STORY OF THE PONY EXPRESS.
The glamour and pageantry of the crusaders in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries were revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth by Columbus,
Cortez, and Pizarro, and repeated in the nineteenth by Taylor,
Scott, Doniphan, and Fremont. As a resultant were the wonderful gold
discoveries of 1849, in California, and a State born full-fledged and
armed in a day, as Minerva from the brain of Jove. Among the wonderful
and prolific accomplishments of Western thought and genius was the
conception and successful fruition of the Pony Express, a scheme that
could only have been conceived and launched amid the mountain grandeur
of the Western plains. It could have birth in no other place, and can
be duplicated nowhere else. The world presents no theater for its
reënactment. It was formulated by Senator Gwinn of California, and
fashioned and matured to success by Russell, Majors & Waddell of the
overland mail coach system of 1859, as established by Congress.
[Illustration: RIDING PONY EXPRESS.]
The telegraph extended from the Atlantic seaboard to St. Joseph
and from San Francisco to Sacramento. Two thousand miles of desert
intervened. The ocean communications, via Central America, occupied
twenty-two days, with propitious sea voyages. Could this be reduced?
The stages took from twenty-one to twenty-five days, according to the
weather. Duke Gwinn, as he was afterward called, suggested to W. H.
Russell of the stage line that if the time could be shortened for
communication on a central line, and kept open all the year, a great
increase of travel and emigration, and the location of a railroad by
the Government on a central route, would be the result. The conference
resulted in the habiliment of the Pony Express, which eventuated in
carrying a telegraph mail upon ponies from St. Joseph to Sacramento,
1,982 miles, regularly, from April, 1860, to September, 1861, in
ten days, schedule time, and the special express in December, 1860,
with a message of President Buchanan to Congress, on secession, in
seven days and seventeen hours, a feat never before and never again
to be accomplished. This was done through a desert country occupied
by prowling savages and swept by violent storms, furious blizzards,
and blinding snows. Crossing immense mountain ranges and trackless
wastes of sand and sage-brush, grappling with mountain torrents
and with nature’s wildest orgies, the hardy riders, whose watchword
was “excelsior,” always made (Deo volente) the schedule time to the
objective point. At St. Joseph and Sacramento, until the completion of
the telegraph across the continent, the expectant crowd was never held
in wait over an hour before the messenger waved his red flag of safety,
and in the next instant slid from his panting steed and hastened to the
office of the company with his bag of dispatches, worth its weight in
gold.
During the Mexican War Congress added two new regiments of mounted
volunteers to the regular army under orders to lay out a military
road on the route taken by Fremont in 1843 to Oregon. They were to
locate posts, and changed old Fort Kearney, then at the mouth of Tabor
Creek, where Nebraska City is now located, to the crossing of the
Platte River, where Kearney is now situated, and called it New Fort
Kearney, one at Laramie on the Platte River, fifty miles north of
Laramie City, now a station situated on the Union Pacific Railroad,
and one at old Fort Hall, a Hudson Bay trading-post near the present
site of Pocatella. This was called the military route, and was the
road traveled by most of the emigrants to California in 1849. Passing
by Soda Springs and south of Snake River to the headwaters of the
Humboldt, or St. Marys River, through Nevada, it passed through the
South Pass and struck Bear River, now in Idaho and Utah. The emigration
of 1850 diverged southward from Laramie and past Green River at its
junction with Hams Fork, through Echo Cañon and Salt Lake Valley
westwardly via Reese River, striking the Humboldt lower down, and
crossing the Sierra Nevada at the Truckee Pass and by Donner Lake.
This was a much more direct trail to California and was used mostly
thereafter by emigrants in 1850-51. In 1854 two stage routes were
established, one by Texas and El Paso, on the Gila River, to Southern
California, and one via Salt Lake, the latter much the shorter, but
mountainous. McGraw & Co. had the route on the military road from
Independence by Fort Leavenworth under a government subsidy, and in
1859 Russell, Majors & Waddell became the owners of this mail line and
operated it successfully for years.
[Illustration]
In 1859 Senator Gwinn, then United States Senator from California,
and a devoted Union man, appealed to the stage company to expedite
travel and communications on the military road, so as to have a central
line available to the North and South alike, and to demonstrate the
possibilities of operating it in midwinter. Strange to say, this grand
Union man and able statesman went into the Rebellion and lost his
wonderful prestige and influence in California, as well as a fortune,
in his fealty to his native State of Mississippi, and in 1866 was made
the Duke of Sonora by Maximilian, in the furtherance of some visionary
scheme of Western empire, but soon died. His propositions were duly
considered and responded to by that famous firm, representatives
of thrift, enterprise, energy, and courage, who well deserve the
commendation of history and the gratitude of their countrymen.
Russell was a Green Mountain boy, who before his majority had gone West
to grow up with the country; and after teaching a three-months’ school
on the frontier of Missouri had hired to old John Aull of Lexington,
Mo., at $30 per month, to keep books, and was impressed in lessons of
economy by the anecdotes of Aull that a London company engaged in the
India trade had saved £80 per annum in ink by omitting to dot the “i’s”
and cross the “t’s,” when he was emptying his pen by splashing the
office wall with ink. Alexander Majors is still living, venerable with
years and honors, a mountain son of Kentucky frontier ancestry, the
colleague and friend of Daniel Boone; and William Waddell, an ancestral
Virginian of the blue-grass region of Kentucky, bold enough for any
enterprise, and able to fill any missing niche in Western wants.
The Pony Express was born from this conference, and the first move was
to compass the necessary auxiliaries to assure success. Sixty young,
agile, athletic riders were engaged and 420 strong and wiry ponies
procured, and on the 9th of April, 1860, the venture was simultaneously
commenced from St. Joseph and Sacramento City. The result was a success
in cutting down the time more than one half, and it rarely missed
making the schedule time in ten days, and in December, 1860, making
it in seven days and seventeen hours. The stations were from twelve
to fifteen miles apart, and one pony was ridden from one station to
another, and one rider made three stations, and a few dare-devil
fellows made double duty and rode eighty or eighty-five miles. One of
them was Charles Cliff, now a citizen of St. Joseph, who rode from St.
Joseph to Seneca and back on alternate days. He was attacked by Indians
at Scotts Bluff, and received three balls in his body and twenty-seven
in his clothes. Cliff made Seneca and back in eight hours each way.
Another of these daring riders of this flying express was Pony Bob.
[Illustration]
But the one of these pony riders who has won greatest fame was William
F. Cody (“Buffalo Bill”), who passed through many a gauntlet of death
while in his flight from station to station bearing express matter that
was of the greatest value.
The express was closed on the completion of a telegraph line by Ed
Creighton of Omaha from that point to Sacramento City. The mail-bags
were two pouches of leather, impervious to rain and weather, sealed,
and strapped to the rider’s saddle before and behind, carrying two
ounce letters or dispatches at $5 each.
The keepers of the stations had the ponies already saddled, and the
riders merely jumped from the back of one to another; and where the
riders were changed the pouches were unbuckled and handed to the
already mounted postman, who started at a lope as soon as his hand
clutched them. As these express stations were the same as the stage
stations, the employes of the stage company were required to take
care of the ponies and have them in readiness at the proper moment.
The bridles and saddles were light weight, as were the riders, and
the pouches were not to contain over twenty pounds of weight. There
were two pouches of two pockets each, and secured by oil-silk, then
sealed, and the pockets locked and never opened between St. Joseph and
Sacramento.
This channel of communication was largely used by the Government and by
traders and merchants, and was a paying venture, first semi-weekly and
then daily, and but for the building of the telegraph would have become
a wonderful success.
Every two or three hundred miles there were located at the stations
division agents to provide for emergencies in case of Indian raids or
stampedes of ponies, and at the crossing of the Platte at Fort Kearney
there was then employed the notorious Jack Slade, a Vermont Yankee,
lost to the teachings of his early and pious environments, turned
into a frontier fiend. He shot a Frenchman named Jules Bevi, whose
patronymic is preserved in the present station of Julesburg on the
Union Pacific Railroad. Slade nailed one of his ears to the station
door and wore the other several weeks as a watch-charm. He drifted
to Montana, and in 1865 was hanged by the vigilantes on suspicion
of heading the road agents who killed Parker of Atchison and robbed
a train of $65,000. His tragic end, as related by Doctor McCurdy,
formerly of St. Joseph, contains an element of the pathetic. He lived
on a ranch near Virginia City, Mont., and every few days came into
town and filled up on “benzine,” and took the place by shooting along
the streets and riding into saloons and proclaiming himself to be
the veritable “bad man from Bitter Creek.” The belief that he was
connected with matters worse than bad whisky had overstrained the
long-suffering citizens. The suggestive and mysterious triangular
pieces of paper dropped upon the streets, surmounted with the skull
and arrows, called the vigilantes to a meeting at which the death
of Slade and two companions was determined. On the fated morning
following the meeting he came to town duly sober and went to a
drug-store for a prescription, and while awaiting its preparation he
was suddenly covered with twelve shotguns and ordered to throw up
his hands. He complied smilingly, but proposed to reason with them
as to the absurdity of taking him for a bad man. The only concession
was permission to send a note to his wife at the ranch, and an hour
was allotted him to make peace with the Unknown; ropes were placed
around the necks of the three, and at the end of the time they were
given short shrift, and were soon hanging between heaven and earth.
While the bodies were swaying the wife appeared on the scene, mounted,
with a pistol in each hand, determined to make a rescue; but seeing
that it was too late she quailed before the determined visages of
the vigilantes, and soon left the vicinity, carrying away, as it was
believed, a large amount of the proceeds of Slade’s robberies.
Most of the famous actors in that memorable enterprise known as the
Pony Express have passed beyond the confines of time and gone to join
the great majority. In the summer of 1861 the Pony Express passed,
with the overland stage line, into the ownership of Ben Holliday, one
of those wonderful characters developed from adventure and danger,
and nurtured amid the startling incidents of frontier life. Born
near the old Blue Lick battle-field, he was at seventeen Colonel
Doniphan’s courier to demand from Joe Smith and Brigham Young the
surrender of Farwest. At twenty-eight he entered Salt Lake Valley
with fifty wagon-loads of merchandise and was indorsed by Brigham as
being worthy of the confidence of the faithful. This secured him a
fortune. At thirty-eight, at the head of the overland mail route, and
at forty-five, the owner of sixteen steamers on the Pacific, carrying
trade and passengers to Panama, Oregon, China, and Japan. The stage
route was sold to Butterfield, and ran until the completion of the
Union Pacific Railroad.
[Illustration]
On the streets of Denver daily can be seen the grand figure of
Alexander Majors, carrying his four-score years with a vigor that would
shame half of the youth of the city. Six feet, lithe and straight as
the red man he so often dominated, he is noted as the last of the
Mohicans, and only waits, without fear and without reproach, for
the final summons to that better land where the expresses are all
faithfully gathered and the faithful rewarded by commendations for duty
well performed.
And more wonderful than the express itself is the history of the six
lustrums since it ceased to exist. Two thousand miles of desert waste
have been largely developed in a rich and valuable agricultural and
pastoral region. The iron horse has supplanted the fiery bronco,
and thought flashes with lightning rapidity from ocean to ocean.
Civilization has crowned that terra incognita with seven States and
built large and beautiful cities. Peace has spread her halo of beauty
over the savage haunts and churches have supplanted the horrible orgies
of Indian massacre. The mountains have yielded their treasures to the
steady hand of industry--richer by far than the fabled Ophir--and the
pactolian streams have gladdened the hearts of toiling thousands. All
honor to the pioneers who blazed the way for this civilization.
With this page of frontier history--the days of the Pony Express--will
forever be associated the name of Billy Cody.