from a week
to two hours, and its expense and peril to an inappreciable quantity. It
is a cheering fact that the capitalists who invested their faith and
their means in this beneficent enterprise have already had returned to
them in dividends the full amount of their outlay, and are now receiving
twenty per cent. per annum. Their road has shortened the average Isthmus
passage to and from California by at least a full week, and immensely
diminished the danger of loss by robbery, accident, or exposure, beside
building up a large trade which but for it would have had no existence.

Yet the Isthmus route to California is only by comparison acceptable,
even for passengers and goods, while for mails it was at best but
endurable. It is nearly twice the length of the direct route from the
Atlantic seaboard, while for the residents of the Evart Valley it is
intolerably circuitous. A letter mailed at St. Paul for Astoria or
Oregon City, or at Omaha for Sacramento, must, under the regimen of the
last ten years, be conveyed overland to New York, or by steamboat to New
Orleans, where it might have to wait ten or twelve days for an Isthmus
steam-ship, making a circuit of twice to thrice the distance by a direct
route to its destination. There has been, indeed, for some four years
past, a tri-weekly overland mail from St. Louis via New Mexico and
Arizona to San Diego, in the extreme south of California,--a route
nearly a thousand miles longer than it need or should have been, and
evincing a perverse ingenuity in the avoidance not only of Salt Lake and
Carson Valley, but even of Santa Fe. This long and mischievous
detour--one of the latest of our wholesale sacrifices to Southern
jealousy and greed--has at length been definitely abandoned, and,
instead of a tri-weekly mail via Elposo and the Gila, together with a
weekly by Salt Lake, and a fortnightly or tri-monthly by the Isthmus, we
have now one daily mail on the direct overland route from the Missouri,
at St. Joseph or Omaha, via the Platte, North Platte, Sweetwater, South
Pass, Fort Bridger, Salt Lake, Simpson's route, Carson Valley, and
thence across the Sierra Nevada to Placerville and San Francisco, in
shorter time than was usually made by way of the Isthmus, at less cost
than that of the three mails which it replaces, while the immense
advantage of a daily mail each way, over a tri-monthly or even weekly,
needs no elucidation. The territories of Colorado, Utah, Nevada, are
thus