Stages were manned by a driver and a conductor or messenger, both heavily armed. Provender and relief stations were established along the route, as a rule not more than twenty miles apart, and sometimes half that distance. The schedule first called for two stages a week, then one stage in each direction, every other day; and after a while this plan was altered to provide for a stage every day. There was little regularity, however, in the hours of departure, and still less in the time of arrival, and I recollect once leaving for San Francisco at the unearthly hour of two o'clock in the morning. So uncertain, indeed, were the arrival and departure of stages, that not only were passengers often left behind, but mails were actually undelivered because no authorized person was on hand, in the lone hours of the night, to receive and distribute them. Such a ridiculous incident occurred in the fall of 1858, when bags of mail destined for Los Angeles were carried on to San Francisco, and were returned by the stage making its way south and east, fully six days later! Local newspapers were then more or less dependent for their exchanges from the great Eastern centers on the courtesy of drivers or agents; and editors were frequently acknowledging the receipt of such bundles, from which, with scissors and paste, they obtained the so-called news items furnished to their subscribers. George Lechler, here in 1853, who married Henry Hazard's sister, drove a Butterfield stage and picked up orders for me from customers along the route. B. W. Pyle, a Virginian by birth, arrived in Los Angeles in 1858, and became, as far as I can recall, the first exclusive jeweler and watchmaker, although Charley Ducommun, as I have said, had handled jewelry and watches some years before in connection with other things. Pyle's store adjoined that of Newmark, Kremer & Company on Commercial Street, and I soon became familiar with his methods. He commissioned many of the stage-drivers to work up business for him on the Butterfield Route; and as his charges were enormous, he was enabled, within three or four years, to establish himself in New York. He was an exceedingly clever and original man and a good student of human affairs, and I well remember his prediction that, if Lincoln should be elected President, there would be Civil War. When the United States Government first had under consideration the building of a trans-isthmian canal, Pyle bought large tracts of land in Nicaragua, believing that the Nicaraguan route would eventually be chosen. Shortly after the selection of the Panamá survey, however, I read one day in a local newspaper that B. W. Pyle had shot himself, at the age of seventy years.