The Pony Express

The building you are near on the Sacramento waterfront was, for eighteen months, the western end of the most romanticized communication system in American history. The B.F. Hastings Building was the western terminus of the Pony Express, the relay mail service that carried letters from Saint Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento in approximately ten days, using a chain of roughly a hundred and ninety relay stations and four hundred horses across two thousand miles of prairie, desert, and mountain.

The Pony Express began operating in April eighteen sixty. It went out of business in October eighteen sixty-one. That is eighteen months. It never once turned a profit. It went bankrupt almost immediately after the transcontinental telegraph was completed, a technology that rendered ten-day mail delivery across the continent irrelevant within a matter of days.

The business logic had never quite worked. The Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company, which operated the Pony Express, had invested heavily in horses, riders, and stations and charged high rates for letters, but the volume of mail was never sufficient to cover the costs of running the system. The romantic image, the young rider galloping alone through hostile territory, was real enough in its particulars. The economics were a catastrophe from the beginning.

What the Pony Express did do, briefly and genuinely, was demonstrate that the overland route could be the backbone of transcontinental communication. The telegraph that killed it followed the same route. The railroad that would follow the telegraph followed the same route. The Pony Express lost money and lasted less than two years, but the route it traced is the one that connected the country.