“He became interested in packet boats on the [Erie] canal, and in steamboats on Lake Ontario, in the construction of plank roads leading to Utica and was the originator of its street railroads.

[7] The Resource Study Act, to designate the Butterfield Trail as a National Historic Trail, was authorized under the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act (Public Law 111-11) signed by President Barack Obama on March 30, 2009.

The act was completed and in June 2018 the bill was presented to Congress by Arkansas Senator John Boozman.

Kirby Sanders was the consulting historian and lead researcher for the Butterfield study for the National Park Service.

[8] Congressional authorized researcher Sanders put into perspective Wells, Fargo & Co.’s only direct involvement with the Butterfield Overland Mail Company.

[12]In the late 1960s, some historians tried to make the case, through deductive reasoning only, that Wells, Fargo & Co. was an active part of Butterfield’s Overland Mail Company.

[13] One of these was Ralph Moody even though he stated in his book Stagecoach West: “No conclusive evidence has been ever discovered to prove that Wells, Fargo & Co. had outright ownership of the Overland Mail Company and the Pioneer Stage Line on or before July 1, 1861, the date on which the overland mail contract was transferred to the central line.”[14]It wasn’t until 1867, five years after Butterfield ceased operations on the Southern Overland Trail, that Wells, Fargo & Co. entered the staging business when they scraped off the name on the transom rails of the Pioneer Stage Line and added their own.

[15] His son, Daniel Adams Butterfield (1831–1901), was a Union brigadier general in the American Civil War,[17] and Assistant U.S.

[21] Butterfield was buried in Forest Hill Cemetery in Utica New York, where he lived when the established his first stage coach line.