Pony Takes Railroad into Sacramento
In June, 1860, the General Agent of the Pacific made another, more permanent change in mode of travel, this time east of Sacramento. Until then, the Pony Express, coming into the city, had…
Cribbing and Butterfield’s Frequent Service
THE FOURTH ESTATE of California's early years was a no-holds barred vocation in which the moral qualities, accuracy and objectiveness of one newspaper were held to be fair game for public ridicule in…
Road Over The Sierras
There is likely no more detailed and graphic description of the devastated and hazardous conditions existing along this main immigrant thoroughfare than that written by J. Ross Browne, who, afoot, negotiated the entire…
The Enigma Begins
The enigma begins at St. Joseph. In all the huzzas and hurlyburly that accompanied the send-off, no one apparently thought to record for posterity exactly the place in the city where the grand…
Pony Express Horses
The total bill for putting horseflesh under saddle was in the neighborhood of $87,000. At a $175 average for 500 mounts the company paid what appears to have been a going market price,…
Russell Purchases Hockaday
Through this maelstrom of congressional bickering and administrative ill-will, seemingly only W. H. Russell, the great opportunist, had a clear eye to the future. A month after Postmaster General Holt crippled Hockaday by…
Chorpenning’s Pony Express
George Chorpenning, antedating the Pony Express by a little less than two years, established a one-time run along his new route south of the Humboldt River. When surveying the road in the fall…
Early California Mail
More pertinent, geographically, are the relay express services of Governor Stephen W. Kearny of California and of Major Chorpenning. General Kearny, as military governor of the new territory freshly wrested from Mexico, established…
Butterfield Contract
Nine proposals for the contract were received by Postmaster General Aaron V. Brown. Being a southerner from Tennessee, he placed the hand of favor on the bid submitted by John Butterfield for a…
Feramorz Little’s Mules
His initial trip was a farcical epic. Fort Bridger, 124 miles distant, was the nearest speck of civilization east of Salt Lake City; beyond were 400 lonely miles to Fort Laramie. Years later,…
Paucity of Written Record
For of all the notable episodes in United States history, few have been so scantily annotated as the horseback mail, the trail of which has been indelibly—but only grossly—etched in the panorama of…
Whites and Indians
Though frontier race relations were complex and even free African Americans were unarguably second-class citizens in comparison to whites, many people ultimately recognized only two kinds of people: “whites” and Indians. The white category…
Free to Own Another Man
The Emancipation Proclamation appears to have been the catalyst that launched the unfortunate slave on a journey to his doom. That spring, according to Owens’ letter, the slave’s master, afraid he would lose his…
Black Population in the West
Exactly how many blacks traversed the continent is unclear, but they were only a tiny fraction of the entire emigration. In 1860, California’s population was 379,994, of which 200,335 traveled overland. There is no…
Black Emigrants Noted in Diaries
The presence of black emigrants who traveled west before the Civil War was an oddity occasionally noted in emigrants’ diaries. Anna Maria Goodell, for example, commented in 1854, “There is a darkey in the company.”…