STAGECOACH

A chronicler of west-of-the-Pecos America turns up a tale of horses, cantaloupes, and hard cash.

Fradkin, a well-published environmental journalist (Magnitude 8: Earthquakes and Life Along the San Andreas Fault, 1998, etc.), turns in a solid history of the Wells Fargo Company, whose “operations bisected almost all social, cultural, and economic activities in the trans-Mississippi West.” Born as a kind of catch-all transport company in a time when mailing an ordinary letter cost more than shipping a barrel of flour—and when federal postmasters were a corrupt, self-serving lot eager to enforce their monopoly—the joint concern of Henry Wells and William G. Fargo (and, for a time, of John Butterfield, also of Western stagecoach fame) quickly flourished, as did its sister corporation, the American Express Company. Combining aspects of the modern communications, banking, and shipping industries, Wells Fargo served as the single most important link between east and west, bringing documents and currency from Atlantic seaboard centers into the hinterland, bringing ore and fresh produce from California to New York. A dangerous enterprise in a time of outlaws and hostile Indians, the express shipping business brought considerable fortune to the two partners and their corporate officers—so much so that Wells Fargo’s affairs eventually drew the attention of trust-busting Progressives, who all but dismantled the company by 1918, after which time it dwindled to “a single bank in San Francisco” before reemerging, more than half a century later, as an interstate banking chain.

Although he writes less passionately—and less interestingly—here than in his environmental works, Fradkin makes a good case for the importance of Wells Fargo in the larger history of the American West.