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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West by Cameron Blevins Susan Schulten (bio) Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West. By Cameron Blevins. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 232. Cloth, $34.95.) The U.S. Post has drawn far less attention than other federal agencies in the settlement of the West, particularly the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the General Land Office, and the U.S. military. Yet, in Paper Trails, Cameron Blevins argues that the postal network was essential to the conquest and settlement of this vast and geographically diverse region. By facilitating communication through a loose yet responsive network, the U.S. Post provided "the underlying spatial circuitry of western expansion" (3). Blevins describes the U.S. Post from the 1860s through the early twentieth century as "big, expansive, fast moving, and unstable" (5). This statement captures his nuanced and original thesis. The Post Office Department operated as a highly decentralized organization that relied on "agents" at the local level to convey letters, newspapers, and later money across the country. Blevins argues that its tenuous, unstable nature was precisely what enabled post offices and postal services to appear swiftly alongside new communities—such as mining towns—but also to contract just as quickly when those towns disappeared, as was so common across the West. To capture this dynamic, he terms the postal system in this era a "gossamer network." Blevins uses this observation to rethink the operation of state power. The temporary and flexible agency model enabled the postal network to keep up with the extraordinary pace and reach of western colonization in the late nineteenth century. It might be tempting to see the decentralized and privatized nature of postal operations as a limitation or disadvantage, particularly given our long-standing assumptions about bureaucracy and administrative power. But Blevins argues that the early western postal system was effective not in spite of its institutional weaknesses but because of them. In other words, it was "the absence of so many traditional hallmarks of bureaucratic strength that made the gossamer network such a crucial part of the American state's efforts to incorporate the western United States" (13). By the early twentieth century, he writes, this peculiarly unstable yet flexible style of federal power helped to "transform the western United States from a sprawling and remote territory over which the state had only a tenuous hold into an integrated region occupied by American settlers, industry, and government" (158). Blevins relies on several different types of sources and analysis to make his case. Students of the digital humanities will appreciate his ability to [End Page 417] extract meaningful patterns from an enormous data set that identified thousands of post offices in the second half of the nineteenth century. He asks two questions of this data: Where were post offices established, and when? He successfully maps two-thirds of these 166,000 post offices and, through careful accounting for error and missing information, helps to randomize what cannot be firmly established. With this aggregate data, he is able to see that post offices were constantly being established but also closed across the American West. This dynamic of simultaneous expansion and contraction sets the West apart from the rest of the country. Abundant maps in the study help guide the reader through this western dynamic of boom and bust, but readers will be even more intrigued by the extensive companion website to the book (www.gossamernetwork.com). In a site that is intuitive and thoughtful, Blevins and his colleagues show in real time how the postal network followed—and sometimes anticipated—the rapid dispossession of Native lands in the West. By aggregating and analyzing the location of postal networks, Blevins shows what would otherwise be invisible to historians of the West, answering critics of digital history as confirming what we already know. But Blevins is not strictly engaged with quantitative data. At one end, he relies on individual stories of western migrants whose geographically expansive lives were made possible by the postal network. By facilitating the movement of white Americans into the West, the postal network advanced the conquest of...