Reviewed by: Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West by Cameron Blevins Jesse R. Andrews Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West. Cameron Blevins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 249. $35.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-1900-5367-3. By 1880 the US Post Office was the most expansive communication network in world history. Cameron Blevins's Paper Trails traces how this network grew so large and discusses its role in the history of the western United States from roughly the 1860s to 1913. Blevins avoids writing a traditional historical monograph, instead relying on a dataset of the tens of thousands of post office locations and routes that opened and closed over the roughly sixty years the work covers. While this may seem like dry reading, the book manages to masterfully blend individual narratives to give context to the data, even including a surprisingly touching chapter devoted to an orphaned family of four children. Nonetheless, despite the fruitful excursions into narrative-based history, this is a work of digital history, utilizing computational methods and visualizations to inform us about the past. Where was the state? As simple as the question sounds, it is a question often elided by scholars. Blevins notes Max Weber's model of the state as consisting of bureaucracy and coercive functions. However, Blevins finds that neither of those functions adequately describes the workings of the US Post Office during the nineteenth century. Despite geographic synecdoches like Washington, DC, the American state in the late nineteenth century was dispersed over a continent in tens of thousands of places, many of which the federal government in Washington possessed only a vague awareness. Blevins convincingly argues that in [End Page 82] the guise of the post office, the state, far from being an abstraction to those on the American frontier, was its crucial link to state power. As Blevins documents, the post office was frequently the first and only connection to the federal government in newly occupied territory. Blevins presents the model of the nineteenth-century American state as agency-based. Almost all functions of the post office were contracted out to local operators. This model saved on expenses and made the state much more nimble than it would have been otherwise, dramatically speeding up the process of expropriation of native lands, railroad construction, white settlement, and resource extraction. Blevins also documents how, unlike other nineteenth-century postal systems that required profitability, the United States had virtually no rules concerning locations. The postal apparatus based in Washington acted as a rubber stamp in approving new postal locations with no understanding of conditions on the ground. In this way, the agency-based model was essential in rapidly replicating state functions wherever white Americans took up residence on the continent. This agency-based model also helps explain why the area of the country most dependent on the federal government for its creation and continued existence is the most skeptical of state power. The federal government felt local to the residents of the dispersed settlers of the region because federal power was mediated through local agents. Blevins points out that the agency model often also had the side effect of emboldening local actors, often acting against the explicit direction of the US military in occupying native land and abrogating treaties, and in fomenting conflict on the frontier, but this did little to curtail its use. Maintaining connections back east made moving to remote, often marginal lands more attractive than it would have otherwise been. How much did the ability to receive correspondence, news and entertainment, and even financial support (via postal money order) from loved ones affect the willingness of individuals to relocate to inhospitable areas far away from even a modicum of the conforms of settler societies? This is a difficult question to quantify. However, in chapter 3, Blevins argues convincingly that the effects were significant through his sketch of the orphaned Curtis family. These siblings whose lives are documented through forty years of letters to one another act as a stand-in for the hundreds of thousands of white settlers moving west who used the post office as a...