Chapter 218: Preparing to go Postal

Editor: nnpdad 21 Oct 2022

There was absolutely nothing for Mouse to do whilst I sat through the first meetings of the day. This was not a good thing, Mouse was not the sort of woman to sit around daydreaming. She always preferred to be doing something; perpetual motion was a trademark of that woman of mine. While we discussed and argued, she freshened the fire and made a new pot of coffee for us meeting-dwellers. With that all done she disappeared out the conference room door.

Meanwhile, at the table we were discussing the overall progress of the efforts to the Postal contract. It turned out that we would be ready to leave for Fort Atkinson this afternoon and the slow river current of autumn meant we could be there by nightfall. While this sucked in that I’d be travelling overnight again so soon, it also meant that I could be back again tomorrow and ready to head south.

The season was a big reason for our need for speed. Every day took us another step closer to the onset of winter and the idling of the boats until spring. The unpredictability of early winter storms greatly increased the risk of staying on the river too long. We couldn’t afford to lose our boat until we could purchase or build a couple more. We had plenty of wood for construction and enough pig iron to build a couple of engines. The big slowdown on building boats was a lack of experienced shipwrights and smiths. We were hiring apprentices everywhere we could find them but it was still a slow process. We worked out plans to do more recruiting up at Fort Atkinson during this visit.

There was an issue: by taking a blacksmith or shipwright along to recruit on these journeys, we would slow productivity here by a tremendous amount. However if we didn’t start recruiting talented and experienced folk, our productivity would never increase to keep pace with our growing needs. It was a true dilemma We resolved to visit both shops this morning and upon my return from Ft. Atkinson, a decision would have been made and I’d pick up passengers, if any.

All of that accomplished and it only took two hours! We did have a tentative route map with estimated times; we’d start to catalog those times on this run so that we’d have the basics of a schedule worked out before next spring. That was if the weather and the steam engine held during this run. We were running on coal and would refill the hoppers in St. Louis. One of my goals was to strike a contract for coal while I was down in St Louis; it would guarantee a ready supply for the coming year. The postal contract was a ten year contract and we needed to think along those lines. I also knew that as steam engines grew in popularity, the demand for coal would rise. Competition was guaranteed over the long haul.

I found my wife in the ‘Teacher’s Office’ working on her Pawnee language writing project. She was trying to learn to ‘write’ Pawnee - in her words. First of all, the ‘Teacher’s Office’ was a rather grandiose description for a small storage room that happened to have a desk and a chair in it. Second, and more interesting, was that in reality she was creating a written version of the Pawnee language, something that had never existed before either in the past or future. If it had existed, there was never an example that I’d ever seen or heard of, in the modern version of my life. Pawnee history was well studied, known and taught as part of history classes in my youth under the banner of ‘Regional History.’ Apparently that was all about to change.