Pleasant Grove Pony Express Station

You are near the site of the Pleasant Grove House, one of the relay stations on the western leg of the Central Overland Pony Express. While the Pony Express ran, riders stopped here to swap exhausted horses for fresh ones before continuing along the route.

The Pony Express covered roughly nineteen hundred miles between Saint Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento in about ten days, an astonishing pace for the era. Each rider carried a mochila, a leather saddlebag designed to slip over the saddle horn in seconds, so a horse change took only moments.

The service lasted only eighteen months. The transcontinental telegraph, completed in October eighteen sixty-one, made it obsolete almost overnight. A marker commemorates the site of this relay station on the final western stretch.