Cameron Blevins has crafted a shining masterpiece of interdisciplinary scholarship with Paper Trails: The U.S. Post and the Making of the American West. Blevins contributes a broad reassessment of the state’s role, structure, and reach by leveraging traditional archival research and innovative geospatial digital history methods to study the rapid proliferation of postal services in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American West. However, Blevins’s brilliance lies in his expert balance of broad, sweeping analysis and detailed social history. Paper Trails is not just a story about data and state functions but also a chronicle about ordinary people whose lives were impacted by accessibility to the largest-scale postal service in the world. Blevins illustrates how the U.S. Postal Service facilitated the flow of personal messages, commerce, news, and money through the vast expanses of the western United States while also aiding the destructive colonization of Native American lands as the “underlying spatial circuitry of westward expansion” (3). Blevins successfully argues that the triumph of an accessible federal postal service in a rapidly expanding American frontier was not due to a rigidly centralized bureaucracy but rather the postal system’s decentralized flexibility. Blevins argues that postal decentralization, characterized by an agency model of public-private partnerships, local agents, and contractors, enabled the rapid development of postal services essential to the nation’s periphery through outsourced employees, transportation, and postal facilities.

Throughout Paper Trails, Blevins effectually examines overarching historical themes surrounding the unique nature of the American postal system and the functions of the agency model of administration to effectively bolster his argument for the importance of a dynamic “Gossamer Network” postal system defined by intersectionality that blurred public and private spheres (1). Blevins structures his chapters thematically. He employs maps, charts, and captivatingly written narratives to illustrate his data, examine broad historical questions, and reinforce his central arguments. For example, in his first two chapters, “Geography and State Power” (16–35) and “Stories and Structures” (36–52), he chronicles how the U.S. Postal Service was expansive, accessible, and historically significant. He does this by skillfully framing the Postal Service as the antithesis to Weberian notions of bureaucracy, employing comparative data maps to illustrate an agency-model postal service as one of the most pervasively influential and essential institutions to federal governance in the American West. Subsequently, by employing archival manuscript research, Blevins engages social history to vividly depict how one geographically separated western family relied on the post office over decades to stay connected, provide mutual financial assistance, and even find employment through postal work.

Conversely, in the third, fourth, and fifth chapters, “Postal Maps, 1860–83” (53–74), “Mail Routes and the Costs of Expansion, 1866–83” (75–93), and “The Post Office Window, 1880–92” (94–118), Blevins keeps his monograph balanced by equitably confronting the negative consequences of an outsourced postal system and addressing broad themes such as instability and corruption. The author successfully transitions to a critique by arguing that postal topographers and administrators struggled to supervise a vast postal network in a state of constant flux. Blevins subsequently leverages spatial comparisons of postal route costs to discuss how broad accessibility achieved through public-private partnerships met with rampant corruption, highlighting the famed Star Route scandal, in which mail transportation contractors defrauded public moneys. Additionally, Blevins discusses how political patronage created a vital but unstable class of fleeting, part-time postmasters who frequently disobeyed postal regulations. However, despite his critiques, Blevins defends the drawbacks of the agency model as necessary to the greater mission of universal service, appearing to favor decentralized government administration. For example, Blevins defends postmasters’ noncompliance as beneficial, and contributing to smooth postal operations. In the last two chapters, “Money Orders and National Integration, 1864–95” (119–39) and “Rural Free Delivery, 1896–1913” (140–56), Blevins concludes his monograph with themes of bureaucratization. He chronicles increasing postal centralization and oversight, leveraging data mapping to illustrate how triumphs of bureaucratic efficiency contributed to the limited availability of money order and rural free delivery services in western communities.

Overall, Blevins’s historical research is well balanced. It relies on a mixture of high-quality secondary scholarship, such as Richard R. John’s classic monograph on the Postal Service, Spreading the News, and Gary L. Gerstle’s Liberty and Coercion. Additionally, Blevins uses valuable primary sources, such as The Annual Report of the Postmaster General and various manuscript collections held in institutions ranging from the Bancroft Library to the National Archives. However, Blevins’s limited attention to Record Group 28 in the National Archives, which covers the papers of the Post Office Department, weakens his research. Although this exclusion is not detrimental to his broader synthesis of postal data, it would have provided more depth to his narrative and analysis.

Blevins’s geospatial digital history research is undisputedly praiseworthy. He continues the legacy of geography professor and pioneering postal historian Richard Helbock, whose tireless research documented the name, location, and operation of almost every post office in U.S. history. In both Paper Trails and its interactive companion website, www.gossamernetwork.com, Blevins expertly uses Helbock’s dataset of more than 165,000 post offices as the foundation for his own digital historical analysis. Blevins cross-references Helbock’s data against the Geographic Names Information System, applying geocode map coordinates to two-thirds of all U.S. post offices and randomly assigning all missing post office coordinates within their counties of operation. Numerous maps and charts illustrating how postal geography changed over time are central to Blevins’s argumentation. He effectively employs a wide array of engaging charts, ranging from traditional bar graphs depicting postmasters’ removal to proportional area charts illustrating the flow of money orders, to communicate key concepts. One of the book’s considerable merits is its attention to less commonly studied topics in the scholarly discourse, such as histories of decentralized government actors and ubiquitous social forces. Paper Trails is a must-read for postal historians and will intrigue both history professors and graduate students interested in communications, the state, and the Gilded Age and Progressive Era American West.