Burnt Station on the Pony Express

Out here in Utah's west desert, a small marker points three hundred feet to the spot once known as Burnt Station. In its first life it was Canyon Station, a relay post associated with the frontier rider Howard Egan and the Pony Express, that legendary mail relay that carried letters between Saint Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, in eighteen sixty and eighteen sixty-one. The Express itself lasted barely eighteen months before the telegraph made it obsolete, but the station kept serving the Overland Stage that followed.

The name Burnt Station comes from violence. In eighteen sixty-three, the station is said to have been attacked and burned, with men killed. This marker is one of a long chain of stones tracing the old route across the lonely Utah flats.