“The postman no longer rings twice,” wrote Frank DeFilippo, in a recent column posted by news outlets in Maryland and Pennsylvania. In contrast, he added, “back in the day the Pony Express and its daredevil riders became early western cinematic celebrities for braving treacherous terrain, marauding bandits and worse weather than Texas and yet relaying saddlebags of mail coast-to-coast on horseback in 10 days.”
Ah, the Pony Express. Launched on April 3, 1860, it lasted less than two years and lost a boatload of money. Nevertheless, it quickly loomed large in the American imagination. Eight years after the service ended, for example, it was featured on today’s #stampoftheday, a 2-cent stamp, which was the first U.S. stamp to bear an image other than a prominent American.
And 11 years after it was launched, in “Roughing It,” an account of travels in the West in the 1860s, Mark Twain wrote: “A black speck appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves….Another instant…and man and horse burst past our excited faces and go winging away like the belated fragment of a storm.”
Similarly, Buffalo Bill Cody, who became famous for his Wild West Show, claimed he rode for the Pony Express when he was just 15 years old. His tales, which may or may not have been true, included one about making a 322-mile trip because his relief rider had been killed in a brawl.
The entity behind these images and stories grew out of the need to provide faster mail service to California, which was growing rapidly after gold was discovered in 1848. Initially, the mail travelled by ship to the Isthmus of Panama, then overland across the isthmus, then by ship to California, a process that would, at best, take three or four weeks. In 1858, the post office began an overland stagecoach route across the southern US that, if all went well, took about 24 days.
Concerns that the route not only was slow but also passed through states that were threatening to leave the Union, led a competitor to develop a new, faster service across the central part of the US. The almost 2,000 mile route, which started in St. Joseph, Missouri, traversed the plains of Kansas, continued into Nebraska along the valley of the Platte River, across the Great Plateau, crossed the Rockies into the valley of the Great Salt Lake, then continued through the alkali deserts of Nevada and over the snow-covered Sierra Mountains until ending in Sacramento where mail was transferred to steamboats bound for San Francisco.
The logistics required for this operation are staggering. As Nancy Pope wrote in a 1992 article, in less than two months and “with precision and expertise which would be envied by any military tactician, Alexander Majors [who oversaw the work] arranged for the purchase of over 400 ponies; the building of 200 stations in desolate, uninhabited areas; the hiring of station masters to staff them; the stocking of provisions; and, of course, the hiring of [about 80] riders.”
The riders, who were paid quite well, had to be young, weigh less than 125 pounds, and promise not to drink or swear. Each one, Twain wrote, “was usually a little bit of a man brimful of spirit and endurance. No matter what time of day or night his watch came on, and no matter whether it was winter or summer, raining, snowing, hailing or sleeting, or whether his ‘beat’ was a level straight road or a crazy trail over mountain crags and precipices, or whether it led through peaceful regions or regions that swarmed with hostile Indians, he must be always ready to leap into the saddle and be off like the wind!” And then “he rode without stopping, by daylight, moonlight, starlight, or through the blackness of darkness.”
Riding with a specially designed saddle and mailbags, a rider would switch horses at the relay stations that were about 10 miles apart. After travelling about 75-to-100 miles (and changing horse 8 to 10 times), he would hand the mailbag over to a new rider and horse. As Twain wrote: “He rode a splendid horse that was born for a racer and fed and lodged like a gentleman: kept him at his utmost speed for 10 miles, and then, as he came crashing up to the station where stood two men holding fast a fresh, impatient steed, the transfer of rider and mailbag was made in the twinkling of an eye, and away flew the eagle pair and were out of sight before the spectator could get hardly the ghost of a look.”
While the Pony Express was a logistical success – delivering about 35,000 pieces of mail, usually in about 10 days – it was a financial failure even though the rates charged to use the service were extraordinarily high (initially $5, later $1, which is equal to about $26 today). Moreover, the completion of the first transcontinental telegraph line in October 1861, provided a much faster and cheaper way to send timely news and information. Consequently, the Post Office ended the service in 1862, less than two years after it had started.
But its image has lived on. In 1935, celebrations of its 75th anniversary featured Boy Scouts on horses retracing the routes and celebrations in the communities along that route that supposedly were attended by more than 500,000 people. It was pictured on stamps issued in 1940 and again in 1960. (I only have the one from 1940.) There also have been at least 11 movies and 3 TV shows about the Pony Express, which also was featured in a two-part episode of the “Bonanza.”
And it continues to be a cultural touchstone. In a mid-March piece criticizing the Postal Service for not embracing electric vehicles, for example, Dorothy Robyn, who currently is a fellow at Boston University’s Institute for Sustainable Energy, noted “the Postal Service has a tradition of transportation innovation, from the Pony Express to the airmail contracts used to jumpstart U.S. commercial aviation. Electric vehicles are the next frontier.”
Similarly, at the end of his column on the Postal Service’s woes, DeFilippo lamented “America can put a dune buggy on Mars, 140 million miles away, but can’t deliver mail across town. Honk if you favor the return of the Pony Express.”
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.