Chapter VI

Our new conductor (just shipped) had been without sleep for twenty hours.
Such a thing was very frequent. From St. Joseph, Missouri, to
Sacramento, California, by stage-coach, was nearly nineteen hundred
miles, and the trip was often made in fifteen days (the cars do it in
four and a half, now), but the time specified in the mail contracts, and
required by the schedule, was eighteen or nineteen days, if I remember
rightly. This was to make fair allowance for winter storms and snows,
and other unavoidable causes of detention. The stage company had
everything under strict discipline and good system. Over each two
hundred and fifty miles of road they placed an agent or superintendent,
and invested him with great authority. His beat or jurisdiction of two
hundred and fifty miles was called a "division." He purchased horses,
mules harness, and food for men and beasts, and distributed these things
among his stage stations, from time to time, according to his judgment of
what each station needed. He erected station buildings and dug wells.
He attended to the paying of the station-keepers, hostlers, drivers and
blacksmiths, and discharged them whenever he chose. He was a very, very
great man in his "division"--a kind of Grand Mogul, a Sultan of the
Indies, in whose presence common men were modest of speech and manner,
and in the glare of whose greatness even the dazzling stage-driver
dwindled to a penny dip. There were about eight of these kings, all
told, on the overland route.

Next in rank and importance to the division-agent came the "conductor."
His beat was the same length as the agent's--two hundred and fifty miles.
He sat with the driver, and (when necessary) rode that fearful distance,
night and day, without other rest or sleep than what he could get perched
thus on top of the flying vehicle. Think of it! He had absolute charge
of the mails, express matter, passengers and stage, coach, until he
delivered them to the next conductor, and got his receipt for them.

Consequently he had to be a man of intelligence, decision and
considerable executive ability. He was usually a quiet, pleasant man,
who attended closely to his duties, and was a good deal of a gentleman.
It was not absolutely necessary that the division-agent should be a
gentleman, and occasionally he wasn't. But he was always a general in
administrative ability, and a bull-dog in courage and determination--
otherwise the chieftainship over the lawless underlings of the overland
service would never in any instance have been to him anything but an
equivalent for a month of insolence and distress and a bullet and a
coffin at the end of it. There were about sixteen or eighteen conductors
on the overland, for there was a daily stage each way, and a conductor on
every stage.