I thought Mail by Mule was an amazing story in this day-and-age of instant communications. It reads like an episode of the old west’s pony express era, but it is a story of the actual delivery of U.S. mail today and, probably for the foreseeable future, in Supai, Arizona.
Just after 8:00am, on a Spring morning, 2000 feet below the rim of the Grand Canyon, Nate Chamberlain, wearing chaps and cowboy boots, emerges from the post office in Supai with the last of the morning’s mail. He tucks a Priority Mail envelope into a plastic U.S. Postal Service crate lashed to one of the six mules waiting outside. Then he climbs into the saddle on the lead mule, gives a kick of his spurs, and sets off down the dirt road leading out of the village. It is the beginning of the country’s most unusual USPS route – the very last to deliver mail by mule.
The mule train will travel eight miles along a creek lined with cottonwoods, through a narrow gorge, and up a switch-backing trail carved in the cliffside to reach a hitching post at the top of the canyon, where a sign reads US MAIL DELIVERY ZONE. There, Chamberlain will drop off the outgoing mail with a driver, who will take it another 68 miles to the next post office, in the town of Peach Springs. He then picks up the incoming mail from the driver to deliver back to the village.
Supai, the only village on the reservation of the Havasupai Tribe, is one of the most remote communities in the country. It is accessible only by foot, or by helicopter when the weather allows. The mule train, which makes the 16-mile, six-hour loop up and down the canyon five days a week, is perhaps the most extreme manifestation of the USPS mandate to “render postal services to all communities”. It offers a glimpse into what the Postal Service means for rural America at a moment when the agency’s future is uncertain.
In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed an executive order restricting the Havasupai Tribe to 518 acres at the bottom of the Grand Canyon – they had ranged across the whole southern rim of the Canyon for centuries. A decade later, a school was established on those 518 acres to implement the U.S. Government policy to eliminate Indian culture. A post office was established the same year. That post office slowly became the only way of getting anything into the Havasupai community, short of air drops.
Over the years the post office mule train has involved significant risks. In winter, ice can accumulate on the narrow switchbacks, which drop 1000 feet in the first two miles. In the summer, temperatures can exceed 110 degrees F. Mules can be spooked by blowing debris and the occasional rattlesnake. During monsoon season, rainwater rushing down the canyon walls can turn the desert floor into a surging river in minutes. Chamberlain recalls once taking shelter with 11 of his animals at a high point above the trail as the floodwater rose below them. When he rode back up the trail the next day, the marks left by the water were higher than his head, even on horseback!
Chamberlain still holds the contract for the service, although his nephew now operates the daily route, because the only other way in is by helicopter, and he can easily outbid anyone who tries to introduce that method of mail delivery. He worries that Trump’s comments about privatizing the U.S. Postal Service will mean no more service for Supai. “No private company in their right mind would be interested in delivering mail by mule”, he muses, “and any other method would be prohibitively expensive”.
If the U.S. Postal Service is to live up to its founding tenet of delivering mail to all Americans, then myopic visions of cost cutting in Washington will have to be set aside. Supai, and the Havasupai Tribe are a concrete, if extreme, illustration of what could happen when public service becomes a dirty word in American politics, as it seems to be under the Trump administration.
