Paper Trails will be myth-busting for any student from the John Wayne school of American history. As University of Colorado history professor Cameron Blevins demonstrates, the occupation of the west wasn’t a just the story of cowboys and sodbusters. Both groups depended on the federal government. The expansion of the U.S. was made possible by government subsidies, land grants and the U.S. Mail. It was federal policy, not rugged individualists, who “won the west” and Paper Trails documents the underexamined role of the postal service. A network of post offices and delivery routes spread rapidly across the frontier, allowing relatively easy communication between the country’s eastern and western halves and among the newly organized territories. By 1889 the postmaster general could boast that he ran one of the world’s largest enterprises. Blevins writes with an eye for the small human stories that ultimately invested the subject of his book with meaning.
