CHAPTER V

MAILING AND FREIGHTING CONTRACTS

(1842-1852)

Contracts for carrying mail, Jefferson City to Warsaw, and Warsaw to Springfield, 1842-Manner of life during this period-The mails made tri-weekly-Extra compensation refused him-Act for his relief, March 3, 1849Further experience with mail contracts-Trip to Washington, 1846—Letters to his wife and daughter—Secures part of a government freighting contract to Santa Fé, 1849-Sketch of the Santa Fé traffic-Letter to his daughter, 1851-Cholera in the train, 1849-Retires from the freighting business, 1852.

While he filled the position of Receiver of Public Moneys at Springfield, General Smith was a busy man. In addition to his duties and responsibilities in that office, he superintended the management of his farm at Georgetown, where his family continued to reside; this necessitated frequent trips on horseback between that point and Springfield. He was also engaged in various business speculations, and these, with his political aspirations, made large demands upon his time and strength in the way of correspondence. But all this proved insufficient to consume his restless energy. To these activities he added yet another, and during the whole of his official term, and for some months before and after, he

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was actively engaged on contracts with the government for transporting the mails.

In 1842 he put in a number of bids for mail contracts in Missouri. Though he was unsuccessful on many routes, on two he proved to be the lowest bidder, and was awarded the contracts. These covered the first stages of the newly established route from Jefferson City to Fayetteville, Arkansas. The first stage led southwest from Jefferson City to Warsaw, in Benton county, and was about eighty miles in length; the second led an equal distance almost due south from Warsaw to Springfield, the capital of Greene county, where was the land office in which General Smith was Receiver. The contracts commenced on the first of January, 1843, and terminated on the 30th of June, 1846. The mail was to be carried twice a week and back, in two-horse post coaches, and the compensation for the service was to be $1,400 and $1,200 a year, respectively.

The region through which these routes led was a sparsely settled prairie district, and several of the counties into which it is now formed were not yet organized. When General Smith made the first survey over the proposed route he found it necessary to plow a deep furrow, a good part of the distance, to serve as a trail for his carriers; and this line became the chief public road between the points named. Besides carrying the mails, the stages served also to transport passengers.

Of General Smith's activity in this venture, Mrs. Smith writes:

The same indefatigable energy in business characterized him in this as in all other efforts to make something more than the mere living at farming to which even the most ambitious of our citizens were restricted in that day, hemmed in as they were by the waste of country that separated them from the Missouri river, by which alone they could find a market for their crops. And the same ardent devotion to his little family shone out, if possible, with more than its accustomed force during this time, when storm and tempest, cold and heat, day and night alike, might find him in the saddle, either going to his business at Springfield or returning to his Georgetown home. My mother's health was frail, and she did not wish to leave her parents at Georgetown. With a keen sense of the responsibility resting upon him, both in his business and domestic relations, our father braved all to be with her, regardless largely of food, sleep, or comfort. While others slept by comfortable fires shut in from the wintry blasts, he was riding through dark and dangerous places, through wide uninhabited districts, often lost in the trackless prairies, over which he had to pass for miles and miles without a glimmer of light, excepting at long intervals a flicker from some logcabin window, or the gleam of a friendly star stealing out for a moment through broken rifts of cloud that hung darkly above. At such times, reaching home at midnight, or in the "wee sma' hours," his voice was tremulous with anxiety until reassured by the actual grasp of our mother's hand, and her voice telling him that all was well with herself and her little ones. Then shaking off the snow or the sleet from his heavy boots, overcoat and hat, doffing his leggings and the long comforter that was often fastened by icicles to his beard and hair, he would sit by the open log fire recounting in happy mood

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the incidents of his trip. The dangers now were trifles and the trials light as air. Then he was a happy man; and while Henry, the faithful slave, was attending to the jaded horse at the stable, our father would grow eloquent before the warm fire, in painting to his wife and children, aroused from their sleep by his entry, the better times that were in store for them. All toil was forgotten, and his sleep after such a trip would be sweet and undisturbed.

Mails twice a week proved too infrequent, and the Postoffice Department was importuned, in 1844, to make these routes tri-weekly. This fact, and the appearance of a rival competitor for General Smith's contracts, led the First Assistant Postmaster General to write, under date of May 7, 1844, as follows:

Otho Hinton, of St. Louis, Missouri, proposes to transport the mail on routes from Jefferson City to Springfield, Missouri, three times a week, at present pay. Notice of this proposition is hereby given in order to inform you, that unless you will give equal service without additional pay, the Postmaster General will transfer the routes to Mr. Hinton. advise us of your decision without delay.

Please

This letter was not received by Mr. Smith until June 16. That same day he wrote the Department in reply, saying:

I have understood before that Hinton was making some efforts to get my lines. Sooner than I will give up the line to him, I will carry it at the same price ($2,600) three times a week.

This letter was construed by the Department to

signify his consent to perform the additional service without increased compensation. A third trip each week was accordingly ordered by the Department, and was regularly made by the coaches of General Smith, from the 15th day of August, 1844, to the expiration of his contract with the close of the month of June, 1846. General Smith, however, did not consider that the Department had the right to demand, nor that he had legally consented, that this extra service should be rendered without extra pay; and he made application for additional compensation for this work, which was rejected by the Department. Then General Smith carried the matter to Congress; and finally, after much trouble and delay, a joint resolution of the two houses was, on the very last sessional day of President Polk's administration, passed and signed granting him the sum of $780 "as full compensation for carrying the mail once per week oftener than originally contracted by him" on the routes in question during the period named.1

Twice again General Smith was concerned in mail contracts, and in each instance the connection brought him vexation and annoyance. In December, 1850, the death of his friend and business associate, James Brown, of Georgetown, threw upon him a good deal of labor in arranging for the settlement of the mail contract from Independence, Mis

1 House Report No. 717, 29th Cong. 1st Session, Vol. IV; House Report No. 103, 30th Cong. Ist Session, Vol. I; and Act approved March 3, 1849.