From Mark Twain’s “Roughing It” as Twain recalls the passing of Pony Express rider in 1861 as he traveled west by stagecoach.
In a little while all interest was taken up in stretching our necks and watching for the “pony-rider”—the fleet messenger who sped across the continent from St. Joe to Sacramento, carrying letters nineteen hundred miles in eight days! Think of that for perishable horse and human flesh and blood to do! The pony-rider was usually a little bit of a man, brimful of spirit and endurance. No matter what time of the 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! There was no idling-time for a pony-rider on duty. He rode fifty miles without stopping, by daylight, moonlight, starlight, or through the blackness of darkness—just as it happened. 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 ten 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 mail-bag was made in the twinkling of an eye, and away flew the eager pair and were out of sight before the spectator could get hardly the ghost of a look. Both rider and horse went “flying light.” The rider’s dress was thin, and fitted close; he wore a “round-about,” and a skull-cap, and tucked his pantaloons into his boot-tops like a race-rider. He carried no arms—he carried nothing that was not absolutely necessary, for even the postage on his literary freight was worth five dollars a letter.
Looking back 165 years, it was a publicity stunt, an early one, but an effective one. A coast-to-coast mail contract was worth one million dollars (in 1858 dollars), the equivalent of almost $40 million today. Still, it was a proposal with risk, and not many rewards if it failed.
It did fail, especially in Wyoming, and specifically on the windswept plains of the ridges surrounding the Sweetwater Valley in the future Fremont County.
The route followed the Oregon Trail almost the entire distance. It took two days to cross Wyoming, and less than 10 hours on most runs through future Fremont County.
In the summer months, the schedule could be maintained easily as long as horses were ready at the stations, there was ample water and feed for the horses, and the weather cooperated.
In winter, even the best riders, and stoutest horses, were often stymied by heavy snow on the Nebraska and Wyoming plains. The conditions in Fremont County as riders moved up toward South Pass from the Sweetwater Valley were often impassable. Heavy, drifted snow, high winds, limited or no visibility, and extreme cold were challenges that couldn’t be overcome.
To travel in these conditions, many horses and wagons, breaking trail would have made it possible for the riders to maintain their schedule, but riding alone, breaking the deep snow, and crashing through crusted drifts was too much for both man and horse to endure.
Wyoming, and to a lesser extent, the trail over the Sierra Nevada Range, was the demise of the enterprise.
The Pony Express was an anachronism, a throwback to ancient technology in an attempt to solve a modern problem.
California became a state in 1850, a state so distant from the rest of America that letters took four to six weeks to arrive on the fastest stagecoach and an equal number of months for a letter, parcel, or freight to “Round the Horn” on the swiftest clipper ships of the day.
A “shortcut” was built in 1855 in Panama from Colon on the Atlantic Coast to Balboa on the Pacific via a 48-mile-long railroad. This was the fastest, safest (aside from malaria or Yellow Fever) way to get from New York City or Boston to San Francisco. It still represented months of travel, loading and unloading four times and great expense.
Fremont County wasn’t there in 1858 when the idea for the Pony Express bloomed into reality. Neither was Wyoming, the state, nor the territory. Territorial status didn’t arrive until 1869, and Fremont County didn’t come about until 1884 when the vast distances of the massive Sweetwater County became too great to overcome. Lander was becoming a popular homesteading area on the various branches of the Popo Agie. The needs of the Army garrison at Ft. Washakie were also a consideration. The Territorial County seat at Green River was too distant.
There were 43 Pony Express stations in what would become the state of Wyoming. Heading west, the first station was at Spring Station, near present-day Torrington, and the final one was at Needle Rock, on the Wyoming/Utah border on the outskirts of Evanston.
In between, the others have faded from memory, but a few remain on the map, including Ft. Laramie, Independence Rock, Split Rock, South Pass, Pacific Springs, and Big Sandy.
In Fremont County, the main stations were located at Split Rock with sections in both Natrona and Fremont County, Three Crossings, St. Mary’s, Rock Creek, South Pass, and Pacific Springs. Other smaller stations were Ice Springs, Warm Springs, Rocky Ridge, Upper Sweetwater, Dry Sandy, and Little Sandy.
Twain described his first impression of riding up from the Sweetwater Valley to South Pass in “Roughing It.”
During the afternoon, we passed Sweetwater Creek, Independence Rock, Devil’s Gate, and the Devil’s Gap. The latter were wild specimens of rugged scenery, and full of interest—we were in the heart of the Rocky Mountains, now. And we also passed by “Alkali” or “Soda Lake,” and we woke up to the fact that our journey had stretched a long way across the world when the driver said that the Mormons often came there from Great Salt Lake City to haul away saleratus. He said that a few days gone by they had shoveled up enough pure saleratus from the ground (it was a dry lake) to load two wagons, and that when they got these two wagons-loads of a drug that cost them nothing, to Salt Lake, they could sell it for twenty-five cents a pound.
In the night we sailed by a most notable curiosity, and one we had been hearing a good deal about for a day or two, and were suffering to see. This was what might be called a natural ice-house. It was August, now, and sweltering weather in the daytime, yet at one of the stations the men could escape the soil on the hill-side under the lee of a range of boulders, and at a depth of six inches cut out pure blocks of ice—hard, compactly frozen, and clear as crystal!
Toward dawn we got under way again, and presently as we sat with raised curtains enjoying our early-morning smoke and contemplating the first splendor of the rising sun as it swept down the long array of mountain peaks, flushing and gilding crag after crag and summit after summit, as if the invisible Creator reviewed his gray veterans and they saluted with a smile, we hove in sight of South Pass City. The hotel-keeper, the postmaster, the blacksmith, the mayor, the constable, the city marshal and the principal citizen and property holder, all came out and greeted us cheerily, and we gave him good day. He gave us a little Indian news, and a little Rocky Mountain news, and we gave him some Plains information in return. He then retired to his lonely grandeur and we climbed on up among the bristling peaks and the ragged clouds. South Pass City consisted of four log cabins, one of which was unfinished, and the gentleman with all those offices and titles was the chiefest of the ten citizens of the place. Think of hotel-keeper, postmaster, blacksmith, mayor, constable, city marshal and principal citizen all condensed into one person and crammed into one skin. Bemis said he was “a perfect Allen’s revolver of dignities.” And he said that if he were to die as postmaster, or as blacksmith, or as postmaster and blacksmith both, the people might stand it; but if he were to die all over, it would be a frightful loss to the community.
A total of 197 Pony Express stations were built from Missouri to California.
Before any of these stations could be built, wells dug, corrals built, and men and supplies found to fill them, the plan had to take shape.
Sending messages by runner dates back to the days before history’s most famous example the Athenian messenger Pheidippides who ran 26 miles (and 385 yards according to modern distances) from Marathon to Athens in 490 B.C. to announce that the Greeks had defeated the Persians in the Battle of Marathon.
Legend has it that, Pheidippides shouted, “We have won!” Then promptly dropped dead.
The Romans and those same Persians used horse messengers to carry mail throughout their empires over 2,000 years ago. Genghis and Kublai Khan, leaders of the Mongols, a people who knew how to handle a horse, had well-established mail and messenger relays throughout their vast kingdoms, often considered the largest that have ever existed.
Ben Franklin’s postal system relied on horse and carriage to deliver the mail, albeit at a much slower pace than the breakneck galloping speed of the future Pony Express.
In 1843, the Missionary Marcus Whitman, working with the Nez Perce people in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, proposed a horse relay to deliver mail between outposts on the Missouri and the Columbia Rivers, claiming mail could be delivered in 40 days from Fort Mandan on the Missouri to his location in modern-day Oregon. It was never acted upon.
The immigrant train to Oregon in the 1840s and later the mass migration to California during the gold rush created a demand for faster correspondence, especially between the growing corporate businesses operating in New York City, Baltimore, and Chicago and connecting with San Francisco and the surrounding cities of California.
Some of the ideas bordered on the fanciful.
Congress appropriated $30,000 in 1855 to experiment with camels as mail and freight carriers. The dromedary camels were ideal for the harsh deserts stretching from Texas to Southern California, but they frightened horses, were prone to wandering off, and were difficult to control. They did handle the terrain well and ate just about every thorny, hard-skinned plant that grew in the Great Basin.
They were even victorious in a handful of skirmishes with the Ute tribe in southern Utah.
Camels could cover twice the ground of a horse in a day, pack four to six times the weight, and could go for days without water.
The U.S. Army Camel Corps worked in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California from 1856 to 1866, but the experiment never caught on. Most of the camels ended up in zoos, but a few remained in the wild, the last one was spotted along the Southern Pacific tracks in 1906.
A precursor to the Pony Express came with John Butterfield and his stagecoach line that served the American southwest. Butterfield won a $600,000 contract in 1857 to deliver mail from Ft. Smith, Arkansas to San Diego.
The contract was lucrative, but the route covered 2,800 miles of largely barren, waterless territory. El Paso was the halfway point.
The contract stipulated no more than 25 days’ delivery time. Butterfield was able to make the run and entered a six-year contract from 1858 to 1864.
The Ft. Smith to San Diego was an arbitrary time and place holder, the actual route was from St. Louis and Memphis to San Francisco. The first run began on September 16, 1858.
Butterfield’s success was well publicized and caught the eye of William H. Russell, a freighter and his partners Alexander Majors and William Waddell. They founded the firm of Russell, Majors and Waddell in 1855 with contracts to supply the growing number of western forts on the Laramie, Platte and Missouri Rivers.
These men knew the land, the challenges, the routes, and were familiar with the many hazards along the way, hazards from Mother Nature and from hostile tribes that resented the incursion on their traditional lands.
Russell, Majors, and Waddell signed a $70,000 contract with the United States Postal Service in 1858, hoping to fulfill the contract and get the $1,000,000 in west coast delivery that was being offered for a successful venture.
They needed horses, riders, stations, supplies, and men to man the nearly 200 stations from St. Joseph, Missouri, to the final station at Sacramento, California.
These men knew the freighting business well. They were perhaps even more adept at recruiting young riders.
The mail was charged at three cents per half ounce for distances less than 3,000 miles and six cents for distances over that. The lighter the rider, the more mail he could carry in the leather mochila. Few letters carried by the Pony Express survive. They were printed on rice paper, so thin it was translucent to lower weight. 
Their advertising appealed to the young, fearless, invincible spirit of teenage riders. “Wanted, young, skinny, wiry fellows, not over 18. Must be expert riders willing to face death daily.”
The pay was $25 per week, an outrageously high salary for the pre-Civil War era.
They added a final touch, “Orphans Preferred.”
Young men showed up at their offices in droves.
Most of the riders were 15 or 16 years old, and most didn’t carry a pistol since that added weight. Their saddles were saddles in name only, very thin, lightweight, without a horn. They didn’t wear heavy clothes, even in subzero weather, to reduce weight.
Their average run was 75 to 100 miles per day. They switched horses an average of eight times, and the distance between the stations varied from five to 25 miles, depending on the terrain. Mountainous trails taxed the horses quicker.
They were allowed two minutes at each station to switch horses, toss their saddle on the new mount, throw the mochila in place and then hop on for the next section.
Sometimes there was no next section. Many stations were attacked, burned to the ground, and the tenders were killed. Many more had their horses stolen, so the rider and mount had to continue on to the next station.
One man, who went on after his days as a Pony Express rider to become one of the richest landowners in Wyoming, was James Alexander Moore.
Moore was born in Poland, Ohio, in Mahoning County on May 18, 1840.
He was hired with the Express by lying about his age, claiming he was younger than 18. His route took him across Nebraska.
On one memorable ride, Moore left Midway Station on June 8, 1860, headed to Julesburg, Colorado.
This was one of the longer runs, a distance of about 140 miles. In addition to the mail, he was carrying a special government message to Julesburg. When he arrived, he learned the man scheduled to ride back to Midway Station had died. Moore grabbed the dead man’s mochila, took the corresponding message, and headed back to central Nebraska.
Moore made the run in 14 hours and 46 minutes, at an average speed of 18 miles per hour.
Moore was an actual Pony Express rider, unlike Buffalo Bill Cody, who manufactured the legend of his days as an express rider as part of his Wild West Show.
The Pony Express folded the following year, going bankrupt. It’s estimated that Russell, Majors, and Waddell lost $200,000 on the venture.
Moore went to work in Colorado on the local Pike’s Peak Pony Express that ran from Denver to the gold fields of the mountains to the west. He worked as a driver for the Great Overland Stage Company as well.
When the Union Pacific reached Cheyenne, he went north to Wyoming in 1867.
Moore homesteaded a claim along the Texas Trail near the future county lines of Goshen and Niobrara.
His cattle operation, the J Rolling M, became the second largest in the Wyoming Territory by 1869. In partnership with his older brother Charles, he had ranching operations in Cedar Creek, Nebraska, on the North Platte and on the South Platte near Sterling, Colorado.
James married Mary Cordell Bean, and the couple had three children. They ranched on the J Rolling M at Rawhide Creek, but they had a large, well-built home in Cheyenne and were part of the growing social scene in the territorial capital.
In 1873, while loading hay on a freight wagon, James fell from the top of the stack. He was severely injured. Charles and Mary took him to a doctor in Sidney, Nebraska, but he didn’t improve. Three months later, on December 14, 1873, James Alexander Moore died. He was just 33 years old.
In 1880, a town was established on his old ranch, Jay Em.
He’d survived the rigors of the Pony Express, fights with bandits, and battles with Native Americans in Colorado, but a farming accident took his life.
Ironically, farming was a big part of maintaining the 197 Pony Express stations during its brief 18 months of existence.
The unsung heroes of the Pony Express weren’t the riders; they rode to fame and dime novel glory, or the organizers who eventually made their fortunes in transportation. It was the station managers, the stock tenders, the cooks, and freight wagon drivers that kept the stations supplied.
It was often dangerous work, subject to horse rustlers, bad men on the run, or Native American attacks. The war with the Pauite Tribe coincided with the years of the Pony Express, and many stations were burned and keepers killed.
There were just two states when the Pony Express was active in 1860 and 61, Missouri and California. In between were Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada Territories. Wyoming was eventually carved out of Dakota, Utah, and Idaho Territories.
There were just two stations in Missouri, but 13 in neighboring Kansas. Nevada had the most with 47, but only 417 miles of trail. Wyoming, by contrast, had 43 stations and 489 miles of trail, second only to Nebraska in total miles, with 565. Nebraska had 38 stations. There were 2 in the 27 miles that the Pony Express rolled through the northeast corner of Colorado, 27 in the 263 miles that crossed Utah, and 24 in the final 87 miles to California.
Nevada had so many stations because of the harsh, dry conditions. There wasn’t much grazing on the barren wasteland of Nevada. Hay and grain had to be hauled from Utah to keep the horses fed.
California had so many because of the rapid rise of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range east of Sacramento. It wasn’t a problem on the downhill run to the west, but on the return to the east, it was almost vertical. Stations had to keep fresh horses for both treks.
In all, the 197 stations covered 1966 miles. The mail had to travel 200 miles every day, no matter the conditions, to meet the arduous schedule.
Technology doomed the Pony Express soon after it began.
On June 16, 1860, Congress approved funding for a transcontinental telegraph line to connect St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento. A telegraph network was already in place east of the Mississippi River.
The construction of the telegraph line paralleled that of the transcontinental railroad a few years later. Crews worked from both directions, California heading east and Missouri heading west.
On October 26, 1861, the first telegram was sent from San Francisco to New York City. The Pony Express officially came to an end.
The final letters arrived at stations along the route in November 1861.
Though coast-to-coast delivery by fast horse and rider came to an end in November 1861, the idea of delivering letters and smaller goods on a local basis continued into the early 20th century.
At South Pass, the “Pioneer Pony Express” guaranteed delivery of letters, packages, bank notes, bullion, gold, and silver to Ft. Bridger in less than 24 hours. The business began in the heyday of the South Pass gold rush in the summer of 1868.
Though a romantic image of the “Old West,” the Pony Express was an archaic method of moving mail, and an expensive one. Estimates are that costs exceeded revenue by a factor of three to one during its 18-month run.
Men like James Moore used the experience they gained as Pony Express riders in their youth to build cattle empires on the open plains, but most riders, returned to the cities and farms they came from and were never heard from again.