There is little interest in the earlier phases of the overland mail service save in that they foreshadowed greater things. A stage line was started from Independence to Santa Fé in the summer of 1849; another contract was let to a man named Woodson for a monthly carriage to Salt Lake City. Neither of the carriers made a serious attempt to stock his route or open stations. Their stages advanced under the same conditions, and with little more rapidity than the ordinary emigrant or freighter. Mormon interests organized a Great Salt Lake Valley Carrying Company at about this time. For four or five years both government and private industry were experimenting with the problems of long-distance wagon traffic,--the roads, the vehicles, the stock, the stations, the supplies. Most picturesque was the effort made in 1856, by the War Department, to acclimate the Saharan camel on the American desert as a beast of burden. Congress had appropriated $30,000 for the experiment, in execution of which Secretary Davis sent Lieutenant H. C. Wayne to the Levant to purchase the animals. Some seventy-five camels were imported into Texas and tested near San Antonio. There is a long congressional document filled with the correspondence of this attempt and embellished with cuts of types of camels and equipment. While the camels were yet browsing on the Texas plains, Congress made a more definite movement towards supplying the Pacific Slope with adequate service. It authorized the Postmaster-general in 1857 to call for bids for an overland mail which, in a single organization, should join the Missouri to Sacramento, and which should be subsidized to run at a high scheduled speed. The service which the Postmaster-general invited in his advertisement was to be semi-weekly, weekly, or semi-monthly at his discretion; it was to be for a term of six years; it was to carry through the mails in four-horse wagons in not more than twenty-five days. A long list of bidders, including most of the firms engaged in plains freighting, responded with their bids and itineraries; from them the department selected the offer of a company headed by one John Butterfield, and explained to the public in 1857 the reasons for its choice. The route to which the Butterfield contract was assigned began at St. Louis and Memphis, made a junction near the western border of Arkansas, and proceeded thence through Preston, Texas, El Paso, and Fort Yuma. For semi-weekly mails the company was to receive $600,000 a year. The choice of the most southern of routes required considerable explanation, since the best-known road ran by the Platte and South Pass. In criticising this latter route the Postmaster-general pointed out the cold and snow of winter, and claimed that the experience of the department during seven years proved the impossibility of maintaining a regular service here. A second available road had been revealed by the thirty-fifth parallel survey, across