At the close of the Civil War, however, Holladay controlled a monopoly in stage service between the Missouri River and Great Salt Lake. The express companies and railways met him at the ends of his link, but had to accept his terms for intermediate traffic. In the summer of 1865 a competing firm started a Butterfield's Overland Despatch to run on the Smoky Hill route to Denver. It soon found that Indian dangers here were greater than along the Platte, and it learned how near it was to bankruptcy when Holladay offered to buy it out in 1866. He had sent his agents over the rival line, and had in his hand a more detailed statement of resources and conditions than the Overland Despatch itself possessed. He purchased easily at his own price and so ended this danger of competition.
Such was the character of the overland traffic that any day might bring a successful rival, or loss by accident. Holladay seems to have realized that the advantages secured by priority were over, and that the trade had seen its best day. In the end of 1866 he sold out his lines to the greatest of his competitors, Wells, Fargo, and Company. He sold out wisely. The new concern lost on its purchase through the rapid shortening of the route. During 1866 the Pacific railway had advanced so far that the end of the mail route was moved to Fort Kearney in November. By May, 1869, some years earlier than Wells, Fargo had estimated, the road was done. And on the completion of the Union and Central Pacific railways the great period of the overland mail was ended.
Parallel to the overland mail rolled an overland freight that lacked the seeming romance of the former, but possessed quite as much of real significance. No one has numbered the trains of wagons that supplied the Far West. Santa Fé wagons they were now; Pennsylvania or Pittsburg wagons they had been called in the early days of the Santa Fé trade; Conestoga wagons they had been in the remoter time of the trans-Alleghany migrations. But whatever their name, they retained the characteristics of the wagons and caravans of the earlier period. Holladay bought over 150 such wagons, organized in trains of twenty-six, from the Butterfield Overland Despatch in 1866. Six thousand were counted passing Fort Kearney in six weeks in 1865. One of the drivers on the overland mail, Frank Root, relates that Russell, Majors, and Waddell owned 6250 wagons and 75,000 oxen at the height of their business. The long trains, crawling along half hidden in their clouds of dust, with the noises of the animals and the profanity of the drivers, were the physical bond between the sections. The mail and express served politics and intellect; the freighters provided the comforts and decencies of life.