It’s 1850 and I’m in California searching for gold and decided to write a letter to my parents back in New York. What are the odds my letter actually makes it to them, and how long would it have taken for my letter to get there?

I answered a question like this several months ago: If I had trekked out to California at the start of the gold rush, how quickly could I have sent a letter back to my family at home on the East Coast?. The heart of the answer is as follows:

Correspondence in 1849 (and the early 1850s) reached the East Coast - what they called the "States" - by three means: by hand courtesy of someone travelling back; by mail-packet ship travelling to Panama (at which point the mail was carried to the Atlantic shore and then another another mail-packet picked it up for transportation to the US East Coast; or by a ship going "around the Horn" on return to the "States". The most consistently used means was the second.

For someone wanting to write to family in the East, there was a difference for those living in San Francisco and those who had gone to the Gold Country. Those living in SF usually knew when a mail packet was leaving, so they could go to the wharf, hand a letter over, and see it off. The journey would take several weeks, but it was fairly efficient since Pacific mail-packet to mule pack train to Atlantic mail packet was fairly well timed and predictable. You would need to allow for at least a month, depending on how far your family home was from the Atlantic seaboard.

If you lived (and worked) in the Gold Country, this were much more difficult since you didn't know when the next mail packet was leaving. You would write a letter and give it either to a local "post office" (although what that meant varied considerably from place to place) or more likely to someone who was travelling to the coast to initiate the process. Because it would be difficult for you to predict when your letter would reach the Bay Area, and also when the next mail packet was leaving, you had better expect that it may take two months or more.

These observations are based in part on the Gold Rush letters of the Grosch brothers which I helped transcribe and co-edited. These issues are also described in the Journals of Alf Doten, which were published decades ago in an abridged form, and which I am currently transcribing in totality for online publication in full.