Silver Tailings: Mail Delivery Reduced

The U.S. Post Office reduced mail delivery to two days a week in Taylor, Nevada, on January 24, 1886, where the White Pine News was then being published. Isolated mining camps on more than a hundred mail routes in Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona suffered the same fate.

The editor of the paper, W.L. Davis, lambasted the federal government for reducing western miners to being second class citizens, but this was a futile gesture as more frequent mail delivery wasn’t soon restored. Many of the stage lines in the West were subsidized by mail delivery contracts.

On that same January 24, 1886, the White Pine Stage Line reduced to two per week the number of trips it made to Eureka. It appears to have been intervention by Wells, Fargo, and Co. that caused return of the third weekly stage as the company offered to forward all letters left at its office.

The ability of Wells, Fargo and Co., to make a profit in the West seems to have escaped officials of the ‘Mugwump Administration’ of Grover Cleveland.

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