Perhaps not since Miracle on 34th Street extolled the United States Postal Service for exonerating Santa Claus has an in-depth examination of post office history been so interesting as Cameron Blevins's Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West. In this new book, the author combines a thorough knowledge of western historiography with a digital history analysis of postal records to provide a fascinating study of the nineteenth-century postal system. The result is a new way of seeing both how individual post offices worked and the broader importance of the US Post to the region.At its heart, Blevins argues that the late nineteenth-century US Post was never a centralized bureaucracy but instead a web of individually contracted agents bound together in a flexible "gossamer network" of small post offices. These 59,000 fourth-class local branches, often found in existing homes and stores, numbered nearly twice as many as exist today, were located close to nearly every settler, and were nimble enough to open and close as populations boomed and busted. In addition to the letters, magazines, and packages that allowed far-flung families to stay in touch, the US Post transferred official documents and offered money orders that enabled settlers to conduct small-scale transactions. At the same time, as the largest example of state power in the West, the service was prone to the spoils system of frequent political turnover and fraud. When Rural Free Delivery finally centralized the operation beginning in 1902 and drastically reduced the number of eastern post offices, the West's vast geography, lack of good roads, and few population centers meant that the old system not only remained here but actually expanded in the new century. In the epilogue Blevins quickly brings the story through the twentieth century, examining several reforms and showing how today's Contract Postal Units resemble nineteenth-century post offices.
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