Pony Express Schedule
"On paper, the scheduled time from St. Joseph to Fort Kearney to be thirty-four hours; to Salt Lake, 124 hours, to Sacramento, 234 hours. Including a six-hour railroad trip from…
Organizing the Pony Express Line
"Ficklin, meanwhile, set about reorganizing the line for the coming Pony Express. The stagecoach route—previously divided into three stagecoach divisions between st. Joseph and Salt Lake City—was now reorganized into…
Old Jules’s Horse Thievery
"At the end of January 1860, in anticipation of the Pony Express, Slade's jurisdiction was shifted slightly eastward. It now stretched from Fort Kearney on the east to his headquarters…
First Order of Business
"The first order of business in pursuit of Russell's dream [the Pony Express] was revamping the stagecoach line's existing operations. The trusting general superintendent Beverly Williams was replaced by the…
A Dramatic Gesture
"The Post Office Department's greatest prize—the $600,000-a-year contract held by John Butterfield's rival California mail operation—still had nearly five years to run. But Russell sensed that opposition to Butterfield's 'ox…
Logistics of Establishing a Pony Express
"But the logistics of a mail relay stretching 1,966 miles from the Missouri River to Sacramento was so daunting that only an incurable dreamer like Russell would have considered implementing…
An Idea Whose Time Had Come
"By the fall of 1859, though, the 'Pony Express' increasingly looked like an idea whose time had come. The opening of the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad that February brought…
The Idea of a Pony Express
"Russell was hardly the first dreamer to conceive a horseback relay system for delivering mail across distances: Marco Polo found a similar system in thirteenth-century China, operating with 'post stations…
Mail Call in San Francisco
"As early as the 1840s President Polk had acknowledged that mail service between the East and California was 'indispensable for the diffusion of information, for the binding together [of] the…
The Politics of Mail Service to California
"Like every political question in America in the late 1850s, mail service to California was eclipsed by the slavery question. Although Americans in California, Oregon, and Utah repeatedly pleaded for…
Postal Subsidies Reduced Under Holt
"[Postmaster] Brown's successor—the former commissioner of patents, Judge Joseph Holt of Kentucky—was a southerner like Brown but Brown's antithesis in terms of policy: Holt believed the Post Office should support…
Postal Subsidies
"[Postmaster] Brown at least supported the basic principle that government subsidies for western routes were necessary. Congress had embraced this theory when it subsidized the Butterfield mail line in 1857…
First Overland Mail from St. Joseph
"Residents of Sacramento celebrated the arrival of the first overland mail from St. Joseph on July 20, 1858."
First Mention of a Pony Express
"[The Butterfield Route] failed to address the question of how to provide mail service to Utah, not to mention the political question of how to maintain the North's influence in…
Butterfield and the Ox Bow Route
"In September 1857, [Postmaster] Brown settled on a route [through the south] . . . that was nearly 2,800 miles long—more than 800 miles longer than the central overland route…