they took a stage West. Sam’s
book Roughing It, recounting the
voyage, is an absolute delight.
He tells us with enthusiasm (his
capitals) that "at 5 P.M. we crossed the Platte itself and landed at Fort
Kearney, fifty-six hours out from St Joe – THREE HUNDRED MILES!”
I calculate therefore that they
moved at an average of 5.3 mph. Only a few years later, the train would take
passengers roughly four times as fast, at 19.1 mph. By the way, fares
averaged 50¢ a mile, so the stage fare from St
Joseph to Carson City, Nevada was a hundred and fifty dollars – a monstrous sum
at the time.
At a waystation Mark Twain meets the infamous Jack Slade
Sam and his brother are thrilled
to see the Pony Express rider gallop past their stage and we are told that the
series of young horsemen carried letters from St Joe to Sacramento, nineteen
hundred miles, in eight days, or 235 miles a day (by way of comparison, a wagon
train would do approximately 100 miles a week).
The six-up stage, “of the most
sumptuous description”, almost certainly a Concord (before they changed to a
mudwagon further down the trail) is described in detail. Twain says,
interestingly, that it was the shotgun guard, whom he called the ‘conductor’,
who was the princely commander of the vessel; the driver came next in the
hierarchy but the conductor was regarded by all with reverence and awe, and his
word was law.
It was long
Twain wasn’t the only one
writing about stage trips. European and Eastern tourists and journalists
glamorized the journeys. Few of them failed to include danger of one kind or
another, with their coaches hurtling down mountain trails with precipitous falls
inches away, hold-ups, attacks by Indians and so on. There were also highly
imaginative paintings, scupltures and illustrations (some, such as those by Frederic
Remington or Charlie Russell very fine).
Van Cordle painting after Remington
The Stagecoach, bronze by CM Russell
And the dime novelist embraced
the stagecoaches with gusto, each one more lurid than the last. Calamity Jane
featured heavily with the Deadwood Stage (the Concord which was bought by
Buffalo Bill, ridden in by the crowned heads of Europe,
viewed by thousands, and became of so great historic value that it was placed
in the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, DC for preservation – though today
the coach is at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, a truly
great museum). If you believed the thrilling tales,
no stage ever rolled at anything less than an all-out gallop and every single
one was attacked on each run. Western movies have also been guilty of, er,
over-dramatization.
The Deadwood Stage, 1889
(not the one bought by Buffalo Bill for his Wild West; that was a Concord)
The
twilight of the stage
But eventually time and
technical progress caught up with the West and, as had happened back East, the
stage lines were gradually driven out of business by the railroads. In Dodge City (1939) we see a race to Dodge
between a stagecoach and a train. The stage is driven by an old-timer, to
represent ‘the olden days’, while the train carries General Dodge and
symbolizes modern times. The train wins. There’s a hint of nostalgic regret
that the stage loses, but it’s accepted as inevitable. The general declares,
“Gentlemen, that’s a symbol of America’s future.”
The train overtakes the stage - in every sense
The eastward-moving CPR met up
with the westward track-laying UPR at promontory Point in Utah in in May, 1869,
and the continent was spanned. Journeys were now faster, cheaper and more
comfortable. Why would anyone take a stage?
Of course it didn’t all stop
overnight. Even as the railroad network expanded, linking ever smaller towns,
there were still remote outposts that could only be served by road. Horse-drawn
stages were still operating in the new century in some areas of the West. Still, the days of the stagecoach were numbered.
Not for us, though, not for Western fans. For us the stage keeps rolling along.
Oh, the Deadwood Stage is a-rollin' on over the
plains,
With the curtains flappin' and the driver slappin'
the reins.
Beautiful sky, a wonderful day,
Whip crack-away! Whip crack-away! Whip crack-away!
A six-up, Goldfield, Nevada
