The Butterfield Trail

Description

The Butterfield Trail through Arizona’s New Frontier, 1858-1861: Alkali Dust and Blistering Sands

Paperback – January 1, 2025

by Gerald T. Ahnert (Author)

The Butterfield Trail through Arizona’s New Frontier, 1858-1861: Alkali Dust and Blistering Sands takes the reader through Arizona in the late 1850s and early 1860s on Butterfield’s Overland Mail Company stage wagons. For the present-day explorer there are 48 maps showing the route of the trail and the twenty-six stage station sites in Arizona. The Southern Overland Corridor contained many trails that crisscrossed, paralleled, and sometimes ran on top of each other. A significant transformation came in 1858, when these various trails were consolidated into one dominant trail by John Butterfield Sr., president of the Overland Mail Company. The mail route was over 3,000 miles long. A bifurcated section, starting at St. Louis and Memphis met at Ft. Smith, Arkansas, where the passengers and mail were transferred to a lighter stage wagon to travel through the 1,920-mile frontier section and then on to San Francisco delivering the mail in less than 25-five days. The Butterfield Trail was the first successful government sanctioned trail to connect the East to the West. This book is the result of the author’s fifty-five years of research and exploring the entire trail in Arizona. In January 2023 the National Park Service recognized the importance of this Old West enterprise when it was designated a National Historic Trail. Their planning committee is now in the process of developing an interpretive plan for the entire trial.