Patee House: Pony Express Headquarters

The Patee House in Saint Joseph, Missouri was considered the finest hotel west of the Mississippi when John Patee built its one hundred forty rooms in eighteen fifty-eight. Two years later it became something else entirely. In eighteen sixty, the freighting firm of Russell, Majors, and Waddell leased the hotel's ground floor for the headquarters of the Pony Express.

On April third, eighteen sixty, a rider departed Saint Joseph heading west, inaugurating the nearly two-thousand-mile relay to Sacramento, California. Riders changed horses every ten to fifteen miles and completed the crossing in about ten days. The telegraph caught up in October eighteen sixty-one, and the Pony Express folded almost overnight after just eighteen months.

The Patee House became a women's college, then a shirt factory, then fell into disrepair before being restored as a National Historic Landmark and museum of transportation history.