The motive which prompted Russell to organize and operate the Pony Express has often been misstated. Briefly, it was an advertising proposition to fix public and Congressional attention upon the Central Route, with…
While the stage line was being gotten into operation Russell branched out in a new direction to assume another heavy liability. On May 11, 1859, he bought the contract of J. M.…
While Waddell was writing critical letters in the spring of 1859, Russell and Jones were moving swiftly to get their stage line into operation. In doing so they relied principally upon credit.…
Russell expected Majors and Waddell to join him in the venture, although he had not consulted them. When Waddell heard about it he was so infuriated that he wrote Russell a series…
One Sunday afternoon General William Larimer, professional promoter and town organizer, called upon Russell to seek advice on plains travel. He was organizing a party of prospectors and meant to lay out a…
Being bankrupt and going in deeper every day did not dampen Russell's sanguine spirit or put a crimp in his tendency to speculate. In the spring of 1858, when every dollar was…
James Brown was the first to sign a contract under the new plan. Being one of the best plainsmen and freighters on the trails he delivered his consignment on schedule and in…
One day in 1847 he met his friend E. C. McCarty, wholesale merchant at Westport. "How would you like to try the freighting business," asked McCarty. "I've several customers in Santa Fe who…
Lesser men of his day and since, either through ignorance or misunderstanding, have flippantly labeled him an impractical visionary or reckless gambler. The fact is, he was neither. He carefully weighed each proposition…
As though to confirm their adverse opinion of him, Russell never exhibited a single characteristic of the frontiersman. He never lived in a log cabin, or cleared a patch of ground to…
A contemporary of the Settles', Ray Allen Billington, a prominent historian of the American West at Northwestern University, had a different view of William H. Russell. Writing at the same time, Billington noted:…
Various writers recall that he was known, in the parlance of his day, as a plunger: a risk taker, a gambler, a speculator. An early observer of Russell's business ventures, some of…
As one cons the history of Russell and Waddell and the record of their vast undertakings he is impressed again and again by the fact that many of their decisions,…
Fortune favored them in 1855 and 1856, and their profits from freighting military supplies those two years amounted to about $300,000. That was the only period of unbroken prosperity they…
From the very beginning of the vicious, bloody struggle to determine the status of Kansas as a free or slave state, Russell, Majors & Waddell, being slave owners in Missouri,…