Old West: The Expressmen

This wonderful leather-bound series from Time-Life takes the reader back to The Old West. With color illustrations and plenty of black and white photos. When President James Buchanan predicted in 1858 that the country would someday be bound east and west "by a chain of Americans which can never be broken," the links were already being forged by an army of entrepreneurs known as the Expressmen. Their freight and stagecoach services moved Eastern goods westward, Western ones eastward, and shuttled people, money and mail both ways. By 1860, Pony Express riders were relaying mail across more than half the country in the amazingly brief time of 10 days. Such labors, celebrated here and on the following pages in paintings by Western artists, were eventually to be supplanted by the railroads and the telegraph. But until then. the Expressmen persisted as though the fate of a fledgling civilization rested in their hands - and it did.