Paying Tributes
"As at St. Joe and in the west bottoms the emigrants had been pestered by 'dirty looking redskins' looking for handouts. These were the more shiftless members of the Kickapoo,…
Clean Out of Cash & Poor Pay
" Russell, Majors & Waddell had been surviving on loans made against its government contracts for handling most of the Utah Expedition’s freighting operations since 1858. The government failed to pay its…
Brigham Young Express
Brigham Young hoped to use the federal mail contract he won late in 1856 using Hiram S. Kimball, a merchant who acted as his agent, to build a major overland freighting…
Payoff to Floyd
"From the very beginning two principal objects seemed to govern the [House Bond Scandal] hearings: to investigate Secretary Floyd's acceptances [given to Russell], and to find the abstracted bonds. The…
Russell’s Guilt
"[Godard Bailey, a clerk in the Interior Department, whose wife was related to Secretary of War Floyd] confessed [to Russell] that the bonds he had given Russell belonged to the…
Failure of Russell, Majors & Waddell
"It has been said again and again that the Pony Express ruined Russell, Majors & Waddell. That is not true. It was a failure as a financial asset from the…
Russell’s First Mistake
"On June 19 [1857], Captain Thomas L. Brent, quartermaster at Fort Leavenworth, called upon Russell and served notice that the firm would be required to transport three million pounds of…
Russell’s Second Mistake
"The launching of [the Leavenworth and Pike's Peak Express in 1858] was the second disastrous mistake Russell made. Had he resisted the temptation to join Jones in it and worked…
Startup Costs and Debt
"As soon as the contract [to supply the Army] was signed, the company sent out cattle buyers to comb the country for oxen. When they were through, the firm owned…
Pony Express Operating Deficit
"No expenses had been spared to assure the Pony's success: it had cost about $100,000 to set up. Yet unlike the Central Overland stage line, the Pony Express had no…
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…