Shotguns and Stagecoaches: The Brave Men Who Rode for Wells Fargo in the Wild West
This month, I’m looking at the wild west, making this weeks book Shotguns and Stagecoaches: The Brave Men Who Rode for Wells Fargo in the Wild West by John Boessenecker. So lets do this.
Now, most people these days are only aware of Wells Fargo as the scandal ridden bank of the last 15 years or so, and Boessenecker addresses the scandals in the epilogue. But this book is not about modern day sucky Wells Fargo. Its literally about the men who made the company great 170-ish years ago.
Wells Fargo & Company’s Express started as a bank on the east coast, when financiers Henry Wells and William G. Fargo, who were two of the owners of the American Express Company, realized that huge profits could be made in the newly discovered gold country of California. But not just in banking. Banking was still primarily the province of the East Coast, but Wells Fargo saw the potential, and initially opened up the express shipping company.
And they shipped everything from mail, to packages, to dollar bills, gold dust, and gold bars. And as Boessenecker succinctly puts it, “The connection between commerce and crime was never more evident than in the story of Wells Fargo. America’s frontier regions were violent and lawless in the extreme; study after modern study has shown that to be true.”
So from the beginning, Wells Fargo hired armed messengers. And that’s what this book is about. I mean, the introduction includes the bit about how Wells Fargo came into being. And while the book is called Shotguns and Stagecoaches, primarily with a nod to how Wells Fargo has been inextricably linked with Stagecoaches from the very beginning, I went with a Shotgun cocktail because Wells Fargo also used railroad cargo for transportation, and they also posted armed guards on the trains. Because their job was not protecting stage coaches...it was protect the company’s express boxes. And to a man, each messenger carried a shotgun.
He also clarifies that the term Shotgun Messenger, which is what the guards universally came to be called, was not coined until the 1870’s. Prior to this, they were simply called mail guards. And the terms shotgun riders and riding shotgun were coined by 20th century fiction riders. And he provides a very helpful information on the different stagecoaches used vs the number of horses, and the infamous whip, which 21st century Wells Fargo removed from branding based on the erroneous belief that the whip was used to actually beat the horses, which it was not, versus the truth, which is that the whip was used to guide the horses. Horses at a full gallop are unlikely to hear the verbal commands of the driver over the pounding of their feet. But a whip cracking in the air to the right directs the horses to veer left...away from the whip crack.
And he clarifies some of the Hollywood myths around hold ups, namely that robbers would ride hell bent for leather chasing them down to jump on the stagecoach and beat up the driver. Makes for a cinematic detail, but the reality was a bit more pragmatic. They would wait at the top of a steep grade, which the horses would slow down to climb anyway, then stop em near the top.
And while popular history has that most stagecoach robberies occurred during the 1860s and 1870s, in reality, they continued up into the early 1900’s. As long as stagecoaches were a primary method of transportation, Wells Fargo used them. But they didn’t all have shotgun messengers. Most only carried mail and passengers. And yes, sometimes these would be robbed. But the big scores were the coaches that DID have a shotgun messenger. And Wells Fargo was especially adept at hiring courageous and honorable men to guard their gold.
The first messenger was Pilsbury “Chip” Hodgkins, who began working for Reynolds & Co Express on March 1, 1851. Reynolds & Co would be bought out by Todd & Co Express in March 1853, which would itself be purchased by Wells Fargo in September 1853. And from then on, Hodgkins was a Wells Fargo man.
And Boessenecker goes on to tell short biographies of each of the famed messengers who worked for Wells Fargo, and through telling these stories, gives a solid outline of what life was like in the Wild West, and through necessity covers some of the more infamous outlaws to come out of the decades between 1850 and 1918 when Wells Fargo ceased express package delivery following the nationalization of railroads under Woodrow Wilson as a result of World War I….yeah. I still hate Wilson. Fuck that guy.
And while bankers have had a generally scummy reputation since the stock market crash of 1929, and Wells Fargo particularly tanked their own reputation from the 1980’s on with ridiculous policies and quotas. But it was once a genuinely great company. Tale after tale of the shotgun messengers shows how Wells Fargo used to actually care about the people in their employ. Each shipment was guaranteed. If the shipment got stolen, they replaced it. Full stop. No quibbling about liability. Wells Fargo would replace the money from their own rolls. Then hired detectives, whose biographies are also included herein, to hunt down the theives and retrieve the money.
And when the messengers were inevitably injured on the job, whether it be from train derailment or getting shot in the line of duty, Wells Fargo covered all their medical expenses. All of them. And no, this was not usual, even back then. Companies were more inclined to medically retire the injured party and leave them on their own. But Wells Fargo CARED for their people. They were generous with bonuses and when messengers delivered on protection above and beyond, they gifted gold watches, which given relative cost and inflation, would be like giving them a Rolex watch. Which were treasured possessions of everyone who received them. And when a messenger died in the line of duty, Wells Fargo buried them with honors, paying for marble tombstones so that all might know the courage the fallen exhibited in the face of violence.
From the book “Between 1855 and 1915, at least fifty-three Wells Fargo expressmen died in the line of duty. Nineteen were slain by outlaws or bandits, four were accidentally shot, four more died in shipwrecks and steamboat explosions, and many of the others perished in train wrecks. The biggest loss of life took place in 1866, when, incomprehensibly, an unmarked parcel of nitroglycerin was shipped via Wells Fargo. Five expressmen died when the parcel exploded in the company’s Wells Fargo San Francisco headquarters.”
And from the 1920’s on, for nearly 100 years, Wells Fargo maintained a history department, that proudly talked about and displayed artifacts from the early years, creating museums to the history of the company in Wells Fargo branches. Until, as Boessenecker explains, “In 2010, the bank commissioned its new logo….But in a laughingly inept nod to political correctness, the driver had no whip and the shotgun messenger had no shotgun.” And despite the importance of firearms to maintaining the safety and security of the cargo that Wells Fargo was entrusted to safeguard, company policy was to remove these artifacts from display, essentially erasing the history that had made this company great.
But the real changes started in 1998, when Richard Kovacevich became CEO. And then came the policy changes and requirements to sign up accounts that led to the well publicized series of scandals from 2008 through 2017. And whereas Wells Fargo started out as a literally color blind company, happy to do business with men of all races and colors, Wells Fargo has quite famously been sued for discrimination in their loan processes from everyone from African American’s through Native American tribes.
This book was so well written, and John Boessenecker is a natural born story teller, rolling from one biography to the next with logical bridges and crossovers where needed, returning glory to men who have long since been forgotten by history, but whose deeds well deserve to be remembered. Like...if Hollywood ever gets its head out of its collective asses and stops with the bullshit PC movement, any one of these chapters could easily be converted into a heart pounding western on the life and times of a Shotgun Messenger.
