Our new conductor (just shipped) had been without sleep for twenty hours. Such a thing was very frequent. From St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, by stage-coach, was nearly nineteen hundred miles, and the trip was often made in fifteen days (the cars do it in four and a half, now), but the time specified¹ in the mail contracts, and required by the schedule, was eighteen or nineteen days, if I remember rightly. This was to make fair allowance for winter storms and snows, and other unavoidable causes of detention². The stage company had everything under strict discipline and good system. Over each two hundred and fifty miles of road they placed an agent or superintendent³, and invested him with great authority. His beat or jurisdiction⁴ of two hundred and fifty miles was called a “division.” He purchased horses, mules⁵ harness, and food for men and beasts, and distributed these things among his stage stations, from time to time, according to his judgment⁶ of what each station needed. He erected⁷ station buildings and dug wells. He attended to the paying of the station-keepers, hostlers, drivers and blacksmiths, and discharged them whenever he chose. He was a very, very great man in his “division”—a kind of Grand Mogul, a Sultan of the Indies, in whose presence common men were modest of speech and manner, and in the glare of whose greatness even the dazzling stage-driver dwindled⁸ to a penny dip. There were about eight of these kings, all told, on the overland route.