Gossamer Network
April 29, 2021 11:30 AM   Subscribe

The US Post was the underlying circuitry of western expansion.
By 1848, the United States laid claim to territory that stretched from coast to coast. In reality, the western half of the country remained Indigenous land, a vast expanse of territory that the US Government did not actually control. Over the coming decades the West was utterly transformed. The United States waged war against western tribes, forcing them off their land and onto reservations. Millions of Americans swarmed across this plundered territory, building towns and homesteads, mines and mills, dams and railroads. How did this happen so quickly, in the span of a single generation? The answer lies, in part, with an unlikely source: the US Post. Between 1848 and 1895 the federal government wove together a “gossamer network” across the West, a sprawling and fast-moving web of post offices and mail routes that connected the region’s far-flung settlements into a national system of communications. The US Post was the underlying circuitry of western expansion. Read on to learn more about the spread of this network and the ways in which it wove the region together.
data biography and dataset and github
posted by aniola (7 comments total) 38 users marked this as a favorite
 
aniola, thank you for this post!

Compare the US Post’s spatial coverage to that of four other major federal entities in the American West:
US Post
Military
Judiciary
Department of the Interior
Treasury Department


I would not have guessed that the military (military forts) took second place on that list, before reading this beautifully-presented site -- which itself is "[a] companion website to Cameron Blevins, Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West (Oxford University Press, 2021)." Ohboyohboyohboy.
posted by Iris Gambol at 11:59 AM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


That's one of the best mapping/descriptive interactives I've seen. Really well done.
posted by scruss at 2:16 PM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


"I'll write, ma," he kept saying.
"Write by WASTE," she said, "remember. The government will open it if you use the other. The dolphins will be mad."
"I love you, ma," he said.
"Love the dolphins," she advised him. "Write by WASTE.”

--Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
posted by chavenet at 2:33 PM on April 29, 2021 [6 favorites]


Thanks for this post -- I look forward to going through this. I can think of about nine factors driving western expansion that were more important, but I'm interested in the tenth.
posted by Scarf Joint at 3:44 PM on April 29, 2021


Post office history nerds: Check out Richard John's amazing Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995), which also goes into the outsized political significance of the post office in the first five or six decades of the United States. This is near the top of my list of dull-sounding books that turned out to be tremendous reads.
posted by Scarf Joint at 4:16 PM on April 29, 2021 [5 favorites]


Scarf Joint, you might enjoy The King of Confidence as well...former post master using his knowledge of the system to post fake reviews of his awesome projects in newspapers across the country.

what a great presentation of information and data. Awesome, and such a perfect use of web browser tech...is there a technical term for that style of presentation?
posted by th3ph17 at 5:26 PM on April 29, 2021 [1 favorite]


One tidbit in this presentation that really caught my attention was pointing out the connection between the buildup in military capacity during the Civil War and the use of that martial power to conquer and subjugate the indigenous peoples. It's so obvious now that they mention it but somehow I failed to make the connection before.
posted by mhum at 6:10 PM on April 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


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