Route No. 17404 – 1870-1874
During this contract period the Post-Office Department mandated that Barlow, Sanderson & Co. begin serving Silver City for the first time. On August 12, 1872, Postmaster General Cresswell ordered that the branch line to Pinos Altos be extended a further 10 miles to Silver City. Service was to be provided three times a week, to take effect on August 16, 1872.¹¹² This branch line to Pinos Altos and Silver City was a spur from the main route. The relevant mails would be separated out at the Post Office at the junction of the spur with the main route, and transported to the terminus of the spur. In this case, the junction on the main east-west route was at Rio Mimbres. From here mails were carried back and forth over the spur route by a sub-contractor. It was common practice for principal contractors to sublet some, or even all, of the various sections of their routes to subcontractors; something which has often led to much confusion when trying to trace the histories of mail routes.
Silver City would continue to be served by this branch line for some time, despite its growing population and the fact that it had been the county seat since 1871. This was something which was met with disapproval by the citizens of the town. In August of 1873, their frustrations were expressed in an Editorial in Grant County’s Mining Life:
here was Silver City, with a population by this time of approximately 1,000 yet forced still to receive its mail via Fort Bayard and Pinos Altos, “when by reason of her geographical position she should receive the mail direct from Rio Mimbres.”¹¹³
The Editorial argued that continued use of the spur route meant that the mails had to be conveyed for over 19 miles in a circle around the town, whereas if they were to be conveyed directly to Silver City from Rio Mimbres, then the town could receive its mail some 8-10 hours earlier. It was felt that there was “no valid reason” why Silver City should not have its mails delivered by the most direct route. The county seat would have to be patient a little longer.
In June of 1873, the Post-Office Department had tasked a special agent to inspect the stage routes prior to them being advertised for the new contract period, which would begin on July 1, 1874. Proposals for the new period would be advertised for in September of 1873, with the names of the winning bidders announced in March of 1874.
Before the new contract period began there would be one more change to Route No. 17404 in New Mexico; the stage stop at Cow Springs would be discontinued. In Mid-May of 1874, the Mining Life announced that Mr. L. A. Harding had left Cow Springs for Arizona, taking with him 1,500 head of cattle as well as “a fine lot of riding and buggy animals and some fine Concord road wagons.” Harding had plans to establish a livery stable at Tucson.¹¹⁴
Ralston City: The First Stage Station Established
On May 21, 1870, the Weekly Arizonan, in a column headed “Local Matters”, published the following:
The Southern overland stages of Davis and Barela, heretofore running from Mesilla to Tucson direct, will hereafter touch at Rolston [sic] City.
Davis and Barela were subcontractors on this section of Route 17404.
This is the earliest reference to a stage stop at Ralston; prior to this all references are to the derelict Barney Station. By mid-July of 1870, Barney Station was being referred to as “an old stage stand”¹¹⁵, confirming that it had most definitely fallen into disuse by that time.
From the May 21st Weekly Arizonan account we see that the very first stage stop at Ralston had been established prior to the end of that month. However, the road from “Las Cumas [Las Cruces] to Ralston City” would not become an official Post Road until July 14th of that year.¹¹⁶ This provides us with another example of mails being carried from one place to another before the route gained official recognition as a Post Road, as had been the case with the Fort Cummings – Fort Bayard – Pinos Altos route.
In the case of Silver City, although the order to extend the branch line to that place was not issued until August of 1872, the town had a Postmaster in office prior to September 30, 1871;,¹¹⁷ obviously mail was being delivered to Silver City before Postmaster General Cresswell issued his order.
By September 30, 1871¹¹⁸ Ralston too had its own Postmaster – Henry O. Rogers. In August of that year, J. Francisco Chavez¹¹⁹ had petitioned Postmaster General Cresswell for an increase of service on Route No. 17404, it being, he said:
A very important mail route made more so by the recent discovery of the almost incredibly rich silver mines in the Burro Mountains, which are situated immediately upon the route.
He informed Cresswell that immigrants were “flocking” to the mines from California, Arizona, Chihuahua, Sonora, New Mexico and Texas, and that there was no doubt in his mind that “this winter there will be a large, thriving, and prosperous mining town at Ralston City.” Mindful of this, Chavez requested that the service be increased from twice-weekly to three times a week.¹²⁰
Chavez, like so many others, was far too optimistic (or was perhaps deliberately exaggerating) about Ralston’s prospects; in reality the settlement was already in decline. The optimism and confidence of Jose Francisco Chavez was likely colored by the fact that it was he who had introduced a bill requesting the granting of land to the Ralston City and Gila River Railroad Company in June of 1870.¹²¹
By the end of September of 1873, Ralston had fallen into such decline that it no longer merited a Post Office and Postmaster, leaving Grant County with Post Offices at Rio Mimbres, Pinos Altos and Silver City only.¹²²
There is only circumstantial evidence to indicate why Barlow and Sanderson (or their subcontractors) decided not to use/refurbish Barney Station but to instead establish a new stop at Ralston. At the time that the move was made it would have been the logical and practical thing to do. By the end of May 1870, Ralston would have had a reasonably sized population – it would have afforded the safety of numbers. Buildings and corrals had been erected by this time, and others were probably in the process of being constructed; town lots were beginning to change hands. The establishment of a mining camp would most certainly have meant the presence of a variety of retailers; the settlement would have had at least some basic amenities to offer.
Most importantly, by the end of May at least one well had been dug at Ralston as was reported in James McCallen’s letter of April 2, 1870. Ralston, therefore, had one clear advantage over Barney Station – a more reliable source of fresh water; the water reserve at Barney Station, being entirely dependent upon rain fall, was more often than not stagnant, if there was any reserve at all.
Straw bidding
Barlow, Sanderson & Co.’s time as contractors on Route No. 17404 was not without controversy, especially from 1870 onward. The Santa Fe Daily New Mexican published several editorial commentaries on the Company’s failure to deliver the mails as per their contract and, more seriously, referred on several occasions to their probable involvement in the fraudulent practice of sham bidding.¹²³ These “sham bids” became more commonly known as “straw bids”, and Barlow, Sanderson & Co.’s participation in the practice would form a central part of the 1875/1876 Congressional investigation into the letting of mail contracts nationwide.
The large sums of money involved in Government mail contracting inevitably led to a system ripe for exploitation and fraud, and which had little oversight. In 1830, the Office of Instructions and Mail Depredations had been established as the investigative branch of the Post-Office Department; by 1837 it employed a grand total of four special agents. In 1880, these special agents were re-named “Post-Office Inspectors” and at the end of the fiscal year (June 30, 1880) the Postmaster-General stated in his annual report that the number of inspectors for the whole of the United States and the Territories was 46. Forty six inspectors to cover 11,112 routes (including railroad routes) over 343,888 miles, and 42,989 operating post offices, together with 5,862 contractors – and the 29,569 cases which had been referred to those inspectors during that same fiscal year.
At the beginning of the section on Route No. 17404, brief mention was made of the report of John B. Clark of the Committee on the Post-Office and Post Roads, and from that report it appears that prior to 1869 the practice of straw bidding was all but non-existent, but that during the tenure of Postmaster-General John Creswell (March 1869-July 1874) “the abuses incident to the existence and practice of the sham method of obtaining contracts, known as the “straw bid system”, had its first notable development and its most offensive prevalence.”
Clark’s report provides a general description of how straw bidding was put into practice by the mail contractors. Various combinations of contractors would organize themselves into bidding rings, with each ring being comprised of that contractor who it was intended would ultimately secure the contract, along with several abettors. Each member of the ring would submit his bid, with those bids ranging in price from “exorbitantly high figures to manifestly small amounts.” The bid submitted by the leader of the ring would be towards the higher end of the price range.
By law, the contract would have to be awarded to the lowest bidder, who would fail to take up the contract in order to further the interests of the ring. The contract would then have to be offered to the next lowest bidder, who again would “retire or refuse to answer when notified”, and so on up the list of bidders until the bid of the ring leader was reached, technically by now the lowest bid on what remained of the original list of bidders. In cases where bids had been submitted by contractors who were not part of a ring, Clark found that they frequently received large sums of money to refuse to take up a contract, in other words they were paid off or bribed to withdraw.
Straw bidding also came into play in the way in which temporary contracts were awarded. In some instances, because of the (pre-arranged) withdrawal of the straw bidders, and in order to ensure continuation of service on a route, the Post-Office Department would be left with no option other than to award a contract, on what was ostensibly a temporary basis, to the contractor who had held it during the previous four year period. In effect this was a continuance or extension of the old contract, at the old price, with that contractor more often than not eventually being awarded the permanent contract.
The system of straw bidding was complex, and involved methods other than those just described. Very often the advertisements for bids were deliberately manipulated by the Post-Office Department’s Contracts Office, with the routes being advertised as shorter in length than they really were, and with the requirement of fewer trips per week than under the existing contracts. These were things which didn’t go unnoticed by the public, who very quickly became aware of the fact that, under the new contract, service had deteriorated markedly in comparison to the previous four years. Complaints and petitions to the Post-Office Department soon led to adjustments being made. Orders were issued to increase the number of trips per week (schedule enhancement) and/or the contractor was told that he must shorten the time taken to complete a trip (expedition of schedule). The adjustments meant a corresponding increase in remuneration for the contractor in order to cover the extra expense incurred, the original mis-advertising having been a deliberate ploy in order to achieve this goal. The relevant Post-Office Department personnel received their share of the profits from the relevant contractor.
Clark’s report cites Barlow, Sanderson & Co.’s Oroville – Portland, Oregon route, their Santa Fe – El Paso route and Route No. 17404, Mesilla – Los Angeles as typical examples of those routes which had their schedules adjusted fraudulently.Clark describes how the fraudulent contractors, between 30 and 50 in number, were known amongst Post-Office Department clerks as “The Forty Thieves”, the group including men “of more or less prominence and experience” who worked in conjunction with a second ring made up of Post-Office Department officials and employees of all levels, up to and including Postmaster-General Creswell himself. In some instances an intermediary ring of brokers operated, facilitating contact between contractors and officials.
Action was taken to curb the fraudulent practice of straw bidding, and to amend the process by which temporary contracts were awarded when, in 1874, several amendments were made to an existing act. These amendments had been proposed in a bill introduced into the House of Representatives by J. B. Packer of the Committee on the Post-Office and Post-Roads on June 5, 1874,¹²⁴ they were to be applied to Sections 245, 247 and 253 of the 1872 “act to revise, consolidate, and amend the statutes relating to the Post-Office Department”.
Under the 1874 amendments, all bids and proposals for carrying the mails would have to be accompanied by a bond, submitted by the bidder and formally approved by a postmaster. On being awarded a contract, the successful bidder had to tender to the Postmaster-General a certified check or draft in a sum not less than 5% of the remuneration for the route. At both stages the contractor had to provide sureties, or guarantors, who themselves had to be approved by a postmaster and who had to swear under oath that they owned, free and clear, real estate to the value of twice that of the bond. Severe penalties were put into place for any postmaster making a fraudulent declaration.¹²⁵
©2007-2023 Jim & Erica Parson
REFERENCES FOR THIS INSTALLMENT:
¹¹²Executive Document No. 814. Page VII.
¹¹³Mining Life. August 2, 1873.
¹¹⁴Mining Life. May 16, 1874.
¹¹⁵Daily New Mexican. July 13, 1870.
¹¹⁶Public-No. 182; An Act to establish certain post roads. In: Acts And Resolutions Of The United States Of America Passed At The Second Session Of The Forty-First Congress. December 6, 1869-July 15, 1870. Washington: Government Printing Office (1870). Pages 65 and 261.
¹¹⁷Register Of Officers And Agents, Civil, Military, And Naval, In The Service Of The United States, On The Thirtieth Of September, 1871. Washington: Government Printing Office (1872). Page 877.
¹¹⁸Ibid.
¹¹⁹Francisco Chavez served as Territorial Representative to Congress from March 4, 1865 to March 3, 1867,and from February 20, 1869, to March 3, 1871.
¹²⁰Francisco Chavez to J. A. J. Cresswell, Postmaster General. Dated August 18, 1870. In: Index To Reports of Committees Of The House of Representatives For The First Session Of The Forty-Fourth Congress, 1875-’76. Washington: Government Printing Office (1876). Page 628.
¹²¹R. No. 2107: Granting Lands to the Ralston City and Gila River Railroad Company of New Mexico. The bill had first been introduced in the Senate as S 955 in May of 1870 during the 2ndSession of the 41st Congress (December 6, 1869 – July 15, 1870). On June 2, 1870, J. Francisco Chavez, Delegate for New Mexico Territory to the House of Representatives, introduced it to the House as H. R. 2107. The bill was never enacted.
¹²²Register Of Officers And Agents, Civil, Military And Naval, In The Service Of The United States, On The Thirtieth Of September, 1872. Washington: Government Printing Office (1874). Pages 786-787.
¹²³.Santa Fe Daily New Mexican. April 8, 1870. Under the heading “Mail Business”: After referring to the measures being taken by Congress to prevent sham bidding, the Editors go on to state that “The opening of the bids for carrying the mails in this Territory lately, developed many bids of this kind … We have heard it insinuated, but know not upon what grounds, that Barlow, Sanderson & Co. are somewhat mixed up in this Sham bidding business.”
.Daily New Mexican.. April 11, 1870. Under the heading “Mails”. Here reference is made to the high probability of Barlow, Sanderson & Co. securing the contract for the Santa Fe to El Paso route after the almost certain failure of two other contractors who have submitted lower, sham, bids on the route with Barlow, Sanderson & Co. being “on hand to make private contracts with the [Post Office] Department, and thus getting ahead of the genuine bids” placed by others. The Company did in fact secure this contract.
.Daily New Mexican, April 14, 1870. Under the heading “Mails – The Post – Barlow, Sanderson & Co. – Passes – Sham Service, Sham Bids &c.”
“We have already alluded to the scheme of Barlow, Sanderson & Co. to get the principal mail contracts in the Territory, through the base and discreditable means of ‘Sham bids’; thus swindling the Post-Office Department as well as those who underbid them.”
¹²⁴Report No. 775. Mail Contracts And Temporary Service. In: Reports Of The Committees Of The House Of Representatives For The First Session Of The Forty-Third Congress. 1873-1874. Vol. V. Washington: Government Printing Office. 1874. Page 8. Hereafter referred to as Report No. 775.
Report No. 775 was submitted to the House of Representatives by J. B. Packer; it was the result of a resolution which had been put forward by Representative William H. Stone (D – Missouri) who, in April of 1874 charged that “abuses and irregularities exist in the Post-Office Department in relation to certain mail contracts, the payments to contractors and contracts for temporary service”, at the same time instructing the Committee on the Post-Office and Post-Roads to investigate these charges. Stone had stated that these abuses and irregularities were found on routes in the States of West Virginia, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas during the contract period July 1, 1871 to June 30, 1874, and that as “the facts in relation to all the routes named by him are precisely similar, the history of one being that of all”, he had selected only the first route on his list “for the purposes of presenting and exhibiting the abuses and irregularities upon which he based his charges.” The first route was Route No. 7587, Fort Gibson, Cherokee Nation (Oklahoma) to Sherman, Grayson County, Texas; among those who had bid on this route were James B. Price, Bradley Barlow and John T. Chidester.
¹²⁵Report No. 775. Pages 8-9.
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