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United States Overland Stage starting for Denver from Hays City, 289 miles west of Missouri River

Title: United States Overland Stage starting for Denver from Hays City, 289 miles west of Missouri River.

Topic: Exterior\Landscape\Plains; Nature & Environment\Animal\Horse; Vehicle\Carriage; Portrait

Credit Line: Owner: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution; This record is part of the Catalog of American Portraits, a research archive of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Permission to reproduce images (if available) must be obtained from the portrait owner. Please note that if an owner is listed above, this information may not be current.

Exhibition Label: In his final survey report General William J. Palmer posed a series of arguments to convince the government to finance the proposed Kansas Pacific Railroad route. Among the items Palmer listed was the considerable federal expenditure on the military “to fight the Indians, protect settlers and emigrants, guard the boundaries of the nation, transport mails and Indian goods, &c.” As Alexander Gardner’s photograph suggests, attachments of infantry were regularly called upon for the safe delivery of mail by stagecoach. (In fact, Gardner and the railway’s surveyors enjoyed a military escort as they made their way from St. Louis to San Francisco.) The military personnel pictured here belonged to one of the four African American infantry regiments that the U.S. Army established after the Civil War.