Henry Boonstra took off from Salt Lake City headed for Rock Springs, Wyoming, in a modified de Havilland DH-4 biplane early on Friday, Dec. 15, 1922, on a mission to deliver the U.S. mail.
The number on his plane was 249, and Boonstra, a World War I instructor pilot, was typical of those flying for the U.S. Airmail Service from 1918 to 1926.
After the war, he took up barnstorming. When the U.S. Airmail Service started hiring pilots, he singed up.
The December weather had been snowy, and carrying mail in open-cockpit bi-planes was a notoriously dangerous occupation.
As one of the pilots regularly flying the rute from Salt Lake City across Wyoming through the winter weather, he knew the challenges that blowing snow and storms could bring. His navigation aide was a compass — and of course there were the Union Pacific tracks headed into Wyoming if he could see them.
As he navigated across the empty spaces toward Rock Springs, he was hanging beneath the clouds and above the peaks but somehow got off course to the south.
Ahead was part of the Porcupine Ridge of the Uinta Mountains just a few miles east of the Wyoming state line.
“I found my air speed diminishing, the motor seemed to slow down for no reason at all,” Boonstra later told the Salt Lake Tribune for a story that published Dec. 20,1922. “My instruments were working nicely, I didn’t think much of it. Then suddenly, the top of the peak came up to meet me. I crashed.”
In later years, Boonstra said it was carburetor icing that took him down.
And so began a saga that would lead to the pilot wandering through deep snow for two days before finding a ranch house and getting rescued.
The mail that was on 249 was pulled off the mountain using a pack horse.
Airmail pilot Henry Boonstra, left, is given snowshoes before taking off on a mail plane. After he crashed in the winter in 1922 and survived, all mail pilots flying over mountains were given snowshoes. (Smithsonian) 
In 1922, an open-cockpit airmail bi-plane crashed on the way to Rock Springs. The pilot, Henry Boonstra, somehow survived, but it took more than 40 years to recover the wrecked plane. Now it hangs in the National Postal Museum. (Courtesy Nancy Wright via Smithsonian; National Postal Museum) 
A de Havilland DH-4 parked next to a mail truck. The location is unknown. (Courtesy National Postal Museum) 
President Woodrow Wilson showed up to launch the U.S. Airmail Service in 1918. (Courtesy National Postal Museum) 
Lt. Charles B. Austin sits on a modified de Havilland DH-4 aircraft in the Panama Canal Zone. He was attempting a solo flight from the Panama Canal Zone to Washington, D.C., in October 1920. (Courtesy National Postal Museum) 
The first night flight from the West Coast is unloaded in Omaha, Nebraska, on July 1, 2024. (Courtesy National Postal Museum)
Salvage Operation
The plane stayed and decayed on the mountain about 20 miles east of Coalville, Utah, for more than 40 years, until a member of an airmail pioneer group based in California learned of the plane in the early 1960s from Boonstra.
A salvage operation, plane restoration, tragic hangar fire and second effort to rebuild the plane followed.
In the end, a de Havilland DH-4 bearing the number 249 flew from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., in 1968 in time for the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Airmail Service. It hangs from the ceiling of the National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C., today.
Smithsonian Air and Space Museum Supervisory Curator Robert van der Linden said the postal version of the “Jenny” joined the museum’s other original U.S.-made de Havilland DH-4 when it was donated by the U.S. Airmail Service pioneers.
“It's really not a restoration, it's a replica. They did a very nice job in the 60s to commemorate the 50th anniversary,” van der Linden said. “I think they have some parts off the original 249 but not many. … I don’t want to take anything away from it, because it symbolizes a very important part of the history of the DH-4 and that type of airplane that made the U.S. Airmail Service a success.”
The plane was rescued from the Utah mountain by California-based former U.S. Airmail Service mechanic Bill Hackbarth, who had also become a pilot in later years.
After years of sitting on the mountain, the mostly wooden-framed and cloth-covered machine had deteriorated from the weather. Hackbarth and a group of former pioneer air service employees worked on fabricating parts and restoring the airplane in a Santa Paula, California hangar.
Efforts were almost complete when a brush fire engulfed the hangar in October 1967. The group rallied to resurrect another DH-4 to meet the May 1968 anniversary deadline.
The new version had just a couple of parts from the original 249.
The story of Henry Boonstra and 249 is one of many associated with the U.S. Airmail Service as it blazed an air route across the nation between Washington, D.C. and San Francisco and in the late 1920s gave birth to a private airline industry that would not only haul the mail but eventually start taking passengers as well.
A Compass And Rail Tracks
Casper National Historic Trails Interpretive Center interpreter Reid Miller, who has researched the airmail service, compares the pilots who flew across the state to the Pony Express Riders in their day.
“They were very vulnerable and on their own, particularly when you compare the conditions that they operated under with today’s commercial aviation industry,” he said. “The one advantage a number of them had was that they were World War I veteran pilots and so they brought a fair amount of skill and confidence to the airmail service.”
Miller said the pilots who flew in the early years only had a compass and the Union Pacific tracks across the state to keep them on course before the government added light beacons and large concrete arrows along the Wyoming air route in subsequent years to help with navigation.
“There was no real way to land safely unless you were in gliding distance of one of the intermediate fields and there were several across the state,” he said.
For Boonstra, he somehow was able to land on the side of the mountain with little damage to the plane. He told the Salt Lake Tribune in its Dec. 20, 1922, edition that he took his clothing and the plane’s compass and set out toward the northwest using clothing as a type of snowshoe for hands and arms crawling through four feet of snow down the mountain.
In bitter cold and without food and water he crawled along for two days in the deep snow before finding a barn. There in the dark about a mile away he saw a ranch house.
After rest, food and warmth for a day at the ranch, he and the rancher rode to a nearby ranch to and found a search party gearing up to look for him.
Van der Linden said in total there were 60 U.S. Airmail Service pilots who gave their lives, many in the early years as the pioneer flyers and the government were figuring out how to do the job and improve the service.
The Salt Lake Tribune carried a front-page story about Henry Boonstra’s fight to survive after crashing his airmail plane. (Courtesy Newspapers.com) 
The Deseret News in Salt Lake City gave pilot Henry Boonstra a banner headline when he was found. (Courtesy Newspapers.com) 
The Salt Lake Tribune had a photographer and reporter looking for Henry Boonstra when he showed up at a ranch to be rescued. (Courtesy Newspapers.com) 
The Ogden Standard-Examiner in Ogden, Utah, carried a photo of the de Havilland biplane getting a test flight in California prior to its flight across the country in 1968. (Courtesy Newspapers.com) 
Henry Boonstra was at the Salt Lake City airport to greet Bill Hackbarth when he flew the de Havilland DH-4 numbered 249 in for a landing on the way to Washington, D.C., in may 1968. (Courtesy Newspapers.com) 
The obituary for Henry Boonstra in the Salt Lake Tribune recalls his 1922 crash. (Courtesy Newspapers.com)
Coast-to-Coast In 29 Hours
The early airmail pilots may not have been in same realm as astronauts in the Baby Boomer generation, but they deserved respect for the role they played in helping launch a commercial aviation industry, van der Linden said. He said the job became even more dangerous when the pilots started flying at night.
“By 1924, you could get a letter across the United States in 29 hours, which isn't much longer than you could do today.,” he said. “So, it's a great tribute to them that was possible.”
The curator pointed out that the early mail routes not only linked the coasts together, but also all the Federal Reserve banks.
“That way, the banks could transfer money much quicker,” he said. “And anytime you could save transferring … bearer bonds and that type of sort of thing, we could save a ton of interest. So, it was very important financially.”
Van der Linden said U.S. Airmail Service which turned over its role to private carriers in 1927 was instrumental in putting pressure on contract carriers to start hauling passengers as well.
“Now we have an airline industry that operates efficiently for basically 80 percent of the population who can fly have flown and we can trace that back to those guys,” he said.
Boonstra, who nine months after his crash married a girl from Rock Springs, Wyoming, didn’t let the crash keep him grounded.
A Record
In January 1923, he was part of a group of the western division of airmail pilots who set a record by flying the mail from San Francisco to Rock Springs in five hours and 58 minutes of flying time. Boonstra covered the Salt Lake City to Rock Springs portion of the route.
He made the news again in a Jan. 18,1924 article in the Casper Daily Tribune by flying a doctor from Rock Springs to a remote ranch 75 miles north in an effort to save a rancher’s life who could not get to care because of snow-blocked roads.
In May 1968, Boonstra was in the crowd at Salt Lake City to greet Hackbarth as he flew the airmail postal pioneers’ “Jenny” designated 249B across the country to Washington from California following the same route pilots did a half-century earlier.
He would then follow Hackbarth to Washington, to be awarded a special honor with other U.S. Airmail Service pioneers.
Van der Linden said the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum loaned the 249 “Jenny” to the National Postal Museum when it opened in 1993.
“We were very happy to lend it to them because they wanted to tell the very important story of airmail,” he said.
As for Boonstra, following his U.S. Airmail Service, he continued flying and during World War II served as a test pilot for Boeing B-29 bombers in Kansas.
He died on April 29, 1984 and is buried in Salt Lake City. His gravestone has a DH-4 with the number 249 etched on his gravestone.
Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.
