By western author Nick Brumby

“Why send a telegram when you can give your loved ones the Bird?” — Advertising slogan for the ill-fated 1868 Turkeymail Avian Postal Service

DATELINE: 1st APRIL 1868: On this day Texan investor Hiram Snood launched his ambitious but ultimately doomed turkey-powered airmail postal service in Wattle, Texas.

Snood’s ‘Turkeymail Avian Postal Service’ planned to cover the Old West from Deadwood to Dodge City with a little-known and barely believable network of bird-powered ‘avian couriers’.

Snood originally made an early fortune investing in the fabled Pony Express, which eventually was put out of business by the new-fangled telegraph services spanning the West.

Seething with revenge, Snood decided to return the favor and launch a cut-price postal service that would send real physical letters and mail, not just telegrams, across the American Frontier in only days. This, he reasoned, would make the telegram obsolete overnight, and would reap him huge profits.

His revolutionary business concept abandoned traditional ground-based transport such as horses and oxen as too slow and expensive. A visionary, Snood instead planned to take to the skies, figuring that being first in the air would give him a technological airmail edge which could not be bested. After testing hot air balloons and the latest French gliders, Snood settled on a uniquely Texan approach – harnessing flocks of local birds in teams pulling lightweight carts between towns across the Old West.

After trialing starlings, woodpeckers and eagles, Snood chose the humble wild turkey to power his venture. As he told the Houston Post Examiner, the turkey was a sturdy bird weighing up to 30 pounds that could fly at more than 50 miles per hour, faster than any railroad of the time. If the wind was too strong for take-off, his postal turkeys could also run at 20 miles an hour. As turkeys were also readily available in the wild, he reasoned it was the perfect avian candidate to power his fledgling airmail service.

He told the Post Examiner he planned to model his Turkeymail service on that of the Pony Express. Instead of stagecoach waystations he built ‘turkey nests’ every 50 miles where flocks of fresh plump postal turkeys could replace worn out birds. He estimated each cart would carry several hundred letters in a specially designed egg-shaped weatherproof ‘clutch’.

Snood planned to charge a dollar for customers to send a ‘bird’, equivalent to the amount of weight a postal turkey could comfortably carry aloft. “Why send a telegram when you can give your loved ones the Bird,” Snood enthused.

He also had plans of introducing vulture-powered passenger air coaches once his Turkeymail service was up and running.

However, things came unstuck when the first batch of postal turkeys took longer to train than expected, meaning Snood never actually tested his Turkeymail Avian Postal Service until launch day on April 1st, 1868. Harnessing his strongest pair of postal turkeys to his air-cart, he posed for pictures, cracked his whip and sat back smiling. The turkeys started flapping but the cart didn’t move.

Snood was prepared for this eventuality and harnessed more and more birds to his cart. Eventually a team of 256 postal turkeys stood squawking and gobbling in front of him. However, no matter how hard his specially trained postal turkeys flapped their wings his cart refused to move.

Snood sat humiliated in front of an expectant and jubilant crowd of onlookers as his visionary business literally failed to get off the ground.

A broken man, Snood freed his postal turkeys and left his air-cart to rot where it stood. His Turkeymail Avian Postal Service was lost in the annals of history, a myth only commemorated by locals each year on April 1st.

About Nick Brumby

I like a good story. And of all stories, I love westerns the most.

As a kid, I spent far too many afternoons re-watching Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns, picking up ‘Shane’ for just one more read, or saddling up beside Ben Cartwright when ‘Bonanza’ was on TV each afternoon.

I’m a former journalist and I love horses, dogs, and the occasional bourbon whiskey. I live with my wife, daughter and our ever-slumbering hound in a 1800’s-era gold mining town – our house is right on top of the last working gold mine in the area. There may not be much gold left, but there’s history wherever you look.

I hope you enjoy my westerns as much as I enjoyed writing them!

Happy trails,

Nick