Mailing a Letter to California in the Old West
25 April 2010
The Overland Mail stage departing for San Francisco, October 23, 1858. From Frank Leslie's Illustrated News
BOB DOUGHTY: Welcome to THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English. I'm Bob Doughty.
BARBARA KLEIN: And I'm Barbara Klein. This week on our program, we tell you about the Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas. We explain its place in the history of the first stagecoaches that carried mail to the American West.
(MUSIC)
BOB DOUGHTY: Across the United States, the speed limit on fast roads is generally eighty-eight kilometers an hour. But in the western United States, there are highways where the speed limit is one hundred twenty-five kilometers an hour.
These are usually in areas with little traffic but lots of open country. The roads are good, a driver can see far -- and a trip hundreds of kilometers long can take just a few hours. And if that is not fast enough, then people can drive to another part of the modern transportation system: the airport.
There used to be a time when the quickest way to travel across the western United States was in a stagecoach. A stagecoach was a large, enclosed wagon pulled by teams of horses or mules. The driver tried for a speed of about eight kilometers an hour.
BARBARA KLEIN: Our story really begins in Washington, D.C. Lawmakers in Congress wanted to make it possible to send mail all the way across the United States by land. Mail was usually carried west on ships that sailed around the bottom of South America and then north to California. That could take several months.
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