From the time when the first lean and bearded horsemen in their
garments of fringed buckskin rode out into the savage West, men gave
the same excuse for traveling that hard road toward the setting sun.
The early pathfinders maintained there must be all manner of
high-priced furs off there beyond the sky-line. The emigrants who
followed in the days of '49, informed their neighbors that they were
going to gather golden nuggets in California. The teamsters who drove
the heavy freight-wagons over the new trails a few years later told
their relatives and friends that they were going West to better their
fortunes. And when the Concord coaches came to carry the mail between
the frontier settlements and San Francisco, the men of wealth who
financed the different lines announced there was big money in the
ventures; the men of action who operated them claimed that high wages
brought them into it.
So now you see them all: pathfinder, argonaut, teamster, stage-driver,
pony-express rider, and capitalist, salving their consciences and
soothing away the trepidations of their women-folk with the good old
American excuse that they were going to make money.
As a matter of fact that excuse was only an excuse and nothing more.
In their inmost hearts all these men knew that they had other
motives.
There was one individual who did not try to hoodwink himself or others
about this Western business, and if you will but take the time to look
into his case you will be able easily to diagnose an itching which was
troubling all the rest of them.
That Individual was usually taken most acutely with his ailment on a
warm May morning, one of those mornings when the lawless youths of the
village decided to play hooky in the afternoon and test the
temperature of the swimming-hole. On such a morning he was to be found
somewhere near the center of the school-room, this being the point
most remote from the distraction of open windows and hence selected
for him by the teacher. He was seated at a small desk whose top was
deeply scored by carven initials and monograms of rude design, all
inked in to give them the boldness of touch necessary when one would
have his art impress the beholder. An open book lay on that desk-top
but the eyes of the Individual were not focused on its pages.
He was gazing--aslant so that the teacher would not detect him at
it--through one of those remote open windows. And he was not seeing
the roofs of the little town or the alluring line of low wooded bluffs
across the river. He was seeing swarms of Indians mounted bare-back on
swift ponies.
Swarms and swarms of them, stripped to the waist, befeathered,
trousered in tightly fitting buckskin, they were defying all the laws
of gravitation by the manner in which every one clung by a single heel
to his mustang, allowing his body to droop alongside in a negligently
graceful attitude. These savages were circling round and round a
stage-coach. And on the top of that stage-coach, with his trusty rifle
at his shoulder--while the driver beside him died a painful
death,--sat the Individual himself. None other. And he was certainly
playing havoc with those redskins.
We need not undergo the weary ordeal of waiting with him while the
clock's slothful hands creep around the dial. We may skip the
interval--as he would do ever so gladly if he only could--and see him
that night as he climbs from his bedroom window, crawls down the
woodshed roof, and drops from the low eaves to make his way across the
vacant lot next door and thence--out West.
As far perhaps as the next town, which lies seven miles or so
away; where he is overhauled and ignominiously dragged back to
civilization.
That Individual--the only one of them all who did not attain the
consummation of his hopes, the only one who had to stay at home--is
the sole member of the foregoing list who acknowledged his true
motives. For he asserted loudly, and with lamentations, that the
spirit of adventure was blazing within him; he wanted to go out West
to fight Indians and desperadoes.
Resisting the temptation to indulge in dissertation concerning the
beneficial effects of the dime-novel on the morale of successive
younger generations, we return to the men who said that they went
beyond the Mississippi to gain money. Like the schoolboy they were hot
with the lust for adventure. The men of action wanted to risk their
lives, and the men of wealth wanted to risk their dollars.
Which does not imply that the latter element were anxious to lose
those dollars any more than it implies that the former expected to
lose their lives. But both were eager for the hazard.
Like the schoolboy all of them dreamed dreams and saw visions. And the
dreams were realized; the visions became actualities. Few of them
justified their excuse of money-making; many came out of the adventure
poorer in this world's goods than when they went into it. But every
man of them had the time of his life and lived out his days with a
wealth of memories more precious than gold; memories of a man's part
in a great rough drama.
The Winning of the West, that drama has been called. Perhaps no act in
the play attained the heights which were reached by the last one
before the coming of the railroad, the one with which this story has
to deal, wherein bold men allied themselves on different sides to get
the contract of carrying the mails by stage-coaches on schedule time
across the wilderness.
And in the tale of this great struggle there is another motive in
addition to the love of adventure--and like that love, unacknowledged
by those whom it stirred,--the strong instinctive desire for a closer
union which exists among all Americans.
In the beginning there was a frontier two hundred miles or so west of
the Mississippi River. Behind that frontier wide-stacked wood-burning
locomotives were drawing long trains on tracks of steel; steamers came
sighing up and down the muddy rivers; cities smeared the sky with
clouds of coal smoke; under those sooty palls men in high hats and
women in enormous hoop-skirts passed in afternoon promenade down the
sidewalks; newspapers displayed the day's tidings in black
head-lines; the telegraph flashed messages from one end of that land
to the other; and where the sharp church steeple of the most remote
village cut the sky, the people read and thought and talked the same
things which were being discussed in Delmonico's at the same hour.
Beyond the Sierra Nevadas there was another civilization. In San
Francisco hotel lobbies men and women passed and repassed one another
dressed in Eastern fashions--some months late, but Eastern fashions
none the less. Newspapers proclaimed the latest tidings from the East
in large type. Men were falling out over the same political issues
which embroiled men by the Atlantic seaboard; they were embarking in
the same sort of business ventures.
But two thousand miles of wilderness separated these two portions of
the nation. That vast expanse of prairies as level as the sea, of
sage-brush plains, of snow-capped mountains and silent, deadly
deserts, was made more difficult by bands of hostile Indians.
In Europe such an interval would have remained for centuries, to be
spanned by the slow migration of those whom ill-fortune and bad
government had driven from the more crowded communities on each side.
During that time these two civilizations would have gone on in their
own ways developing their own distinct customs, until in the end they
would have become separate countries.
But the people east of the Mississippi and the people west of the
Sierras were Americans, and the desire for a close union was strong
within them. Their business habits were such that they could not
carry on commercial affairs without it. Their political beliefs and
their social tendencies kept them chafing for it. And furthermore it
was their characteristic not to acknowledge nature's obstacles as
permanent. Two thousand miles of wild prairie, mountain ranges, and
deserts simply meant a task, the more blithely to be undertaken
because it was made hazardous by the presence of hostile savages.
So now the East began to cry to the West and the West to the East,
each voicing a desire for quicker communication, and to get letters
from New York to San Francisco in fast time became one of the problems
of the day.
The first step toward solution was the choice of a route, and while
this was up to Washington, the proof on which it rested was up to
the men of wealth and the men of action. Immediately two rival
groups began striving, each to prove that its route was the
quickest. Russel, Majors & Waddel, who held large freighting
contracts on the northern road, from Independence, Missouri, via Salt
Lake to Sacramento, bent their energies to demonstrating its
practicability; the Wells-Butterfield coterie of stage and express
men undertook to show that the longer pathway from St. Louis by
way of the Southwestern territories to San Francisco was best.
In 1855 Senator W. M. Gwinn of California, who had conceived the idea
with F. B. Ficklin, general-superintendent of the Russel, Majors &
Waddel Co., introduced a bill in Congress for bringing the mails by
horseback on the northern route, but the measure was pigeonholed.
Snow in the mountains was the main argument against it.
In 1857 James E. Birch got the contract for carrying a semimonthly
mail from San Antonio, Texas, to San Diego, and the southern route's
champions had the opportunity to prove their contention.
Save for a few brief stretches in Texas and Arizona there was no wagon
road. El Paso and Tucson were the only towns between the termini. A
few far-flung military outposts, whose troops of dragoons were having
a hard time of it to hold their own against the Comanches and Apaches,
afforded the only semblance of protection from the Indians.
Horsemen carried the first mail-sacks across this wilderness of dark
mountains and flaming deserts. On that initial trip Silas St. Johns
and Charles Mason rode side by side over the stretch from Cariso Creek
to Jaeger's Ferry, where Yuma stands to-day. That ride took them
straight through the Imperial valley. The waters of the Colorado,
which have made the region famous for its rich crops, had not been
diverted in those days. It was the hottest desert in North America;
sand hills and blinding alkali flats, and only one tepid spring in the
whole distance. One hundred and ten miles and the two horsemen made it
in thirty-two hours--without remounts.
The company now began to prepare the way for stage-coaches. During the
latter part of November, St. Johns and two companions drove a herd of
stock from Jaeger's Ferry to Maricopa Wells. The latter point had been
selected for a relay station because of water and the presence of the
friendly Pima and Maricopa Indians, who kept the Apaches at a
distance. During that drive of something like two hundred miles the
pack-mule lost his load one night in the desert. The men went without
food for three days, and for thirty-six hours traveled without a drop
of water in their canteens.
The first stage left San Diego for the East in December with six
passengers. Throughout the trip a hostler rode behind herding a relay
team. The driver kept his six horses to their utmost for two hours;
then stock and wearied passengers were given a two hours' rest, after
which the fresh team was hooked up and the journey resumed.
In this manner they made about fifty miles a day. Luck was with them.
There were several runaways along the route; at Port Davis, Texas,
they found the garrison, whom they had expected to supply them with
provisions according to orders from Washington, short of food, and
they subsisted for the next five days on what barley they felt
justified in taking away from the horses; they arrived at Camp
Lancaster just after the departure of a Comanche war-party who had
stolen all the stock, and were obliged to go two hundred miles further
before they could get a relay. But these incidents, and a delay or two
because of swollen rivers, were accounted only small mishaps. They
came through with their scalps and the mail-sacks--only ten days
behind the schedule.
Thereafter the Birch line continued its service; and letters came from
San Francisco to St. Louis in about six weeks. Occasionally Indians
massacred a party of travelers; now and then renegade whites or
Mexicans robbed the passengers of their belongings and looted the
mail-sacks. But such things were no more than any one expected. James
Birch had proved his point. The southern route was practical, and in
1858 the government let a six years' contract for carrying letters
twice a week between St. Louis and San Francisco, to John Butterfield
of Utica, New York.
Thus the Wells-Butterfield interests scored the first decisive
victory.
Butterfield's compensation was fixed at $600,000 a year and the
schedule at twenty-five days. The route went by way of Fort Smith,
Arkansas, El Paso, Tucson, and Jaeger's Ferry. Tie one end of a loose
string to San Francisco and the other to St. Louis on your wall-map;
allow the cord to droop in a semicircle to the Mexican boundary, and
you will see the general direction of that road, whose length was 2760
miles. Of this nearly two thousand miles was in a hostile Indian
country.
Twenty-seven hundred and sixty miles in twenty-five days, meant a
fast clip for horses and a lumbering Concord coach over ungraded
roads. And such a clip necessitated frequent relays. Which, in their
turn, demanded stations at short intervals. While a road gang was
removing the ugliest barriers in the different mountain passes--which
was all the smoothing away that highway ever got during the
stage-coach era--a party went along the line erecting adobe houses.
These houses were little forts, well suited for withstanding the
attacks of hostile Indians. The corrals beside them were walled like
ancient castle-yards.
William Buckley of Watertown, New York, headed this party. Bands of
mounted Comanches attacked them on the lonely Staked Plains of western
Texas. Apaches crept upon them in the mountains of southwestern New
Mexico. Of the battles which they fought history contains no record;
but they went on driving the Mexican laborers to their toil under the
hot sun, and the chain of low adobe buildings crept slowly westward.
In those days Mexican outlaws were drifting into Arizona and New
Mexico from Chihuahua and Sonora; and these cutthroats, to whom murder
was a means of livelihood, were almost as great a menace as the
Indians. Three of them got jobs on the station building gang and
awaited an opportunity to make money after their bloody fashion.
At Dragoon Springs they found their chance.
Here, where the Dragoon Mountains come out into the plain like a lofty
granite promontory that faces the sea, the party had completed the
walls of a stone corral, within which enclosure a storehouse and stage
station were partitioned off. The roofing of these two rooms and some
ironwork on the gate remained to be completed. The main portion of the
party moved on to the San Pedro River, leaving Silas St. Johns in
charge of six men to attend to these details. The three Mexican
bandits were members of this little detachment. The other three were
Americans.
The place was right on the road which Apache war-parties took to
Sonora. For this reason a guard was maintained from sunset to sunrise.
St. Johns always awoke at midnight to change the sentries. One
starlight night when he had posted the picket who was to watch until
dawn, St. Johns went back to his bed in the unroofed room that was to
serve as station. He dropped off to sleep for an hour or so and was
roused by a noise among the stock in the corral. The sound of blows
and groans followed.
St. Johns leaped from his blankets just as the three Mexicans rushed
into the room. Two of them were armed with axes and the third with a
sledge.
The fight that followed lasted less than a minute.
St. Johns kicked the foremost murderer in the stomach, and as the man
fell, sprang for a rifle which he kept in the room. The other two
attacked him with their axes. He parried one blow, aimed at his head,
and the blade buried itself in its hip. While the man was tugging to
free the weapon St. Johns felled him with a blow on the jaw. The third
Mexican struck downward at almost the same instant, severing St.
Johns' left arm near the shoulder.
Then the white man got his right hand on his rifle and the three
murderers fled. They had killed one of the Americans who was sleeping
in the enclosure, left another dying near him and the third gasping
his last outside the gate.
St. Johns staunched the blood from his wounds and crawled to the top
of a pile of grain-sacks whence he could see over the unroofed wall.
Here he stayed for three days and three nights. With every sunrise the
magpies and buzzards came in great flocks, to sit upon the wall after
they had sated themselves in the corral, and watch him. With every
nightfall the wolves slunk down from the mountains and fought over the
body outside the gate. Night and day the thirst-tortured mules kept
up a pandemonium.
A road-grading party came along on Sunday morning. They gave him such
first aid as they could and sent a rider to Fort Buchanan for a
surgeon. The doctor amputated the arm nine days after the wound had
been inflicted. Three weeks later St. Johns was able to ride a horse
to Tucson.
Silas St. Johns is offered as a sample of the men who built and
operated the overland mail lines. Among the drivers, stock-tenders,
and messengers there were many others like him. Iron men, it was not
easy to kill them, and so long as there was breath in their bodies
they kept on fighting.
John Butterfield and his associates were made of the same stuff as
these employees.
How many hundred thousand dollars these pioneer investors put into
their line before the turning of a single wheel is not known; it must
have been somewhere near a cool million, and this was in a day when
millions were not so common as they are now; a day, moreover, when
nothing in the business was certain and everything remained to be
proved.
They established more than a hundred stage-stations along that
semicircle through the savage Southwest. They bought about fifteen
hundred mules and horses, which were sent out along the route. To feed
these animals, hay and grain were freighted, in some cases for two
hundred miles, and the loads arrived at the corrals worth a goodly
fraction of their weight in silver. There was a station in western
Texas to which teamsters had to haul water for nine months of the
year from twenty-two miles away. At every one of these lonely outposts
there were an agent and a stock-tender, and at some it was necessary
to maintain what amounted to a little garrison. Arms and ammunition
were provided for defense against the savages; provisions were laid in
to last for weeks. One hundred Concord coaches were purchased from the
Abbot-Downing Co., who had been engaged in the manufacture of these
vehicles in the New Hampshire town since 1813; they were built on the
thorough-brace pattern, and were regarded as the best that money could
buy. Seven hundred and fifty men, of whom a hundred and fifty were
drivers, were put on the pay-roll and transported to their stations.
Nearly all this outlay was made before the beginning of the
first trip. It was the greatest expenditure of money on a single
transportation project of its kind up to this time in America.
And there were a thousand hazards of the wilderness to be incurred,
a thousand obstacles of nature to be overcome before the venture
could be proved practical.
The men of money had done their part now. The line was ready for the
opening of traffic. On September 15, 1853, the mail-sacks started from
St. Louis and San Francisco. It was up to the men of action to get
them through within the schedule.
Twenty-five days was the allowance for the 2760 miles. The westbound
coach reached San Francisco about twenty-four hours inside of the
limit. On that October evening crowds packed Montgomery Street; the
booming of cannon and the crashing of anvils loaded with black powder,
the blaring of brass bands and the voices of orators, all mingled in
one glad uproar, to tell the world that the people by the Golden Gate
appreciated the occasion.
In St. Louis, the eastbound mail was an hour earlier. John Butterfield
stepped from the Missouri Pacific train with the sacks, and a great
procession was on hand to escort him to the post-office.
Bands and carriages and a tremendous display of red, white, and blue
bunting enlivened the whole city. President Buchanan sent a telegram
of congratulation.
It looked as if the northern route were out of it for good now, but it
remained for the men to keep the southern line in operation. What had
been done was only a beginning; the long grind of real accomplishment
still lay ahead.
Storm and flood and Indian massacre were incidents; hold-ups and
runaways mere matters of routine in carrying on the task. The stock
was for the most part unbroken. At nearly every change the fresh team
started off on a mad gallop, and if the driver had a wide plain where
he could let them go careering through the mesquite or greasewood,
while the stage followed, sometimes on two wheels, sometimes on one,
he counted himself lucky. There was many a station from which the road
led over broken country--along steep side hills, across high-banked
washes, skirting the summits of rocky precipices; and on such
stretches it was the rule rather than the exception for the coach to
overturn.
The bronco stock was bad enough but the green mules were the worst. It
was often found necessary to lash the stage to a tree--if one could be
found near the station, and if not to the corral fence--while the
long-eared brutes were being hooked up. When the last trace had been
snapped into place the hostlers would very gingerly free the vehicle
from its moorings and, as the ropes came slack, leap for their lives.
They called the route a road. As a matter of fact that term was a
far-fetched euphemism. In some places approaches had been dug away to
the beds of streams; and the absolutely impassable barriers of the
living rock had been removed from the mountain passes. But that was
all. What with the long climbs upgrade and the bad going through loose
sand or mud, it was always necessary for the driver to keep his six
animals at a swinging trot when they came to a level or a downhill
pull. Often he had to whip them into a dead run for miles where most
men would hesitate to drive a buckboard at a walk.
During the rainy seasons the rivers of that Southwestern land
proceeded to demonstrate that they had a right to the name--to which
they never pretended to live up at other times--by running bank full.
These coffee-colored floods were underlaid by thick strata of
quicksands. Occasionally one of them simply absorbed a coach; and,
unless the driver was very swift in cutting the traces, it took unto
itself two or three mules for good measure.
The Comanche Indians were on the war-path during these years in
western Texas. On the great Staked Plain they swooped down on many a
stage, and driver and passengers had to make a running fight of it to
save their scalps. The Indians attacked the stations, two or three
hundred of them in a band. The agents and stock-tenders, who were
always on the lookout, usually saw them in time to retreat inside the
thick adobe walls of the building, from which shelter they sometimes
were able to stand them off without suffering any particular damage.
But sometimes they were forced to watch the enemy go whooping away
with the stampeded stock from the corral. And now and again there was
a massacre.
Under Mangus Colorado, whom historians account their greatest
war-chief, the Apaches were busy in New Mexico and Arizona. They
worked more carefully than their Texan cousins, and there was a gorge
along the line in that section which got the name of Doubtful canyon
because the only thing a driver could count on there with any
certainty was a fight before he got through to the other side.
Nor were the Indians the only savage men in that wilderness. Arizona
was becoming a haven for fugitives from California vigilance
committees and for renegade Mexicans from south of the boundary. The
road-agents went to work along the route, and near Tucson they did a
thriving business.
Yet with all these enemies and obstacles, it is a matter of record
that the Butterfield overland mail was only late three times.
In spite of runaways, bad roads, floods, sand-storms, battles, and
hold-ups, the east and west bound stages usually made the distance
in twenty-one days. And there was a long period during 1859 when
the two mails--which had started on the same day from the two
termini--met each other at exactly the half-way point. Apparently
the Wells-Butterfield interests had won the struggle. Service was
increased to a daily basis and the compensation was doubled. The
additional load was handled with the same efficiency that had been
shown in the beginning.
It is hard, in these days of steam and gasolene and electricity, to
understand how men did such things with horse-flesh. The quality of
the men themselves explains that. One can judge that quality by an
affair which took place at Stein's Pass.
"Steen's Pass," as the old-timers spelled it--and as the name is still
pronounced--is a gap in the mountains just west of Lordsburg, New
Mexico. The Southern Pacific comes through it to-day. One afternoon
Mangus Colorado and Cochise were in the neighborhood with six hundred
Apache warriors, when a smoke signal from distant scouts told them
that the overland stage was approaching without an armed escort. The
two chieftains posted their naked followers behind the rocks and
awaited the arrival of their victims.
When one remembers that such generals as Crook have expressed their
admiration for the strategy of Cochise, and that Mangus Colorado was
the man who taught him, one will realize that Stein's Pass, which is
admirably suited for all purposes of ambush, must have been a terribly
efficient death-trap when the Concord stage came rumbling and rattling
westward into it on that blazing afternoon.
There were six passengers in the coach, all of them old-timers in the
West. And they were known as the Free Thompson party, from the name of
the leader. Every one of these men was armed with a late model rifle
and was taking full advantage of the company's rule which allowed the
carrying of as much ammunition as one pleased. They had several
thousand rounds of cartridges.
Such a seasoned company as this was not likely to go into a place like
Stein's Pass without taking a look or two ahead; and six hundred
Apaches were certain to offer some evidence of their presence to keen
eyes. Which probably explains why the horses were not killed at once.
For they were not. The driver was able to get the coach to the summit
of a low bare knoll a little way off the road. The Free Thompson party
made their stand on that hilltop.
They were cool men, uncursed by the fear of death, the sort who could
roll a cigarette or bite a mouthful from a plug of chewing-tobacco
between shots and enjoy the smoke or the cud; the sort who could look
upon the advance of overwhelming odds and coolly estimate the number
of yards which lay between.
These things are known of them and it is known that the place where
they made their stand was far from water, a bare hilltop under a
flaming sun, and round about them a ring of yelling Apaches.
There were a few rocks affording a semblance of cover. You can picture
those seven men, with their weather-beaten faces, their old-fashioned
slouching wide-rimmed hats, and their breeches tucked into their
boot-tops. You can see them lying behind those boulders with their
leathern cheeks pressed close to their rifle-stocks, their narrowed
eyes peering along the lined sights; and then, as time went on,
crouching behind the bodies of their slain horses.
And you can picture the turbaned Apaches with their frowzy hair and
the ugly smears of paint across their grinning faces. You can see them
creeping on their bellies through the clumps of coarse bear-grass,
gliding like bronze snakes among the rocks, slowly enough--the Apache
never liked the music of a rifle-bullet--but coming closer every hour.
Every gully and rock and clump of prickly pear for a radius of a
half-mile about that knoll sheltered its portion of the venomous brown
swarm.
Night followed day; hot morning grew into scorching noontide; the full
flare of the Arizona afternoon came on; and night again. The rifles
cracked in the bear-grass. Thin jets of pallid flame spurted from
behind the rocks. The bullets kicked up little dust-clouds.
So for three days and three nights. For it took those six hundred
Apaches that length of time to kill the seven white men.
But before the last of them died, the Free Thompson party slew between
135 and 150 Indians.
In after years Cochise told of the battle.
"They were the bravest men I ever saw," he said. "They were the
bravest men I ever heard of. Had I five hundred warriors such as they,
I would own all of Chihuahua, Sonora, New Mexico, and Arizona."
That was the breed of men who kept the Butterfield stage line open,
and the affair at Stein's Pass is cited to show something of their
character, although it took place after the company began removing its
rolling-stock. For in 1860 Russel, Majors & Waddel accomplished a
remarkable coup and brought the overland mail to the northern route.
They performed what is probably the most daring exploit in the history
of transportation. The story of their venture bristles with action; it
is adorned by such names as Wild Bill Hickok, Pony Bob Haslam, Buffalo
Bill, and Colonel Alexander Majors.
Colonel Majors held the broadhorn record on the old Santa Fe trail,
ninety-two days on the round trip with oxen. He was the active spirit
of the firm of Russel, Majors & Waddel. In 1859 these magnates of the
freighting business had more than six thousand huge wagons and more
than 75,000 oxen on the road between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Salt
Lake City, hauling supplies for government posts and mining companies;
they were operating a stage line to Denver where gold excitements were
bringing men in droves.
One day in the winter of 1859-60 Senator W. M. Gwinn of California had
a meeting with Majors' senior partner, William H. Russel, and several
New York capitalists in Washington. Senator Gwinn proposed a plan to
show the world that the St. Joseph-San Francisco route was practical
throughout the year.
That scheme was the pony express; men on horseback with fresh relays
every ten or twelve miles, to carry letters at top speed across the
wilderness. Congress had pigeonholed his bill to finance such a
venture. He urged now that private capital undertake it, and he talked
so convincingly that Russel committed himself to enlist his partners
in the enterprise.
Russel went back to Leavenworth, Kansas, the headquarters of the firm,
and put the matter up to Majors and Waddel. They showed him in a very
few minutes that he had been talked into a sure way of losing several
hundred thousand dollars. But he reminded them that he had committed
himself to the undertaking. They said that settled it; they would
stand by him and make his word good.
Their stage line had stations every ten or twelve miles as far as Salt
Lake; beyond that point there was not a single building; but within
two months from the day when Russel had that talk with Senator Gwinn,
the firm had completed the chain of those stations clear to
Sacramento, purchased five hundred half-breed mustang ponies which
they apportioned along the route, hired eighty riders and what
stock-tenders were necessary, and hauled feed and provisions out
across the intermountain deserts. They had droves of mules beating
down trails through the deep drifts of the Sierras and the Rockies.
On April 3, 1860, Henry Roff swung into the saddle at Sacramento and
Alexander Carlyle leaped on a brown mare in St. Joseph, Missouri.
While cannon boomed and crowds cheered in those two remote cities, the
ponies came toward each other from the ends of that two-thousand-mile
trail on a dead run.
At the end of ten miles or so a relay mount was waiting for each
rider. As he drew near the station each man let out a long coyote
yell; the hostlers led his animal into the roadway. The messenger
charged down upon them, drew rein, sprang to the earth, and while the
agent lifted the pouches from one saddle to the other--as quickly as
you read these words describing the process--gained the back of his
fresh horse and sped on. At the end of his section--the length of
these intervals varied from seventy-five to a hundred and twenty-five
miles--each rider dismounted for the last time and turned the pouches
over to a successor.
In this manner the mail went across prairie and sage-brush plain,
through mountain passes where the snow lay deep beside the beaten
trail and across the wide silent reaches of the Great American Desert.
And the time on that first trip was ten days for both east and west
bound pouches.
The riders were light of weight; they were allowed to carry no weapons
save a bowie-knife and revolver; the letters were written on
tissue-paper; the two pouches were fastened to a leathern covering
which fitted over the saddle, and the thing was lifted with one
movement from the last horse to the relay animal. When one of these
messengers came within earshot of a station he always raised his voice
in the long shrill coyote yell, and by day or night, as that signal
came down the wind to them, the men who were on duty scrambled to get
the waiting horse into its place.
Many of these half-breed mustangs were unbroken; some were famous for
their ability at bucking. There is a man in my town, Joe Hand--he
would hate to acknowledge that he is getting on in years even now--who
used to ride the western end, and he said:
"They'd hold a bad horse for a fellow long enough to let you get the
rowels of those big Mex spurs fastened in the hair cinch. Then it was
you and that horse for it. The worst of it was that the pony would
usually tire himself out with his pitching, and you'd lose time. I
remember one that left me pretty badly stove up for a while, but I had
the satisfaction of knowing he'd killed himself trying to pile me."
But bad horses were a part of the game; like bad men every one in the
business expected them and took them as a matter of course. The riders
of the pony express hardly recall such incidents because of the larger
adventures with which their lives were filled.
There was the ride of Jim Moore, for a long time famous among the
exploits on the frontier. His route went from Midway station to old
Julesburg, one hundred and forty miles across the great plains of
western Nebraska. The stations were from ten to fourteen miles apart.
Arriving at the end of that grueling journey, he would rest for two
days before making the return trip.
One day Moore started westward from Midway station, knowing that his
partner, who carried the mail one way while he was taking it the
other, was sick at Julesburg. It was a question whether the man would
be able to take the eastbound pouches, and if he should not be there
was no substitute on hand.
Realizing what might lie ahead of him, Moore pressed each fresh horse
to its utmost speed during that westward ride. A man can endure only
so long a term of punishment, and he resolved to save himself what
minutes he could at the very beginning. He made that one hundred and
forty miles in eleven hours.
The partner was in bed, and there was no hope of his rising for a day
or two. The weary messenger started toward one of the bunks to get a
bit of rest, but before he had thrown himself on the blankets, the
coyote yell of the eastbound rider sounded up the road.
It was up to Moore to take the sick man's place now. While the
hostlers were saddling a pony and leading it out in front of the
station, he snatched some cold meat from the table, gulped down a cup
of lukewarm coffee, and hurried outside. He was just in time to swing
into the saddle. He clapped spurs to the pony and kept him on a run.
So with each succeeding mount; and when he arrived at Midway he had
put the two hundred and eighty miles of the round trip behind him in
twenty-two hours.
In western Nevada, where the Paiute Indians were on the war-path,
several of the stations were little forts, and riders frequently raced
for their lives to these adobe sanctuaries. Pony Bob Haslam made his
great three hundred and eighty mile ride across this section of
scorching desert.
He rode out of Virginia City one day while the inhabitants were
frantically working to fortify the town against war-parties whose
signal-fires were blazing at the time on every peak for a hundred
miles.
When he arrived at the Carson River, sixty miles away, he found that
the settlers had seized all the horses at the station for use in the
campaign against the savages. He went on without a relay down the
Carson to Fort Churchill, fifteen miles farther. Here the man who was
to relieve him refused to take the pouches.
Within ten minutes Haslam was in the saddle again. He rode thirty-five
miles to the Carson sink; got a fresh horse and made the next thirty
miles, without a drop of water; changed at Sand Springs and again at
Cold Springs; and after one hundred and ninety miles in the saddle
turned the pouches over to J. G. Kelley.
Here, at Smith's Creek, Pony Bob got nine hours' rest. Then he began
the return trip. At Cold Springs he found the station a smoking
shambles; the keeper and the stock-tender had been killed, the horses
driven off by Indians. It was growing dark. He rode his jaded animal
across the thirty-seven-mile interval to Sand Springs, got a remount,
and pressed on to the sink of the Carson. Afterward it was found that
during the night he had ridden straight through a ring of Indians who
were headed in the same direction in which he was going. From the sink
he completed his round trip of three hundred and eighty miles without
a mishap, arriving at the end within four hours of the schedule time.
Nine months after the opening of the line the Civil War began, and the
pony express carried the news of the attack on Fort Sumter from St.
Joseph to San Francisco in eight days and fourteen hours.
Newspapers and business men had awakened to the importance of this
quick communication, and bonuses were offered for the delivery of
important news ahead of schedule. President Buchanan's last message
had heretofore held the record for speedy passage, going over the
route in seven days and nineteen hours. But that time was beaten by
two hours in the carrying of Lincoln's inaugural address. Seven days
and seventeen hours--the world's record for transmitting messages by
men and horses!
The firm of Russel, Majors & Waddel spent $700,000 on the pony express
during the eighteen months of its life; they took in something less
than $500,000. But they accomplished what they had set out to do. In
1860 the Butterfield line was notified to transfer its rolling-stock
to the west end of the northern route; their rivals got the mail
contract for the eastern portion.
The Wells-Butterfield interests were on the under side now. The change
to the new route involved enormous expense; and with the withdrawal of
troops at the beginning of the Civil War, Apaches and Comanches
plundered the disintegrating line of stations. The company lasted only
a short time on the west end of the overland mail and retired. Its
leaders now devoted their energies to the express business.
At this juncture a new man got the mail contract. Ben Holliday was his
name, and in his day he was known as a Napoleon. Perhaps it was the
first time that term was used in connection with American promoters.
Holliday, who had begun as a small storekeeper in a Missouri village,
had made one canny turn after another until, at the time when the mail
came to the northern route, he owned several steamship lines and large
freighting interests and was beginning to embark in the stage
business. The firm of Russel, Majors & Waddel was losing money, owing
in part to bad financial management and in part to the courageous
venture of the pony express. Holliday absorbed their property early in
the sixties. He was the transportation magnate of his time, the first
American to force a merger in that industry.
One of his initial steps was to improve the operation of the stage
line. Some of the efficiency methods of his subordinates were
picturesque to say the least. In Julesburg, which was near the mouth
of Lodge Pole Creek in northeastern Colorado, the agent was an old
Frenchman, after whom the place had been named. This Jules had been
feathering his own nest at the expense of the company, and the new
management supplanted him with one Jack Slade, whose record up to that
time was either nineteen or twenty killings. Slade was put in charge
at Julesburg with instructions to clean up his division.
While the new superintendent was exterminating such highway robbers
and horse-thieves as Jules had gathered about him in this section, his
predecessor was biding in the little settlement, watching for a chance
to play even.
One day Slade came into the general store near the station, and the
Frenchman, who had seen a good opportunity for ambush here, fired both
barrels of a double-barreled shotgun into his body at a range of about
fifty feet.
Slade took to his bed. But he was made of the stuff which absorbs much
lead without any great amount of permanent harm. He was up again in a
few weeks. He hunted down Jules, who had taken refuge in the Indian
country to the north on hearing of his recovery. He brought the
prisoner back to Julesburg, and bound him to the snubbing-post in the
middle of the stage company's corral.
Accounts of what followed differ. Some authorities maintain that Slade
killed Jules. Others, who base their assertions on the statement of
men who said they were eye-witnesses, tell how Slade enjoyed himself
for some time filling the prisoner's clothing with bullet holes and
then exclaimed,
"Hell! You ain't worth the lead to kill you." And turned the victim
loose.
But all narrators agree on this; before Slade unbound the living
Jules--or the dead one, whichever it may have been--he cut off the
prisoner's ears and put them in his pocket.
It may be noted in passing that this truculent efficiency expert went
wrong in after years and wound up his days at the end of a rope in
Virginia City, Montana.
Ben Holliday carried the mails overland throughout the early sixties.
But during the summer of 1864 the Indians of the plains, for the first
time in their history, made a coalition. They united in one grand
war-party against the outposts along the line, and for a distance of
four hundred miles they destroyed stations, murdered employees, and
made off with live stock. The loss to the company was half a million
dollars.
It crippled Holliday. And the government so delayed consideration of
his claims for reimbursment that he was glad to sell the property. The
firm of Wells Fargo, who had been increasing their express business
until they virtually monopolized that feature of common carrying
throughout the West at the close of the Civil War, took the line over.
Wells Fargo! It was the old Wells Butterfield Co. again. The first
winners in the struggle were the last.
The railroad came. Men said that the day of adventure was over. But
this adventure has not ended yet.
While this story was being written another pioneer died on that
overland mail route. And when his aero-plane came fluttering down out
of a driving snowstorm to crash, in a mass of tangled wreckage, on
the side of Elk Mountain, Wyoming, Lieutenant E. V. Wales went to
his death within a rifle-shot of the road where so many of his
predecessors gave up their lives trying--even as he was then
striving--to quicken communication between the Atlantic and the
Pacific.