mail driver

chained_bear commented on the word mail driver

"The most important and respected travelers on the trails were the mail drivers. Whether they were Native, part Native, or white, they were usually the best dog drivers around, and they were experts at surviving in almost any weather conditions. It was a tough job and carried huge risks, and this was reflected in their pay, which was about $150 a month, one of the highest in Alaska. They took their oath seriously and went out on the trail at times when no one else dared. They braved blizzards, rain, and bitter cold, and sometimes became the only contact between the isolated miner and the outside world. They understood the importance of a letter home to both the miner and the shopkeeper.

"'To see the excitement that the mail from the Outside makes, to see the eagerness with which the men press up to the postmaster's desk for their letters, and the trembling hands as they are opened, and the filling eyes as they read, touches the heart,' wrote one author as he watched the arrival of mail in 1897.

"By law, mail drivers had the right of way and were always given the warmest seat at the roadhouse. They were served the best food and their dogs were given table scraps saved especially for them; sometimes the animals would be given beds of hay for the night. The dogs worked as hard as their drivers. ...

"Nothing could compare to the dog team, particularly when the weather was bad. The drivers often had to pay a penalty if their delivery was late, and they pushed themselves and the dogs to the limit.

"'You'd have to be on time regardless of the weather or trail conditions,' said Peter Curran, Jr., who had the mail route between Solomon and Golovin on the Bering Sea coast. 'If I lost a day, I had to make a double run the next day. So I had to go no matter what the weather. ... Sometimes in those storms you couldn't see half the team. You just had to trust your leader to keep going.'

"'There were days the poor dogs, they just hated to go,' said another driver, Bill McCarty, who had a route in the Interior in the mid-1920s. 'Going up river, against a headwind, cold. Oh. It really bothered them. But we had no choice. They had to go.'

"Roadhouse keepers and other travelers understood the extent of the pressure on the drivers and their dogs, and they often went out of their way to help. If it had snowed overnight, they would wake up early and tramp down the trail for more than ten miles so that the mail driver and his dogs would not have to labor through heavy drifts.

"The drivers rarely took advantage of these privileges, and whenever they could, they would take passengers to neighboring villages or drop off gifts along the route. A mail driver might have as many as 25 dogs pulling two heavy freight sleds, or as few as five dogs pulling a light load. Either way, the mail was packed into heavy canvas bags tied shut with a drawstring and lashed down in the basket of the sled. Important mail such as bank drafts and company slips stayed in the driver's backpack. Sleigh bells were tied to the dogs' harnesses to announce their arrival and to warn a traveler that they were coming round the bend.

"By the 1920s, mail drivers crisscrossed the entire territory. For the most part, they were a tough and humble lot, often identified by the gruesome stamps of their profession, an amputated finger or a toe lost to the cold, or a frostbitten nose or cheek. Some of them were legendary. ...

"If a driver failed to deliver his mail on time, it was a sure sign that there had been a mishap, and the lodgers at the roadhouse would go out and look for him."

--Gay Salisbury and Laney Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race against an Epidemic (NY and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003), 102-104

January 24, 2017