The Pony Express history: a western tale

Following the gold rush of 1848, California’s population ballooned; San Francisco became a city of twenty-five thousand in one year and had become an important business center requiring faster communication with the East Coast. Telegraph lines reached from the Atlantic coast to St Joseph, Missouri. California newspapers, anticipating the eventuality of the telegraph reaching San Francisco, had run lines from San Francisco to Los Angeles. But as of 1860, the two thousand-mile mail route between Missouri and California was a twenty-day crossing for a heavy stagecoach. If inclement weather closed the mountain passes, the wait could be considerably longer. Impatient merchants and bankers clamored for a faster mail delivery system.

The owners of three stagecoach lines, Phelps, Gwin, and Majors, foreseeing a possibly lucrative market, responded by drawing on an idea originally implemented in the east by Benjamin Franklin: they would have pony riders deliver the mail between St Joseph, Missouri and San Francisco, California.

The route from St Joseph, Missouri would follow the Oregon Trail through territory that would become the states of Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming. It continued across the Great Basin and Utah-Nevada desert, over the rugged Sierras around Lake Tahoe and down steep mountain trails into California. The entire route covered a distance of eighteen hundred and forty miles. Instead of the twenty days required for a stagecoach to carry mail, pony express riders could travel the distance in ten days.

Each rider would carry a mail pouch called a Mochila (mo-kee’-ya), a long rectangle of leather with a padlocked mail pouch in each corner. The mochila was designed to be thrown over the saddle where the rider’s weight would keep it in place during the rougher parts of the ride. After dismounting from his tired pony, the rider could toss the mochila over the saddle of a fresh mount and be back on the road in less than two minutes.

Johnny Fry was the first rider to leave from St. Joseph, Missouri. He took off on April 3rd, 1860 at seven-fifteen in the evening at a dead gallop. Crouched low over the pony’s neck and squinting at the sprays of dirt flung into his face by flying hooves, he would cover seventy-five miles on seven different ponies before meeting a relief rider.

The next morning, April 4th at eight o’clock, Sam Hamilton dashed off from Sacramento to the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains where Warren Upson would relieve him. Upson rode fast through the stinging snow of a spring blizzard, legs clamped tight to the precious cargo in the mochila, to complete the ride over the pass.

Often repeated tales of the Pony Express told of the young riders’ bravery and endurance. One famous pony rider, William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, is touted as having completed the longest non-stop ride in the Express’ short history. Hired at fifteen years old, he was given the forty-five mile stretch beginning at Julesburg, Colorado and going west. Eventually his superb horsemanship and fearlessness in the face of bandits and hostile Indians earned him a portion of the most dangerous route through Wyoming. During the end of one ride, he found his relief rider had been killed. Undaunted, Cody continued on, traveling the three hundred and twenty-two miles on twenty-one different horses. He finished the non-stop ride in twenty-one hours and forty minutes.

The telegraph lines that connected St Joseph to San Francisco were completed in 1862, ending the need for the Pony Express. The Express had cost its creators almost three hundred thousand dollars to implement and run, but had brought in revenue of less than ninety-one thousand dollars. It’s estimated that the cost to deliver each piece of mail was five dollars, an extremely hefty sum in those days.

The Pony Express was not a profitable venture monetarily, but in the historical romance of the old west, it was a priceless twenty-one month journey.