"It is difficult for us to comprehend both the difficulty and leisure of traveling in the United States in the .....nineteenth century. Today, we get our two weeks of paid vacation a year, head down the road at 85 miles per hour or board a plane, and arrive at our destination within 24 hours. For the next five days, we chase attractions, hit the ski slopes, or sunbathe until we must repeat our frantic journey back home. Almost everyone can afford to take some sort of yearly excursion, and there are travel options for every budget. We go by bus, car, train, or airplane and stay in hotels, motels, campers, tents and hostels.

"Over one hundred.....years ago, things were quite different. Travel was not for everyone, literally. The upper class and members of the aristocracy went on holiday for months at a time. The working class, for the most part, did not travel. When on the road, travelers would stay in one place for weeks at a time either in a hotel or enjoying the hospitality of a friend or person to which they had a letter of introduction. They did not travel light. Besides lugging trunks filled with gowns and other finery, the aristocratic traveler would often bring along various "extras"; a nurse for the children, a secretary, or a cousin or distant relative to act as a pseudo-servant."

This description is one of a series of discussions found on the website, "The Handbook of Texas Online". I was hoping to find information as to how mail and travelers got to West Texas, specifically our area, at the turn of the century. I wasn’t very successful.

Okay, so apparently we didn’t actually have stagecoaches in Littlefield. The era of the stagecoach had passed before the city of Littlefield came to be. But….did you ever wonder how folks got their mail, or how long it took to get mail from point A to point B? What kind of people did it take to push through the wilderness, to brave the elements, Indians, the desert, and the hundred other hazards that could befall even the most vigilant traveler?

I could not find any evidence that Littlefield or any of the surrounding region benefited from stagecoach service, even before the community existed. I can tell you that mail was delivered - somehow - long before George W. Littlefield granted land for a community. There were ranches scattered all over the Panhandle, though they were few and far between. The pioneers who established these outposts and the cowboys and other employees wanted mail service. Often the mail was delivered by a single rider, and sometimes by freight wagons. Sometimes travelers would be asked to deliver letters if they were traveling closed to a particular ranch or outpost.

Never-the-less, the stage coach played a big part in the citizens of Littlefield receiving their mail "in a timely fashion". For instance, relatives or friends from Tennessee posted letters that were carried as far as possible by stage coach. From there, letters were forwarded along, often with goods being shipped to the closest outpost. Very often letters were addressed with only the name of the recipient and a general location. Of course, there were no street addresses, post office boxes or zip codes.

The picture above shows an office of the Holladay Overland Mail and Express Company somewhere in Wyoming. Ben Holladay, known as the Stage Coach King, was the great uncle of D. W. (Dave) Holladay, Bettye Kate Smith’s father.

Six Horse Hitch is an historical novel written by Janice Holt Giles. The book is a novel in that most of the characters are fictional, but it is historically accurate in describing some of its characters. There really was a Ben Holladay, and he is, to the best of the family’s knowledge, fairly accurately depicted. Another character mentioned that actually existed was Jack Slade. There are several versions of Slade’s life, but for our purposes, Slade was above all a stagecoach man. Ms. Giles weaves the tale of a young man, Starr Fowler, enthralled with his dream of driving a six-horse hitch, or a team of six horses, and how his dream became reality.

Ben Holladay is described through the eyes of the main character: "Ben Holladay was a booger, no two ways about it. He was ruthless, and he was hard, and he was unscrupulous. His friends loved him, his enemies hated him and called him a scoundrel and a rogue and said he was so crooked he could hide behind a cork screw. His enemies were the men he beat."

The narrative continues, "He lived in a princely palace on the Hudson, and his associates were other millionaires and senators and cabinet members in Washington.

"But on the Overland we liked him, we respected him and we admired him. He was one of the boys who had gone up the hard way. When he called a turn he could make it stick. We were proud of him. And before he was through he ran the #!@%#est best stage line ever seen in this country or anywhere else on the face of the globe. There was never anything like the Overland Stage Company before, or since.

"When he rode the line it was in his own special coach, in luxury. But he could handle sixes on any stretch of the road with as much skill as any driver he employed, and we knew it. He could have lived by his gun had he been a violent man, and we knew that. His body was tough and he could ride the box as long in weather as bad as we did, and we knew that. There wasn’t anything we had to do he couldn’t do himself and do it as well."

There were a number of famous stagecoach lines, most of them starting out as freight lines. Holladay’s Overland Stage Line was the first transcontinental line in the country.

As for Texas, "Risher and Hall Stage Lines, owned by B. Risher and E. M. B. Sawyer were operating mail lines in Texas in 1858, and by 1860, when the firm was joined by C. K. Hall, they controlled sixteen of the thirty-one passenger and mail lines in the state, employed more than 300 men, and used over 1,000 mules and horses in their operations in Texas and Louisiana."