Stagecoach Ginny Reigning Over a Slice of the Old West

Stagecoach Ginny held onto the reins as she drove the Wells Fargo stage down Main Street in the typical small-town, hands-in-pocket parade at the 66th annual Red Bluff Round-Up.

Stagecoach Ginny is Virginia Fellingham, 64, for 30 years a full-time professional stagecoach driver for the San Francisco-based banking company. She has driven a Wells Fargo stagecoach in more than 3,000 parades and rodeos.

Fellingham and her team of horses were as calm as the quiet sea as they headed down Main Street. She didn’t scream or crack her whip or jump up and down. She has a way with her horses. The gentle tug of the lines with her sturdy hands gave the animals all the directions they needed.

“Driving a stagecoach is like playing a piano,” she explained. “With the lines you have your hand on every horse. You feel each horse individually. You got to have a certain rhythm, a certain beat. The horses know me like a book. I know them.”

Driven Stage in Commercials

The 5-foot-4, 115-pound stagecoach driver has appeared in parades and rodeos throughout the West, at the Calgary Stampede and at President Richard M. Nixon’s second inaugural in Washington. She also has driven the stage in several Wells Fargo television commercials.

Riding shotgun beside Stagecoach Ginny in her 26th Red Bluff parade was Jay Lambert, 72, one of the nation’s best-known authorities on the stagecoach and the builder of nine replicas of 1860s Concord stages for Wells Fargo. Concords were the Rolls-Royces of their day, a coach Mark Twain described as “a cradle on wheels.”

Lambert said Fellingham is “the best stagecoach driver alive, man or woman. I’m sure she ranks among the best all-time stagecoach drivers in history.”

Fellingham operates a ranch near Livermore, 50 miles east of San Francisco, when she isn’t driving a stagecoach. She appears in an average of 120 parades and rodeos each year driving original stagecoaches dating to the 1860s and the replicas made by Lambert.

She transports the stagecoach and horses to her appearances in a big, red 55-foot truck and trailer with Wells Fargo & Co. stenciled in huge letters. To get here she drove the rig 210 miles from her ranch.

Her horses in the Red Bluff parade were “Lady, Albert, named after Prince Albert in the can, and Ellie and Nellie, named after two old friends,” she said.

‘All My Life’

“I’ve been drivin’ horses all my life,” Fellingham said with a big grin and bright eyes. “Why, when I was 5 on our farm in Kansas, I drove a team of horses down a lane while the rest of the family pitched corn into the wagon. I drove a horse and buggy to the one-room school I attended.”

She moved to California, married rancher Al (Sport) Fellingham, who died in 1965. She has a son, Paul, 36, and a daughter, Patsy Gilbert, 32. Patsy is a chemist. Paul helps her run the ranch.

An excellent rodeo rider in her younger years, she is hired by Wells Fargo by contract for each job, the same practice the company followed for drivers of the Old West. She drives the stagecoach nearly every Saturday and Sunday and many days in between.

“I never tire of it. When you least expect it, the horses teach you a new trick,” she said.

Stagecoach Ginny carries on a tradition dating to 1852 when Wells Fargo was founded in San Francisco, a tradition of running the bank’s stagecoaches in parades. For many years, in addition to operating banks, Wells Fargo ran stagecoach lines throughout the West carrying money, passengers and mail.