New Chapter About to Be Added to History Mirroring the West’s

Wells Fargo & Co. on Monday added a chapter to its history that dates to California’s Gold Rush in announcing a merger with Minneapolis-based Norwest Corp.

The company was started in 1852 by Henry Wells and William G. Fargo, who were among the founders of American Express Co. in New York. The idea was to extend deliveries to California.

Wells Fargo provided stagecoach service, mail delivery and banking services across the prairies and mountains west of the Mississippi River, as well as the short-lived Pony Express.

Railroads eventually supplanted stagecoaches as the nation’s primary freight and passenger carriers.

Wells Fargo’s banking business became separate in 1905.

Today, Wells Fargo, based in San Francisco, is the nation’s 10th-largest bank holding company with assets of $94.8 billion, 1,930 branches in 10 Western states--including 922 in supermarkets--and about 32,400 employees.

The stock-swap merger with Norwest, which values Wells Fargo at $32 billion and would create the nation’s seventh-largest bank, is not the first combination for Wells Fargo in the merger boom that has swept the industry. In 1996 it won a $11.3-billion bid for First Interstate Corp. of Los Angeles and then was plagued with computer problems that created account mix-ups.