The Minnesota Stage Company was the largest stagecoach company based in Minnesota, United States. It was established in 1859 in a merger of J.C. Burbank & Company and Chase & Allen, at which point it controlled all the major stagecoach lines in the state. In the years before railroads linked Minnesota communities, the Minnesota Stage Company played a crucial role in shaping the commercial and social life of the young state. [1]
Willoughby & Powers opened the first stagecoach line in 1849 in what was then Minnesota Territory, running between St. Paul and St. Anthony. There were no railroad lines in the territory. Instead, inhabitants relied on carts, wagons, and coaches for overland travel and shipping. Individuals and companies scrambled to establish roads, routes, and coach lines. [1]
James Burbank was born in Vermont and moved to Minnesota by 1849. In 1851, he started a one-man operation transporting letters, documents, and cargo from St. Paul to Galena, Illinois, and back by stagecoach. He officially formed the Northwestern Express Company in 1854. The company's expansion was slow until 1855, when new associate Russell Blakeley helped bring in valuable mail contracts that allowed the company to grow. [1]
Along with the mail contracts, the company soon began to gain wider recognition in Minnesota. In 1858, businessmen from Lake City paid them to operate a line of stage coaches between Lake City and Rochester, Minnesota. In the winter of 1857–58 they were hired by the Hudson's Bay Company to help transport goods from St. Paul to their northern outposts in the Red River Valley. They agreed to operate freight wagons, stage coaches, and steamboats up the Red River to Fort Abercrombie, and then to outposts farther north. [1]
In 1859, J.C. Burbank & Company's Northwestern Express merged with the stage company of Allen & Chase to form the Minnesota Stage Company. That June, Russell Blakeley set out with a group to build and expand a stage route from St. Cloud to Fort Abercrombie. In three weeks the team built bridges, cleared trees, and established stage stops along the 160-mile (260 km) stage road. The route, which originally transported freight, soon began transporting passengers to the Red River Valley. [1]
The Minnesota Stage Company's road opened the valley to new immigrants. However, it did so at the expense of the area's original inhabitants. While the stage road ran on land already ceded by the Ojibwe people, the company's steamboats passed through territory held by the tribe's Red Lake and Pembina bands. They wrote to the company requesting compensation for the huge increase in traffic that frightened fish and game and disturbed the spirits of their ancestors. [1]
The company did not compensate the tribe. Instead, the U.S. government sent negotiators to open talks for a new treaty in 1862. The negotiators, however, were unable to reach the Red River Valley because of the start of the Dakota War of 1862, and talks did not proceed. After the war, the company lost its contract with the Hudson's Bay Company. It maintained the stage route, however, carrying goods and people into the Red River Valley. [1]
By the end of 1859, the company controlled all the major stage routes in Minnesota. Its lucrative mail contracts on each line required it to build better roads. It continued to expand its network of stage stops, coaches, and wagons. Where stagecoaches stopped, hotels, restaurants, and shops appeared to serve the traveling clientele. By 1865 the company employed 200 men and regularly used 700 horses. At top speeds, the stagecoaches could travel about 105 miles (169 km) in 24 hours. [1]
As railroads were built throughout Minnesota in the years following the American Civil War, the role of the stagecoach declined. James Burbank sold his share in the Minnesota Stage Company in 1867 to concentrate on his other business endeavors. By 1880, most parts of Minnesota were linked by railroads, rendering the stage routes obsolete. [1]
While the stagecoach industry thrived in Minnesota for less than 30 years, it played a vital role in the development of the state. The company built roads, extended communication networks, and connected the fledgling state. In the late twentieth century, in recognition of their contribution to the history of Minnesota, efforts were made to preserve the remaining stagecoach roads. [1] The Kandota Section of the Red River Valley Stage Road and the Mount Pleasant Section of the Lake City and Rochester Stage Road, both built by the Minnesota Stage Company, were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991. [2]
The Oregon Trail was a 2,170-mile (3,490 km) east-west, large-wheeled wagon route and emigrant trail in the United States that connected the Missouri River to valleys in Oregon. The eastern part of the Oregon Trail spanned part of what is now the state of Kansas and nearly all of what are now the states of Nebraska and Wyoming. The western half of the trail spanned most of the current states of Idaho and Oregon.
A stagecoach is a four-wheeled public coach used to carry paying passengers and light packages on journeys long enough to need a change of horses. It is strongly sprung and generally drawn by four horses.
The California Trail was an emigrant trail of about 3,000 mi (4,800 km) across the western half of the North American continent from Missouri River towns to what is now the state of California. After it was established, the first half of the California Trail followed the same corridor of networked river valley trails as the Oregon Trail and the Mormon Trail, namely the valleys of the Platte, North Platte, and Sweetwater rivers to Wyoming. In the present states of Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah, the California and Oregon trails split into several different trails or cutoffs.
Butterfield Overland Mail was a stagecoach service in the United States operating from 1858 to 1861. It carried passengers and U.S. Mail from two eastern termini, Memphis, Tennessee, and St. Louis, Missouri, to San Francisco, California. The routes from each eastern terminus met at Fort Smith, Arkansas, and then continued through Indian Territory (Oklahoma), Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Mexico, and California ending in San Francisco. On March 3, 1857, Congress authorized the U.S. postmaster general, at that time Aaron V. Brown, to contract for delivery of the U.S. mail from St. Louis to San Francisco. Prior to this, U.S. Mail bound for the Far West had been delivered by the San Antonio and San Diego Mail Line since June 1857.
The Santa Susana Pass, originally Simi Pass, is a low mountain pass in the Simi Hills of Southern California, connecting the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles neighborhood of Chatsworth, to the city of Simi Valley and eponymous valley.
The Central Overland California and Pike's Peak Express Company was a stagecoach line that operated in the American West in the early 1860s, but it is most well known as the parent company of the Pony Express. It was formed as a subsidiary of the freighting company Russell, Majors, and Waddell, after the latter two partners bought out Russell's stage line, the Leavenworth and Pikes Peak Express Company. The stage line had made its first journey from Westport, Missouri, to Denver on March 9, 1859.
Fort Abercrombie, in North Dakota, was an American fort established by authority of an act of Congress, March 3, 1857. The act allocated twenty-five square miles of land on the Red River of the North in Dakota Territory to be used for a military outpost, but the exact location was left to the discretion of Lieutenant Colonel John J. Abercrombie. The fort was constructed in the year 1858. It was the first permanent military settlement in what became North Dakota, and is thus known as "The Gateway to the Dakotas".
The Central Overland Route was a transportation route from Salt Lake City, Utah south of the Great Salt Lake through the mountains of central Nevada to Carson City, Nevada. For a decade after 1859, until the first Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869, it served a vital role in the transport of emigrants, mail, freight, and passengers between California, Nevada, and Utah.
James Hervey Simpson (1813–1883) was an officer in the U.S. Army and a member of the United States Corps of Topographical Engineers.
The Red River Trails were a network of ox cart routes connecting the Red River Colony and Fort Garry in British North America with the head of navigation on the Mississippi River in the United States. These trade routes ran from the location of present-day Winnipeg in the Canadian province of Manitoba across the Canada–United States border, and thence by a variety of routes through what is now the eastern part of North Dakota and western and central Minnesota to Mendota and Saint Paul, Minnesota on the Mississippi.
Cobb & Co is the name of a company that operated a fleet of stagecoaches in Australia in the late 19th century. Cobb & Co themselves did not operate in New Zealand officially but their name was used by many private stage coach operators.
John Butterfield (1801-1869) was a transportation pioneer in the mid-19th century in the American Northwest and Southwest. He founded many companies, including American Express that is still in operation today. The Butterfield Overland Mail Company was the longest stage line in the world. The line operated from 1858 to 1861 on the Southern Overland Trail and established an important connection between the new state of California and the government and economy of the contiguous eastern states.
The Old Santa Susana Stage Road, or Santa Susana Wagon Road, is a route taken by early travelers between the San Fernando Valley and Simi Valley near Chatsworth, California, via the Santa Susana Pass. The main route climbs through what is now the Santa Susana Pass State Historic Park, with a branch in Chatsworth Park South.
The Overland Trail was a Klondike Gold Rush-era transportation route between Whitehorse, Yukon and Dawson City in Yukon, Canada. It was built in 1902 at a cost of CDN$129,000 after the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad won a contract to deliver mail to the Dawson City gold fields from the Canadian government. The trail consisted of a 330 miles (531 km)-long, 12 feet (4 m) wide graded surface with culverts in some locations. Before its construction, transportation to Dawson City required a steamboat trip on the Yukon River during the brief subarctic summer, or dog sleds after the rivers had frozen.
The Montana Trail was a wagon road that served gold rush towns such as Bannack, Virginia City and later Helena, Montana during the Montana gold rush era of the 1860s and 1870s. Miners and settlers all traveled the trail to try to find better lives in Montana. The trail was also utilized for freighting and shipping supplies and food goods to Montana from Utah. Bandits and Native Americans, as well as the weather, were major risks to traveling on the Montana Trail.
The Overland Trail was a stagecoach and wagon trail in the American West during the 19th century. While portions of the route had been used by explorers and trappers since the 1820s, the Overland Trail was most heavily used in the 1860s as a route alternative to the Oregon, California, and Mormon trails through central Wyoming. The Overland Trail was famously used by the Overland Stage Company owned by Ben Holladay to run mail and passengers to Salt Lake City, Utah, via stagecoaches in the early 1860s. Starting from Atchison, Kansas, the trail descended into Colorado before looping back up to southern Wyoming and rejoining the Oregon Trail at Fort Bridger. The stage line operated until 1869 when the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad eliminated the need for mail service via Thais' stagecoach.
Vallecito, in San Diego County, California is an oasis of cienegas and salt grass along Vallecito Creek and a former settlement on the edge of the Colorado Desert in the Vallecito Valley. Its Spanish name is translated as "little valley". Vallecito was located at the apex of the gap in the Carrizo Badlands created by Carrizo Creek and its wash in its lower reach, to which Vallecito Creek is a tributary. The springs of Vallecito, like many in the vicinity, are a product of the faults that run along the base of the Peninsular Ranges to the west.
The Drain–Coos Bay stage line was a stagecoach line that operated an overland and marine transportation line that connected the interior of southern Oregon with Coos Bay from 1876 to 1916.
The Saint Cloud and Red River Valley Stage Road–Kandota Section is a preserved fragment of a stagecoach road in Kandota Township, Minnesota, United States. It was part of a long route established in 1859 that ran from St. Cloud, Minnesota, to the Red River Valley on the border of Minnesota, North Dakota, and Manitoba. The 250-yard-long (230 m) road fragment was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991 for having state-level significance in the theme of transportation. It was nominated for being a remnant of one of Minnesota's most important stagecoach roads, and a reminder of the stagecoach companies' founding role in establishing the state's overland travel routes.
The Lake City and Rochester Stage Road was an early road between Lake City and Rochester, Minnesota, United States. It was blazed in 1858 to carry stagecoach traffic between the Mississippi River port and a major inland town in southeast Minnesota.