Bay Area mail used to be delivered by bicycle
Bicycle messengers have a pretty tough job as it is. But this is hardcore. In the late 19th centurty, relays of cyclists would deliver mail between San Francisco and Fresno, some 198 miles.
The Pullman rail strike of 1894 basically shut down rail transit, and thus the delivery of mail, for almost the entire nation – mail could get into Fresno. but there was no connection to Oakland or San Francisco. Arthur C. Banta, the Fresno agent for Victor bicycles, came up with an ingenious solution to ensure mail delivery between San Francisco and Fresno – a relay of cyclists between the two cities. Special stamps and cancels were issued, and the mail was delivered in loads between the two cities. The stamps are commonly found in sheets of 6, or as individual stamps, though they were also applied as imprints to postpaid envelopes (these are quite substantially rarer). The messenger service ran from 07-18 July 1894, and delivered somewhere around 400 letters, though more than that number of stamps exist. Initial batches of the stamp were printed with the mispelling “San Fransisco”, which was corrected, along with some slight changes in the artwork, in a second issue.
