The Pony Express, Ten Days to Sacramento

On April third, eighteen sixty, a rider named Johnny Fry, or possibly Billy Richardson, the historical record here is genuinely contested, spurred a horse away from the Patee House stables in Saint Joseph, Missouri, crossed the Missouri River on a ferry, and began what the organizers hoped would become a reliable mail route to Sacramento, California. The Pony Express had launched. The concept was straightforward: relay riders on fast horses, spaced roughly ten to fifteen miles apart, carrying mail in specially designed leather mochila saddlebags at speeds no wagon train could match.

The route covered roughly nineteen hundred miles through Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California. The fastest run on record, carrying news of President Lincoln's inaugural address in February of eighteen sixty-one, covered the distance in seven days and seventeen hours. The enterprise belonged to the freighting firm of Russell, Majors, and Waddell, who invested what contemporary estimates put at close to seven hundred thousand dollars in the venture.

They employed roughly eighty riders at peak operation, most of them young, most of them slight, the hiring advertisement famously asked for orphans, though this was partly practical, partly theater. Each rider was paid around one hundred to one hundred fifty dollars per month, substantial wages for the era. The Pony Express lasted eighteen months.

The transcontinental telegraph, completed in October of eighteen sixty-one, made it obsolete almost immediately. Russell, Majors, and Waddell went bankrupt. What remained was a mythology: the lone rider, the great distances, the nation's need to hold itself together across impossible space.

Saint Joseph was where that mythology set out from, and Missouri has claimed it ever since.