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It was a bone-jarring, elbow-jabbing ride through hostile Apache country.

At one time it was also about the best way in or out of Tucson.

The next time you're whining about taking off your shoes at the airport, say to yourself: "It could be worse. I could be a passenger on the Jackass Mail."

Named not for the stagecoach passengers' temperaments but for the fact that they had to get out of the coach and ride mule-back over the route's roughest spots, the Jackass Mail first lurched into Tucson the summer of 1857.

Formally known as the San Antonio and San Diego Mail Line, it was, notes historian John Bret-Harte, "the beginning of the opening of Southern Arizona to the rest of the United States."

Even so, the Jackass Mail lasted little more than a year, replaced by the Butterfield Overland Mail, which first thundered into town on Oct. 2, 1858.

Getting somewhat of a jump on the occasion, the Arizona Federation of Stamp Clubs, along with the Postal History Foundation, will be honoring 150 years of U.S. mail service in Tucson this weekend at the Tucson Convention Center.

Territorial history talks will be given next to a "genuine" Butterfield Overland Mail coach on display.

Perhaps homage will be paid to some of those early passengers who ponied up as much as $200 for the entire route, which ran from St. Louis to San Francisco and took 25 days. Maybe less.

As Tucson historian C.L. Sonnichsen noted: "Tucson was a 'timetable' station, meaning that drivers made every effort to arrive on schedule. The westbound mail came in at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesdays and Fridays; the eastbound at 3 in the morning — a ghastly hour for the bruised and sleepless passengers — on Wednesdays and Saturdays."

And no lollygagging about. The pause at the station was brief, noted Sonnichsen, just long enough for a change of horses or mules and a few mouthfuls of beans.

Those who wished to tarry were told, "Wait two days for the next stage."

There was good reason for all that haste. When New Yorker John Butterfield won the $600,000 yearly government contract, one of the conditions was that the route be covered in 25 days or less, each way.

That meant roughly 100 miles a day for passengers, though teams and drivers were changed more frequently.

The route into Tucson crossed the San Pedro River near what is now Benson and somewhat followed what would become the old Benson Highway into Downtown Tucson.

It then headed north along the Santa Cruz River, jogged eastward toward Pusch Ridge and up to what is now Florence, before heading west to Los Angeles and eventually San Francisco.

Wagon trains soon followed the coaches, and Tucson became an "increasingly important commercial center," noted Sonnichsen — although "lawless riffraff" also enjoyed the opening of this particular frontier.

By the spring of 1860, the Pony Express was galloping between Missouri and California, but it never came to Tucson.

That same year, Butterfield, who owed large debts to Wells, Fargo & Co., lost his stage line to the latter.

With the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, the line's southern route was discontinued. But predictions that the route's removal would be a "death blow" to the region proved to be a tad overblown.

By the mid-1860s, people and public mail were again arriving in Tucson via stagecoach — a practice that would continue until the coming of the railroad in 1880.

Today, one can only wonder what those passengers on the "Jackass" would make of airline travel — let alone e-mail.