A Rendezvous
With History

(excerpts from Vol I, No. 1)

Name Recognition

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The word "express" has an ancient and honorable history that to some extent has been lost in this century. When the governor of the province of New Mexico, in 1805, sent an obscure Indian interpreter named Pedro Vial to stop the Lewis and Clark Expedition on the Missouri River (without success, the governor told his superior at Chihuahua: "If the news is usual, I will send it by the regular express; if unusual, I will send it by an extraordinary express." Thus, the "express" was a man (sometimes several men in one party) who carried messages, news, information, and articles - all covered under "intelligence."

The word "Butterfield" is from John Butterfield who projected and carried to success the first overland mail route - "The Great Overland Route," as it was called in Congress. It became known as the Overland Mail, and since it its stage coaches ran twice a week from St. Louis and way of El Paso, over the Gila Trail, across the desert past Vallecito and Warner Springs to San Francisco (and east-bound as well), it had a rather close connection with San Diego, especially inasmuch as its predecessor, James E. Birch's San Antonio & San Diego Mail Line, had already opened the route as far east as San Antonio and had shown that regular service could be maintained eastward from San Diego over the deserts and mountains and through the Indians.

Purpose & Reach

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What phrase in Southwestern history, then, would be more hallowed that "the BUTTERFIELD EXPRESS"?
For it is our purpose to publish a newspaper that will recreate our vivid past in all its aspects, - well, in most of its aspects, - because there is a very pressing need for historical information on this section of the United States.


It is well known that a large portion of the population in the San Diego area is made up of persons who have moved here from other states and other parts of the nation and of the world, and there is a saying that one who has lived in Southern California five years is a native. This is why one sometimes sees the rather strange (journalistically speaking) phrase in a California newspaper: "Mr. Smith, a native Californian," or "Mr. Jones, the grandson of a native Californian" - which demonstrate the great pride of Californians in their heritage.

Others have that pride too, for all natives, whether of five years or of five generations, grow to love the country down here in this corner, and would like to know more about it. We hope to have something to offer them all.

It is no uncommon for a tourist to make a flying trip to Los Angeles, to negotiate a freeway ride down to San Diego and to go back home across the mountains to report: "Oh, yes, Los Angeles - smog. San Diego - sailing." Somehow it seems to escape them that Los Angeles is surrounded by mountains, that in the Back Country of San Diego, up above the palm-tree and bougainvillea belt, are huge pines and giant oak-trees (some of them hundreds of years old.)

Well, each town has considerably more than can be seen in several weeks. San Diego - and some of us rather regret it - is no longer a sleepy little Spanish town, isolated from the rest of the United States by reason of being off the mainline railroad route to the East. It is getting to be a big town, and so it is too late to look back from time to time on one of our most charming assets: our history. For this is where California began.

Historical Perspective

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The stories of our sailors goes back to the Portuguese Cabrillo, who discovered this great land-locked harbor in 1542. On a little broader scale, Coronado went up through Arizona (Pimeria Alta) in 1540, and his two-year explorations helped to turn Spanish eyes toward California and the South Sea (the Pacific Ocean). Father Junipero Serra built the first mission in California in 1769 - seven years before the Revolutionary War; and when, a few years later the mission of San Diego de Alcala was established in Mission Valley - where it still stands - the fathers planted a hedge of prickly pear so they could use the apples or the meat as a specific for diarrhoea - and the nopal is still growing there, with trunks as big as a man's leg. California history began, then, on Presidio Hill, where the Serra Museum now stands.

Over the hundreds of years since Coronado and his hell-raising young conquistadores made their great search for the Seven Cities of Gold, many men have followed the arduous road across the southern Arizona desert (though not on Coronado's trail); some by orders of the Spanish king or the viceroy of Mexico; some in search of the gold that Coronado never found; some after customers and cargoes. They came and they went, but not always through San Diego. This town was off the direct route through Warner's by some sixty miles, and since most of the travelers went on to the pueblo of Los Angeles and eventually to San Francisco, San Diego was often by-passed and seemed to remain aloof from the rest of the United States.

In the 1820's the Yankees came by sea in their clipper ships on the long, long voyage around Cape Horn, and for many years San Diego's principal connection with the world was through ships going to or coming from San Francisco. The early issues of the San Diego Herald, starting in 1851, show many, many columns of advertising by San Francisco merchants, but not a great deal by San Diego business, and at least one steamship sailed regularly between the two towns. Inasmuch as San Diego was a Spanish town, it didn't mind being left alone by the outside world; and in the meantime, some of the roving Yankee ship captains (Bostonians, they were called) became smitten with the black-eyed senoritas of San Diego, married them and became proper San Diegans.

In 1826 the mountain men began to come, much to the dismay of the padres in the missions they raided. The first was James Ohio Pattie (and he raided no missions), whose father died in jail and was buried here while California was a part of Mexico. In 1846 the army men came down the Gila River - Kearny to the Battle of San Pasqual and Mule Hill near Escondido, Cooke which the Mormon Battalion - to secure California for the Union; and they too brought men who found their restless blood cooled by the sea-breezes, and they also married Spanish girls and founded dynasties that still exist.

The horde of Gold Rush emigrants started in 1849, and the endless cattle-drives from Texas emigrants after they got here. In the first year, 9,000 Argonauts crossed the Colorado and Yuma on their way to the Gold Country, and many of them came to San Diego and took ship for San FRancisco. And again, some of them stayed.

The Topographical Engineers came in the 1850's to settle th southern boundary. San Diego was the western headquarters for the Boundary Survey - even though for a while there was some question as to whether San Diego itself would turn out to be Mexican or Gringo.

The Apache wars soon started in New Mexico and Arizona, and cut off the emigration (but not until, it is estimated, 60,000 men, women, and children had made the crossing at Yuma). The Indians continued on the rampage until after the Civil War, when three fourths of the United States Army was sent to Arizona and finally subdued the Apaches in 1886 under General Miles - who had done the same job in 1874-1875 in the Texas Panhandle.

The cattlemen had been coming in since the American conquest, and with the subjugation of the Indians, most of the country between San Diego and El Paso became cattle country - and still is.

Because Father Serra made the first Caucasian establishment in California, San Diego is the birthplace of history in the Southwest Corner, and this is one of the important areas of interest of the BUTTERFIELD EXPRESS. But a larger and fully as legitimate an interest is expressed in our presentation of the Southwest; Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, perhaps West Texas, perhaps parts of Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, and certainly all of California and the Mother Lode Country - and who knows what else?

Sphere of Interest

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Our final sphere of interest, of course is in the whole West (west of the Mississippi River) - this incredible land of great distances, of extremes of weather; this violent area where justice was (and sometimes still is) dispensed without protocol (and sometimes - but no other - without justice), where a lot of things were done because they had to be done. This entire region is our field of interest.

And yet we have in mind a much broader and more significant purpose. While we expect to tell our readers (with the greatest possible authenticity) about the men, the places, the events, and the artifacts of our history, we hope also to bring them something a little more subtle and a great deal more important we want to take them back into history itself.

For history is not a record of governors and battles and tax laws. History is the story of men and women; of their strivings their failures, and their successes; of their motivations; of their envies and their avarices; of their loves and their hates and their fence-straddling; of their generosity, they loyalty, their unselfishness, and their perseverance. Of - as one early writer put it - their everlasting go-ahead-it-ive-ness.

Above all they were human beings, and we hope to make the reader feel that; to show you where they lived, how they lived, and why they lived.

This then explains the newspaper format of the BUTTERFIELD EXPRESS, for the newspaper, more than any medium in existence, has always been a reflection of its time. Its faces were often colored by its editor, but that bias can be observed and allowed for. It is a voluminous document, and does not change its story from generation to generation. It is, - more than any other one item - living, breathing history. And to assist us in recreating in the reader an authentic feeling of the past, we shave studied typefaces, advertising, and the typography of old-time newspapers - of which we have hundreds. Over a period of fifty years, we have clipped from them and have properly filed (properly for us, anyway):

  • thousands of news stories;
  • advertisements;
  • editorials;
  • heads; and
  • distinctive lines of type.
We have studied the subject-matter of a hundred years ago and the manner of its presentation in every detail. We have studied the style of writing in newspapers of a century ago, the vocabulary, the syntax, and the punctuation, and we hope in suitable places to present material so much like that of old time newspapers that you will find it difficult to decide whether it was written today or whether it was composed in 1850. Everything that goes into style, whether as of today or as of yesterday, will be the best (the most real) that we can produce. We hope to make you feel that you are there - that this might almost BE a paper of 1850.

Caution Statement

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A word of caution: this is a rendezvous with culture, and you cannot keep it in five minutes. Man in the twentieth century has worked himself into an incessant sweat of work and hurry, hurry, hurry - but culture, atmosphere, and feeling cannot be absorbed that way. Let your reading of the BUTTERFIELD EXPRESS be leisurely deep, and thoughtful. Let yourself be projected. It is that kind of paper. Savor it.

When you unfold your BUTTERFIELD EXPRESS, pause for a moment to slip back into the past, with our help. You might be a man in a Prince Albert coat, green trousers, and a white brocade waistcoat, with a heavy silk hat and a gold-headed cane under one arm, opening a copy of the San Diego Herald in the year 1852 or of the San Diego Union in 1870. (Yes, they had small-sized newspapers much earlier than that.) You will be reading the kind of headline, in type and in writing, that you might have read when San Diego was a village of adobe huts, and we hope that you will be so drawn into the spirit of Old Southwest that when you hear a strange sound, you will think of horses stomping, and you will glance outside to see if your carriage is still waiting.

We bring you history, but really the people of the century ago, the life of olden times, the soft breezes of the brown hills where there was room and time and sunshine.

Ladies and gentlemen, with loving pride but in all humility we offer the BUTTERFIELD EXPRESS for your tender reflections.

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