Cameron Blevins. Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West.

Abstract

How did the United States colonize western North America so quickly? In the space of a generation, between the Civil War and the turn of the twentieth century, the United States displaced Native peoples, seized Native territories, and poured white settlers into the West. In Paper Trails, Cameron Blevins turns the spotlight on an unlikely actor in this continental drama: The US Post. Mail service linked white American settlers in the rural West to family and friends; kept settlers politically and socially engaged; and made their participation in regional and national economies possible. Blevins argues that the US Post created “the underlying spatial circuitry of western expansion” (3). Tracing this circuitry helps us see the late-nineteenth-century American state as influential because of its structural (not coercive) power and continually shaped from the periphery rather than the center. The book’s foundation is postal historian Richard Helbock’s dataset of US post office openings and closings, which Blevins digitally mapped to show how the postal system developed over time and space. These maps, Blevins argues, reveal the US postal network as unusually large, geographically expansive, fast-growing, and deliberately unstable. Revelatory interactive maps are available on a companion website, http://gossamernetwork.com.