Dennis Cassinelli’s Chronicles of the Comstock article this week is about the life of “Snowshoe” Thompson, the first mail carrier in the Sierra. He was called Snowshoe because every winter in the 1850s he would ski the 80 miles between the two towns several times, carrying up to a hundred pounds of mail and packages each way. Until the railroad was finished in the late 1860s, the best way to get something over the mountains in the winter was via Snowshoe.
