Transportation and Communication Systems
Robert Harold Brown · 2019
Early inhabitants of the Wyoming area-mostly Indians, the first white explorers, and mountain men-lived a simple life, and their means of the transportation and communication were also uncomplicated. Use of the horse during most of the eighteenth century certainly altered previous Indian patterns of both transportation and communication. The most important transportation aids were the wheel and wagon, canoe, ferry raft, saddle, pack-horse techniques, bridging skills, and the advanced snowshoe. The demand for transportation to and from the Pacific coast and desert settlements west of the Wyoming region in the 1850s encouraged the operation of stagecoach lines. At the turn of the twentieth century, advancing technology initiated even greater and more far-reaching effects upon Wyoming’s transportation and communication systems. One of Wyoming’s oldest continually operated institutions, the US Post Office system, has continued to undergo changes in its communications functions.