PrefaceAny account of Wells Fargo & Company involves a history of the more dramatic aspects of the Old West. There is, however, another story that is quite interesting in its own right and certainly more relevant to our times.
The company's operations bisected almost all social, cultural, and economic activities in the trans-Mississippi West and were conducted in such diverse physical landscapes as the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin Desert, the wet Northwest, the dry Southwest, the Sierra Nevada, and the Pacific coast.
Wells Fargo's early history meandered through and illuminated the booms and busts of gold and silver mining rushes, the collection and distribution of mail, the rise and failure of banks, the Pony Express, over-land staging, the building of the transcontinental railroad, the Civil War and the Indian wars, the violence of robbers and gunfighters, the development of agriculture, the rise of capitalist entrepreneurs, and the regulation anddisbanding of monopolies. In fact, more than any government agency or any other commercial enterprise, the history of Wells Fargo mirrored the history of the American West through the second decade of the last century.
Follow Wells Fargo and you follow the path of money and products through a vast network of western trails. Wells Fargo was a business dedicated to remaining in business and making a profit, which was sometimes considerable and a few times excessive. The company has managed to operate for one hundred and fifty years, an unusual length of time in a region renowned for its economic vicissitudes and the transience of its population. Along with the nostalgic appeal of its Old West identity, speed, security, service, and the ability to connect people, money, and goods have been constants in Wells Fargo's long history.
There is a set of historical bookends that illustrates Wells Fargo's long reach from the era of sailing ships to the age of the Internet.
On July 30, 1844, the twenty-two-gun sloop Levant anchored off Sausalito in San Francisco Bay. The passage of the American naval vessel from Hawaii had taken an unusually long three weeks. A few days later a party of seven rowed ashore. William A. Richardson, a middleman between the governing Mexicans and visiting foreigners, provided the group with horses and a guide for purposes of hunting. They rode north to the San Rafael Mission in what would become known as Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate.
A young acting lieutenant, Louis McLane Jr., kept a journal. He was amazed by the abundance of wildlife. "The whole country around is covered with quail & deer -- the latter wild," he wrote.
They reached the mission in time for dinner, which was mutton: "a great rarity in this country, where a man kills a fat Beef for the quarters & a deer for the saddle [a prime cut of meat]," McLane commented.
Their host at the run-down mission, Timothy Murphy, managed the property for the Mexican government, California then being part of Mexico. Murphy was pleased to see them, since he only encountered one or two fellow Anglos a year. After dinner they mounted fresh horses and tracked down the large doe McLane had wounded earlier in the day. The dogs finished her off. Other members of the party shot two more does, and McLane bagged a fawn before they retired from the field.
The next day the group departed for the return ride to the ship before breakfast. They saw more than one hundred deer, but only managed to shoot three bucks, as the large party made too much noise. The three-hundred-pound Murphy regaled them with stories about grizzly bears, one of whom had pawed him in the back three weeks previously. "He showed us the wound, barely healed," said McLane.
It was a taxing day. The nine hours in the saddle were "the hardest riding I have ever seen or ever expect to see." The lieutenanthad a fair amount to say about the durable California horses, finding them "swift, surefooted & of great bottom." They were much hardier than the eastern horses he was used to. McLane looked about and saw a bountiful land: "The pasturage is excellent -- fine grass in the valleys & wild oats on the hills & mountains. In consequence, both horses & cattle are in fine order."
For a time, horses would power the stagecoaches that drove the commercial empire McLane oversaw on the West Coast. The offspring of a distinguished Maryland and Baltimore family -- his grandfather served as a colonel in the Revolutionary War and his father was a congressman, U.S. senator, ambassador to the Court of St. James's, and secretary of treasury and secretary of state in the cabinet of President Andrew Jackson -- McLane offered this assessment of his future domain: "From all I can learn Oregon has no good harbor, is unhealthy & has large tracts of poor Land. California has several fine harbors, (this bay of San Francisco, is one of the best in the World) has very little poor land & is remarkable for the purity of its atmosphere."
Louis McLane would return to San Francisco to head the Wells Fargo office in what had become a thriving city by the mid-1850s. He would eventually take over the West Coast operations and then ascend to the firm's presidency in New York City.
Some tens of millions of additional inhabitants later, Wells Fargo was firmly ensconced in California and the West in 1996, having gobbled up such lesser entities as Crocker and First Interstate banks, doubling in size each time. Wells Fargo was second only to Bank of America, which had been taken over by a North Carolina bank. It was the oldest bank in the West.
Wells Fargo had become so large and so successful that it made a tempting target for an aggressive "in-your-face" advertising campaign by Glendale Federal Bank, which was seeking to entice customers following Wells Fargo's takeover of First Interstate. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the southern California bank was guilty of gross adulation.
The bank's advertising agency, the aptly named Wise Guys of Pasadena, hired a tug to pull an eighty-foot barge around San Francisco Bay. Two sail-like square banners were rigged on the barge's deck. One had the international sign for no, a red circle and slash, superimposed over a stagecoach pulled by six horses -- the Wells Fargo icon. The other banner sought to emulate the western theme that Wells Fargo has so successfully employed over the years: "Hit The Trail," it stated. "The other way to bank."
The campaign backfired. In an era when stadiums were being named after Internet companies, schools sold space for advertising in textbooks, and airships and biplanes circled lazily overhead with their forgettable messages, the commercialization of the ad-free waters of San Francisco Bay was too much. There was an outcry. One public agency banned nautical advertising in the wake of the ill-conceived campaign. Very soon thereafter Glendale Federal disappeared in a merger.
What the campaign demonstrated, however, was the drawing power and value of a recognizable corporate identity, or brand, as a company's Geist is now called. David A. Aaker, a former professor of marketing strategy at the University of California at Berkeley and vice chairman of Prophet Brand Strategy in San Francisco, wrote in his book Managing Brand Equity:
A study of banks in California confirmed that their associations are very similar with respect to money, savings, checking account deposits, and tellers. Nothing distinctive -- with the exception of Wells Fargo, which has had a host of associations going along with their ubiquitous stagecoach. In an industry in which similarity is the norm, the stagecoach is an enormous asset, in part because of the richness of the concept, In addition to providing associations with the Old West, horses, and the gold rush, it also effortlessly is linked to reliability in the face of adversity, adventurousness, independence, and even building a new society out of wilderness.
How true are these associations? Time -- in this case one hundred and fifty years -- would tell.
There are two layers to this story, as Henry Wells pointed out in an 1864 speech to the American Geographical and Statistical Society. Wells cited to that august body the need for "hard facts." But as one of the founders of the express business, and American Express and Wells Fargo in particular, he said the "Romance of the Express" also had its appeal. "I could tell of midnight adventures in the forest; of perils in the waters; of perils by robbers; of awful catastrophes...[and] of humorous, pathetic, and tragical occurrences."
The facts and romances of the express business and the American West are intertwined. The realities and myths need to be separated. A business that spans the history of the region provides the perfect tool for that exercise.
The emphasis of this book is on the period from 1852 to 1918 when Wells Fargo was an express company. During those sixty-six years, Wells Fargo made three major contributions to the well-being of the West and the nation as a whole. First, the company served as the principal communications conduit between East and West; second, it contributed to the Union victory in the Civil War; and last, it shipped fresh vegetables and fruits via fast refrigerated express, thus ensuring better health in the colder regions of the country. After 1918, Wells Fargo was just another bank until its reemergence as a major national financial institution in the 1990s.
Copyright © 2002 by Philip L. Fradkin