Faust Pony Express Station

You are standing along the old Pony Express trail, at the site of Faust Station. For about eighteen months, from eighteen sixty to eighteen sixty-one, riders carried the mail across nearly two thousand miles of wilderness from Saint Joseph, Missouri, all the way to Sacramento, California, and this was the first home station west of Salt Lake City, where exhausted riders could rest. It took its name from Henry Jacob Faust, a German immigrant who had chased gold in California, found little, joined the Mormon church, and settled in Utah.

In eighteen sixty he signed on as station keeper and part-time rider, and he raised horses for the Express and the Army. The telegraph soon made the Pony Express obsolete, but Faust stayed on, ranching this valley. The little community of Faust, Utah, just down the road, still carries the name of the German immigrant turned frontiersman who once kept the mail moving through here.