Treasure Express: Epic Days of the Wells Fargo

By Neill C. Wilson

Treasure Express: Epic Days of the Wells Fargo by Neill C. Wilson is a riveting and richly detailed account of the legendary Wells Fargo Company, chronicling its vital role in the development of the American West during the 19th century. Wilson, a skilled historian and storyteller, brings to life the thrilling adventures, daring exploits, and indomitable spirit of the men and women who built one of the most iconic institutions in American history.


Wells Fargo began as a modest express and banking enterprise, but it quickly became synonymous with the untamed frontier, serving as the lifeline for gold shipments, mail delivery, and essential goods across the vast and often perilous landscapes of the West. Treasure Express captures the essence of this tumultuous era, recounting the epic days when stagecoaches laden with treasure braved treacherous terrain, outlaws, and unpredictable weather to connect remote communities and fuel the dreams of fortune-seekers.


Wilson's narrative is filled with colorful characters, from the intrepid stagecoach drivers and vigilant shotgun guards to the ambitious entrepreneurs who shaped the destiny of Wells Fargo. He delves into the company's strategic importance during the California Gold Rush, its expansion across the frontier, and its enduring legacy in American commerce and folklore.


Treasure Express also explores the challenges and dangers faced by Wells Fargo's employees, including notorious stagecoach robberies, the harsh realities of frontier life, and the relentless pursuit of innovation that allowed the company to thrive in an era of rapid change.


This book is a must-read for history enthusiasts, fans of the Old West, and anyone interested in the dynamic and often perilous journey of Wells Fargo as it grew into a symbol of reliability and adventure. Neill C. Wilson's engaging prose and meticulous research make Treasure Express a captivating tribute to the epic days of Wells Fargo, where the spirit of enterprise and the quest for fortune shaped the American frontier.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Porirua Publishing
• Release date: Aug 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9781991323453

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© Porirua Publishing 2024, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1

DEDICATION 4

THE OLD STAGECOACH 5

ILLUSTRATIONS 7

I — SO IT ALL BEGAN 8

II — RISE OF THE EXPRESSES 13

III — THE CONCORD COACH ARRIVES 26

IV — ON A PEAK IN DARIEN 33

V — DICK TURPIN MAKES HIS BOW 38

VI — STEAM AND LATHER 42

VII — REMME’S GREAT RIDE 48

VIII — THE STAGECOACH HILARIOUS 53

IX — THE STAGECOACH BELLIGERENT 61

X — STEVE AND HENRY 66

XI — REVERSING THE EMIGRANT TRAIL 71

XII — THE HOLD-UP AT BULLION BEND 77

XIII — THE STAGECOACH CHIVALROUS 85

XIV — AFFAIRS ON THE ALKALI TRAIL 89

XV — MERCHANDISE—LEAKY 105

XVI  — THE BIGGEST HOLD-UP OF ALL 108

XVII — THE ARIZONA APPASSIONATA 116

XVIII — THE TRAIN OF EVENTS 123

XIX — THE STAGECOACH PERFIDIOUS 131

XX — THE STAGECOACH UNPREDICTABLE 136

XXI — THE NON-SURRENDERING STAGECOACH 144

XXII — THE WAR ON MANY FRONTS 153

XXIII — AARON ROSS’S FIGHTING BOOTS 166

XXIV — THE CONCORD COACH ROLLS ON 172

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 177

MANUSCRIPTS 177

PAMPHLETS 177

MISCELLANEOUS 178

TREASURE EXPRESS

Epic Days of the Wells Fargo

BY

NEILL C. WILSON

ILLUSTRATED

DEDICATION

TO GLADYS

THE OLD STAGECOACH

Drums the rain and sears the sun.

Now its hardy course is run,

And the vines and meadow grasses

Draw it to oblivion.

Rusts its iron, rots its leather,

Parts its hickory, peels its paint,

And the steeds that swung together

Gallop far and faint.

U.S. Mail and brave Wells Fargo!

Dancing harness, screeching brakes,

Reinsman bold, superb, loquacious,

Sawed-off shotgun disputatious.

Miners, gamblers, dames flirtatious,

Dusters, pokes and wideawakes—

On by winding purple canyons

Over granite crests you rolled,

Storm and battle your companions,

Glitter in your hold.

Where is now that gallant cargo

Of the days of old

When the West, to jingling traces,

Bounced and skimmed on thorough-braces—

Rocked and banged through sun and shadow

Up the trails of El Dorado?

Veteran of the craggy passes,

From their oat bins in the sky

Call your vanished six. Prince, Beauty,

Lady, Star, Nell, Lightning! Ay,

Back, you wheelers, swing-span, leaders!

Now, by foothill oaks and cedars,

Spring for pine-clad heights and rutty,

Sinks of sage and alkali.

Box aclink and stout defended,

Roll, O coach refreshed and splendid!

Nay. The odyssey is ended,

Charge delivered, waybill filed,

Passengers and whip descended,

Concord long outstyled,

And the grand old rubbish yields

To the fingers of the fields.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Sacramento in the middle fifties

Steamers Senator and New World at San Francisco wharf

Letter express

Post Office, San Francisco, California

Where Wells, Fargo & Co. succeeded Adams & Co.

First U.S. Mailbag

Henry Wells

William G. Fargo

An advertisement of 1852

Some old-time shotgun messengers and stage drivers of the Shasta run

The Stage

Stagecoaching poster, 1866

A typical pair of express messengers reasonably ready for business

James B. Hume, for long the Chief Special Agent, Wells, Fargo & Co.

Overland Mail

Passing an emigrant train on the Plains

Swimming the storm-swollen stream

Crossing the Sierras in a snowstorm

Pony Express, St. Joseph

Receipts for the Treasure Express

The Stagecoach Unpredictable

The war on many fronts

The war on many fronts

George Hackett, a famous shotgun messenger

Black Bart, who held up twenty-eight stagecoaches

TREASURE EXPRESS

I — SO IT ALL BEGAN

IN the year 1848, when a workman chanced to spy yellow glint in a mountain river, California had six or seven thousand Nordic settlers. These had already considerably upset a placid Mexican regime. They had hoisted the bunting of freedom in the cattle-raising coastal valley of Sonoma; they had seen the flag of the United States raised at Monterey and San Francisco; their settlement at the Bay even had two newspapers. But in the main the land was about as vacant as the moon. A land without coins, clocks, calendars, post offices, or roads.

With his back to the great central valley, green under January rains, Jim Marshall knelt to inspect that curious substance in the bottom of his mill race. Coldly it gleamed—the spark that was about to blast Elysium into bedlam.

Word of the find reached John A. Sutter’s baronial fort on the Río Sacramento. Native Californians yawned; they had heard of the gilt before, down San Fernando way. Why bother, senores, when life was already so satisfactory? Word also reached San Francisco, where a little newspaper was making up the pages of a special edition intended for Atlantic Coast readers. The editor casually included gold in the new land’s resources, but declined to grow passionate about it.

But the report interested other San Franciscans. These slipped out of town, made their way across the bay which separated their peninsula from the mainland, and let out their horses. Returning, they marched into barrooms, ordered the best and wettest, and for payment slapped down the evidence. Sam Brannan, who owned a newspaper, ran through the streets shouting: Gold, boys! From the American River!

Seeing was believing. Bartenders ripped off aprons. Merchants shut shop. Sailors went over the side. The few printers dropped their type and kicked the pi into the corner. The little Californian produced a single page, announcing suspension. "The whole country from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and from the seashore to the base of the Sierra, resounds with the sordid cry of ‘gold!! gold!! GOLD!!!’—while the field is left half planted, the house half built, and everything left but the manufacture of shovels and pickaxes."

Down from the Sierra foothills came the first important wave of the new wealth. It came to purchase tools and provisions and cared nothing for the price. A quarter-million dollars’ worth of yellow grains and flakes reached the seaboard in two months. Six hundred thousand more in the next six weeks. From rancho and pueblo every form of conveyance—carreta, calash, spring wagon—was lick-larruping for the diggings. A man named Weber, at Weber Creek, took out $50,000 in a few days with the aid of some wondering Indians. At Dry Diggings, near the site of Marshall’s discovery, a man named Wilson gleaned about $2,000 directly under his doorstep. One man, working a piece of ground measuring only a few square feet, picked up nearly twenty pounds of gold in the space of twenty days. Major Reading, a pioneer ranchman on the upper Sacramento, climbed the knotted mountains at the head of the valley and took out $80,000 along the Trinity River in six weeks—moving on when he found himself too closely crowded by men from Oregon.

The instinct of a publisher dies hard. The Californian managed to recapture a printer or two. Soon it was recording the amazing scene. It told of dirt, carried in wagons two or three miles to water, washing out at the rate of $400 a load. Five exceptional loads produced $ 16,000. By midsummer some five or six thousand amateur miners were feverishly plying knife and pan along the Mother Lode, where average luck was said to be $100 a day and the fortunate were picking up $10,000 and $15,000 a week. From the spot where Marshall found his first Hake, worth about fifty cents, an ever widening circle of strikes had been made until claims by the hundreds had been located along one hundred and fifty miles of the Sierra foothills.

This was local fervor. The Atlantic states were months distant by land, seventeen thousand miles and thirty weeks by sea. But the word spread. Kit Carson galloped eastward with it in army pouches. Mormon settlers heard the news and tossed it independently beyond the Rockies.

Gold!

The news caught the nation in fitting mood. The times were ripe for a mighty surge westward. War with Mexico had lately ended. Victorious troops, blooded by adventure, had marched home in no humor for humdrum return to plow or counter. New lands for old. New lives for old. Just address me at the mines, Ma. California!

First ships got away in November, ‘48. With February, sixty vessels departed New York. Seventy prows in the same month drove outward from Boston and Philadelphia; little New Bedford dispatched eleven. We are on the brink of the Age of Gold! cried Horace Greeley in his New York Tribune. We look for the addition, within the next four years, equal to at least one thousand millions of dollars to the general aggregate of gold in circulation and use throughout the world. This is almost inevitable.

Twenty or thirty thousand overlanders by spring of ‘49 were gathered along the Missouri. Before them stretched a thousand miles of prairie. Beyond, stony mountains. Beyond those, God knew what. Barrens and unexplored fearfulness, certainly. But these companies were gay. Cares had been shed. Not one in ten would find fortune at the placer diggings, but who could ask fairer odds or a more glorious gamble? How’s the grass by now, boys, out yonder on the Platte? Fetlock-high! Giddap!

Up Nebraska’s long river, across Wyoming, into South Pass cleft in stupendous sterile mountains, and out upon the fateful floor of the unknown basin moved the continuous train of bellowing oxen, straining mules, cantering horsemen, swaying wagons—the grandest parade, and not the least tragic, in history. Others took the southwest course, following the caravan trail worn broad by Santa Fé freighting. Across Texas and New Mexico streamed yet more thousands; across Nicaragua; across fevered Panama.

Oh, Susanna, don’t you cry for me—

I’m off for California with my washbowl on my knee!

So they hurried into the sunset, those marchers of ‘49, with their shovels and blankets, their hopes and enthusiasms, their youth and their primal cussednesses. Life was intensified. The sun had never been so radiant. Pull, you sweaty bullock! The track—where’s the trade? Is that the track? But it’s white—white with salt; white with bones. No matter. We’ll cross those sands and we’ll burst those mountains. On for California!

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Arriving by land or by sea, they made for the placers. They filled the manzanita vales and azalea hollows with their whoops. They set up tents and brushwood shacks; the more clear-sighted set up saloons.

By the end of ‘49 the number of them was thought to be around one hundred thousand: wholly male, footloose and obstreperous. Buckskinned frontiersmen from Oregon, South Americans, Chinese, Hawaiians mingled with swarthy Mexicans openly aggrieved at such interloping; mingled with men from every country of Europe and every state of the Union. Seldom in the world’s slow turning had so many different kinds of men been drawn to one spot for so single a purpose. Other stampedes would follow, to Australia, the Pacific Northwest, the Rocky Mountains, the wide deserts. But this was the modern world’s first great treasure rush since the days of the Conquistadores. In one year California, lately a wilderness, would be a populous state.

At San Francisco, where recently half a dozen ships had been a rarity off the wharfless shore, ‘49 brought half a thousand. They came from every frontage on the seven seas. Forty thousand passengers that year entered the port of tumult by water. Two hundred windjammers lay deserted at one time, a tangle of idle spars—crews gone for the mines. All the vessels that came were not sky-raking square-riggers, and all were not ocean steamships. The year before the rush, a floating palace was launched at New York for excursion duty on the placid Hudson River. The owners of the luxurious New World got into financial difficulties and in ‘49 the sheriff came to her wharf with papers of attachment. The broad-beamed paddleboat was gone. It was suggested that she was off somewhere on a weekend picnic. But the sheriff waited in vain. The New World did not return from her picnic. Windows boarded up and hold and decks stocked with fuel, she was making straight out the Narrows for the Atlantic, bending south, and flipping blue water behind her in a nervy charge for the far tip of South America. When next heard from she had rounded the hemisphere and was at Panama—a godsend and a surprise to a mob of gold-seekers who had crossed the Isthmus to its Pacific side and were waiting clamorously for any kind of transportation onward. After sixteen or eighteen thousand miles of varied steaming, Captain Ned Wakeman and his extraordinary river boat entered the Golden Gate and passed onward to do shuttle duty between San Francisco and Sacramento City. These were dauntless times.

Other craft, equally valorous, preceded and followed.

Stockton, burg of sacking built on mud, became the base town for the southern diggings, and its boats did a river traffic of $50,000 to $100,000 a day. Sacramento City fifty miles north, a canvas town built about a levee, did even better. It served the Mother Lode belt in the region surrounding Marshall’s pioneer discovery. Marysville up the Sacramento Valley served the northern mines. Down at San Francisco, the eight-score adobe houses of a few months previous grew to six hundred structures, mostly frame, to two thousand, to four thousand; the population, from four hundred and fifty-nine souls, including Indians, to six thousand, fifteen, thirty. The busiest port on earth! Jangling dance hall and whooping gin mill obliterated any memory of Mission bell; though by October of ‘49 life had become sufficiently stabilized for the Daily Alta California, a merger of the two elder weeklies, to urge its readers to persuade some of the respectable families that have daughters to settle in life, to come to California and build up the society, which without woman is like an edifice built on sand. The oracle further discovered: There is something in the climate, we of course except San Francisco and the Valley of the Sacramento, which predisposes one to contentment.

Meanwhile, out yonder where the Mother Lode foothills rose against the Sierra granite, canyons were being churned with a spirit that was the very reverse of contentment.

The merchant was there with boots and shirts at monstrous prices, flour at $600 a barrel, liquor at $50 a gallon, remedies at one dollar to ten dollars a pill and purge. The gambler was at hand with his polished boots, fine hat, and supple fingers; the horse thief, with his pistols; the Cantonese, with his pigtail and his washee. For the favored minority the Snowy Mountains continued yielding up new gold in flakes, pellicles, and chunks. The story of it all has been told and retold, but when will it ever stale?

What days they must have been!

II — RISE OF THE EXPRESSES

PUT me down, Alex! One from my sister and six from my girl.

Me, too!

"Me!"

The youth with pantaloons stuffed into boots, pistol belt at slope, and whiskers making hammock for his nose writes them all down. Two dozen miners on Mokelumne Bar, half a hundred in Jackass Gulch, a score each in Murderers’ Gulch, Bloody Gulch and Rattlesnake Flat—and he is on his way. He will bring back the mail: for a measure of gold per letter.

At Stockton or Sacramento City he puts up his horse and fights for a place in the first down-bound launch. The boiler manages to hold together. Twenty-four hours later, San Francisco pushes its sand hills through the morning fog. Up the littered trough called Clay Street he rushes for the post office.

Long queues of men stand before this shanty. They will be here all night. Places near the head of the line are worth a golden ounce or a mortal fight. A side-wheeler, weeks out from New York, has been sighted off the Golden Gate. The courier seeks the rear of the shanty, plucks out Postmaster Geary, offers his services, and is sworn in as a clerk. With a pair of helpers he ransacks the arriving mail bags; by morning he has abstracted several hundred missives addressed to his clients.

Getting back upstream is no easy matter. Somewhere along the Embarcadero the resourceful courier finds a ship captain who will part with a skiff. Clearly the skipper is a newcomer, or he would want its weight in gold for the craft of pine. He names his price—$300, and the craft’s capacity—eight or nine men. The new proprietor retails places on its thwarts and gunwales to twice that many passengers for an ounce of gold dust each, with the privilege of doing their own rowing up the hundred miles of bay and river and eating themselves. The owner-captain sits on his mail bag and steers. Thus returns in style to his base town, one of the West’s first letter expressmen. He sells his small argosy at a handsome profit and probably pays it all out on a four-day board bill for his horse. Yes, this is El Dorado.

When he bursts through to the Mokelumne Bars, Jackass Gulches, Jimtowns, Mud Canyons, and Greenhorn Slides of his mountain territory: Six from your mother, Baltimore, and only one from your girl....Nothing for you, Provincetown. She must have took up with the drugstore feller that stayed home....Three for you, Brattleboro. At sixteen dollars each. I’m starting back for another mail tomorrow.

News from home, boys! News from home!

The whiskerandos of ‘49 may have liked to consider themselves rough, tough, and boisterous; but scratch the surface, and every mother’s son among them was unutterably homesick. Memories of home cooking and the girl in gingham grew more poignant with each passing day. A thousand yellowing diaries and letter packets have come down the decades to reveal this aspect of the Argonaut. Address me at the mines, Ma had been spoken lightly enough, with little thought for the vicissitudes those letters would encounter before one in five of them ever reached delivery.

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In February of ‘49 one William Van Voorhees arrived at San Francisco as the first United States Mail agent. Washington knew nothing of the job it had sent him on. He was instructed to establish post offices in five towns. They were far from the mines. Most of the immigration was scurrying like ants over a great range of country remote from all former trading centers. To leave his diggings and go down for letters meant a long, arduous trip for the miner—and perhaps no claim when he got back. With native gold or high wages beckoning to all, who would carry the mail at government pay? Meanwhile, from mothers and sweethearts of half the world, those letters came pouring. They piled up at the entry port, and later with equal lack of system at the few inland post offices. Here was a problem officialdom could not solve. But private enterprise could. Whether Alex Todd was the first of the mountain letter-expressmen, he soon had competitors. All developed from letter men into treasure expressmen when the miners began entrusting them with bags and cans of gold dust to take down for safekeeping.

Just behind Todd in the southern diggings rode W. T. Ballou. Bill Ballou slashed Todd’s bonanza rate to a quarter-ounce per letter, or about four dollars. The mining country lacked scales. So Ballou equipped himself with a sewing thimble. With this domestic engine he leveled off his fees just as they came virgin and shining from the creek beds.

Jim Tolles was mining farther north. Fortune had smiled on many, but turned the back of her neck to him. He, too, conceived the occupation of community courier. He journeyed down from the Feather River country. Shortly before Christmas, 1849, returning from San Francisco, he debarked from the river boat at Sacramento City. Young Tolles had no horse, but he had willing legs. He elevated his sack of letters to his back and set out across country. By night he wrote up his diary:

Today it rained continually and the wind blew hard. I walked from the city up to Fremont and was very much fatigued, having to go through brush and water, traveling thirty miles. Two wolves kept a short distance ahead of me.

Meanwhile Todd was finding the goddess of Fortune no shy maiden. He covered the whole range of gold-bearing uplands behind Stockton. At each camp the principal merchant was his agent. Merchants enjoyed the distinction. It made their huts focal points for additional excitement. Todd rode far, but managed to be at San Francisco for the steamers. When the California, Oregon, Panama, or John L. Stephens was sighted through the heads, he rowed out and bought up old New York Heralds from the passengers at a dollar a copy. He retailed these for eight dollars each at the mines, and a single ship sometimes provided several hundred copies.

Opening an office at Stockton, Todd installed an iron safe. Still the personal expressman, he continued setting forth into the hills with two pack horses laden with letters and papers, and returning with them freighted with yellow dust. For lodging the gold in his safe Todd exacted one-half of one per cent per month, together with the privilege of lending like a banker. If the depositor preferred individual storage, Todd doubled the fee. He expanded, took partners, sold out, successively re-entered the lively occupation; finding time as well to be paddled for one hundred and twenty miles up the Columbia River and the Willamette, and to open Oregon’s first expresses at Portland and Oregon City. A superlative business!—until California fires nine times cleaned him out, clerks decamped with $40,000, $50,000, and $70,000, and competition cut the rates to a dollar, to four bits, and finally to two bits a letter.

Throughout the treasure lode country this evolution was in progress, of volunteer post-riders turning into treasure carriers and, in some cases, into bankers. Others never went in for such large affairs; they remained lone travelers of the trails to the end of their era, though their careers took them to the firry ravines of British Columbia, the limestone mountains of Montana and Colorado, or far out into the alkali glare of the sagebrush basins. By horse, by mule, and afoot these messengers were everywhere breaking