Old Highway 395, Part 10: US 395/CA 71 via Old Town Temecula, Murrieta, Wildomar and Lake Elsinore (1934-1953)

Until the opening of the completed eastern routing of US 395 in 1953 (as we will see in Part 12, now traversed by modern Interstate 215), US 395 had a longer and significantly more prosaic routing in southern Riverside county as shown in the ACSC map at left (click for a 111K enlargement). This routing went up through what is now Old Town Temecula, then Murrieta (with a set of two 90-degree turns), Wildomar and Lake Elsinore before turning east towards Perris. Resembling the similar "dogleg" routing through Fallbrook to the south that we saw in Part 6, its analogously indirect nature would lead to its own eastern shift later which, again, we will talk about when we discuss the modern Interstates in Part 12.

US 395's routing here, naturally, follows that of its ancestors. Prior to US 395's designation, this was of course part of CA 71 and LRN 77, and prior to that was a major local route as part of the Butterfield Trail, born of the 1857 Post Office Appropriations Bill that established an official overland route for mail traffic instead of the sporadic monthly steamboat service (which could take as long as eight months to get a letter from New York to Los Angeles at its, er, "peak"). The Butterfield in Butterfield Trail was John W. Butterfield, founder of the American Express Company and personal friend of President James Buchanan, who received the contract and the designated route from Postmaster General Aaron V. Brown.

Brown's route was somewhat meandering, probably affected by the prevailing politics of the day, but importantly despite its hundreds of miles of padded and seemingly superfluous length was not affected by snow. With two eastern termini in St. Louis and Memphis (Memphis being Brown's home town), the routes converged in Fort Smith, AR, then went to Colbert's Ferry, TX and Franklin, TX, and finally through southern New Mexico along approximately what was later US 80 to Tucson, AZ and then Fort Yuma on the Colorado River. (There is still an exit on Interstate 8 for the Butterfield Trail in Gila Bend, AZ, where old US 80 is the business route.) The Trail then dipped slightly into Mexico, emerging near the New River in Imperial county, up to Vallecito and then Warner's Ranch (modern Warner Springs), and then to Temecula, Chino and Los Angeles. North of Los Angeles, it proceeded roughly along the route of later US 99 through the San Fernando Pass and Tejon Pass to Fresno, then west over the Pacheco Pass along modern CA 152 to Gilroy and along modern US 101 to San Jose and San Francisco. Butterfield drew on his considerable knowledge of the communications industry to construct rail links into Missouri and a complex stagecoach system from there to San Francisco linked by 139 individual stations using specialized wagons and specific animals on difficult sections. On 16 September 1858 the first piece of westbound mail left on the new route, marked "Per Overland Mail," from Saint Louis with two other bags of mail and a New York Herald correspondent. It completed its trip to San Francisco in 23 days, 23 hours and 30 minutes, over a day faster than Butterfield's contract of 25 days required.

Despite its great success, the Butterfield Overland Mail was decommissioned less than three years later by act of Congress on 2 March 1861. Part of the impetus came from the complaints of the North, who suffered under the considerably slower northern route maintained by George Chorpenning and wanted Butterfield's contract cancelled to move resources closer to them, but the secession of seven states in 1860-1 on the eve of the American Civil War was what ultimately convinced the legislature that a southern mail route would be all but crushed under a hostile states' alliance. Mail route #12578 was moved to the central United States and the Butterfield Trail was decommissioned as a mail route in the Union, but not as a trade road: since it was now well known as a carefully researched and passable artery throughout the state, the Butterfield Trail lived on to accommodate homesteaders and traders to finally become a component of the modern highway system during the rise of the automobile, including, for a time, US 395. (It is interesting to note, however, that the eastern remnant of the Butterfield Overland Mail continued to operate in the Confederacy for some months later, even using Butterfield employees, until 1862.)