Why study the postal service specifically?
I was thinking of different institutions I could use to map how the West was changing over time, and thought I could use post offices as a proxy for where changes were taking place and when. The more I looked at it, I realized the post office wasn’t this passive proxy — it was facilitating and accelerating this process of expansion. The big analytical takeaways really rested on the work of stamp collector Richard Helbock, who spent years collecting information on 166,000 post offices in the U.S. and their dates of operation, which go back to the 17th century. I basically stumbled on that a couple of years into my dissertation research — though Helbock had already died, I was able to buy a CD-ROM for about $80 that contains this incredibly rich spatial historical dataset. Once I was able to geocode as many as I could, I could map out and see in fine-grain detail a lot of these changes in how this network was moving, shifting, and expanding.
An accompanying online project, called Gossamer Network, animates and narrates those maps, which show that between 1848 and 1895, the federal government established approximately 24,000 post offices. They also show how the wildfire-like expansion intersected with the “decline of unceded Native land and the growth of government reservations,” as you write. Tell us how the postal service interacted with and bolstered that project of Western expansion?
The 1850s to the 1890s is a period of rapid change in the West, where millions of people occupy land that is actively being seized from Native peoples. This is taking place across a giant swath of land that is not necessarily the most hospitable place — it’s deserts and mountains and arid plains, yet millions are going. The post isn’t causing this, but I argue that because it was the most expansive communications system and the most expansive arm of the federal government, its ability to move quickly into really remote places causes it to have an accelerating or facilitating role in this larger regional and national project. Once you understand the geography of the postal system — its massive size and fast-moving speed and ability to spread out — that’s when you understand the role it’s playing at the macro scale.
