Quick Facts – Pony Express Ride

A collection of historical tidbits about the Pony Express taken mostly from books, except as otherwise noted. This slider cycles through all of the Quick Facts in random order. I will be adding to these as I read through more sources. You can pause a slide by hovering your mouse over the Fact. To find Quick Facts on a particular topic, click on the appropriate tag in the sidebar. All Facts connected with places on the trail also appear under the appropriate state in the Route Reports section.

Mile 330: Fort Kearney
“Of the five historic trail ‘forts’—Kearney, Laramie, Hall, Boise, and Bridger—we were now approaching the first in point of geography, last in point of time. It was established in 1848 as a curb to the exuberant habits of the Indians and was the only one of the five actually to be built for the accommodation of soldiers (the other four were originally trading posts and were established much earlier). . . .In accordance with the casual habit of the day, the name was a duplication of an older and already abandoned fort on the Missouri River just below Table Creek.”

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 83-84

Dogtown and Dobytown
“Beginning in 1858 there were two famous—or infamous—appendages of Fort Kearny, primitive communities which supplied vital needs for civilians and soldiers alike. Eight miles to the east, just off the reservation line, was Valley City, or Dogtown. Just beyond the western line, two miles away and therefore a much bigger and livelier place, was Kearney City, or Dobytown. . . .

Monthly mail between Independence, Missouri, and Salt Lake City, Utah, began in the summer of 1850. In 1858 mail service went on a weekly basis, and with this began the systematic transportation of passengers, first by mail wagon, later by the famous Concord coaches. To facilitate this service, the company built stage stations at intervals of town or twelve miles. This was the actual beginning of Valley City and Kearney City. The former was related to a ‘swing station’ where horses were changed; the latter evolved from a ‘home station’ where drivers were changed and meals offered the passengers. . . .

The Pony Express of 1860-1861, operated by Russell, Majors & Waddell, of freighting fame, shared most of its stations with the Holladay company along the main Platte; accordingly, there were Pony Express stations at Valley City and in the Fort Kearny vicinity. Contrary to widespread impression, the Pony Express riders did not gallop up to Moses Sydenham’s sod [sutler] post near the Fort Kearny parade ground; they kept right on going to the log station west of the fort, and mail by stage or Pony Express was carried back to the fort from there.”

Merrill J. Mattes, The Great Platte River Road, p. 216-217

Mile 554: Lodgepole Creek Road
“The Lodgepole Creek Road was unknown until 1857 and was used very little until ’61, when the government routed the new mail stages that way. Within a year or two the Indians grew so belligerent that the mail was rerouted to avoid the Sioux country along the North Platte . . . and the Pole Creek Road stepped out of the staging limelight as abruptly as it had stepped in. In its few years of intense activity, running the gamut of Civil War drama, romance of the mail coach, swarming tumult of the emigrant trail, and the horror of Indian warfare, have won for it a permanent place in history.”

[N.B. The Lodgepole Trail runs (roughly from Ovid (at Mile 554) to Bridgeport (Mile 642) where it rejoins the Ash Hollow Road up from the South California Crossing. (Paten, pg. 145]

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 140

Mile 1134: Green River
“The trouble with the Green River Desert was not lack of water. There was plenty, but it was all in the Green River—’by far the most formidable stream to be met on this entire journey,’ said William Johnston, whose company was well in the forefront of the gold rush. He found it in full flood, a rushing torrent three hundred to four hundred feet wide and ten to twenty feet deep. . . .

The traders’ caravans and the early wagon trains skirted the desert proper to the southeast, remaining timidly near the Big Sandy until well within the angle of its confluence with the Green an then striking up the east bank of the great river about twenty miles to a crossing near the mouth of Slate creek. Later companies crossed almost at the mouth of the Big Sandy at what was called the Lombard Ferry. . . .

The Green in the month of June is a rare sample of a watercourse born of perpetual snowbanks. Its swollen current, racing down from icebound peaks and crisp and sparkling upland meadows, arrives in the hot sage flats swiftly but ponderously, and as cold as Greenland’s icy mountains.

It is almost unimaginable, but on this torrential sluice ordinary men, butcher, baker, and candlestick maker, launched their wives and young families in wagon beds. Taking such a liberty with the Green was surely the quintessence of something or other—maybe heroism, maybe just foolhardiness. . . .

Later there were ferries, but the earliest pioneers had to do with substitutes: catamaran rafts, made of braced logs dug out to hold the wagon wheels; ordinary rafts constructed hastily of any small timber available; sheet-iron or wooden boats fitted with wheels and previously driven in the caravan as vehicles.; and, most common, wagon beds caulked tight and with the naked bows stripped of canvas. . . .

And then, in the summer of ’47 came the ubiquitous Mormon and his ferryboats. By ’49 several were needed at the main crossings. It was a money-making venture, but the prices were ordinarily fair, ranging from three to four dollars a wagon.

[N.B. The Big Timber Pony Express Station site lies near Mile 1126 on the Pony Express Bikepacking Route, but is off the route to the southeast. To reach it, it looks like there is a cutoff road at about Mile 1123 that rejoins the Route around Mile 1127.

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 240-241

Mile 946: Willow Springs
“In time [the emigrants] passed. out of the poison-spring region, went over a snappy ridge, and came to Willow Springs at a distance of twenty-six miles from the ferry. In years of little travelit was the perfect oasis, pure water in a tiny willow grove surrounded by untainted grass. During heavy migrations the grass soon disappeared, and the cattle of the poor or improvident man went unfed at the end of a grueling day’s work. The water never failed.”

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 205-206

Mile 1088-1094: Dry Creek to Parting of the Ways
“From Pacific Creek the modern road parallels the trail to Dry Sandy Creek. This disappointing watercourse is ordinarily all that its name implies; but we, like the Forty-niners, were regarding it in the summer of a wet year, and the hot, sandy bottom between steep banks boasted a string of unappetizing stagnant ponds.

The emigrant ford is right at the bridge, and the trail, continuing north of the road for some time, angles to the south side and meanders through a wide curving gap toward the Little Sandy. In the gap, Sublette’s Cutoff splits from the original trail and wanders down the mountain, keeping to the right. Well within our view as we stood on the mountain it strikes the sage flat, passes the small rocky trail landmark called Haystack Butte and goes on and on interminably through a dreary waste.

We came to the forks and paused there, realizing that the solid unit of trail, which had come up the Sweetwater so heavily burdened with wagons and stock, had again frayed out into loose ends. First the long thread of Lander’s Cutoff had unloosed itself toward the north, and now the main cord was parting into two strands. As we had planned, we bore left with the road to Fort Bridger where the light soil of the mountain side was, in the old days, so pulverized that gusty dust clouds often hid from the bewildered driver all of his team except the wheelers.”

[N.B. Haystack Butte lies to the north of the Pony Express Bikepacking Route near the Little Sandy Station, which is also north of the route at around Mile 1102. More info about Haystack Butte here; More info about Parting of the ways here; More info about Dry Sandy Crossing here; ]

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 237

Russell's Stagecoach Moves to the Platte Route
On May 11, 1859, not even one month after the L & PPE coaches started running, Jones, Russell & Company purchased the United States mail contract from John M. Hockaday & Co. Hockaday and John Liggitt began the government contract in 1858 to transport mail from Saint Joseph, Missouri to Salt Lake City, Utah. The contract required mail service to Forts Kearney and Laramie, which left Jones and Russell with what they believed to be one choice. A United States mail contract provided security of income along with passenger and express fares, an opportunity difficult to ignore. They transferred the L & PPE line and operations north to the Platte Route.

Heather King Peterson, Colorado Stagecoach Stations, p. 25-26

Advantages of Mules
“The advantages of mules have been known since ancient times. Fully grown mules tend to have the height and musculature of their mother, while inheriting the leaner physique and more nimble legs of their jack father. This produces a hybrid with the strength, but nowhere near the weight, of the mother. The two most common draft-mule crosses today are mammoth jacks bred to black or gray Percheron mares, and the sorrel and dun mules produced by mating with Belgian mares. When mature, the hybrid offspring weigh as much as seven hundred pounds less than their mother, giving the finished mule an extraordinary strength-to-weight ratio and agility far beyond its roots in the horse. In the equine world, the most common adjective applied to mules is ‘athletic.’

The hybridization of closely related but not exactly matched species, like horses and donkeys, produces sterile offspring, and mules cannot reproduce themselves. (Donkeys have sixty-two chromosomes; horses have sixty-four. This creates a mule with sixty-three chromosomes, preventing a full “chain” of matches that can produce an embryo.) But the contributions from the more feral side of the donkey sire more than make up for the mule’s inability to reproduce itself. Mules endure heat much better than horses and can travel long distances without water. They require about half the feed of horses and don’t gorge on grain. The legs and hooves of a mule are stronger and tend not to ‘founder,’ or go lame, on rocky ground or with hard use. Mules live and continue to work until they are thirty years old, while most horses have finished their working lives at twenty. Another critical advantage is contributed by the donkey’s large eyes. Because mules’ eyes are set farther back on the head and are more D-shaped than a horse’s, their peripheral vision includes their hind feet, making them exceptionally sure-footed and confident in rough terrain.”

Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail, p. 35-36

Green River Desert
“In ’49, when the laboring, panting, exhausted line of animals and duct-caked humans arrived within ten miles of green River, they found broken country and no definite road. They must push and tug at the heavy wagons in the in the full heat of blazing noonday. Many collapsed and were loaded in the wagons by companions almost in like case. The poor beasts fell, were hastily cut loose, died, and added their bit to the discomfort of next week’s caravans. The only solution possible was to double-team and abandon some of the wagons, and this section of the cutoff was one of the two or three places of the whole overland trail where no one had time or reason to burn them.”

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 255

The Prairie Night Clock
“The stars of the Great Bear—the prairie night-clock—first began to pale without any seeming cause, till presently a faint streak of pale light dum i gurg, or the wolf’s tail, as it is called by the Persian began to shimmer upon the eastern verge of heaven. It grew and grew through the dark blue air . . .”

Richard Burton, The City of Saints, p. 131

Slade and Gilman Ranch
What is certain is that the division superintendent for the Pony Express who stopped to enlist the Gilman brothers in the crosscountry mail relay was a name that Mark Twain knew well. In writing about Joseph (Jack) Slade in Roughing It, Twain recalled a famous and notorious published description of the bad man: “From Fort Kearny, west, he was feared a great deal more than the Almighty.”

Joseph Slade was not a figment of Mark Twain’s imagination. Nor was he a tall tale. Slade is perhaps the most solid example that everyone in the employ of Russell, Majors & Waddell was not enjoying a glass of sarsaparilla and the Psalms in the evening. The Central Overland California & Pike’s Peak Express Company hired men who could get the job done, and some of those men were plainly outlaws. Joseph Slade was the most stunning example.

Christopher Corbett, Orphans Preferred, p. 135

Workshop Wagon
“A full-fledged t r a i n for crossing t h e p l a i n s was made up of twenty-five t o twenty-six wagons, or as sometimes stated twenty-five wagons and one mess. At times there was also a reserve mess wagon. There might be one or more provision wagons, an office wagon, and a workshop wagon. The last named unit was stocked with coils of rope, extra tires, jacks, pulleys, wheels, spokes, iron bars, and very often a small forge. A twenty-five wagon train was called a “bull outfit”. A train of less than this number of wagons was simply an ‘outfit.'”

Floyd Bresee, Overland Freighting in the Platte Valley 1850–1870, p. 29

Mile 2126-2148: Pacific House to Placerville
Fifteen miles above Hangtown [Placerville] the teams reached Pacific House, at fourteen, Bullion Bend, where a stage was held up and loot is supposed to be buried; at twelve, Sportsman’s Hall (named from the multitude of card sharks that frequented its tables) where the relay waited for the Pony Express rider on his mad dash. It was the chosen stopping place for teamsters freighting to the Nevada mines and had stable room for several hundred horses. Then they came to Five Mile House and on down to Hangtown Creek with all its water drained out into ditches to feed the big toms.'”

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 453

Mile 1280: Echo City, UT
“Exhibit A is Pulpit Rock, where, so the townspeople told us, Brigham Young stood to preach yo his followers in 1847 on the way to their new home in the Salt Lake Valley.”

[N.B. The historical marker is in the town, less than a mile from the Pony Express marker just before town. Also note, the Pony Express Bikepacking Route left the original Pony Express route around Mile 1232 (just past the Bear River station), and rejoins it in Echo.]

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 294

Panic of 1837
By the early 1840s, the post’s vast system of 150,000 miles of mail routes had unified an ever-expanding America, but the institution was one of many enterprises, both private and public, to find itself in deep financial trouble. A burst of wild economic excess and speculation had culminated in the great Panic of 1837, which set off a recession that dragged on for seven years. A third of the states defaulted on loans for building railroads, canals, and other overly ambitious projects. Many banks closed, the real estate bubble burst, businesses failed, and unemployment climbed. By 1842, the catastrophe’s ripple effect had left even the U.S. Treasury nearly penniless.

Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, p. 80

March to Fort Bridger
“When [Colonel Albert S.] Johnson at last joined the army [at Camp Winfield in November], he saw immediately that its present location would not suffice for winter quarters. Its only hope, he realized, was Fort Bridger, thirty-five miles away.

On November 6 [1857] began the desperate race for that sheltered valley before the animals failed completely. Intense cold froze the feet of the Dragoons on patrol and congealed the grease on the caissons axles. . . .The stock . . . died in such great numbers along the road that a soldier who followed the trail of the army in the summer of 1858 found carcasses of mules and oxen at every hundred steps. . . .

As Johnson suffered through this last stage of the 1857 campaign, is methodical nature caused him to investigate the army’s recent losses in order to ascertain its position. Three trains with 300,000 pounds of food, he knew, had been burned by the Mormons a month earlier. He learned also that the daring Porter Rockwell had stolen some 800 head of cattle belonging to Russell,, Majors & Waddell in the third week of October, and that another 300 animals had been run off by the Mormons just before the army left Ham’s Fork . . . [D]uring Alexander’s futile advance up Ham’s Fork and the final march to Fort Bridger, at least 3,000 head of cattle perished of starvation and cold. The military effectiveness of his force was badly impaired, too, for both batteries had only half their requisite number of horses and almost two-thirds of the Dragoons had no mounts at all.”

Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850-1859, p. 113-116

Mile 1850: Simpson Park Station
“At Simpson’s Park [on May 20, 1860], James Alcott was killed, the station burned, and the stock driven off during the Pah Ute War. Two Indians were employed here to herd the stock. Another of the employees was Giovanni Brutisch.”

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“When [William H.] Streeper reached Simpson’s Park he found the station burned, the stock gone, and the keeper, James Alcott dead. Hurrying on he met the east bound mule mail carrier who upon learning what had happened at Simpson’s Park, refused to go any further. Instead, he turned back with Streeper to Smith’s Creek.”

Settle and Settle, Saddles and Spurs, p. 142, 155

Pawnee Reputation
“On the other side of the camp—a curious contrast—guns and ammunition were being distributed, as there were reports of the Pawnees being collected some twelve miles in advance. The Pawnees have the name of being about the meanest and most rascally set of Indians in the whole country; more ready to bully than to fight, and most to pick off stragglers; as a tribe, they are at peace with the United States.”

William Chandless, Chandless, W. (1857). A Visit to Salt Lake, p. 57

Extortionated
“A middle-aged woman from Dover was a curious free-spoken person for a ‘saint,’ and almost put our men to the blush; for a very trifling gratuity she would have (and perhaps did) acted as the procuress of the girls of her people. On common-place subjects she talked sensibly; told me from having delayed so long at Atchison they were already short of provisions, and got only one pound of bacon a week each (perhaps including all the children); complained bitterly that the settler would not sell her any butter, he would keep it all for the ‘captain’s lady’ (the captain of the United States’ troops)—that in a free country !—besides, he had ‘extortionated’ her for other trifles; but—and this she told with immense gusto—she had sold his wife some worsted stockings, and put just as much extra on the price of them.”

William Chandless, Chandless, W. (1857). A Visit to Salt Lake, p. 38-39

Emigrant Characteristics
Most of the emigrants shared certain characteristics as a group: they were men and women who had already made one or more moves before in a restless search for better lands. They were children of parents who themselves had moved to new lands. If ever a people could be said to have been “prepared” for the adventure of the Overland Trail, it would have to be these men and women. They possessed the assortment of skills needed to make the journey and start again. They had owned land before, had cleared land before, and were prepared to clear and own land again. And they were young. Most of the population that moved across half the continent were between sixteen and thirty-five years of age.

Lillian Schlissel, Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey, p. 27-28

Alexander Doniphan
“One of [Boggs’s] militia commanders in 1838 was Alexander Doniphan. He was a famous jury lawyer, probably the best in all Missouri, and it followed naturally that he commanded six militia regiments. He was a mighty man – and a righteous one. So when General Lucas captured Joseph and other leaders of the Church and, in obedience to Boggs’s Extermination Order, tried them by courtmartial and ordered them to be shot for treason in the public square at Far West, Doniphan took a stand. Called upon to execute the condemned, he refused. “It is cold-blooded murder,” he wrote his general. “I will not obey your order. My brigade shall march for Liberty tomorrow morning at 8 o’clock, and if you execute these men I will hold you responsible before an earthly tribunal, so help me God.” His troops marched, the order was not executed, and the chastened general, after holding the condemned prisoners over the winter, finally arranged for them to escape.

“Even before that, Doniphan had tried to deal justly with the Mormons. When they got into trouble at their earliest Missouri settlements, in Jackson County, Doniphan, as a member of the Legislature, had put through the bill which set off two new counties, Davies and Caldwell, in the unoccupied part of the state and arranged for the Mormons to take one of them. He had also represented Joseph in various suits brought against him; during one of them it had been the prophet’s whim to study law under him …. He was very much of Benton’s type, a crammed, insatiable mind, a conspicuous integrity. This is the image of the leader in frontier democracy, the kind of man who was called an empire-builder before the phrase lost its meaning. He also was to go west in ’46.”

Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision, 1846, p. 86

Russell, Majors & Waddell's Complaint to Congress
“When in 1860 members of the firm Russell, Majors & Waddell came to meditate on their experience in the Mormon War, they were to consider themselves victims of their own generosity and the army’s eminent folly. In that year they presented a claim to the United States Congress for certain sums which they felt the Government in all fairness owed them. When they had been required by the War Department in 1857 to transport an unexpectedly large amount of supplies to Utah on very short notice, they had not demanded a new contract. Instead, they had accepted the promise of the Assistant Quartermaster at Fort Leavenworth that Congress would reward the contractors with a fair profit, or at the very least would protect them from financial loss. Subsequent events proved the worthlessness of this of this guarantee. Furthermore, the contractors complained that their trains could have reached Utah unharmed by the Mormons if the army had not interfered with their normally rapid rate of of travel by forcing them to move with elements of the expedition. Even worse, Van Vliet had ordered the trains in advance of the main army to halt at the Green River, where they were compelled to sit in idleness until the Mormons pounced on them.

What most enraged the managers of the company, however, was the fact that three of their trains had been destroyed almost within sight of the army and after two of its senior officers had received ample warning of impending trouble.”

Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850-1859, p. 110

Bullwhackers
“Many young men were seeking a means to earn their their way to the western gold camps, and freighters took advantage of this situation by paying a bonus of ten dollars per month to any teamster who would take his discharge at the far end, thus reducing the payroll. . . . Such empty wagons as were not sold in the West could be hooked in tandem, three to five to a team, for the return trip.”

Henry Pickering Walker, The Wagonmasters (1966), p. 87

The First Leg of the Emigrant Trail
“It was one of the great American experiences, this first stage of the trail in the prairie May. It formed the symbols we have inherited. The ladies knitted or sewed patchwork quilts. They extemporized bake ovens for bread, made spiced pickles of the “prairie peas” and experimented with probably edible roots, gathered wild strawberries to serve with fresh cream. They shook down into little cliques, with a chatter of sewing circles, missionary talk, and no charity for any nubile wench who might catch a son’s eye. Tamsen Donner wrote home – there was a pause for letter writing whenever someone moving eastward was encountered – that linsey proved the best wear for children. They put a strain on clothes – this was a fairy tale for children: the absorbing train, the more absorbing country, bluffs to scale, coyote pups to catch and tame, the fabulous prairie dogs, the rich, exciting strangeness of a new life with school dismissed. The sight of the twisting file of white-tops from any hill realized all the dreams of last winter along the Sangamon, and the night camp was a deeper gratification still. The wagons formed their clumsy circle, within reach of wood and water. Children whooped out to the creek or the nearest hill. The squealing oxen were watered in an oath-filled chaos, then herded out to graze. Tents went up outside the wagons and fires blazed beside them – the campfire that has ritual significance to Americans. The children crowded back to stand in the perfume of broiling meat. The most Methody of them were singing hymns – Parkman walked into a search party who were settling the question of regeneration while they hunted their oxen. Glee clubs sang profaner songs, sometimes organized by the most meticulous choirmasters. An incurable Yankeeness extemporized debates, political forums, and lectures on the flora of the new country or the manifest destiny of the American nation. Oratory pulsed against the prairie sky. Be sure that nature was served also and the matrons who distrusted the unmarried girls had cause. This was the village on wheels, and the mind and habit of the village inclosed it, beside those carmine fires which Hollywood need only show us against white canvas to awaken our past. The fires lapsed, the oxen came grumping into the inclosure, and one fell asleep hearing the wolves in endless space. . . . This is what the grandfathers remembered when they told us stories.”

Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision, 1846, p. 158-159

Joseph Smith
“But it must not be forgotten that, during the last two years of his life, Joseph’s paranoia had increased. He had always been drunk on glory, now he was drunk on power. His fury fell alike on those who questioned him within the Church, the Missouri Pukes, and the Congress and President of the United States. In musical-comedy uniforms, he was lieutenant general of the Nauvoo Legion; its rituals were fantastic but its muskets were just as usable as any the Pukes had. He had announced himself as a candidate for President against Polk and Henry Clay – his platform was mostly apocalypse but included a plank for the seizure of the West – and several hundred missionaries were stumping the East to get him votes. He had dropped some of the secrecy that had hidden the doctrine of polygamy; he and many of his hierarchy were practising, it with a widening range that could not be altogether covered by denials.

“All these were blunders; the last was the worst blunder. There had always been dissent in Israel, backsliders, apostates, a sizable if futile bulk of opposition. Suddenly opposition to polygamy crystalized in a revolt led by men of courage and genuine intelligence. They struck hard, establishing in Nauvoo a newspaper which def nounced Joseph. He struck back, and the newspaper printed one l issue only. Joseph’s marshal, assisted by Joseph’s Legion, pied its type and pounded its press to pieces in the street. The rebels fled. The Illini, especially the politicians who had been sold out, needed f just this to produce their own uprising. Illinois had had enough of the Mormons, the mob rose, and Joseph was killed.”

Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision, 1846, p. 87

Provisional State of Deseret
“When the Mormons arrived in the Salt Lake Basin, their plans for their New Zion envisaged the creation of a vast empire in the West, with a number of far-flung settlements radiating from the central hub of Salt Lake City. Thus their ProvisionalState of Deseret encompassed in its boundaries all of present-day Utah and most of New Mexico, Nevada, and California, with some of Wyoming and the Pacific Northwest included. Although Congress severely reduced this domain when it delineated the Territory of Utah, the Church established colonies at San Bernardino, Carson Valley, and Limhi, on the Salmon River. These missions were placed at strategic locations on the western and northern approaches to the Valley, but the eastern route of travel, through what is now southern Wyoming, still lay open.”

Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850-1859, p. 35

Winter Over the Central Route
One of the most damaging arguments put forward against [the Central Route] was that it could not be traveled in the winter time. . . .

The following May {Leavenworth & Pikes Peak] bought the J. M. Hockaday & Company mail contract, stations, and stock on a line extending from Independence, Missouri, to Salt Lake City, Utah. Now Russell was also in the business of carrying United States Mail. In May, 1860, the Post Office Department cancelled Chorpenning’s contract from Salt Lake City to Placerville, California, and awarded it to Russell, which action gave him two mail contracts covering the entire length of the Central Route. He was ready now to demolish, by actual demonstration, the argument that that route was not adapted to travel at all seasons of the year.

Settle and Settle, "Orgin of the Pony Express," Missouri Historical Society Bulletin Vol. 26, No.3, April 1960, p. 209

Buffalo Grass
“The Wind had very much Freshened, and as we got down into the valley, which was here two or three miles wide on each wide of the stream, Captain O’Brien started to light a cigar. This was a great feat for anyone to do, in such a wind, on horseback. But the Captain from his former service in the army claimed that he could light a cigar in a tornado. The Captain did light a cigar and threw the match away, which he thought had gone out. In a flash a blaze started up in a northerly course toward the river. The grass was fine and silky; the ‘prairie-grass ‘ had not got in that country at that time, and there was only short, matted buffalo-grass.”

Eugene Ware, Indian Wars of 1864, p. 59

Mile 582: Pole Creek Station No. 2
“Site unidentified, vicinity of Lodgepole, Nebraska. The route was along Lodgepole Creek, future route of the Union Pacific Railroad into Cheyenne.”

[N.B. This location is not on the Pony Express Bikepacking Route. To get here, you’d have to turn west on Road 10 at Mile 566, then north on Road 149 (which becomes Highway 17 F). The marker is located 1 mile south of Lodgepole on Highway 17F between Lodgepole and I-80. According to one source, “Pole Creek No. 2 Station also known as the “Texas” Pony Express Station was not one of the original station sites. This station was put into service in July 1861 when a new mail contract called for twice a week Pony Express and a near daily stagecoach going both east and west. The original stations, were too far apart for the use of a stagecoach and thus the ‘Hughes Ranch’ in the Chappell area and ‘Texas’ sites were added.”]

Merrill J. Mattes, The Great Platte River Road, p. 471

Loss of Romance of the Trail
And partly what Burton saw along the trail reflected the change that had come in the trail itself. By 1860 much of the romance had gone out of an overland crossing, along with much of the uncertainty and danger. The human race had begun already to pollute its new environment; frontier naturalness and health and freedom had begun already to give way to the second stage of settlement, which is generally merely backward, dirty, and deprived. The Saints who stuck with the Gathering, and lived in tight Saintly communities in one of the valleys of Zion, had a much better chance to retain or to develop the qualities that Richard Burton would have thought civilized than those who “went Gentile” out along the trail.

Wallace Stegner, The Gathering of Zion, p 297

The Plains as an Obstacle
“If it is borne in mind that the objective of most of these exploring parties was the Pacific coast or the Rocky Mountains, it is easy to understand how the Plains themselves, with their aridity and their nomadic Indians, assumed at once the character of an obstacle blocking the path of the explorer intent on what lay beyond.”

Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains, p. 141

Mail Contracts and the Mormon War
[William M.F.] Magraw lost his contract [to provide mail service between Salt Lake City and Independence] in 1856 for unsatisfactory service and was succeeded by a Mormon, Hiram Kimball, the new low bidder. Brigham Young then took over Kimball’s contract, planing a great Mormon commercial enterprise which would carry not only the mails but all goods between the Missouri River and Utah. . . . [T]he contract was summarily annulled in June of 1857, on the pretext that Kimball was late in fulfilling its terms. The charge was true but only because winter blizzards had, as usual, delayed the mails. . . . Magraw’s unhappiness at losing his contract, and Mormon unhappiness at losing theirs, were contributory causes to the ensuing ‘war’ of 1857-58.”

John D. Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, p. 241

Local Knowledge
“I have always wondered why it is that all information extant on any given historic spot is always somewhere else and the immediate neighborhood is in complete and blissful ignorance.”

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 30

Cholera Along the Platte
“The swampy drainage of the Platte extended several hundred yards from the main river channels. The expanse of standing pools of brackish water and salty, alkaline mudflats often began just a few steps from the wagon ruts. This created a natural petri dish for the microorganism responsible for causing cholera, and the pioneers were adding fresh host material for bacteria-human waste, animal manure, the carcasses and offal of slaughtered animals-every day. Biologists now know that the alkaline deposits that occurred naturally along the Platte River flats mimicked the salty delta conditions of the bacteria’s native India, encouraging the growth of Vibrio cholerae in the squalid waste piles of the camps. The anarchy of latrines in the camps festered overnight, becoming killers for the next arriving train. When the river rose after storms, cholera traveled downstream several miles in a single night.

“Viewed in this way, the largest land migration in history created a fascinating intersection between human need and biological self-destruction. For 450 miles the Platte offered the pioneers everything they required in an otherwise arid, hostile environment—clear navigation points west, water, fresh game, and timber for cooking fires. But the Platte also provided ideal conditions for disease: warm temperatures, alkali soil, and mud holes that acted as stewpots for organic waste.”

Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail, p. 177-78

Mile 927: Emigrant Gap, WY
“Our road started uphill and rose higher and higher, but very gently. Wyoming makes less fuss about its elevation than any place I know. To our left was the wide sandy pass used by migrants of the sixties. A later generation of indigenous Casperites have named it Emigrant Gap, one of a long series of Emigrant Gaps that puncture the trail clear to the Pcific coast. The highway uses a parallel pass nearby. Just beyond it we found Poison Spider Creek, all the wrong colors for respectable water and very scummy, but wholesome in comparison with the neighboring supply, for the emigrants now had a new trail bugbear—alkali.

The travelers had seen alkali water along the Platte, but with the river running near by, the discolored pools were little temptation to the cattle. Now the migration wallowed in billowing dust (also tinctured with alkali) that choked and almost blinded the animals. Their ears, ey rims, and nostrils were coated an eighth of an inch thick, and the implacable brassy sun baked it solid. Anyting that looked like water caused a rush in its direction. . . .

And here again, it was all a matter of preparedness. After the enormous migrations of ’49 and ’50 had learned what not to do, later comers handled the fifty-odd miles of semidesert much better. After all the was good water at short enough intervals to preserve the stock if they could be kept from the poison pools between.”

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 202

Mormon Exodus to Far West, MO
At Far West began the first attempt at the City of Enoch, the New Jerusalem, and to Far West the faithful began to gather. From apostasy-riddled Kirtland, on July 6, 1838 started a caravan composed of fifty-eight wagons and 515 people and hundreds of cattle, sheep, swine-the first of the villages on wheels that would rock through Mormon history. Like most of those later caravans it was fleeing trouble and hunting sanctuary. Unfortunately, on July 4, two days before it set out, Joseph’s counselor Sidney Rigdon had made a fire-eating speech at Far West, daring the Gentiles to come on and threatening what would happen to them if they did. The Lord three days later sent a sign, ambiguous and troubling, by blasting the flagpole in the square of Far West with a thunderbolt. Rumors of Rigdon’s words and rumors of the Mormon secret avengers who called themselves the Sons of Dan spread through Gentile Missouri growing more fearsome with each repeating, and all Missouri that was not already in arms to harass the Mormons flew to arms to repel them, When the Kirtland company dragged wearily in on October 4 they found not sanctuary but bloody crisis. Missourians and Danites were raiding each other and burning farms and looting. On October 26 they clashed at the Battle of Crooked River, with casualties on both sides. Three days later two hundred men, either militiamen or mobbers ( the Mormons saw no reason to make a distinction), burst upon a little group of Mormon families gathered for safety at Haun’s Mill. They killed several at the first fire. The women and children ran screaming for the woods, men and boys dove for shelter into the blacksmith shop. The mobbers put their guns to the cracks and shot them as they huddled together or tried to hide behind the forge. When the women crept back later they found seventeen dead and fifteen others shot to bi~s but still living. Stiff with horror, terrified for their own lives if the mob should return, they dragged the bodies of their husbands and sons across the yard and dumped them into the well, and with their wounded escaped to Far West.

Wallace Stegner, The Gathering of Zion, p 20

Mile 228: Kiowa Station
“Near Kiowa Station the nature of the terrain changed. The hitherto smooth slopes broke into rain-gutted saddles and deep-washed gullies. The wagons had steered a dizzy course like a line of ants disturbed.”

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner,p. 75

"Finding" Missing Stock
“[A] number of overlanders ruefully discovered that even when a horse trade had been accomplished they could not be absolutely certain that the horse was definitely theirs, since a fellow emigrant, from whom the horse had initially been stolen, occasionally came up to claim his property. . . .

There was also a profitable variation on this deceitful tactic. Indians would steal horses or other stock, make an arrangement on a certain price for ‘finding’ the animas with the emigrants from whom they had stolen them, and then quickly appear with the animals to claim the reward. Overlanders suspected Indians of employing this strategem as early as 1843.”

John D. Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, p. 163

Misnaming Plains Animals
“A further fact worth remembering about the Plains animals is that most of those peculiar to the Plains have been popularly misnamed. The buffalo is the bison, the prairie dog is a marmot, the rabbit is a true hare. This is suggestive of what happened when a people having their background in a humid, forested region came out into a new environment. The point is not important except as a symptom of the Easterner’s misunderstanding of the West.”

Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains, p. 41-42

Russell's Stagecoach Company's Debt
No amount of positive publicity, however, resolved the unpaid debts the L & PPE continued to incur. Although the line ran a regular schedule, operating costs exceeded passenger fare receipts and the mail contract rate. By October 28, 1859, the line owed creditors $525,532. Russell, Majors and Waddell, a creditor of approximately $100,000, bought the L & PPE rescuing its own investment. The L & PPE’s largest indebtedness was for buying and more fully equipping the Hockaday mail line. William Russell organized a new company, the Central Overland California & Pike’s Peak Express Company (COC & PP) on November 23, 1859, and reclaimed the stage line from Russell, Majors and Waddell. The same principals involved themselves along with several more individuals as incorporators of the new entity. In August 1860, the Post Office Department awarded the mail contract to the Western Stage Company with delivery service from Omaha, Nebraska to Denver, only complicating the COC & PP’s fragile business. The COC & PP lost most of its mail and express business to and from Denver to its new competitor.

Heather King Peterson, Colorado Stagecoach Stations, p. 26-27

Mile 689: Robidoux Pass
“The river lapped at the very base of Scott’s Bluff. The wagons must go inland. This was the more difficult because the bluff is not an isolated rocky formation, but the end of a line of hills. Several more of less parallel canyons break through, and of these Mitchell’s Pass, used by the highway, is the best and shortest and lies nearest the river; but it was not passable to the early migrations. Probably it was obstructed by fallen rock and debris. Instead the wagons toiled through Robidoux Pass, the next canyon to the south. . . .

Robidoux Canyon or Pass is reached from the town of Gering. One proceeds first over a decided rise and then down into a large circular valley of loose sandy loam. The emigrants’ columns raised storms of dust through which exposure of Scott’s Bluff showed fitfully until they reached the canyon and entered its obscuring walls. The dust was bad for lungs and equally so for eyes. Helen Carpenter’s little dog became entirely blinded and caused her mistress some bad hours by getting lost in the billowing clouds that smothered the teams. Many stated that they suffered more acutely from eyestrain and from cracked and bleeding lips than from any other cause.

Graves grew thick and thicker.They were no longer approached on paths worn smooth by enquiring emigrants who trudged up from the road to read the crude marker and learn who lay below. Now the travelers were too intent upon their own discomfort to bother . . . And still the westbound families camped near and, unless the smell was offensive, even on the graves in stoical disinterest.

The diarists raved about the distant beauty of Scott’s Bluff. It gave off romance in practically visible emanations, but they seldom mention being comfortable there.”

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 148-149

End of the Pony Express
But Indian resistance and financial woes, serious as they were, did not bury the Pony Express. Technology did. About two months after the first mochila left St. Joseph, Congress authorized funding to build a transcontinental telegraph. Crews from Nebraska and what is now western Nevada began working toward each other, erecting poles and stringing wire along the Pony Express route. The lines met on Salt Lake City’s Main Street. On October 24, 1861, Western Union ceremoniously linked the two segments and made near instantaneous, coast-to-coast communications a reality. Two days later the now-obsolete Pony Express closed its doors. Mail that was already underway continued to its destination, with the last mochila arriving in San Francisco on November 20, 1861. The Pony’s parent company, the Central Overland California & Pike’s Peak Express Co., soon fell into bankruptcy and was acquired by “Stagecoach King” Ben Holladay. That operation continued under a new name, the Overland Stage Company.

National Park Service, Auto Tour Route Interpretive Guide–Utah, p. 45

Five Weather Phenomena of the Plains
“The five weather phenomena -hot winds and chinooks, northers, blizzards, and hailstorms – are all localized in the Great Plains country. Four of the five bring distress and economic ruin to man and beast and crop ; yearly they take their toll, amounting in the aggregate to millions of dollars; they are a significant part of the unusual conditions which civilization had to meet and overcome in the Great Plains.”

Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains, p. 26

Route Between Fort Laramie and Horse Creek
“That day we marched thirty-seven miles, passing the ranch of Beauvais, five miles from Fort Laramie ; Bordeaux ranch, ten miles from Fort Laramie; the ‘First Ruins,” so called, eighteen miles; and the Woc-a-pom-any agency, twenty-eight miles. We camped at the mouth of Horse Creek, which was thirty-seven miles from Fort Laramie. This Horse Creek was the scene of a celebrated ancient treaty with the Indians [Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851], but which was no longer observed or recognized. But there had been heretofore many provisions in it which were referred to as the provisions of the ‘Horse Creek Treaty.”

“The ruins, first and second, were ruins of stone stations which had been put up by ranchmen for the overland express company running through to Salt Lake; but the express company, for the time being, was knocked out of existence, so that there was at the time of which I speak no mail, stage or express carried over the road except by soldiers. There was also a pile of stone about two feet high and ten feet square, where the celebrated Gratton massacre had taken place. This has been written of so often that I will not refer to it, except to say that a lieutenant with a few men was sent to deal with some Indians, several years before, and make them surrender some property, and having a piece of artillery, the Indians being obstinate, he fired over the heads of the Indians to scare them, and the Indians immediately massacred the whole detachment. . . .

“The road from Fort Laramie to Horse Creek, almost the entire distance, was sandhills and deep dust. The dust was almost insufferable. There was but little air stirring, and the long line of horsemen kept the dust in the air so that it was very difficult to breathe.”

Eugene Ware, Indian Wars of 1864, p. 301-303

Mile 1795: Route Alternate
At the Pony Express Monument marked on the XP Route map just past Mile 1794, there are two possible routes.

The first turns southwest and heads more or less straight to Robert’s Station. The distance is about 10 miles. This is the route followed by the official XP Bikepacking Route and marked on the BLM route of the Pony Express Trail (around Mile 67–https://ridewithgps.com/routes/34091538). This is the route the Simpson Expedition took (Jesse G. Petersen, A Route for the Overland Stage, p. 61).

Jan’s “True as accessible” route at Mile 1676 (https://ridewithgps.com/routes/34516845?privacy_code=ESM1W5E3dAJJhaEI) continues straight at this point (northwest on Highway 278 through Garden Pass Canyon) to go north over Mt. Hope before turning southwest to Robert’s Station. This route is 14 miles, and seems to include more climbs than the southern route. It also may offer access to numerous springs, as yet unscouted. This route is marked on the US Topo map as the Pony Express Route.

If Burton’s mileage estimates are reasonably accurate, the historical route seems to go north around Mt. Hope.

Cross Moonshine [Diamond] Valley. After 7 miles a sulphurous spring and grass [future site of Sulphur Springs Station?]. Twelve miles beyond ascend the divide [Sulphur Springs Ridge, according to Peterson]; no water; fuel and bunch-grass plentiful. Then a long divide. After 9 miles, the station on Roberts’ Creek, at the E. end of Sheawit, or Roberts’ Springs Valley [Kobeh Valley]. 28 Miles

Richard Burton, The City of Saints, p. 512

Lexicon: “Simpson indicated that the natives of the area called the stream She-o-wi-te, which he understood to mean Willow Creek, and that is what he decided to call the stream.” It later came to be known as Roberts Creek, after Bolivar Roberts (Jesse G. Petersen, A Route for the Overland Stage, p. 62).

Mile 1795: Route Alternate

Pony's Accomplishments
His [Pony Expresses’] work—that’s an interesting point. It may be well to cast the account, to see just what he did do.

First, consider his speculating founder. For the optimistic, hopeful Russell he accomplished precisely nothing, except to help push him deeper into the mire of debt and, hence, disrepute, remitting to him only a timeless fame and memory.

As for the telegraph, it’s been said that the brass key followed in the Pony’s train, as he virtually pulled the wire ends together. Truthfully, the honor is not his; the staccato messages would have come anyway. . . .

Well, surely the Pony must be given credit as the forerunner of the Pacific Railroad, so profoundly forecast when Mayor Jeff Thompson slapped the hindquarter of the first impatient steed at St. Joseph. . . . No, Russell’s brief hope was only the predecessor, not the pathfinder, and neither the cause nor procurer, of the iron horse.

What, then, did the fame-ridden charger do? Plainly, he carried the mail. That was his means to the end, and the end was Russell’s gamble.

Roy S. Bloss, Pony Express—The Great Gamble, 138

The Pony Express Was Not an End in Itself
“The Pony Express was not an end in itself, but a means to an end. There had been previous suggestions for the establishment of a fast overland express, and an attempt was made inn Congress in 1855 to provide such a service, but these efforts did not succeed. With the establishment of the overland stage lines a rivalry had arisen between Butterfield and the ‘Central’ routes . . .

During the winter of 1859-60, while Mr. William H. Russell was in Washington, he discussed the overland mail question with Senator Gwin of California. The Senator contended that it was necessary to demonstrate the feasibility of the Central route before he would be able to get from Congress a subsidy to reimburse the firm for the undertaking. The plan appealed to Russell and he agreed to put through the enterprise.”

LeRoy Hafen, The Overland Mail: 1849–1869, p. 164-169

Mile 82: Log Chain Station
“David M. Locknane’s station (Log Chain of later accounts) was located on a branch of the Grasshopper river, and was termed by Burton ‘Big Muddy Station.’ It is said that an early settler who lived nearby made good money during the spring months by renting his log chains to freighters whose vehicles became mired in the mud of this cr0ssing (interviews of George A. Root with old settlers). This was the home of “Old Bob Ridley” (Robert Sewell), a very popular stage driver on the eastern division between Atchison and Fort Kearny.–Overland Stage, pp. 193-195.”

George Root, "Pike's Peak Express Companies," Part III, Kansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 8 (1944) p. 515, note 297

Mile 1: Kansas
“Landing in Bleeding Kansas—she still bleeds—we fell at once into ‘Emigration Road,’ a great thoroughfare, broad and well worn as a European turnpike or a roman military route, and undoubtedly the best and the longest natural highway in the world.

“For five miles the line bisected a bottom formed by a bend in the river, with about a mile’s diameter at the neck. The scene was of a luxuriant vegetation. A deep tangled wood rather a thicket or a jungle than a forest of oaks and elms., hickory, basswood, and black walnut, poplar and hackberry (Celtis crassifolia) box elder, and the common willow (Salix longifolia), clad and festooned, bound and anchored by wild vines, creepers, and huge llianas, and sheltering an undergrowth of white alder and red sumach, whose pyramidal flowers were about to fall, rested upon a basis of deep black mire, strongly suggestive of chills fever and ague. After an hour of burning sun and sickly damp, the effects of the late storms, we emerged from the waste of vegetation, passed through a straggling ‘neck o’ the woods,’ whose yellow inmates reminded me of Mississippian descriptions in the days gone by, and after spanning some very rough ground we bade adieu to the valley of the Missouri, and emerged upon the region of the Grand Prairie which we will pronounce ‘perrairey.'”

Richard Burton, The City of Saints, p. 16-17

Russell's Freighting Expands
While Majors was expanding his freighting business in the latter 1840’s and early 1850’s Waddell and Russell were reaching out in various directions at Lexington and elsewhere. In 1850 Russell, James Brown, and John S. Jones formed a partnership, called Brown, Russell & Company, and contracted to deliver at least 600,000 pounds of military stores in Santa Fe for 14% cents per pound. This was the largest contract for the transportation of government sup-plies ever let at Fort Leavenworth up to that time. In addition Brown also sent out 30 wagons of his own loaded with military stores. From September 14 to October 2, more than three months past the usual starting time, Brown, Russell & Company put four trains of 25 wagons each and one of 15 on the road to Santa Fe. These were organized into two caravans, with Brown himself in charge of the one in the lead. In the latter part of November this train ar-rived at the old Pecos pueblo, 45 or 50 miles from Santa Fe. Here it was stalled by a heavy mountain blizzard. Since they could not travel Brown rode into Santa Fe to report the situation to the commandant of the garrison and ask permission to lay over until better conditions prevailed. Immediately after arriving he suffered a severe attack of typhoid fever and erysipelas from which he died on December 5.

When he did not return at the time he said he would, his assistant, Charles O. Jones, brother of John S. Jones, rode into Santa Fe to ascertain the cause of the delay. He made the same request that Brown did, but was refused. Moreover, the commandant delivered an ultimatum that unless the caravan moved immediately he would bring it in himself at the contractor’s expense. There being no alternative Jones returned to the camp to do his best. He forced the caravan through to Santa Fe, but with the loss of most of the oxen. Forage alone for the animals cost the firm $14,000. Russell presented to congress a claim for losses amounting to $39,800, but it was several years before it was paid. The other two trains wintered in the neighborhood of Bent’s fort and went on to their destination in the spring. In 1851 Russell and John S. Jones, under the name of Jones & Russell, got a two-year contract to deliver government stores in New Mexico. This was the first time contracts for more than one year were given.

Settle and Settle, "The Early Careers of William Bradford Waddell and William Hepburn Russell: Frontier Capitalists," Kansas Historical Quarterly Vol. 26, No.4, Winter 1960, p. 367-68

Waiting at Ham's Fork
“We passed the Rattlesnake Hills [or Granite Mountains] and Sweetwater Mountains and crossed the Rookies at South Pass.

We drove on the west slope of the mountains till we reached Dry Sandy Creek. Here we had poor water and heavy, sandy roads, and our cattle were getting weak from the long journey. It was slow traveling down this stream, and we would have to double our teams to get through the sandy streaks.

We went from here on down Big Sandy Creek, and across to Green River near where Granger now is.

We had quite a hard time in crossing this stream.

Here we found a sort of trading post, and they had farmed a little. Rennick found some potatoes here and bought some. They were the first vegetables we had had since leaving Leavenworth, and it was a treat to us all.

Here we laid over, as we were in no hurry now. Colonel Van Vliet had gone into Salt Lake City, and Brigham Young refused to allow the soldiers and their supply trains to enter the city. The Mormons had an armed force stationed along the road out, nearly to old Fort Bridger, one hundred miles from Salt Lake City, and they were building fortifications to keep the government trains out. There were twenty-five hundred armed Mormons stationed along this road.

Colonel Van Vliet came back, and when he met the first train, ordered them to turn back to Ham’s Fork and stop till further orders. He left part of his escort with them, exchanged part of his mules, and rode back to Fort Laramie as fast as he could, changing mules at each train and ordering each train to stop at Ham’s Fork.

We were twenty-six miles from the Fork when he met us.

We rested here a while, then drove in and camped near the other trains. There were four trains ahead of us.

There was a fine camping place with plenty of good water and fine grass for our cattle.

Other trains kept coming in every day or two.”

William Clark, "A Trip Across the Plains in 1857," Iowa Journal of History and Politics, 20 (1922), p. 192

Mormon Land Rights in Utah
“U.S. President Buchanan [in 1858] even weighed in on the land issue in Utah saying, ‘The land you live upon was purchased by the United States and paid for out of their treasury. The proprietary right and title to it is in them, and not in you.’ Church distribution and ‘ownership’ of the land in the territory was alarming, because the Church leadership had no legal proof or right to the large amount of land they claimed. Now that the United States owned the land that would become Utah, anyone could buy the land that Church members were now living on. The 1841 Preemption Act allowed any citizen over 21 to buy 160 acres of land for $1.25 an acre. In order for a citizen to claim land under the Preemption Act, the land needed to be surveyed by federal surveyors and Indian claims to land would need to be settled. Federal land surveyors would need to come to Utah. “

Raelyn M. Embleton, Racial Conflict in Early Utah: Mormon, Native American and Federal Relations, p. 9

Cause of the Paiute War
“The latter author points out that the real cause of this attack [The May 7 attack by Paiute Indians on the station of J. O. Williams, in which seven men were killed and the house burned] is not definitely known, but two stories exist, both of which blame tho occupants of William’ station. One account charges that they seized several young Bannock squaws (allies of the Pah-Utes), leading to a punitive expedition by the red men, and another that the station keeper, J. O. Williams, himself stole a horse of a Pah-Ute leading to retribution on this score. Even before this attack it was reported that 30 horses belonging to the Pony Express had been stolen by the Indians (San Francisco dispatch, April 27, in New York Daily Tribune, May 8, 1860). William B. Russell replied that inasmuch as the Express still operated, there could be no foundation for the rumor.—Leavenworth Daily Times, May 10, 1860.”

George Root, "Pike's Peak Express Companies," Part IV, Kansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1944) p. 58, n. 373

Early California Mail
“[U]nder Mexican rule, California had depended for mail service upon the irregular arrival of supply vessels and couriers, and the convenience of the commandants. The United States military authorities improved upon this by the. establishment of a regular service between their posts, which was open to the public; and by sending occasional messengers to Washington City.April 17, 1848, the military authorities dispatched ‘Kit’ Carson with the first United States mail ever carried overland from the Pacific to the Atlantic.”

LeRoy Hafen, The Overland Mail: 1849–1869, p. 54

Rugged Individualism and Manifest Destiny
“Over the summer, we camped at small-town public parks and the public corrals dozens of times, across two thousand miles of America. We lived on the public space established by the pioneers. Rugged individualism and manifest destiny, for which the West is still celebrated, are fine things to believe in, but they never existed as abstractions. People were desperate and they needed free land and free places to camp, which government decided to supply, and still does. This national legacy was one of the best discoveries of crossing the Oregon Trail, but we never would have found it without detaching ourselves from the umbiclical cord of the interstates and the motel chains, forcing ourselves to forage every night for a place to stay.”

Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail, p. 347

First Stagecoach Service
“John M. and Isaac Hockaday advertised a monthly passenger-coach service to Salt Lake in 1854 in association with [William] Magraw. They began laying the groundwork for what become the first effective stage service on the Oregon-California Trail.”

First Stagecoach Service

Army of Utah Winter Camp
“On November 3, Colonel Johnson arrived [to join Colonel Alexander at a point three miles below the junction of Ham’s Fork and Black’s Fork] with the rear of the army and a column of Major’s & Russell’s trains. Three days later he broke camp and marched for Fort Bridger to go into winter quarters. . . .At about noon a snowstorm so heavy the bullwhackers could scarcely see their lead teams swept down upon them. The oxen were turned loose to graze, but they could find nothing to eat. What little grass the Mormons had not burned was buried under seven inches of snow. . . .

On the morning of November 8 the thermometer stood at 3º below zero.The night before more than half of Majors & Russell’s remaining oxen some of the army’s mules had died. . . .

Conditions on the march of the 9th were worse than those of the day before. Again Majors & Russell’s oxen died on the road. The Army of Utah was now battling a foe far more dangerous and implacable than Brigham Young’s Mormons. The long, frigid Rocky Mountain winter had set in, animals were dying by the hundreds, the soldiers were exposed in the open to subzero weather, and the danger of losing all the supplies was acute.

The troops remained in camp on November 10 and 11 while Majors & Russell’s trains were being moved forward. Nobody thought of advancing upon Salt Lake City now. Fort Bridger, only a few miles away, was their sole hope of refuge.”

Army of Utah Winter Camp

Post Offices on the Pacific Coast
California was desperate for fast, efficient mail. Miners wanted to correspond with the folks back home, perhaps on the new illustrated stationery that predated picture postcards. Businessmen needed to transfer bank drafts and contracts. In 1848 Postmaster General Cave Johnson authorized its first post offices, in San Francisco and Sacramento, but service remained so poor that, in 18501 irate residents didn’t get the news that they had achieved statehood until six weeks after the fact. . . .

The federal government had been quick to use the post to strengthen its new stake in the Pacific Northwest, at least in theory, by authorizing the first post offices west of the Rockies in 1847: one at Astoria, a deepwater port on the Columbia River, and the other at Oregon City, on the outskirts of today’s Portland. By 1851, the region also had eighteen postal routes. However, mail from the outside world still had to reach San Francisco first, then travel north by bimonthly steamers to Astoria, where the portion destined for Oregon City was dispatched. Hopeful recipients had to travel to an often distant post office to fetch their letters in person or wait for an obliging traveler to bring them into the outback.

In 1853, the northern section of the Oregon Territory split off to become the Washington Territory. The tiny village of Seattle, founded in what’s now the Elliott Bay neighborhood, boasted a log post office as well as a church, a brothel, and two blockhouses used for protection during Indian attacks. Nevertheless, one of the few things on which its fifty or so white, Indian, Hawaiian, and Cape Verdean residents could agree was that postal service was worse on their side of the Columbia River.

Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, p. 120, 122-23

Inspiration for the Pony Express
Historians of the Pony Express usually invoke ancient Roman and Greek mail couriers or the mounted messengers of Genghis Khan in China in establishing the tradition and pedigree of the cross-country mail service, the practice of delivering mail using a fast relay system of riders.

But the custom of using a mounted courier in the American West was not inspired by such ancient tales. In colonial times, mail had been moved in such fashion in New England. Even the expression “pony express” was common long before Russell, Majors & Waddell launched its cross-country venture. The nineteenth-century American writer and early Californian Joaquin Miller left this account of the days of the forty-niners and early mail delivery:

“The Pony Express was a great feature in the gold mines of California long before anyone ever thought of putting it on the plains. Every creek, camp or “city” had its Pony Express which ran to and from the nearest office. At Yreka we had the Humbug Creek Express, the Deadwood Camp Express, the Greenhorn, and so on. . . .”

The inspiration for Russell, Majors & Waddell’s daring risk of crosscountry horsemanship was a feat that would have been familiar in the American West of the mid-nineteenth century. Horsemen knew it on the Plaza in Santa Fe and they knew it, too, on the edge of the Missorui frontier. It was a series of heroic one-man cross-country rides made in the early 1850s by Francis Xavier Aubery, a contemporary of Kit Carson’s in Santa Fe. Aubery, described by Frank A. Root and William E. Connelley in The Overland Stage to California as “a man of pluck and indomitable energy and perseverance,” was a nearmythic figure in the American West at the time. Root and Connelley’s 1901 assessment of Aubery’s horsemanship concluded that “not one man in 100,000 had the physical endurance to perform the seemingly important task.”

Using a relay of horses, Aubery at first made the run from Santa Fe to Independence in two weeks. It was a trip that oxen hauling freight normally did in two to three months. Aubery, who was built like a jockey, then shaved that time to eight days. He arrived in Independence so exhausted that he could not dismount from his horse. But Aubery was not satisfied with this personal best. His next trip, which would set horsemen talking across the Great American Desert, was completed in only five days and thirteen horus.

The odd legacy of Aubery (he made his famous five-day ride for a thousand-dollar bet and was later stabbed to death in a bar fight in New Mexico) is sketchy, but Majors recalled in his autobiography the French-Canadian trader’s feats of horsemanship. Changing mounts every one hundred to two hundred miles, Aubery crossed the eight hundred dangerous miles that separated the old Spanish city from Independence in an unheard-of time. It nearly killed him, and he slept for twenty hours after making the run. But it made a powerful impression on Majors.

Christopher Corbett, Orphans Preferred, p. 25-26

Camping
“From West of Casper, WY to outside of Sacramento, CA free camping on public lands can happen almost anywhere you can find a place to put your sleeping bag down. I wouldn’t necessarily suggest a hammock as there aren’t very many tall things to tie off to out in the high desert.

Here’s a link to information about camping on Bureau of Land Management land (BLM)

Check out the interactive map to see a trace of the Pony Express route on top of a layer that shows public lands”

Jan Bennett on Bike The Pony Express , 3/6/20

Alexander Majors' Oath
“This oath was the creation of Majors, who was a very pious and rigid disciplinarian; he tried hard to enforce it, but how great was his failure it is needless to say. It would have been equally profitable had the old gentleman read the riot act to a herd of stampeded buffaloes. And he believes it himself now.”

J.W. Buel, Heroes of the Plains, p. 247

Majors' Freighting Experience
Among the freighters of civilian goods to Santa Fe in 1848 was Alexander Majors making his first trip over the Santa Fe trail with six wagons loaded with merchandise, 30 or 40 oxen, and ten or twelve men. A small beginning indeed for a man who in less than ten years would estimate the number of great Conestoga and Murphy prairie schooners under his command by the acre, count his oxen by the thousands, and employ several regiments of bull-whackers. In 1849 his business required about the same number of wagons as in 1848. In 1850, however, it had grown until ten wagons and 180 oxen were used.

Upon returning home in the fall of 1850 Majors learned that Q. M. Maj. E. A. Ogden at Fort Leavenworth wished to send 20 wagon loads of supplies to Fort Mann at the Cimarron crossing on the Arkansas river, 400 miles down the Santa Fe trail. Although the time for starting on a journey of that kind was long past he took the contract and reached his destination without difficulty. Before leaving for home he hired his train at Fort Mann to the commandant of the fort, which was under construction, to haul logs from a creek 25 miles away. He returned home in time to celebrate Christmas with his family. In 1851 Majors was again on the Santa Fe trail with 25 wagons loaded with merchandise. When he returned he corraled his wagons, sold his oxen to California immigrants, and remained at home in 1852. The following year he bought a new outfit of oxen for his train, hired some 80 bullwhackers, and freighted civilian goods to Santa Fe. Again he returned home in time to make a second trip to Fort Union, N. M. In 1854 he freighted no mer-chandise, but transported 100 wagon loads of military supplies to New Mexico. This work required 1,200 oxen and about 120 men,** a creditable showing indeed for a man who only six years before owned only six wagons and employed a dozen men or so. This, in brief, is the story of the rise of the man who became the partner of Waddell and Russell in 1854.

Settle and Settle, "The Early Careers of William Bradford Waddell and William Hepburn Russell: Frontier Capitalists," Kansas Historical Quarterly Vol. 26, No.4, Winter 1960, p. 367

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 firt effort was quite successful, the latter only partially so. . . .

In all the material of the Waddell Collection, there is nothing in the way of direct, conclusive evidence that Floyd received money from Russell, but there is much to arouse suspicion that he did.”

Settle and Settle, Empire on Wheels, p. 108-109

Oxen on the Trail
Oxen gathered their living entirely from the prairie. Feed had to be transported for horses and mules, but cattle would become stronger and fatter during a summer spent on the trail . They might come out of the winter ‘poor and scrawny,’ but would return t o it ‘fat and hearty’ at the close of the freighting season. If driven properly, oxen would travel 2,000 miles during one season, or an equivalent of making two round trips to Denver from the Missouri River. “

Floyd Bresee, Overland Freighting in the Platte Valley 1850–1870, p. 30

Placerville Becomes the Western Terminus
“On July 1 [1861], Placerville became the western terminus for the Pony Express.”

William E. Hill, The Pony Express: Yesterday and Today, p. 71

Sand and Alkali
“This report of the eyes is a fact of which I have spoken before. The incessant wind which blew upon the plains, and kept the sand and alkali in circulation, affected the eyes of the men, and there were constantly some of the men who were unable to do much until their eyes were well; and this was so general a matter that all of the ranches kept large spectacles or goggles to sell to the ‘pilgrims,’ and we had a lot in our company to be used by the men when they felt that they were beginning to suffer.”

Eugene Ware, Indian Wars of 1864, p. 181

Greeley on Chorpenning's Route
“It was over the new stage route that Horace Greeley, in July, 1859, traveled in Mr. Chorpenning’s coaches to California, and had his famous ride over the Sierra Nevadas, driven by Hank Monk, one of Chorpenning’s fancy drivers, and which is so humorously described by Artemus Ward in his travels in that country.”

Henry H. Clifford (comp.), Mail Service, Settlement of the Country, and the Indian Depredations, p. 8

Mile 258: Liberty Farm Station
“The storm had been local and, after we had worked our way slowly through ten more miles of mud, things became more normal. Along little roadways with reassuringly solid bases we really enjoyed the refreshing, pungent odor of earth freshly drenched and strung with puddles. The sun reflected pleasantly from the white knoll at the site of the old Liberty Farm Station and struck diamond points of light from the rain-soaked masses of trees behind it. The station did not survive the terrible massacre in 1864 but was replaced by one known as Pawnee Station located at a more favorable site.”

[N.B. the Pony Express Bikepacking Route shows this landmark about a quarter mile off the Route on Road 18C as it heads south to Deweese. Other sources show it on the main road (which the Route follows) between Mile 258 and 259]

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 77

Platte Water
“[T]ravelers found that, at times, it was necessary to sink headless barrels in the river bed to get water. Captain Howard Stansbury found ‘innumerable’ small wells dug in the sand of the river two to four feet deep that yielded good clean water. Concerning its potability, there were a number of standard quips, including; including, “It was good drinking water if you threw it out and filled the cup with whiskey” and “It was water you had to chew.”

Henry Pickering Walker, The Wagonmasters (1966), p. 39

Resupplying the Utah Expedition
“In January 1858 the Government to arrange with Russell, Majors & Waddell to transport approximately sixteen million pounds of freight, most of it destined for Utah. To fulfill this assignment the firm was compelled to acquire 40,000 oxen and 1,000 mules, and to hire more than 4,000 teamsters; altogether the Government ordered the contractors to send to the Territory at least 100 trains, each composed of twenty-six wagons.”

Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850-1859, p. 172

Mile 1732: Jacob's Well Station
“Today nothing remains but a few old stones from which the old well has long since caved in with rock and dirt. It was not only was a change station for the Pony Express until its demise as well as the Overland Stage Line until 1869, but it later served the Hill Beachy Road to Hamilton and the White Pine Mines.”

Expedition Utah, Nevada Pony Express Stations

Pony Express and the St. Joe Road
“The main emigrant road meandered west about 150 miles, back and forth across present U.S. 36 from St. Joseph to Marysville, Kansas (which route is not to be confused with the later Pony Express route, joining the Fort Leavenworth Road, further south).”

Merrill J. Mattes, The Great Platte River Road, p. 142-143

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 Indian Trust Fund of the Department of the Interior of which he was merely a custodian . . . In plain, everyday terms, Bailey was an embezzler in the amount of $150,000. . . .

One who has followed Russell’s unique, colorful and sometimes brilliant business career from the beginning regrets to face the remainder of the story concerning the bond transactions. Next day Bailey . . . delivered $387,000 worth of Missouri, South Carolina, and Florida Trust Fund bonds to Russell . . . By this act Russell fully shared Bailey’s guilt. Whether he was morally guilty in the first instance might be debatable, but certainly not in the second. By his own frank, straightforward confession he convicts himself of receiving and using for his own purposes property he knew was stolen.”

Settle and Settle, Empire on Wheels, p. 98-100

Butterfield Contract Satisfactory for Russell
Russell’s feeling of satisfaction with the contract was fully justified. In the first place, he and his partners, Majors and Waddell, would receive $220,000.00 a year more for operating over approximately half the route from the Missouri River to Salt Lake City than they were then receiving for covering the whole line to Placerville, California.

Raymond W. Settle, "The Pony Express, Heroic Effort—Tragic End," Utah Historical Quarterly, Vol. 27 n.2, p. 114

Mile 48: Kennekuk Station
“After Mosquito Creek the toiling caravans passed, in staging days, an important home station called at first Kickapoo Agency and later Kennekuk Station in honor of chief Kennekuk of the Kickapoo. The military road from Fort Leavenworth to Fort Kearney joined the Oregon Trail at Kennekuk, and all travelers proceeded together to Wolf Creek where they camped. They found here a rude log bridge floored with poles guarded by the Sac and Fox Indians, and toll was collected by friendly but firm braves who looked (so one woman wrote) ten feet high. The very moderate price was twenty-five cents. Every one used the bridge and begrudged the money verbosely in his or her diary.

Nearby was the old stone mission to the Kickapoo, which cold be seen for miles in all directions and was surrounded by cultivated farm lands. Many of the emigrants blamed their vanished coin on the business acumen of the white missionaries; but others, watching the imperturbable Sac and Fox playing cards in the intervals of collecting two-bit pieces, figured that they were quite capable of thinking it up for themselves.”

[N.B. According to the NPS, “A granite stone west of the marker and across the road indicates the site of the relay station. The stone memorial marker is one-and-one-half miles southeast of present-day Horton, Kansas.” One source located that site on Road 326, between Cheyenne and Chautauqua Roads. To get there from the Pony Express Bikepacking Trail, you’d need to turn off the Trail and onto Cheyenne Road just before Mile 46.]

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 58-59

Mile 1491: Boyd/Butte/Desert Station
“Fourteen miles from Fish Springs Station, via a road around the north end of the Fish Springs Range and nine miles over the pass to the west of the station. Although Boyd Station is not identified in the 1861 mail contract, it was named by Howard Egan as an Express Station. The structure was small, built of stone and contained gun-ports. Boyd Station survives as one of the best preserved Express Stations in Utah. This preservation is probably due to the fact that Bid Boyd, station master, continued to occupy the site into the current century.

“Limited excavations and structural stabilization were undertaken at the site in 1974 and 1975. The site is interpreted on the ground by the Bureau of Land Management.

“At this juncture the Express diverted from the old Chorpenning trail and headed straight west to Callao and Willow Springs Station. Chorpenning had gone south into Pleasant Valley and then around the south end of the Deep Creek Mountains.”

The Pony Express Stations of Utah in Historical Perspective, Boyd (Butte, Desert) Utah No. 22 Non-contract Station

Hurt and the Mormons
“More important than Burr’s encounters with the Saints in Utah was the concurrent reappearance of the quarrel over the Church’s policy toward the Indians. Previous agents, especially Jacob Holeman, had collided with Young on this matter and had helped broadcast the conviction that the people of Utah were seeking to subvert the Indians. Garland Hurt, the new agent, brought this situation to a head. . . .His opposition to their Indian policy was more determined than that of any other man in this period, and he further antagonized the Church by winning a wide influence among the tribes under his jurisdiction. In addition, unlike many federal officers, he did not react in panic to the anathemas of the Saints’ leaders; instead he continued his work after his Gentile colleagues had fled the Territory in 1857 and left only when the emotions of the excited populace seemed to threatend his life. . . .

Until June 1857 Hurt experienced no great difficulty in the territory and remained after the departure of Drummond, Burr, and the other officials . . . But when [the Mormons] learned that President Buchanan had ordered an expedition to Utah, the Mormons resolved that Gentiles in their settlements should not be allowed to remain in a position to weaken them at a time when they faced invasion.”

Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850-1859, p. 47-48

Wagons Across the North Platte
“There were those [at the North Platte Crossing], as at any ferry, who could not or would not pay the price and who used self-constructed substitutes. To these novices the strong west wind was an additional hazard—a twin current flowing above the river. It caught the rumbled in the capacious bellies of the white-topped wagons, swelling them into sails that flung the rafts downstream. Pulling men were dragged into the current. Ropes snapped. Rafts capsized. . . .One experience was enough to teach everyone present to remove the wagon tops during a ferry trip in a windstorm; but the next playful breeze, sneaking up after a two- or three-day calm, would catch a new group unprepared.”

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 196

Mile 235: Oak Grove Ranch Marker
Just after Mile 235, near the town of Oak, is a historical marker commemorating the August 7, 1864 raid on this ranch.

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 76 (discussing "The Narrows")

Sweet Morpheus
“We started and travelled 10 miles and comped very late; here we found no wood to cook with, so we ate a few crackers, and resigned ourselves to the arms of sweet morpheus. This night was awful dark and cloudy, and the guards had to feel their way around the carrell. I was on guard, this night, and about 2 o’clock a Platte Bottom thunder-storm came up, and quick as thought, it commenced thundering, lightning and pouring down oceans of rain on us.”

John Wood, Journal of John Wood, p. 11 (June 2, 1850)

Crossing the South Platte
“From the moment they had passed the junction of the rivers the emigrants were fired with only one thought: to get across the South Platte. The Colorado gold-seekers of ’59, Pikes Peakers as they were called, might remain comfortably on the south bank, but travelers to Oregon and California, and, later, to Montana and Idaho must ford this large watercourse which unaccommodatingly swung too far to the left for their purpose.

Many crossed immediately above the forks, following Frémont’s example. There were also several little-used fords, but the great bulk of the migration crossed four miles above Brule, Nebraska at a spot called the Lower California Crossing, although in the late fifties and the sixties the Upper California Crossing at Julesburg, Colorado, became a rival. . . .

Everything considered, the crossing near Brule was the greatest ford of the Overland trek . . . [T]here were hundreds of wagons each day during the season, which must get through the quicksand of the South Platte ford or give up the journey. it was one of the few dangers of which they had definite advance notice. They could, and did, worry about it from the time they left home . . .

From the days of the first fir trappers, on through the Oregon migration and the California gold rush, it was in everybody’s way.”

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 106-109

Protecting Oxens' Feet
“[In the Black Hills of Wyoming], Lydia Waters wrote: ‘ The hoofs of the cattle became so worn they had to be shod. Now the amateur blacksmiths had to show their skill. George became quite proficient shoeing both horses and oxen—To shoe the cattle a trench the length of the animal and the width of the shovel was dug. The animal was then thrown and rolled over so that its backbone lay in the trench and all four legs were up in the air. In this position it was helpless and the shoes were nailed on readily.’ In very bad cases protectors made of buffalo hide were tied clear up over the hoofs like bags. Even dogs had leather moccasins. A few owners hardened their animals’ hoofs with alcohol and omitted the footwear.”

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 185-166

Russell's House
In the meantime Russell increased his holdings in the Lexington First Addition Company until he owned 65 lots. Upon one of these at the corner of 12th and South street he built a 20-room house with a garden, Negro quarters, and stables at the back for the good horses he always owned. Waddell also built a commodious home a block away at the corner of 18th and South streets.

Settle and Settle, "The Early Careers of William Bradford Waddell and William Hepburn Russell: Frontier Capitalists," Kansas Historical Quarterly Vol. 26, No.4, Winter 1960, p. 364

Winter Quarters
“With Fort Bridger as the northeastern anchor, the various units of the [Utah expedition] stretched up Black’s Fork for a number of miles, the entire settlement assuming the name of Camp Scott in honor of the crusty but able general. Since this high mountain region, 6,600 feet above sea level, lacked forage for the expedition’s remaining stock, the mules and other animals were sent with Cooke and six companies of Dragoons to graze on neighboring streams, where they remained until March 1858. . . .

Camp Scott was a busy community, for some 1,800 officers and men of the regular army occupied it during seven snow-bound months. In addition, other volunteers were recruited during this period. Although the contracting firm of Russell, Majors & Waddell had hired its teamsters for the trip to Salt Lake City with the promise of employment on the return journey if they chose, these contracts were broken when the trains halted at Fort Bridger. . . . For many of these men the only alternative to unprofitable idleness was enlistment for nine months in the army, with the promise of the same pay, allotments of clothing, and provisions given the regulars.”

Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850-1859, p. 149-150

First Appropriation for Overland Mail to California
“Bills authorizing an overland mail were introduced in Congress in 1855 and 1856, but they did not pass. On March 3, 1857, the Post Office Appropriations Bill, which bore an amendment authorizing an overland mail to California, became law. It provided $300,000 for a semimonthly service, or $450,000 for a weekly service, or $600,000 for a semi-weekly service.”

Settle and Settle, Empire on Wheels, p. 68

Branding Steer
“Then, after applying a solution of salt and water, he was left to recover as best he could. The brand would remain in evidence more than a year unless the steer was captured by cattle thieves, who possessed a secret for growing the hair again in six months. When the branding was completed, each man was given twelve steers to break to yoke, and it was three long weeks before we were in shape to proceed on our long Western tramp.”

Charles E. Young, Dangers of the Trail, p.27

Causes of the Utah War
“On January 27, 1858, the House of Representatives requested President Buchanan to furnish it with information concerning the war in Utah. At the moment the expedition which had been sent to the Territory six months earlier was huddled in tents and other makeshift shelters near Fort Bridger, with the snows and cold of a mountain winter shutting it off from entrance into the Salt Lake Basin or even from reinforcements across the Plains. . . .

In obedience to the congressional mandate cabinet members searched their files, and in due time the President was able to submit a bulky dossier of official correspondence and private communications accusing the Mormons of objectionable activities over a period of many months. The collection was a hodge-podge of both significant and irrelevant material . . .

To exclude extraneous elements from the causes of the Administration’s warlike policy toward Utah, one must first discover when its decision was reached. It is a difficult task, for Buchanan kept his purposes secret as long as he could. . . . [though] it is probably that his decision came on or about May 20 [1857]. . . .

Whatever the explanation given after the event, the Administration had unquestionably come to the conclusion in May 1857 that Utah’s defiance of the United States demanded stern measures. . . .

In assessing the factors that led to the ordering of armed forces to Utah, one is well advised to observe the part played by ignorance and misinformation. . . .

The view of Utah’s population in the East during 1857 was of a people oppressed by religious tyranny and kept in submission only by some terroristic arm of the Church. . . .The Saint, these non-Mormons falsely reasoned, would . . . welcome [the army] with open arms . . .

It would not have been difficult for Buchanan to inform himself of the situation in Utah. . . . [but] he had not even inquired into the facts before angrily seeking to punish the people of Utah. As a result he later found himself in the embarrassing position of sending the army in 1857 and a peace commission in 1858, instead of performing these actions in a reverse order.”

Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850-1859, p. 62-60

Change to Fifteen Day Schedule
From the Leavenworth Daily Times, December 1, 1860. PONY EXPRESS! CHANGE OF SCHEDULE. ON and after the first day of December next, the Schedule Time of the Express will be changed and run as follows: Fifteen days between St. Joe and San Francisco; eleven days between Fort Riley and outer telegraph station Utah. This Schedule will be continued running as new semi-weekly trips during the winter, or until] Congress shall provide for a tri-weekly Mail Service, which alone will enable the Company to return to present or a shorter schedule, the present mail service between Julesburg and Placerville being only semi-weekly, which is not sufficient to keep the route open during winter. Wo. Russet, Secretary

"The Pony Express Rides Again," The Kansas Historical Quarterly, Winter 1959: Volume 25, Issue 4, p. 383

Petitioning for Postal Service
Encouraging the people’s expectation of a place on the country’s communications grid was essential to the republic’s physical and political development as well as the post’s. Pioneers were likelier to venture into the wilderness if they anticipated maintaining a link to the great world and having an outpost of the federal government, a place on the map, and a civic identity. The first step in the so-called petitioning process for mail service required a community to badger the Post Office Department or their congressman for it. In many instances, the congressman then submitted the constituents’ appeal to the postmaster general, who had retained the constitutional power to establish post offices. If service was deemed warranted, he authorized a new post office, and Congress, responding to the direct will of the local people, determined the route by which the mail would reach it.

Petitioning processes were very often successful, especially in the freewheeling territories, as areas under federal jurisdiction but lacking the status of an official state were called. Indeed, complaints about the overabundance of post offices created by legislators’ pork-barreling were voiced by the turn of the century. Nevertheless, Americans had objective proof of their national government’s responsiveness to their direct input, which not only brought them mail but also turned clusters of cabins in the middle of nowhere into villages with names, and rutted trails through dense forests into roads on a map.

Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, p. 35

Breaking Oxen
“Most of [the oxen] were broken to work, but some were not. Over by the corrals sweating bullwhackers were busy making up their teams, yoking them together, and allowing them to become accustomed to each other. If a young one was to be broken and trained he was yoked with an old one, and, their tails tied together, they were turned loose so that the youngster might learn how to conduct himself in that situation. When he had learned to walk quietly beside his companion, they were hitched to a wagon and driven about for a while.”

Settle and Settle, Empire on Wheels, p. 27

Sharing Blankets
“Mat, the other Irishman, I consider in special my comrade; we slept for three months in the same waggon and under the same blankets. I made his acquaintance here by curing him of ague with a dose of quinine, a good deed never forgotten.”

William Chandless, Chandless, W. (1857). A Visit to Salt Lake, p. 20-21

California Regiment
When Lincoln called for volunteers April 15, 1861, a meeting of former citizens of California and Oregon was held In New York, nearly 300 being present. “It was there resolved to raise and offer to the government a regiment to be composed as far as possible of persons at some time residents of California.” The regiment formed was not entirely a New York nor a Pennsylvania regiment (much of the recruiting was done in Pennsylvania); It was finally credited to Pennsylvania, however, and designated as the Seventy-first Pennsylvania Infantry, although It was called the “California Regiment” throughout the war.

Imogene Spaulding, "The Attitude of California to the Civil War," Annual Publication of the Historical Society of Southern California , 1912-1913, Vol. 9, No. 1/2 (1912-1913), pp. 121 n.5

Staples of the Emigrant Diet
“The two great staples of ordinary diet were ‘sowbelly’ and ‘biscuits’—which, being translated, meant bacon and hot bread baked in a Dutch oven. In a camp exclusively masculine this was not varied much. Sometimes they had beans or ‘slam-johns’ (the current slang for flapjacks) with occasional game and a pickle now and then as a precaution against scurvy.”

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 17

Army Discharge Description of Slade
“Said Joseph A. Slade was born in Clinton Co in the State of Illinois, is 18 years of age, 5 feet 6 inches high, dark complexion, black eyes, light hair, and by occupation, when enlisted, a farmer.”

John B. McClernan, Slade's Wells Fargo Colt, p. 40

Pony Express Finances
Theoretically, the combined assets of the partners exceeded liabilities by about $419,000. But unreported was a catastrophic loss of $150,000 in a herd of freight oxen, caught in a howling blizzard at Ruby Valley, Nevada. It had been decided to speculate the cattle on the California market, rather than return them to Leavenworth from Camp Floyd, Utah, to which they had pulled wagons of Army supplies. The loss reduced their margin of assets to $269,000-and their obligations due in December totaled $250,000. Someone had computed that, through the following June, notes and bills payable would breach the staggering sum of $1,000,000.

Roy S. Bloss, Pony Express—The Great Gamble, 109-110

The Role of the Traitor
“The traitor-whose presence will be foregrounded if he exists, and invented if he does not-serves at least two purposes. First, he is a foil created to further heighten the noble or at least invincible character of the hero: only a treacherous shot in the back or a deceitfully planned ambush could defeat James/Bonney /Bass. Open and fair fights always end in the hero’s triumph. And then, his character is further glorified by this contrast with the deceitful adversary. The hero gains stature when he defeats enemies of stature; and he is also raised in our esteem when only “dirty little cowards” can gun him down from behind.”

Bruce Rosenberg, The Code of the West, p. 170

Oiled Silk Cloth Protection
“Mail from either end of the Pony Express run was wrapped in oiled silk cloth to protect it from rain, mud and water, before it was placed in the pockets of regular mail. Way mail was not.”

Scott R. Trepel, The Impact of Indian Attacks on the Pony Express in 1860, p. 37

Mile 1850: Simpson Park
“A second divide, more abrupt than the former, placed us in sight of Simpson’s Park and such a park! a circlet of tawny stubble, embosomed in sage-grown hills, the ‘Hiré’ or ‘Look-out,’ and others, without other tree but the deformed cedars. The bottom is notorious for cold; it freezes even in June and July; and our night was, as may be imagined, none of the pleasantest. . . .

“Simpson’s Park lies 195 miles from Carson City, where we might consider the journey at an end; yet the cold of night did not allow us to set out before 10 A.M. Our route lay across the park, which was dotted with wheat-grass and broom-like reeds rising from a ground saupoudré like salt. Presently we began to ascend Simpson’s Pass, a long kanyon whose sloping sides and benches were dotted with the green bunch-grass. At the divide we found the ‘Sage Springs,’ whose position is too elevated for the infiltration of salt: they are consequently sweet and wholesome.”

Richard Burton, The City of Saints, p. 485-486

Mile 1834: Route Alternatives
At Mile 1834, you have the option of:

Staying on the Pony Express Trail to Dry Creek Station, through Simpson Park Mountains, to Simpson Park Station. This route takes Streep’s Cutoff, also called Streeper’s Cutoff, after the rider William Streeper, or Fool’s Cutoff, due to its unsuitability for wagons. It goes west over a pass just south of Eagle Butte.

Turning south to US 50 and following Simpson’s route around Cape Horn Station (of the Overland Stagecoach).

Mile 1834: Route Alternatives

Border Ruffians
“So I journeyed on, getting over about thirty-five miles a day on an average, and nothing worth recording occurred till Independence, an important town and Indian trading-post on the frontier of Missouri, was reached. There I found the place crowded with Missourians and a goodly sprinkling of men from the Southern States, all full of excitement over the burning question whether the Territory of Kansas, recently opened up for settlement, should be Slave or Free.

The Free State party in the North, managed and worked from Faneuil Hall, Boston, had been sending up men and arms, and had occupied positions defended by light artillery. The Missourians were crossing the river, and volunteers from all the Southern States were marching up to the conflict, which might break out at any moment.

In this scene of seething unrest and wild passion, a stranger was naturally regarded with suspicion until he declared his sympathies. Mine were strongly on the side of the South, and, as soon as I made this known, I was heartily welcomed amongst the ” Border Ruffians,” as the pro-Slavery party was nicknamed by the Free Staters.”

R.H. Williams, With the Border Ruffians, p. 74

Russell's First Freighting Venture
Not until the capture and annexation of New Mexico in 1846, however, were all barriers and handicaps [to the Santa Fe trade] entirely removed and the trade freed to pursue an unhindered course. Prior to that, however, the professional, contract freighter appeared upon the scene. These were men, like Alexander Majors, who organized their own wagon trains, and contracted to transport goods belonging to someone else.

One of these early contract freighters was E. C. McCarty of Westport, who entered the business in 1838. In 1847 Russell formed a partnership with him and sent a train load of goods to Santa Fe. This venture, under the name of Bullard & Russell, was his introduction to the freighting business. James H. Bullard accompanied the train and returned home March 1, 1848. They also sent out another train in 1849. In this latter year Russell and Robert Aull engaged in speculation in hemp with very satisfactory results. Incidentally, in that same year Russell was fined $20 in Lafayette county circuit court “for permitting a slave to go at large and hire his own time.”

Settle and Settle, "The Early Careers of William Bradford Waddell and William Hepburn Russell: Frontier Capitalists," Kansas Historical Quarterly Vol. 26, No.4, Winter 1960, p. 364-65

Freighter Wagons
“The wagons used were of special design and construction, and built for ‘the plains transportation business.’ The tires were wide and heavy; the boxes, high and tight, were made of the beat seasoned wood. Over these curved the huge bows. The most common makes of wagons were the Murphy and Espenshied, built in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Studebaker, built at South Bend, Indiana. The Studebaker was considered the easiest running, but more Murphy wagons were used than either of the other makes.

“These great, cumbersome wagons weighing at least fifteen hundred pounds each, were of the thimble skein type. The axles were wooden, but had iron thimbles on the ends which fit into the iron thimbles of the wheel hubs. The wheels were held in place by big linchpins fastened into the ends of the axles. Tar was used for lubricant.

“The amount of freight which one of these wagons carried would vary, of course, according to the type of merchandise. But they were made to haul six thousand pounds or more, and they night be loaded with ten thousand pounds.”

Floyd Bresee, Overland Freighting in the Platte Valley 1850–1870, p. 28

Freighter Meal
“‘Bacon was the r e l i a b l e meat,’ and flap jacks, beans, crackers, and sour dough fried in a skillet and flooded with molasses was the most regular menu for the cook’s ‘guests.’ . . .

“The breakfast menu varied to the extent of having coffee, and fried bacon sandwiched between thick cornmeal bread covered with syrup.”

Floyd Bresee, Overland Freighting in the Platte Valley 1850–1870, p. 50, 52

Diseases on the Trail
“The gamut of contagious diseases associated associated with childhood are indicated as causes of adult death on the Trail: whooping cough, measles or vareloid, mumps, and smallpox. Other serious conditions often reported are ‘pneumonia or lung fever’ and malaria, identified also as ‘fever and ague.’ The common cold or it symptoms were much in evidence, but the most common non-fatal afflictions were internal disorders variously identified as ‘derangements of the liver or kidney,’ ‘bilious complaints,’ ‘inflammation of the bowels,’ summer complaints,’ ‘the ailment incidental to travel on the Plains,’ or just plain dysentery or diarrhea (spelled, of course, at least fifteen different ways). . . . Philura Vanderburgh’s father had a standard remedy for this condition: ‘Fill a saucer with brandy, sugar and mutton tallow.’

Among miscellaneous sicknesses reported are ‘congestion of the brain,’ delirium tremens,’ hydrophobia, bloody flux, intestinal inertia, inflammatory rheumatism, vertigo, and mountain fever, the last probably a western variant of dysentery. The agony of tootjache, sometimes relieved by opium or amateur extractions, was another frequent phenomenon pf the prairies.”

Merrill J. Mattes, The Great Platte River Road, p. 83

Complaints Against Magraw
“The bill of indictment agains Magraw contained innumerable petty and some amusing complaints. His critics claimed that the superintendent was well known on the plains apparently had an old quarrel to settle with every trader on the road. Moreover, he had breathed anathemas and bitter denunciations against the Mormons, but as he approached Brigham Young’s domain his courage failed him. The disgruntled branded him as a coward. The crowning absurdity of his tyrannical egotism, they reported, was his urging each traveler headed east to take a personal letter introducing him to Magraw’s crony, the President of the United States, and advising the emigrant that the best possible introduction to Buchanan was to appear with the smell of good alcohol on the breath.”

W. Turrentine Jackson, Wagon Roads West, p. 360, n. 22

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 solely to repair Russell, Majors & Waddell’s damaged credit [after losses incurred during the Mormon War] the firm might have succeeded. His action further undermined its financial standing, earned for himself the reputation of being a reckless gambler and involving him and his partners in a series of catastrophic events which in the end brought total ruin.”

Settle and Settle, Empire on Wheels, p. 37

Fort Bridger and the Mormons
“The beautiful and fertile valley of Blacks Fork, with Fort Bridger standing squat and picturesque in its midst, was well known to the Mormons. The first small Mormon advance party passed near it in 1847 when, by reason of bloody clashes with their gentile neighbors in the States, they left the Missouri River for an unknown haven near the Great Salt Lake. They were closely followed by the great Mormon migratory caravan, who took careful note of the trading post just east of the passage leading through the Wasach Range. It must be confessed that they also took note of the histrionic Mr. Bridger and recorded him tersely as a man who did not tell the truth.

There he was, however, firmly ensconced in the best piece of pasture land between Salt Lake City and Horseshoe Station, and so situated that whatever the Mormons required from civilization, whether mail, freight, or converts, must pass within a mile or two of his door. The setup was far from satisfactory to Brigham Young. . . .

Distrust and dissension prevailed between Mormon and gentile, aggravated by lack of definite information and the growing gossip concerning polygamy, then an intrinsic part of the Mormon religious custom. The colonists had once been forced, if they wished to continue its practice, to leave their homes, and they felt that their freedom of action was again threatened. Any gentile settlement near them was unwelcome.

The facts and issues are clouded by the passage of many years, but the two conflicting stories are somewhat as follows: Jim Bridger contended that the Mormon leaders had no particular grievance against him but simply coveted his property; that they sent a group of their ‘avenging angels’ to do him bodily harm; that he barely escaped into the willows and, with the aid of his Indian wife, was able to get away, abandoning everything to the Mormons. The Mormons claimed that Bridger was furnishing guns to the dangerous Utes, with whom they were at war. Both are nice healthy arguments and are not at all incompatible. This happened in 1853. The Mormons took over Fort Bridger . . . [which] became a Mormon outpost.

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 248-249

Women Did Not Initiate Emigration
“The historian John Faragher, based on comparative research of men’s and women’s accounts of the westward journey, has concluded that “not one wife initiated the idea [of emigrating to Oregon or California]; it was always the husband. Less than a quarter of the women writers recorded agreeing with their restless husbands; most of them accepted it as a husband-made decision to which they could only acquiesce. But nearly a third wrote of their objections and how they moved only reluctantly” (Faragher:1979, p. 163).

Keith Heyer Meldahl, Hard Road West, p. 16 n.2

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 government mail subsidy; its only revenues came from the $5 fee it charged per letter. This charge brought in only about $500 a day, while the Pony’s expenses were at least twice that amount. Above and beyond its exorbitant startup costs, the Pony Express was losing between $15,000 and $20,000 per month.”

Dan Rottenberg, Death of a Gunfighter, p. 191

Mail to Denver
With the L & PPE’s regular mail service, Auraria and Denver City residents anxiously waited in line for a letter from the states six to seven days old. Previously, Fort Laramie was the closest United States mail connection to Auraria and Denver City. Jim Saunders created the first express line from Denver City to Fort Laramie in November 1858, retrieving the newly formed communities’ mail, often six weeks old, and sending mail for the townspeople. He charged fifty cents for letters and twenty-five cents for newspapers; this was in addition to the three cents United States postage for a letter. Since the L & PPE was not an official United States mail carrier, it too charged a private carrier fee of twenty-five cents for letters and ten cents for newspapers. Although these were steep prices, the recipients and senders willingly paid the price to communicate with the states. By the spring of 1860, Auraria Town Company merged with Denver City creating one town called Denver.

Heather King Peterson, Colorado Stagecoach Stations, p. 22

Virginia Dale Persuades Slade to Move
“Slade next took up a ranch not far from Fort Bridger in western Wyoming, and began freighting. He was in the midst of his enemies—without the protection, of the armed stage company employees. Maria never knew what day her man would be brought home full of bullet holes. She persuaded him to seek new territory.

Early in June, 1863, the big gold strike at Alder Gulch on Grasshopper Creek in Idaho Territory was attracting men from far and near. Slade decided to join the rush.”

Florabel Muir, "The Man Who Was Hanged for a Song," Liberty Magazine, June 30, 1928, p. 47

The Call to the Mexican War
“Polk thought with admirable realism about tariffs, the treasury, and the routine of domestic policy. He thought with. astonishing shrewdness about the necessary political maneuvers of government. But he thought badly about war. He was willing to make war on either England or Mexico, if he should have to in order to accomplish his purpose. But he believed that if there should be a war it could be won easily, probably without fighting, and certainly without great effort or expense. Deliberately carrying twin torches through a powder magazine from March 4, 1845, to May 13, 1846, he made no preparation for either war. He had no understanding of war, its needs, its patterns, or its results. The truth is that he did not understand any results except immediate ones. He did not know how to make war or how to lead a people who were making war.

He was not, however, behind his nation or his colleagues in public life. A generation had lived and died since the last war, and the generation of the first war had not been dead quite long enough. The generations in between had had the spread-eagle em-Jtions of the expanding nation without any need to refine them under the test of fact. What was thought to be the Spirit of ’76 blazed across the entire country when word came of Thornton’s capture. Under the headline “To Arms! To Arms!” A True Yankee Heart wrote in the National Intelligencer an epitome of a thousand editorials, all of which came down to “Young men . . . fly to the rescue of your country’s rights, and save her brave little band from a savage foe! … now, my friends, is the time for you to show the world that you are all chips of the old Revolutionary block, that you are made of the true Yankee stuff even to the backbone …. Come out,* young men, one and all, and you will stand in bold relief before the world.” They came out by the thousand, before there was any organization to receive them, more than any organization could receive …. It was ’76 all over again in the people’s thought. Hardly aware of it, they had been spoiling for a war; here it was and the Americans could lick the world. They were all Washington. · Greene, Morgan, barefoot Continentals staining the snow of Valley Forge with their blood, foreheads bandaged, banners tattered, tootling a fife in a heroic painting.”

Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision, 1846, p. 205-206

John Colter and Blackfeet Antipathy
Colter reached the equator of the Missouri, the mouth of the Platte and there met a big party coming upriver, bound for the rich beaver country which the return of Lewis and Clark had publicized. It was commanded by the veteran St. Louis trader Manuel Lisa, the shrewdest mind in the business and by far the most successful bourgeois the American trade was to have during its first period. Lisa had hired George Drewyer as his guide and principal dependence in the new country. He had also hired the John Potts and Peter Wiser who had been with Lewis and Clark, and now he got another member of the great company. For again Colter turned back to the wilderness, and this time he marched into American legendry. Where the Big Horn River empties into the Yellowstone, a site that had been duly recommended by William Clark, Lisa built the first post of the Western fur trade. Thence he sent Colter to find the Blackfeet and bring them in to trade. Without companions Colter made a journey so remarkable that it makes one’s breath catch. His route has been much disputed and will never be confidently established, but he went up the Big Horn and found the Stinking-Water River (more gently the Shoshone in these days) and the neighboring bitumen springs and thermal phenomena that were called “Colter’s Hell” thereafter – and were laughed at by greenhorns back home as a damned amusing lie. He crossed the Divide, the first white man to do so after the expedition, and traveled across part of the more spectacular hell that is now Yellowstone National Park. Before he met the Blackfeet he met their implacable enemies the lcrows and traveled with them. So when the enemies met he had to fight with the Crows, killing some Blackfeet.

Some writers have held that this encounter sealed or perhaps created the murderous hostility to American trappers that the Blackfeet maintained for many years. Probably it was more complex than that, and perhaps a great part of it was the natural belligerence of the Blackfeet who never kept the peace with anyone for very long, not even with themselves, but there is no doubt that the anti-American policy existed. And in the next year and a half Colter helped a good many Blackfeet find the sunset trail.

Bernard De Voto, The Course of Empire, p. 491-92

Mile 437: Cottonwood Station
“Eighty miles west of Fort Kearney the emigrants found a spring surrounded by cottonwoods. Near it the ravines were filled with scrub cedar. It was always a favorite camp and later became an important stage stop with the unimaginative name Cottonwood Spring. The cedar wood was freighted by ox train for a hundred miles in each direction to supply the stations, and the cottonwood logs were cut and hauled for building purposes. When the Indians became troublesome Fort McPherson was established close by; and we saw its flag, high and tiny but unmistakable, long before we arrived in sight of the buildings. The stage station disappeared long ago, but the fort remains, surrounded by the beautifully kept grounds of a national cemetery.”

[N.B. The Fort McPherson marker is just before Mile 435 on the Pony Express Bikepacking Route.]

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 100-102

Mile 137: Marysville/Palmetto
“Palmetto City and Marysville were adjacent settlements, the latter being one of the oldest and best known towns of northern Kansas, which had been laid out by Frank J. Marshall (Overland Stage, p. 109). When the daily stage service was instituted in 1861, the route ran west from Guittard’s to Marysville, where it crossed the Big Blue by a rope ferry (in dry weather the river could be forded here). The Pony Express station was located in a ‘small brick structure in Marysville.”

George Root, "Pike's Peak Express Companies," Part III, Kansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 8 (1944) p. 517, note 302

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 Overland Mail from St. Joseph

Mile 680: Scott's Bluff
“The third of the soft stone landmarks is Scott’s Bluff, slightly more than twenty miles from the Chimney. Scott’s Bluff owes its name to an incident of the fur-trapping days. Scott, it seems, was employed by the American Fur Company, and fell sick on his way home from the mountains. . . . [I]n order to make speed, the leader of Scott’s group went ahead with his men, leaving only two to bring Scott down the North Platte in a bullboat. It was agreed to meet at this distinctive bluff.

The boat was wrecked, and there was no way to take Scott along. The two men deserted him, expecting that he would obligingly die quietly where they left him. In fact they reported to their party that he had done so, and the entire company left the bluff and returned to civilization.nThe unfortunate Scott, meanwhile, struggled along toward the assigned meeting place, a distance of some sixty miles. After untold agony of body and mind he arrived to find unmistakable evidence of their departure. Hope was gone. He relinquished his soul to its maker and his outraged body to the wolves; but his bones remained—his bones and some identifying trifles by which they were recognized the next summer anf the whole sordid story was exposed. A memorial tablet has been erected near the spring where he spent his last hours.”

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 147-148

Reasons for Utah War
A book about the Mormon Trail had better not concern itself with the Utah War, but it cannot avoid mentioning it. Buchanan’s posse comitatus was brought on by more than simple outrage at polygamy (which after all was perfectly constitutional) or anger at Brigham Young’s refusal to cooperate with the territorial officials, though anger surely had some weight in the decision. Somewhere behind the determination to impose the federal will on the stiffnecked Mormons and to weaken Brigham Young’s absolute control of church and state there lay reasons of political opportunism. From one point of view the Utah War was a diversion created by Secretary of War Floyd to: 1) deflect public attention from slavery, 2) weaken the power available to the Union in the event of trouble by sending an expedition into the West, and 3) fill his own pockets. From another point of view, it was an attempt by Buchanan to discourage secessionism in the southern states by a show of firmness in suppressing secession in the territories. From the Mormon point of view it was more Gentile persecution. This was a war that began as political maneuver, turned into a military fiasco, was resolved by compromise without any shooting, and ended by becoming a good business proposition for the people it was supposed to discipline.

Wallace Stegner, The Gathering of Zion, p 275

Bloodthirsty Slade Story
“The bullwhackers in camp, when there were no wheels to fix, tires to tighten, boxes to wedge, oxen to shoe, or clothes to wash or mend, could sleep, play cards, write letters or tell stories. The stories of one old bullwhacker who had seen much of frontier life were quite interesting. He would tell about the noted stage company boss, Jack Slade, who caught one of his stage tenders listening at a door and who whipped out his bowie knife and cut the listener’s ear off, telling him if he ever caught him doing it again, he would cut his heart out—and hundreds of other such bloodthirsty stories.”

John Bratt, Tales of Yesterday, p. 55

Pony Express Bible
Among Joe Nardone’s gifts to the Library is an original “Pony Express Bible.” It is 5–7/8 inches high, 4 inches wide, and 2–1/8 inches thick, and exceedingly rare. Two thousand of these Bibles were ordered from the American Bible Society in New York. Today, there are only twenty-two of them known to be in existence. The scroll work on the leather covers as well as the lettering are in gold gilt. Printed on the spine are the words HOLY BIBLE and on the front cover:

PRESENTED BY
RUSSELL, MAJORS, & WADDELL
1858

If the Pony Express wasn’t started until 1860, why does this Bible have the date 1858 written on it? The three founders of the Overland California & Pikes Peak Express Company William H. Russell, Alexander Majors, and William B. Waddell were operating a very large freighting business. “They had a big contract with the federal government to supply all the western forts,” Nardone said. “Russell was the president. Waddell was in many ways the bookkeeper of the company. So Majors was the one who hired everyone, and he was a devout Christian.” In 1858–1859, Majors hired 5,000 men. He had each new employee take the oath described above, and then according to Nardone, “He would hand the men a Bible as a gift.”

However, it is Nardone’s feeling that few, if any, Pony Express riders got one when hired in 1860–1861. Majors conducted his business from his farm in Nebraska City, Nebraska, 150 miles north of the Pony Express Trail, and his original order of Bibles was insufficient to give copies to every one of the company’s newly hired men. Majors did order 300 more Bibles in 1860 that were received in 1861. “But it is a totally different Bible in size, in text, and in style,” Nardone said (6).

In his opinion, Nardone believes Bibles like the one now on view in the State Library’s California History Room should have been called the “Alexander Majors Transportation Bible.” Whatever it is called, this Bible speaks to the nature of the company that distributed it and calls to mind powerful associations with the history of the period.

M. Patricia Morris, "Pony Express Historian Joe Nardone’s Gifts from the Trail, " California State Library Foundation Bulletin, June 24, 2020

Anti-Mythic Journey for Women
It has been suggested by historian Howard Lamar and psychiatrist Daniel Levinson that the overland passage played a vital role in the life cycle of men, corresponding to “breaking away,” improving, or bettering oneself, the stages that mark a man’s life. If experiences attain mythic dimension because some pattern in all the endless variety reverberates against the fixed frame of human needs and yearnings, if the westward migration became an expression of testing and reaching for men, then it surely must have been an “anti-mythic” journey for women. It came when the physical demands of their lives drained their energies into other directions. The severity of the dislocation of the journey can be gauged in the knowledge that about one of every five overland women was seized by some stage of pregnancy, and virtually every married woman traveled with small children. When women wrote of the decision to leave their homes, it was almost always with anguish, a note conspicuously absent from the diaries of men.

Lillian Schlissel, Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey, p. 13

Stations Attacked During the Paiute War
“A San Francisco dispatch of June 4, in New York Daily Tribune, June 26, 1860, reported the stations abandoned beyond Sand Springs toward Salt Lake. The station at Simpson Park was burned, and tho horses driven off; the station keeper at Dry creek was murdered. . . .

“For some time Ruby Valley station, 300 miles west of Salt Lake was the one farthest west (this side of the trouble sone) not interfered with by the Indians. At this time it was announced that the Pony Express would begin semiweekly trips from St. Joseph (apparently to take care of the emergency).”

George Root, "Pike's Peak Express Companies," Part IV, Kansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1944) p. 59, n. 378, 381

Creation of the Post Office
Finally, however, they saw that the war’s outcome would depend on a secure network that could both sustain popular support and allow communications between politicians and the military. On July 26, 1775, the Continental Congress voted to transform the short-lived but crucial Constitutional Post into the Post Office Department of the United States-a nation rooted in a communications network that promoted the free exchange of ideas.

============

Political minefields notwithstanding, Congress finally rose to the president’s challenge. After much heated argument, the legislators passed the comprehensive Post Office Act of 1792, which laid down important policies that would affect the country’s political, social, and physical development for generations to come and help expand the founders’ provincial East Coast into the transcontinental United States. Just as the republic truly came into its own with the signing of the Constitution, the post assumed its permanent status and open-ended, truly American character with this landmark legislation. . . .

Modern Americans take for granted the “universal-service mandate,” which says that all citizens everywhere are entitled to mail access for the same price, but this principle was rarely discussed in such absolute terms until the twentieth century. The act didn’t make it a basic right, like freedom of speech or religion, but it fostered the idea that if a group of citizens could establish their need for postal service, they could reasonably hope that the government would provide it.

Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, p. 26, 34-35

The Word "Oregon"
The vast Oregon Territory sprawled from the Pacific to the Rockies across what are now the states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Wyoming and Montana as well as British Columbia. Its rich natural resources and coastal ports had first attracted Russia, Spain, Great Britain, and France, whose colonial forays had created a live-and- let-live, polyglot culture that mostly revolved around commerce.(“Oregon” comes from fleuve d’ouragan, or “hurricane river,” as the French called the great Columbia.)

Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, p. 116

North Platte
“Emerging from Ash Hollow, the trains rolled on-ever west-along the south bank of the North Platte. “Its width is not so great [as the Platte],” Edwin Bryant observed, “but still it is a wide stream, with shallow and turbid water, the flavor of which is, to me, excessively disagreeable.” The North Platte may taste bad, but in June its valley is dazzling. The full glory of spring paves the land with a carpet of lush grass and wildflowers. The bulbous yellow-white flowers of blooming yuccas pepper the landscape. Thunderstorms regularly scrub the air clean, leaving it cool and pungent with the smell of wet grass and sagebrush. Much of the valley today is a patchwork of irrigated fields and fenced cattle ranges. Up on the valley flanks, though, far from the river and on land too steep to irrigate, you can still sense the wild high plains-the vanished buffalo grasslands.”

Keith Heyer Meldahl, Hard Road West, p. 59

Star Bids
“The transportation of the mails overland before the completion of the railroad was considered impracticable by the Postmaster-general [Joseph Holt, Aaron Brown’s successor] because of their bulk. As dispatched semi-monthly they averaged ten tons. This amount he considered to be too large for overland transmission even when divided into semi-weekly allotments. The overland routes had been demonstrated as available for light mail and could be used in case of foreign war or such emergency, and now there was no further necessity for their extensive employment. He believed that the law of March 3, 1845, announced the proper principle in reference to mail contracts when it provided that contracts were to be tendered to ‘the bidder tendering sufficient guarantees for faithful performance, without other reference to the mode of such transportation than may be necessary to provide for due celerity, certainty, and security of such transportation.’ Inasmuch as this law was still in force, Holt announced that hereafter only ‘Star Bids,’ in conformity with the above law, would be invited. . . .

In the Post office Department files the lines upon which the service was performed with ‘celerity, certainty, and security,’ with no reference to the mode of conveyance, were marked with a star, hence the term ‘Star Bids.'”

LeRoy Hafen, The Overland Mail: 1849–1869, p. 137 (and note 295)

Mile 1421: Point Lookout
“Beyond [Faust’s, or Rush Valley Station] was Point Lookout, which was the doorway to the worst desert on the North American Continent. Ahead lay a country of bare, rocky mountain ranges, limitless miles of parched sand, scant herbage, dust storms, shimmering mirages in summer and deadly cold in winter. It was a lonely land devoid of civilized habitations. Even wild animals seemed to shun it.”

Settle and Settle, Saddles and Spurs, p. 139

Butterfield's Pony Express
“So successful did the Pony Express appear during the first few weeks of operation, that it was rumored as early as April 14, 1860, that the Butterfield Overland Mail Company or Overland Mail Company planned on starting their own horse express to compete with Russell, Majors, and Waddell. Reportedly, the Butterfield express proposed covering the 1,500 miles between Fort Smith, Arkansas, and Los Angeles in five or six days, and transmitting telegraph messages between these two points. Not to be outdone, C.O.C. & P.P. Express Co. agents confidently promised they would compete by establishing a similar enterprise reaching California in four and a half days, whether or not the telegraph was extended further westward from St. Joseph, Missouri.”

Anthony Godfrey, Historic Research Study Pony Express National Historic Trail, p. 68-69

Russell's Retail Experience
At 19 years of age Russell appears to have been manager of the store [Aull’s in Lexington, MO]. The extent of the firm’s business is seen in the fact that it had an interest in three Missouri river steamboats, operated a ropewalk in Liberty, owned a saw and grist mill, and engaged in the Santa Fe and fur trade. It also contracted to furnish supplies to Fort Leavenworth, Indian missions, emigrating tribes, and United States troops.”

Although only fragmentary studies of this giant pioneer firm have been made, it is clear that during the early 1830’s it was the largest and most influential business enterprise on the western Missouri frontier. As such it not only constituted excellent training ground for Russell, but to a very great degree provided a blue print for his career in days to come. In breadth of vision, energy, daring, and remarkable skill in organization, he was destined to operate in a similar though much wider field and by far surpass his old employer and mentor.

Settle and Settle, "The Early Careers of William Bradford Waddell and William Hepburn Russell: Frontier Capitalists," Kansas Historical Quarterly Vol. 26, No.4, Winter 1960, p. 362

Easterners' View of Mormons
“If some causes of the Mormon War are only dimly visible today, the part played by eastern public opinion is not. throughout the 1850s, hostility toward the Latter-day Saints had increased until it approached unreasoning frenzy by mid-1857. . . .

there is no doubt that the Saints’ practice of polygamy was another potent force inflaming Gentiles against Mormonism. . . the Church’s explanation of ‘the Principle,’ as plural marriage came to be called, was an intricate one. . . .

To eastern minds the Mormons were guilty of more than immoral conduct; they also formed a society of conspirators against the national government. . . There was even greater concern among anti-Mormon Gentiles that Young might seek the more treasonable goal of complete separation from the Union. . . .

Agents Holeman and Hurt, supported by other federal officials, accused the Mormons of tempering with the tribes of their region, seeking to entice them from their dutiful allegiance to the country. . . .

The conceptions of the eastern Gentiles, then, pictured the Saints as libidinous villains, eager to terminate their relation with the country and prepared to transgress every standard of moral behavior by forming alliances with the hated Indian. On the other side of the anti-Mormon stereotype the leaders of the Church were held guilty of innumerable murders, indeed had a powerful secret society of assassins to commit their infamous deeds.

Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850-1859, p. 77-87

Pony Express Map
“W. R. Hoonell of Kansas City constructed probably the best ‘Map of the Pony Express Route,’ and also wrote a short account which is published in The Kansas Historical Quarterly, v. V, pp. 68-71.”

George Root, "Pike's Peak Express Companies," Part IV, Kansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1944) p. 54, n. 360

Magraw's Philippic Against the Mormons
“When Buchanan requested his cabinet officers to gather correspondence justifying his policy toward Utah, the Secretary old State, old Lewis Cass, could locate only one document in his files, but it was a dandy. It came from W. M. F. Magraw, whose hatred of the Mormons had been heightened by loss of his mail contract to Hiram Kimball. At considerable length Magraw charged the Saints with crimes against the laws of the nation and humanity. According to his letter the Church had destroyed all non-Mormon courts in the Territory, thus leaving the Gentiles to the mercy of ‘a so-styled ecclesiastical organization, as despotic and damnable, as any ever to exist in any country.’ The result was violence and murder by ‘an organized band of bravos and assassins;’ ‘indiscriminate bloodshed, robbery and rapine’ at midnight or in full daylight.’ . . .

Like many anti-Mormons in these years, Magraw possessed an inenviable character. After the mail contract had been taken from him, he became superintendent of a crew constructing a federal road across the Plains, and while serving in that capacity he was guilty of shady practices, if not outright theft of government property.”

Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850-1859, p. 63-64, and p. 265 n. 5

Missourians and Mormons on the Trail
Their second day out, June 5, they crawled up over the bluffs west of modern Guernsey, Wyoming, where today’s tourist may see the trail rutted nearly four feet deep in the soft rock, and as they were nooning at the warm spring which Fremont had noted, they were passed by an Oregon company that had left Independence on April 12 and was pushing to stay ahead of everything on the road. Next morning another Oregon train passed them, and there were murmurs and dark looks for in this company were some recognized Missourians. But segregation was impossible, for water and camping sites were scarce, and at Cottonwood Creek (the Hermann Ranch) the Saints found themselves corralling only a little beyond this second Oregon company. For all their mutual suspicion, there was some hobnobbing. Some of the Missourians had heard about the roadometer, and came over to inspect it. Burr Frost, one of the Mormon blacksmiths, got some credit in heaven by setting up his forge and repairing a carriage spring for one of them.

Wallace Stegner, The Gathering of Zion, p 145

South Pass, the True Northwest Passage
“South Pass provided the key to a continent and made possible the transformation of the American West in a single generation.”

Will Bagley, South Pass: Gateway to a Continent, Location 329 [Kindle Edition]

Francis Parkman's Group
“[Parkman] could not suffer the Pukes or the Suckers. So he joined three Englishmen whom he had met at St. Louis, preparing for a summer on the plains, and who also wanted no truck with the “Kentucky fellows.” They were three of God’s innocents and one of them had high ranking among God’s bores. Captain Chandler had retired from Her Majesty’s Army on a competence; he had his brother with him and a Mr. Romaine. This was a faintly literary gentleman who bossed everything, knew nothing, was inept in all things, and expressed his type at the very beginning by leading them off the trail for a full week.

Yet he had to be accorded a certain authority since he had been on– and survived – a mountain expedition in 1841. Parkman had hired his mountain man, Henry Chatillon, and a humble Canadian pork-eater named Delorier; the Britishers had three engages. Ten strong altogether, with twenty-three horses and mules, they fled the movers into the prairies, where there would be no worse affiiction than the Pawnee. They intended to travel a long way, the Englishmen to the Pacific and Parkman as far as need be to find the noble savage in his unspoiled state. One supposes that Henry Chatillon assumed they must soon join a wagon train; otherwise, to take so small a party west was folly. “

Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision, 1846, p. 142-143

Superposition
“The pattern of today’s rivers [in Wyoming] only makes sense when we recognize that they inherited their paths from ancestral streams that flowed high above the ridges, in what is now the blue Wyoming sky. In 1875 the great western explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell dubbed this process stream superposition.”

Keith Heyer Meldahl, Hard Road West, p. 82

Prairie Medicine
“Captain Marcy outfits his prairie traveler with a ‘little blue mass, quinine, opium, and some cathartic medicine put up in doses for adults.’ I limited myself to the opium, which is invaluable when one expects five consecutive days and nights in a prairie wagon, quinine, and Warburg’s drops, without which no traveler should ever face fever, and a little citric acid, which, with green tea drawn off the moment the leaf has sunk, is perhaps the best substitute for milk and cream. The ‘holy weed Nicotian’ was not forgotten ; cigars must be bought in extraordinary quantities, as the driver either receives or takes the lion’s share . . .”

Richard Burton, The City of Saints, p. 9-10

Mile 1078: Pacific Springs
Pacific Springs, WY

“Pacific Springs is a marshy area just beyond South Pass in Wyoming. Seemingly unassuming, it was the first source of water for riders on the western side of the continental divide. And the Pony Express station that was built here in 1860 was the first station on the Pacific side of the United States encountered by west-bound riders! This station burned to the ground in 1862, but the remains of a cabin built in the late 1800s/ early 1900s marks its general location.”

Posted on the Pony Express National Historic Trail Facebook page , 4/21/18

Emergency Test of the Pony Express
In mid-march, 1860, Jules Beni shot Jack Slade, superintendent of the division, in Julesburg and left him for dead.

“Now, less than three weeks before the scheduled opening of the Pony Express, the new relay system would be put to the test under emergency conditions. Rider J.K Ellis was saddled up and dispatched to Fort Laramie, 175 miles to the northwest, in the hope that a relay horse would await him at each of the stations planted at ten-mile intervals. Fort Laramie represented the nearest legal authority; more important at this moment, it housed a military surgeon who held the only chance to save Slade’s life. . . .

J.K. Ellis made the 175-mile ride to Fort Laramie to fetch a surgeon in eighteen hours. ‘I believe,’ he later remarkes, ‘it breaks the record for a straightaway ride by a single individual.'”

Dan Rottenberg, Death of a Gunfighter, p. 184

Marcy Expedition Crossing the Rockies
“Marcy offered the [Ute] chief the value of three horses if he would guide the party to Cochetopa Pass, the only feasible route in miles over the continental divide. But the Indian was adamant, indicating that the white men would die if they tried to cross.

“On the 11th of December the ascent of the western slope of the Rockies was commenced. Soon snow began to impede progress and presently became deeper with a crust on the surface which cut the legs of the mules. Deeper and deeper it grew and the order of march was changed. Instead of having the animals break the trail the men were ordered in front and proceeding in single file, tramped down a path. But despite this solicitude for the animals the poor beasts began to weaken. The bitter pine leaves from the evergreens formed their only sustenance and on this unwholesome forage the famished brutes grew thin, weak, and began to die. Burdens must be lightened if the crossing was to be made, and accordingly, all surplus baggage was cached.

“But still the mules continued to perish. One day five were lost, and on the following morning eight others lay stark and rigid on the mountain side. Not only was the pace being greatly reduced but the food supply of the men was becoming alarmingly small. All the beef cattle had been consumed and the bread supply was very limited. To husband the strength of men and animals Marcy now ordered all baggage discarded except arms and ammunition and one blanket for each man.

“The snow, now four feet deep, was so dry and light that the men when walking upright sank to their waists in the fluffy whiteness. Jim Baker decided to try snow-shoes, but found the snow too loose and powdery to sustain them. In breaking trail through the deepest part the men in front now found it necessary to crawl on their hands and knees to pack the snow so that it would bear up the other men and the animals. The leading man was usually able to go about fifty yards before he became exhausted and dropped out into a rear position.

“Rations had been reduced and finally were exhausted before the summit of the divide was reached. The only food now available to the hungry men was the meat of the famished animals.”

LeRoy R. Hafen, "A Winter Rescue March Across the Rockies," p. 9-10

Mile 753: Fort Laramie
“Recorded history of the section immediately west of Scott’s Bluff begins about the year 1818 when Jaques La Ramie, a French Canadian, built a trapper’s cabin near the junction of the North Platte and the Laramie River. He was trapping in the vicinity of Laramie Mountains when the erection of the tiny dwelling established him as the first permanent resident of the section. Four years later the Indians clinched his claim to permanence by leaving his bones to bleach on the headwaters of the river that bears his name. . . .

[In 1834, Robert Campbell and William Sublette stopped to trade at the Laramie River on their way to the rendezvous at Green River.] At Laramie River, the trading was excellent. Sublette left Campbell to hold down the situation and hurried on. Campbell, getting help, built a small trading post consisting of a high stockade of pickets and a. few tiny huts inside. . . .he named the place Fort William, after his partner; but in two years, it evolved into what history knows as Old Fort Laramie. . . .

In 1835 . . .Fort William passed into the hands [of the American Fur Company] and was rechristened Fort John after John B. Sarpy, an officer in the company. . . .In 1836 the American Fur Company deserted the the stockade of Fort John and built a better one a few hundred yards up Laramie River on a small plateau. The name went with it but ‘Fort John on the Laramie’ was soon corrupted to the simple ‘Fort Laramie’ that has remained in use ever since. It was of adobe, copying those forts farther south that had been built with Mexican labor. . . .

By the year 1845 the fur traders dealt mostly in buffalo robes, beaver having passed gradually from its position of importance, and although the other forts did a brisk business, the preeminence and prestige of Fort Laramie was unquestioned. [Francis] Parkman wrote of the American Fur Company at Fort Laramie that they, ‘well-nigh monopolize the Indian trade of this whole region. Here the officials rule with an absolute sway; the arm of the United States has little force; for when we were there, the extreme outposts of her troops were about seven hundred miles to the eastward.’ . . .

The lack of governmental protection mentioned by Parkman was felt so keenly that in the summer of ’49 the United States purchased Fort Laramie and garrisoned it for the avowed purpose of giving advice, protection, and the opportunity of buying supplies to the emigrants. It had a monthly mail service, and the marching thousands moved perceptibly faster the last few miles, hoping for a letter from home. Comparatively few were received, for they were apt to be longer en route that the would-be recipients; but the myriads of letters sent eastward fared better, and, if the addressee stayed long enough in one place, they arrived in the fullness of time.”

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 151-156

Mormon Battallion and Winter Quarters
“From the Mormon point of view, the decision to move across the Missouri seemed the most desirable. Two events soon closed the matter. On June 27, Capt. James Allen arrived in camp with a message from President James K. Polk asking for five hundred Mormon volunteers to join Gen. Stephen S. Kearny and the Army of the West marching on Mexican territory now that the war had been declared. Such a request, besides providing the Saints with some desperately needed cash, gave Brigham Young a reason to claim that the loss of five hundred able-bodied men would stall the exodus. Young thus agreed to form a Mormon battalion if he received permission to winter on Omaha and Potawatomi lands. Allen agreed, Young next turned to the Indians for permission to remain. Big Elk, the aging chief of the Omaha, his son StandIng Elk, a half-breed interpreter named Logan Fontenelle, and about eighty tribesmen were called to council by the Saints on August 28. Young put forth his case, intimating government approval, and asked for ‘the privilege of stopping on your lands this winter or untill [sic] we can get ready to go on again.’ In return for this privilege, the Mormons offered to construct a trading house, plant crops, and establish a school. Big Elk accepted the terms largely because the well-armed Saints offered protection from their enemies, the Sioux. The treaty, of course, was extralegal. The Mormons also negotiated a similar agreement with the Potawatomi and then sent both ‘treaties’ to the Office of Indian Affairs and to the President with the request that they be given official permission to remain.

“Brigham Young did not wait for an answer. By the end of August, ‘Winter Quarters of the High Council of the Camp of Israel’ were officially located on Omaha lands. Large groups of Saints moved across the Missouri at a spot about eighteen miles above Bellevue and began laying out a town on the table land just above the river. Other villages were constructed in the same general vicinity, as well as one on Potawatomi lands on the Iowa side. In all areas log houses went up, cattle were put to graze, and a substantial quantity of timber was cut for the coming cold weather.”

Robert A. Trennert, Jr., "The Conflict Over Winter Quarters, 1846-1848," p. 386-387

Mile 970: Independence Rock
“A few miles upstream from where they gained the Sweetwater River, the emigrants came to Independence Rock—a half-mile-long ridge of granite that rises like a whaleback from the sagebrush sea of the Sweetwater Valley. It was a rite of westward passage to write one’s name on Independence Rock. Thousands of signatures plastered its surface during the emigration years, and many remain today. Emigrants carved their names with hammers or chisels, or painted them with sticky mixtures of black powder and buffalo grease. . . .

A party of 1830 trappers and traders lead by William Sublette probably gave Independence Rock its name when they celebrated Independence Day at its base. For the emigrants, the name signified westward progress. If you reached Independence Rock by the Fourth of July, you were on schedule to get over the western mountains before winter snows.”

Keith Heyer Meldahl, Hard Road West, p. 92

Indian Botheration
“But sagely thus reflecting that ‘dangers which loom large from afar generally lose size as one draws near;’ that rumors of wars might have arisen, as they are wont to do, from the political necessity for another ‘Indian botheration,’ as editors call it . . .

Richard Burton, The City of Saints, p. 2

Mormon Emigrants From Eurpoe
Between 1847 and 1868, the last year of overland emigration by trail, nearly 50,000 British, Scandinavian, and German converts were pumped along that pipeline into Salt Lake City. During the peak year of 1855 it was said that a third of all the emigrants from the British Isles to the United States were Mormons.

Wallace Stegner, The Gathering of Zion, p 9-10

Jim Clyman on Hastings' Cutoff
“The wagon train grew quiet but this one fire was kept blazing – a carmine splash against the blue-velvet night, the desert stars near above it, the white bow of a wagon top behind, and, farther away, the singing of drunken Missourians at the fort and the screaming of drunken Sioux. [Jim] Clyman talked on. He knew Hastings’ plans, he knew what Hastings would tell these innocents near South Pass. And he had just crossed – with Hastings – from the bend of the Humboldt to Fort Bridger by way of the Salt Desert, Great Salt Lake, and the Wasatch Mountains. A Sioux yipped, the barking of coyotes ringed the sleeping caravan, and Jim told his listeners: take the familiar trail, the regular, established trail by way of Soda Springs and Fort Halt. Do not try a cutoff, do not try anything but the known, proved way. “It is barely possible to get through [before the snows] if you follow it-and it may be impossible if you don’t.” Shock and alarm struck the travelers and made them angry, who were still far short of South Pass, whose minds could map that weary angle from Fort Bridger to Fort Hall and back again to the Humboldt. Tense and bellicose, Reed spoke up (Jim records his words), “There is a nigher route, and it is no use to take so much of a roundabout course.” Reference to Lansford Hastings’ book, Jacob Donner’s copy bought at Springfield, back in the States, now scanned by firelight at Fort Bernard, a well-thumbed passage marked with lines. The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California, page 137: “The most direct route, for the California emigrants, would be to leave the Oregon route, about two hundred miles east from Fort Hall; thence bearing west southwest to the Salt Lake; and then continuing down to the bay of San Francisco. ” Proved. And someone would spit into the fire.

(When Lansford Hastings wrote that passage he had never seen the Humboldt, or Great Salt Lake, or the Wasatch Mountains, or the Salt Desert; neither he nor anyone else had ever taken the trail here blithely imagined by a real-estate man who wanted to be President or mortgagee of California.)

Yes. But Jim has just traveled that route, and if they would save their skins, they will not take it, they will go by way of Fort Hall. “I . . . told him about the great desert and the roughness of the Sierras, and that a straight route might turn out to be impracticable.” Told him about the glare of the salt plain under sun and without water. Told him about the Diggers lurking outside the camps to kill the stock. Told him about the chaos of the Wasatch canyons which Jim Clyman and Lansford Hastings, who were on horseback and had no wagons and so no need of a road, had barely got through.”

Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision, 1846, p. 184-185

Wide-Awake
“I was glad to drink off the brim of my ‘wide-awake.'”

[A wideawake hat is a broad brimmed felt “countryman’s hat” with a low crown, similar to a slouch hat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wideawake_hat]

William Chandless, Chandless, W. (1857). A Visit to Salt Lake, p. 29

Crik
“Beyond Kennekuk we crossed the first Grasshopper Creek. Creek, I must warn the English reader, is pronounced ‘crik,’ and in these lands, as in the jargon of Australia, means not ‘an arm of the sea,’ but a small stream of sweet water, a rivulet ; the rivers of Europe, according to the Anglo-American of the West, are ‘criks.’ On our line there are many grasshopper creeks; they anastomose with, or debouch into, the Kansas River, and they reach the sea via the Missouri and the Mississippi.

Richard Burton, The City of Saints, p. 21

Ancient Pony Express
Some four thousand years ago, Middle Eastern monarchs established the first postal systems, which were designed to transport official government communications. Herodotus famously praised the ambitious 1,600-mile-long system of the Persian emperor Darius I (r. 522-486 BCE), which used “post riders,” or mounted couriers, to carry communiques etched on clay tablets: “It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day’s journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed [italics added].” Centuries later, the network established by the Roman emperor Augustus (27 BCE-14 CE) was similarly reserved for officials, who often traveled in carts along with the mail on the post roads that also helped to spread imperial hegemony and civilization. Indeed, Rome’s post was called the cursus publicus, or “public road.”

Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, p 12

Pony Express and the Central Route
Keetley’s letter [in Visscher’s book] is so full of confusion and obvious mistakes that it would be easy to dismiss it completely. Colonel Visscher, as was his editorial practice, printed the entire letter without comment. He had come of age when journalists were paid by the column inch, and Keetley had written a nice long letter. Visscher tossed it into what the National Geographic later called “the buck-a-roo stew” that was to be the story of the Pony Express. It would be easy to ignore Keetley’s letter but for this observation:

The Pony Express was never started with a view to making it a paying investment. It was a put-up job to change the then Overland mail route which was running through Arizona on the southern route, changed to run by way of Denver and Salt Lake City, where Ben Holladay had a stage line running tri-weekly to Denver and weekly to Salt Lake. The object of the Pony Express was to show the authorities in Washington that by way of Denver and Salt Lake to Sacramento was the shortest route, and the job worked successfully, and Ben Holladay secured the mail contract from the Missouri River to Salt Lake, and the old southern route people took it from Salt Lake City to Sacramento. As soon as this was accomplished and the contract awarded, the pony was taken off, it having fulfilled its mission. Perhaps the war also had much to do with changing the route at the time.

Christopher Corbett, Orphans Preferred, p. 185

Army of the West on the Plains
“They left the high grass behind and timber with it, so that part of the duty of the soldier was to collect buffalo chips during the last hour of marching. This was another strangeness and some thought the fires stank abominably but others found that they gave a welcome tang to the salt pork and corned beef. So many things were strange: jack rabbits, antelopes, and especially the buffalo, the great legend now gaped at by these rural youths, who tried to hunt it and some times succeeded. The country was unimaginable, plains on a scale they had not dreamed of diminishing one to a dot that seemed to travel on the bottom of a bowl, the vast heave of the swells that seemed like the swells of the ocean they had read about, many miles long. Most of all the sun. Missouri sun is nothing amateurish but the sun of the plains flattened the life in you, filled your eyes with the color of blood, and baked you to the bone with sudden overheated winds and violent dust storms making it worse. The boys kept going and began to stink.”

Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision, 1846, p. 254

Langford Hastings
“This Hastings was a Fremont in miniature. He is an elusive soul, not much can be said about him with certainty. A young man on the make, he was at this moment engaged in a grandiose and still wholly theoretical real-estate enterprise on the golden shore, and he was the local agent of a bigger one managed from Washington which was a kind of gaudy bet on an insider’s guess that there would be war. But he also had speculations – or visions – more gaudily ambitious. He may have meditated another overlordship on the frontier of empire, like the one which Sutter had actually established at New Helvetia. He may have seen himself – he would only have been one of a good many- as a kind of Sam Houston, president of another Lone Star Republic. He may have intended to utilize the opportunities provided for a smart man with nerve – precisely as Fremont did. Rumors connected him.._ loosely – with the Mormons ,md, on grounds that are apparently more substantial, with one of the current revolutionary intrigues. Whatever was in his mind, he did not have quite enough stuff, Put him down as a smart young man who wrote a book – it is not a unique phenomenon in literature – without knowing what he was talking about. As the first head of the California Chamber of Commerce, the first Booster on the golden shore. He went from his home town, Mount Vernon, Ohio, to Oregon in 1842 with Elijah White’s famous caravan. He found no opening for his talents in that sober commonwealth and moved on to California. He liked what he saw, he perceived there were opportunities for smart men, so he wrote a prospectus and took it east in 1844. It was published at Cincinnati in 1845 and Hastings went back to California. Jim Clyman heard of him just when the Bowens and the Smiths and the Does were reading it. And while they were reading it Mr. Hastings formed a new design, one which shifted him from merely mischievous advertising to really dangerous activity. As, farther along, we shall see.”

Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision, 1846, p. 45

Pony Express Re-Rides
“[I]n 1923, the first re-ride of the Pony Express was organized. Sixty riders traversed eight states in a celebration commemorating the C.O.C. & P.P. Express Co. that was formed sixty-three years earlier. Authenticity of the original days of the Pony Express was provided by the dress of the riders, as well as the route of the re-ride.. . .

“In 1935, the Diamond Jubilee of the Pony Express, a second re-ride of the route was made, sponsored by the Oregon Trail Memorial Association. On April 3, the date that the Pony Express began, celebration activities began across the nation. In August, approximately 300 Boy Scouts participated in the re-ride of the Pony Express historic trail. All events ended in late October, which signified the start of the transcontinental telegraph and the end of the Pony Express.”

Anthony Godfrey, Historic Resource Study Pony Express National Historic Trail, p. 227

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 company. The venture began as a private business initially proposed in January 1856 to compete directly with the government mail service. Later that month, the Utah Territorial Assembly incorporated the Deseret Express and Road Company. The first of two mass meetings in Salt Lake revealed the proposed corporation’s expansive vision of ‘establishing a daily express and passenger communication between the western States and California, or, more extendedly, between Europe and China.’ Both Mormon and non-Mormon leaders in Utah supported the proposal. . . .

The government terminated Brigham Young’s mail contract shortly after it ordered troops to Utah. Like Burnt Ranch, all the buildings of the Y.X. Express went up in smoke. ‘Nearly $200,000 was expended during the winter of 1856–57 to establish way stations, purchase teams and wagons, hire help, and to buy equipment and other supplies,’ historian Leonard Arrington wrote. ‘The resources of the Church were almost exhausted in this venture.’ Brigham Young would not be the last entrepreneur to lose a fortune trying to dominate western trade and transportation.”

Will Bagley, South Pass: Gateway to a Continent, Location 3836-3873 [Kindle Edition]

Mormon Attacks on the Army's Supply Trains
“On October 4 a small band of Mounted Mormons led by Major Lot Smith bypassed the Tenth Infantry and fell upon two of [Russell, Majors & Waddell’s supply] trains camped along the Green River, a very few miles from Colonel Waite’s command [Fifth Infantry]. Secure in the knowledge that the army’s calvary, the Dragoons, was some 700 miles to the east [as it had been ordered to assist keeping order in Bleeding Kansas], Smith burned these trains and the next day surprised and destroyed a third on the Big Sandy.

All told the flames lit by Smith and his few dozen men consumed seventy-two wagons containing 300,000 pounds of food, principally flour and bacon—enough provisions to feed the troops for several months.”

Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850-1859, p. 109

Platte Valley
“The valley of the Platte from Fort Kearney to the South Crossing has an average width of six or eight miles, closed in N. and S. by low bluffs from 200 to 300 feet high; while the river divides the level between pretty evenly, having itself a width of little less than a mile. Cedar-wood is sprinkled thinly over the bluffs, and now and then (but rarely), you may find a copse on the river-side, half impervious through the tangled masses of the wild vine; their grapes, though small and acid, are wholesome and refreshing, and an excellent remedy for either hunger or thirst.”

William Chandless, Chandless, W. (1857). A Visit to Salt Lake, p. 66

Russell's Character
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: “Profits from freighting encouraged the exuberant William H. Russell, the irrepressible plunger of the combination, to involve his partners in two fantastic ventures that vastly benefitted the West but led inevitably to the company’s downfall.” An exuberant and irrepressible plunger sounds like a sporting man, a man who might make a little wager. Billington’s assessment of the end of the Pony Express also considers an aspect of Russell’s character that many of his admirers and other historians of the venture avoid or neglect. It spoils the story. Russell was dishonest.

Christopher Corbett, Orphans Preferred, p. 250-251

The Mormon "Halfway House"
“Year by year the number and variety of available goods and services [in Salt Lake City] increased. . . .By 1852 . . . travelers could patronize several eating houses and hotels. In 1853 yjr United States Hotel owners advertised the only bar in the city . . . By 1856 clothiers, weavers, druggists, sign painters, saddlers, and operators of vegetable markets were also actively engaged in trade . . .

The total effect of all this was significant. To be able to interrupt the once-formidable overland journey for an extended sojourn in a large city where an emigrant could feast on memorable cuisine, board in a bona fide hotel, have a likeness made to send back to relatives, have his hair cut, his watch repaired, and even eyeglasses prescribed must have altered the atitudes with which travelers faced the overland journey.”

John D. Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, p. 310-311

The Rider's Horn
“Billy Campbell commented about another item provided, ‘Each rider at the outset was given a horn to blow as he approached the station. This was to warn the station keeper to have fresh mounts ready. Usually, however, they could hear the hoof-beats of our ponies about as far as they could hear the horn.'”

William E. Hill, The Pony Express: Yesterday and Today, p. 27

The Custer Paradigm
“The Custer paradigm has nearly twenty segments, or motifs, within it. Yet the likelihood is that the creation of this paradigm was polygenetic; that is, each society, each author or storyteller who put his imaginative talents to retelling this tale, had to fabulate it anew. The Custer cluster includes Saul, Leonidas, Roland, Sir Gawain, and the garrison of the Alamo; we have no evidence that Herodotus (whose version of Thermopylae is the most important) copied or even knew of the Old Testament account of Saul’s death; that Turoldus or whoever was the writer of the Roland knew of Herodotus or made Saul his model; or that the alliterative Morte Arthure is based on any of these; or that the Alamo legends arose in imitation of those other heroic stands.”

Bruce Rosenberg, The Code of the West, p. 160

Cholera in Independence, MO
“The Asiatic cholera brought along by steamboat passengers from St. Louis was particularly deadly around Independence, and graves multiplied. This, coupled with the rivalry of neighboring Westport and the advantages of going farther upriver by steamer, led to the decline of Independence in the fifties as a significant jump-off.”

Merrill J. Mattes, The Great Platte River Road, p. 108

Westerners and Government Roads
“Individualism and adaptability characterized all those who participated in America’s westward movement. Frontiersmen evinced this as they sought out new routes toward the West and more convenient means of transport.

Despite this individualism, the Westerner has always sought the aid of the federal government in solving his transportation problems. Such a vast undertaking as the construction of wagon roads from the Mississippi west to the Pacific required more than half a century for completion. Federal sponsorship was essential, since there must be exploring expeditions, reconnaissance of trails, and the survey, building, and improving of roads.”

W. Turrentine Jackson, Wagon Roads West, p. 1

Bullboat
“Our next obstacle was the Walnut Creek, which we found, however, provided with a corduroy bridge; formerly it was a dangerous ford, rolling down heavy streams of melted snow, and then crossed by means of the ‘bouco’ or coracle, two hides sewed together, distended like a leather tub with willow rods, and poled or paddled.”

Richard Burton, The City of Saints, p. 21

Pony Bob Halsam's Ride
“The first Pony Express rider going east after the attack upon Williams Station was “Pony Bob” Haslam, who set out for [from?] Friday’s Station on May 9. If he was not aware of the outbreak when he started, he quickly learned about it when he arrived in Carson City. Since the volunteers had taken all the horses to chase the Pah Utes, there was no change for him. Scores of men were frantically at work fortifying Penrod Hotel and everybody was armed. After feeding his own mount he rode on to Buckland’s, 75 miles away. When he arrived he found W. C. Marley, the station keeper, and Johnson Richardson, the rider who was to relieve him, in something of a panic.

Richardson refused to take the mochila on and Marley offered Haslam $50 to continue with it. This he agreed to do not because of the bonus, but because he felt it was his duty to do so. Changing horses he pounded on to Sand Springs where he changed again. Making still another change at Cold Spring he arrived safely at Smith’s Creek, having covered 190 miles without a rest.

Jay G. Kelley took the mochila and raced eastward with the news of the tragedy at William’s Station. He made his regular changes along the way, briefly told his story, and pushed on to Ruby Valley, his home station. From there both mochila and news were rushed eastward. Every rider along the route, knowing the necessity for both reaching Salt Lake City at the earliest possible moment, outdid himself in an effort to make the best possible time.

Eight hours after arriving at Smith’s Creek, Haslam turned back with the west bound mochila, possibly on May 12, the day of the battle at Pyramid Lake. At Cold Spring he found that the station had been burnt, the station keeper killed, and the horses driven off. After watering and feeding his own horse, he rode on. Upon reaching Sand Springs he found only the stock tender there whom he persuaded to accompany him for fear he would be killed if left alone.

At Carson Sink he found fifteen men, probably the most of them survivors of the battle at Pyramid Lake, barricaded in the station. Leaving them to hold the place he rode on to Buckland’s, arriving only three and a half hours late.

Marley was so overjoyed to see him back alive that he doubled the bonus promised him. After resting an hour and a half he sped on to Carson City, which he found a city of mourning for those slain at Pyramid Lake. He reported to Bolivar Roberts, then rode on to Friday’s Station. When he arrived he had covered 380 miles and had been in the saddle thirty-six hours.

Settle and Settle, Saddles and Spurs, p. 150-151

Mile 927-946: Emigrant Gap to Willow Station
“By either the Emigrant Gap route or the older road it was in the neighborhood of fifty miles from the ferry to Independence Rock on the Sweetwater River—a forced march of two days. The emigrants of both routes softened this somewhat by making a short drive after crossing the [Platte] river and camping at the last drinkable water, so that repellant Poison Spider Creek was populous if not popular in its day. Both routes led to Willow Springs on the second night, and from there it was possible to make the Sweetwater by the end of the next afternoon.”

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 203

Pony Express in Buffalo Bill's Show
Like every other frontier reeenactment in the Wild West show, the Pony Express was a chapter in the life of its hero and his country. Before audiences of thousands, the horseman—not Cody himself, but another “Former Pony Post” rider—raced “down the the grans stand at a gallop,” writes one ecstatic reviewer, “checked his pony within a length, and almost before it was at a standstill the rider was on the ground, the bag on another pony, and the man galloping off at full speed, in less time than it would take an ordinary man to dismount.” It was a showstopper.

Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill's America, p. 3

Green River Basin to the Mormons
Two days into the land of promise, they saw little that was promising. Pilot Butte and then Church Butte, well-known landmarks were on their left, to the southeast. Far to the northwest the three Tetons lifted their pure needles, and the “Utah” or “Bear River” mountains—the Uintas—were a snowy crest along the south. But the country they traveled through was “hard-faced,” its soil “as hard as cast iron” and barren of anything but sage. For lack of a campsite with grass and water they had to drive 23 3/4 miles, the longest day’s travel yet, before they corralled by moonlight on the bank of the Big Sandy.

Wallace Stegner, The Gathering of Zion, p 156-157

Rebuilding Fort Bridger
For a long time [after the Utah War] the troops maintained an uncertain tenancy at Jim Bridger’s old trading post . . . naturally much building was necessary; and, with the fade-out of hostilities, timber was brought in from the Uinta Mountains, and barracks, officers’ quarters, guardhouse, etc., were all constructed around and about a large square parade ground through which flowed one of the most beautiful of the tiny channels of Blacks Forks. Far to one side of these were the stables, used later by the Pony Express. It is the back wall of these stables that the modern traveler sees as he rockets by on the highway. It will richly pay him to stop and go in.

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 252

The River Towns
“The river towns, as they developed, were all much alike. At the river’s edge was a levee, sometimes macadamized for all-weather use. Between the levee and the bluffs was the business district, running back for two or three blocks. Here were the warehouses and stores of the ‘outfitters’ and the forwarding and commission merchants. Behind the business district and up the gullies that gave access to the tops of the bluffs were the small stores, saloons, and dance halls. On top of the bluffs was the residential section. Beyond the residential section were the wagon parks and corrals of the freighters who sent their wagons into town in small groups to load at the warehouse.”

Henry Pickering Walker, The Wagonmasters (1966), p. 46

Sharing a Blanket
“In this connection I might say that at least one of the men is still on earth. I refer to Thomas Crummel, ex-mayor of Auburn. He was my ‘partner’ on that trip, slept with me under the same blankets, and a truer or more loyal fellow never cracked a whip or stole a chicken from a ranchman.”

George P. Martin, "Bull-Whacking Days," Proceedings and Collections of the Nebraska State Historical Society, 1902, p. 230

Mile 1020: Icy Slough
“The road continually crossed and recrossed the conspicuous ruts left by the caravans which at this point had saved weary miles by cutting off a bend in the river. Men and women both, and especially children, here had looked forward with a the keenest anticipation to the hour they would spend at Icy Slough.

We have many descriptions of the place, for inevitably it proved a diversion. Delano wrote that they here encountered a ‘morass, perhaps a mile in length by half a mile in breadth. Some of the boys, thinking that water could easily be obtained, took a spade, and going out on the wild grass, commenced digging. About a foot from the surface, instead of water, they struck a beautiful layer of ice, five or six inches in thickness.’ . . .

Companies planned to noon there for the sake of genuine enjoyment afforded. The travelers could use a little diversion; and, as a morale booster, Icy Slough, the last of the trail landmarks that everyone must pass, had few equals.”

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 221

Jornada
“[By 1842, the California emigrants] had gained some valuable geographic knowledge—for instance, the desert country was passable, even with wagons, because there was never a stretch of more than thirty-five or forty miles without water and grass. Such dry drives—called ‘jornadas,’ as people were beginning to call them, using the Spanish term—though hard on teams, were not impossible.”

George R. Stewart, The California Trail, p. 32

Mile 1565: Rock Springs
“Another station, Rock Springs was added on the shortcut or summer express route. It cut over the southern tip of the Antelope Mountains with the intent of reducing distance and time. Nothing remains of Rock Springs or Spring Valley Station.”

William E. Hill, The Pony Express Trail: Yesterday and Today, p. 214

Slavery in Oregon and California
Oregon was less hospitable to blacks than many of them had hoped. The territorial legislature passed laws prohibiting admission to black settlers, even though exceptions were made on individual petition. When Oregon was admitted to the union in 1857, a Free Negro Admission Article was proposed for the state’s constitution. but it was defeated, and the small number of blacks who had made their way to Oregon lived uneasily until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.

California, on the other hand, outlawed slavery within its boundaries in 1850 because miners feared the appearance of slave labor. The mines soon became places where an exotic mixture of races and nationalities shouldered one another in the feverish search for wealth. Mary Ballou wrote home that she lived in a mining camp caUed “Negro Bar,” where “French and Duch and Scoth and Jews and Italions and Sweeds and Chineese and Indians” were all panning for gold. Even before the discovery of gold. California had been settled by men and women of Mexican, lndian, and African descent. Eighteen percent of the population, according to a Spanish census of 1790, were of other than Anglo-American origin. By 1849, San Francisco blacks had formed a “mutual Benefit and Relief Society” of their own. By 1854, that city had three black churches, and within the next decade there were three black newspapers and as many black churches.

Lillian Schlissel, Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey, p. 136

Freighter's Camp
“A level valley, miles in width; a broad river, full of wooded islands, and shallows, and rippling currents ; in the far distance low ranges of interminable hills; a circle of white covered wagons, with the embers of campfires dimly glowing in their midst. This is the scene, but the central object, our camp, only is visible, for the light of morning has not yet come.

It is the dawn of a warm summer’s day. Between the hard bed, the heat and musquitoes, a restless night has been passed, tired and needful of repose as you have been ; but as daylight approaches, a deep sleep comes over you. Suddenly you hear a thumping on the side of the sheeted wagon, accompanied with cries of ‘Roll out ! Roll out !’ and words unmentionable added thereto. This is the reveille of the plains, and the performer is the assistant wagon-master of the train; the musical instruments are his lungs and a detached ox-bow. The sounds travel around the circle of wagons until not a driver is slighted. Drowsily you roll on your bed of hard bags of flour and try to think you imagine the sounds and can sleep longer, but no, they are reality.”

Thaddeus S. Kenderdine, A California Tramp and Later Footprints, p. 31

Brigham Young's Plans for the Desert
“Brigham Young’s plans for the desert mecca were ambitious, extending even to the acquisition of a seaport on the Pacific Coast. Initial explorations into the surrounding area were quickly followed by colonizing missions. Passing emigrants thus found not only an impressive city by the lake but also clusters of small communities presumably located to defend the ‘inner core of settlements’ and to sustain the all-weather route to San Diego along the ‘Mormon Corridor.’

Within ten years of their arrival at Salt Lake, Mormon pioneer-missionaries under Young’s close supervision had established ninety-six separate settlements. Outposts fanned out from the Salt Lake City axis in all directions: southwest along the corridor to San Bernardino, California, southeast to Moab, Utah, northeast to Forts Bridger and Supply, north to the Fort Lemhi mission on Idaho’s Salmon River, and westward to Mormon Station in the Carson Valley. An impressive testament to both Young’s aspirations and abilities, this extensive domain initially spanned some 1,000 miles from its northernmost to southernmost point and 800 miles from east to west. It incorporated one-sixth of the territory of the United States.”

John D. Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, p. 303

Texas or Cherokee Oxen
“The oxen were not, in general, the massive beasts bred in the northeast but were range cattle from Texas or the Cherokee country. While they should be large and at least four years old for best performance, they actually varied greatly. One man said that they were ‘of every character and description—some of them very small, but having horns of immense size, that we boys used to say that the meat of the steer could be packed in its horns.’ . . . According to a merchant of Nebraska City who had done some freighting, the Texas steer made the best leader; quick on his feet, he could, and at times did, outrun a horse.”

Henry Pickering Walker, The Wagonmasters (1966), p. 107

Mile 1086: Parting of the Ways
Parting of the Ways, WY

“About 18 miles after travelers on the Oregon Trail crossed the Continental Divide at South Pass, they reached a junction known now as the Parting of the Ways. The right fork went west toward Fort Hall in present southern Idaho, while the left continued southwest toward Fort Bridger and Salt Lake City. The Fort Hall route was a cutoff, opened in 1844. It saved about 46 miles and two and a half days’ travel, but only by crossing a waterless, sagebrush desert.”

[Reported by Jan Bennett in the Bike the Pony Express group, 10/10/19]

Wyoming History.org

Civil War Interrupted Pony Express Research
The Civil War, still America’s most deadly conflict, became the blinding focal point of public attenton, juat as the flet little poniesd had chalked up a year’s service freighting the California mail. By then the unique venture had assumed something of the flavor of an institution, and was comfortably taken for granted, while the great fratricide simply crowded it off the front page of public consciousness. After the war, the stress of reconstruction days, and the burgeoning development of the West, nearly relegated the Pony Express to the limbo of forgotten history.

Roy S. Bloss, Pony Express—The Great Gamble, iv.

Black Camel
This side of Eternity, it is all one now. The last rider has departed for that bourne whence the Black Camel is the only steed.

John L. Considine, “Eleven Days to St.Joe!,” Sunset Magazine 51, no. 4 (1923): 81

Russell, Majors & Waddell Set Up in Leavenworth
In the dawn of 1855 Kansas territory presented a scene unique in American history. Six months before, when its 22 million acres were thrown open to settlers, there were few white men in it ex-cept at Forts Leavenworth, Scott and Riley, and at Indian missions. Neither was there a town of any size within its borders. There were few roads, no schoolhouses or churches, and no stores or other business concerns necessary to develop communities, and no newspapers. In fact, Kansas territory in the spring of 1854, so far as civilized political, economic, commercial, and social institu-tions were concerned, was almost a total vacuum.

When Russell, Majors & Waddell signed a copartnership agreement on December 28, 1854, effective January 1, 1855, creating the great freighting firm of Waddell, Russell & Co., Majors & Russell, Majors, Russell & Company, or Russell, Majors & Waddell, as it was variously known, they evidently meant to assemble their trains at Westport and drive them to Fort Leavenworth for loading. In the meantime, however, they looked the situation in Kansas over and decided that entirely apart from the freighting business the new territory offered fabulous opportunities to capitalists able to grasp them. Consequently they established field headquarters in the infant town of Leavenworth. They opened a store under the name of Majors, Russell & Company, built a warehouse, an office, a blacksmith and wagon shop, a packing plant to provide meat for their trains, a sawmill on nearby Shawnee creek, a lumber yard, and corrals for their oxen.

Settle and Settle, "The Early Careers of William Bradford Waddell and William Hepburn Russell: Frontier Capitalists," Kansas Historical Quarterly Vol. 26, No.4, Winter 1960, p. 372-73

Early Overland Mail Proposals
The idea of carrying mails overland by stage was of early origin. In 1849, a petition embodying a plan for a continental mail was recommended to the Senate by the Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads. At the close of the same year, a second petitioner, William Bayard, offered to open a road to California and to carry mails over it “once a week in four-horse coaches.” Two years later, Henry O’Reilly proposed to establish a route through “Nebraska, the Desert, California and Oregon,” and to erect stockades upon it, each twenty miles apart, for the quartering of “twenty dragoons,” two of whom should ride daily between posts and carry express and mails. This plan received nation-wide attention, for its author was a successful telegraph builder.

Curtis Nettles, "The Overland Mail Issue During the 1850s," The Missouri Historical Review, XVIII, no. 4 (1924), 521

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 record revealing how many of the mere 4,086 blacks enumerated there made the journey by land or sea. One hundred twenty-eight blacks lived in Oregon, thirty-nine in Washington, and fifty-nine in Utah.

Todd Guenther, “‘Could These Bones Be From a Negro?’” Overland Journal 19, no. 2 (Summer 2001), 46

The Ocean and the Great Plains
“Much evidence of the immediate effects may be found in the reaction of men who came to the Plains. If we again visualize a migrating host suddenly emerging from the forests on an open and boundless plain, we are in position to understand the startled expressions of wonder which involuntarily escaped those who the first time beheld such scenes. The Anglo-American had in his experience no background to prepare him for such a far vision. His momentary surprise and wonder were what we might expect of a person fitted with powerful glasses which opened to him a new and hitherto unseen world. . . .

Such quotations could be increased to hundreds. They have these things in common: men expressed surprise, pleasure, and elation, and with one accord they compared the Plains to the sea. This comparison runs throughout the literature from Coronado on. In his Commerce of the Prairies Josiah Gregg speaks of the “grand prairie ocean,” of the caravans “making port”; he proposed a law based upon maritime law for control of the prairie caravan, and gave the wagons the name of “prairie schooners,” which they have borne ever since. Marcy described the Llano Estacado as an “ocean of desert prairie.” Van Tramp said of the prairies:

There is no describing them. They are like the ocean, in more than one particular; but in none more than in this: the utter impossibility of producing any just impression of them by description. They inspire feelings so unique, so distinct from anything else, so powerful, yet vague and indefinite, as to defy description, while they invite the attempt.”

Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains, p. 486-488

Chorpenning's Route
“[After the difficulty of delivering mail over the Sierra Nevada the first winter of the contract], [p]ermission was obtained from the special agent in San Francisco to send the March mail down the coast to San Pedro and thence by Cajon Pass and the Mormon Trail to Salt Lake City. . . .

With the interruption by bad weather of the mail service east of Salt Lake City, the mail was sent westward to San Pedro, where it was transmitted by steamer to the Atlantic seaboard.

During the first three years (1851-4) the Utah-California mail was carried, except in winter, by the old emigrant route. In the lettings of 1854, the Utah-California mail route was changed to run from Salt Lake City over the Mormon trail to San Diego. . . .

The service [of the second four-year contract with Chorpenning] began July 1, 1854, and was to continue for four years. The mail was carried on horseback or packmules . . .

During the four years of the duration of the contract (until July 1, 1858), the mail was carried with fair regularity, and often in less than scheduled time.

before the termination of the contract on this [Mormon trail] route the policy of extensive increases in western mail lines were inaugurated, and partisans of the “Central Route via Salt Lake City and across northern Nevada were demanding service upon that more direct route to San Francisco. Accordingly, in 1858, this Los Angeles-to-Salt Lake City route was discontinued and the original route of 1851 was re-established and put on an improved basis.”

LeRoy Hafen, The Overland Mail: 1849–1869, p. 64-70

Slade's Colt
“Mark Twain was familiar with all the gun models of that day and stated that Slade used Navy revolvers, as did Mrs. Slade.”

John B. McClernan, Slade's Wells Fargo Colt, p. 14

Stamps
The new stamps also made correspondence far more convenient. Previously, letters of one or more sheets had been folded up, sealed shut with wax or an adhesive wafer, addressed on the “cover” side, and taken to a post office. The postmaster calculated the postage and jotted it on a corner of the cover, perhaps adding the date and name of his town or office. . . .

Most of the time, however, the cost was paid by the recipient, who had to come to the post office to fetch it. He or she might well decide that, unless it was a love letter, the message wasn’t worth the expense and return it to the postmaster. This labor-intensive system naturally generated a huge backlog of unwanted mail and dead letters. In one of many schemes to avoid postage, a traveler promised loved ones that he or she would send a letter upon reaching a particular destination; when it arrived, the reassured recipients would refuse it. Indeed, Zachary Taylor did not realize that the Whigs had nominated him to be their presidential candidate in 1848 because their letter to that effect sat in his local post office amid a pile of mail that he had refused to redeem.

Stamps revolutionized this cumbersome mailing process. Postage was standardized and prepaid by the sender, so recipients were no longer primed to reject all but the most important letters. (As a result, the volume of commercial solicitations, advertisements, religious tracts, and get-rich-quick promotions soared along with that of personal correspondence.) Moreover, stamps came in sheets that, although not yet perforated, were conveniently backed with adhesive and ready to stick on covers, which themselves were soon rendered obsolete by manufactured envelopes.

Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, p. 93

Missionaries to Oregon in 1836
South Pass, July 4, 1836. The annual pack train of the American Fur Company, commanded by Thomas Fitzpatrick; a considerable outfit, seventy-odd engages, upwards of four hundred horses and mules. Fitzpatrick’s adjutant is Black Harris, the specialist in solitary and winter travel. Harris rides at the end of the Company train to keep an eye on the technique of the march and to enforce trail discipline. A Company cart (a ‘charette’ as in Miller’s drawings) is going through the Pass this year – and with it a light wagon which will presently establish itself in American history forever. At the head of the train Fitzpatrick is the familiar figure of the partisan, thin-faced, gaunt, eyes sweeping the land, Hawken rifle unslung and held across the saddle. He looks in fact like a Ranney painting of the next decade or a Tait lithograph of the following one. Beside him on a superb black horse rides his hawk-nosed, mustached friend of three years’ standing now, Captain William Drummond Stewart. . . .

Fitzpatrick and Stewart and the unexplained Sillem in the lead, an outrider or two on each flank, three-quarters of a mile of diabolism and dust, then the Company cart and Black Harris with a headful of trail cunning.

But behind Harris the momentous thing: a light four-wheeled wagon without springs, fourteen horses and six mules, fifteen head of beef and milch cattle – and the missionary party. The new missionary party that was a revolution. Marcus Whitman and the two Nez Perce boys who had gone East with him last year and a third one inexplicably found at Liberty. A dubious hired hand named (or spelled) Dulin and a nineteen-year-old youth named Miles Goodyear who was hellbent to be a mountain man – and soon made the grade. Also William H. Gray, a ‘mechanic’ of attested piety and proved malice whom the American Board had added to the party for no sound reason. Also the Reverend Henry Hart Spalding. Also, and here was the difference, Mr. Spalding’s wife, Eliza, and the wife whom Marcus Whitman had married during the winter.

Bernard De Voto, Across the Wide Missouri, p. 245-46

Senator Gwin on California and the South
Senator Gwin had said, in a speech delivered December 12, 1859, in the senate chamber, “I believe that the slave-holding states of this confederacy can establish a separate and independent government that will be impregnable to the assaults of all foreign enemies,” and had gone on to show why they should, and how they could, exist as a separate government. He had also said that if the southern states went out of the union “California would be found with the south;” but he was careful to expunge this and other similar remarks from the official report of his speech. It was intended for the senate and not for the ear of California; but it was wafted on the wings of newspaper gossip, and was known before either of the conventions met to choose a course for the future.

H. H. Bancroft, History of California, Vol. VII, 258-259

Higher Than Haman
“And if ever another man gives a whistle to a child of mine and I get my hands on him, I will hang him higher than Haman!”

[Haman (also known as Haman the Agagite or Haman the evil) is the main antagonist in the Book of Esther, who according to the Hebrew Bible was a vizier in the Persian empire under King Ahasuerus, commonly identified as Xerxes I. . . .

As described in the Book of Esther, Haman was the son of Hammedatha the Agagite. After Haman was appointed the principal minister of the king Ahasuerus, all of the king’s servants were required to bow down to Haman, but Mordechairefused to. Angered by this, and knowing of Mordechai’s Jewish nationality, Haman convinced Ahasuerus to allow him to have all of the Jews in the Persian empire killed.

The plot was foiled by Queen Esther, the king’s recent wife, who was herself a Jew. Esther invited Haman and the king to two banquets. In the second banquet, she informed the king that Haman was plotting to kill her (and the other Jews). This enraged the king, who was further angered when (after leaving the room briefly and returning) he discovered Haman had fallen on Esther’s couch, intending to beg mercy from Esther, but which the king interpreted as a sexual advance.

On the king’s orders, Haman was hanged from the 50-cubit-high gallows that had originally been built by Haman himself, on the advice of his wife Zeresh, in order to hang Mordechai. The bodies of Haman’s ten sons were also hanged, after they died in battle against the Jews. “All the enemies of the Jews” were additionally killed by the Jews, 75,000 of them.^[8]

The apparent purpose of this unusually high gallows can be understood from the geography of Shushan: Haman’s house (where the pole was located) was likely in the city of Shushan (a flat area), while the royal citadel and palace were located on a mound about 15 meters higher than the city. Such a tall pole would have allowed Haman to observe Mordechai’s corpse while dining in the royal palace, had his plans worked as intended.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haman]

Mark Twain, Roughing It, p. 124

Mile 0: St. Joseph Founding
“In the beginning St. Joseph was the pet project of Joseph Robidoux, one of the six Robidoux brothers of pioneer and fur-trading fame. He commissioned two men to submit plans for the city. One of them presented a drawing which he had titled St. Joseph after the patron saint of his employer. Both plan and name appealed to Robidoux—and St. Joseph it became. It was only natural that it should be a favorite take-off for the overland trail, for it lay a full two-day steamer journey from Independence, up the Missouri toward the mouth of the Platte, every mile of which was an advantage. In addition it was considered to be seventy miles farther west—or about four day’s steady travel by ox team.”

irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 54

Mile 1059: Rock Creek Hollow
Rock Creek Hollow, WY

“Rock Creek Hollow. A stop along the trail that holds significance for the Mormon faith.

Mormons made the trek to Salt Lake City with only hand pushed carts. They could only carry about 25 lbs [250lbs?] of items on these carts total. The cost was a fraction of that of a wagon and oxen or mule team. They could also make the journey in far less time as they could move at a quicker pace.

Along this section of the trail, from Casper, one will find a number of Mormon monuments and campgrounds.

I came upon this one with 4 hours of daylight left but decided I would set camp. There is a bubbling stream that I filtered water from and sat and watched a storm brew at the base of the Wind River range.

One of the best nights I’ve ever had in the back country!”

Jan Bennett (Repost) on Pony Express Bikepacking Route , 5/23/18

Secretary Floyd Stealing Guns for the Confederacy
When the Rebellion started, it was found that Floyd,· while in office, had removed 135,430 firearms, together with much ammunition and heavy ordnance, from the big Government arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts, and distributed them at various points in the South and Southwest. Of this number, fifty thousand were sent to California where twenty-five thousand muskets had already been stored. And all this was done underhandedly, without the knowledge of Congress.

Glenn D. Bradley, The Story of the Pony Express, p. 76

Russell as Postmaster
In 1840 Russell was appointed treasurer for Lafayette county to succeed his old employer James Aull. He was also appointed postmaster at Lexington by Pres. John Tyler on June 16, 1841, which office he filled until January 31, 1845.

Settle and Settle, "The Early Careers of William Bradford Waddell and William Hepburn Russell: Frontier Capitalists," Kansas Historical Quarterly Vol. 26, No.4, Winter 1960, p. 363

Riding Half-Asleep
“Tired out and cramped with cold, we were torpid with what the Bedouin calls El Bakl—la Ragle du Désert, when part of the brain sleeps while the rest is wide awake.”

Richard Burton, The City of Saints, p. 488-491

Mormon Stations Along the Trail
But Brigham did not, as he had intended, send Jones back to manage the Y.X. Express station now established at Devil’s Gate. He said he guessed Dan had had about enough of Devil’s Gate for any one man. And anyway, by that time it was midsummer, and by midsummer all of the stations ambitiously projected to give the Saints substantial control of the trail from the Missouri to the mountains would have seemed precarious. A few, particularly those at Fort Bridger, at Deer Creek, and at Genoa, a Mormon colony deliberately planted on the Loup Fork as a permanent way station on the model of Garden Grove and Mt. Pisgah, were already well established, along with others of a more tentative kind.

Wallace Stegner, The Gathering of Zion, p 273

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 the columns of a competing sheet. Charges of plagiarism were rife, yet nearly every paper throughout the state copied, as a matter of course, items from other news journals. Cribbing was particularly evident on current out-of-state news, originating largely in letters from paid correspondents. These were employed by the papers which could afford them, in principal cities of the eastern states.

Until the 20-day Butterfield Overland Mail was inaugurated, contributions from correspondents were forwarded via the Isthmus of Panama, making the arrival of every steamer at San Francisco a news event of major proportions. It wasn’t so much the speed of the Butterfield line (approximately equal to that of the Panama route) as it was the stage company’s more frequent, twice-a-week schedule that caused it to find especial favor in the eyes of California publishers. Its overland route was a means of halving the time between news making and news printing.

Roy S. Bloss, Pony Express—The Great Gamble, 55

Platte Valley
“Going over the rolling prairies into the valley of the Platte, the surroundings suddenly change. Spread out before us is the wide but shallow river, running eastward to the Missouri, its banks at intervals fringed with willows and occasional belts of young cottonwood trees; the bottom covered with a rank growth of tall dead grass, presenting a decided contrast when compared with the last thirty or forty miles which we have just gone over in crossing the divide.”

Root and Connelley, The Overland Stage to California, p. 201

Theft
“The politeness of the savages did not throw us off our guard; the Dakotah of these regions are expert and daring kleptomaniacs; they only laughed, however, a little knowingly as we raised the rear curtain, and they left us after begging pertinaciously—bakhshish [baksheesh] is an institution here as on the banks of the Nile—for tobacco, gunpowder, ball, copper caps, lucifers, and what not.”

Richard Burton, The City of Saints, p. 60

Jim Bridger and Brigham Young
Mormon legend has it that Bridger so scorned the Great Salt Lake country that he offered to give a thousand dollars for the first bushel of corn they raised there. It would have been a rash statement, for when a Mormon community wants to prove something to the Gentiles it can grow corn in a cement sidewalk. But like many stories of the trail, the story of Jim’s offer is somewhat stretched. Bridger actually took a more favorable view of the Bear River Valley than Black Harris had, he thought the Utah Valley a very likely place for a settlement, and he gave them a good report of the valley the Sevier and of the country along the eastern rim of the Great Basin for two hundred miles south of the Salt Lake. He expressed doubt about the Salt Lake Valley only because he thought the nights might be too cold for the maturing of corn. The discontent they felt at his information reflected more bewilderment than disappointment. For the knowledge in Old Gabe’s head was too broad to be handily condensed, or perhaps they had primed him with too much tongue-loosener, or perhaps their extraordinary attentiveness, with three trained clerks keeping minutes and a dozen other men taking notes, led him into expansiveness. From whatever cause, his specific, information on the country they wanted to know about was half lost in a rambling discourse that covered the whole West from the Pima country to Oregon. Clayton, who set down pages of Bridger’s answers to their questions concluded that “it was impossible to form a correct idea of either the route or the country “from the very imperfect and irregular way he gave his descriptions,” and, that “we shall know more about things … when we have seen the country for ourselves.” Since Bridger was bound for Fort Laramie they got him to carry a letter to Thomas Grover at the ferry, and: thdmselves rolled on, more confused than enlightened, toward Fort Bndger.

Wallace Stegner, The Gathering of Zion, p 156

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 beginning and made its contribution to the final debacle, but that contribution was both minor and one of many. The Central Overland California & Pike’s Peak Express Company which operated it was a failure as a money-making institution. So were most of the other partnerships which which these men were concerned . . . The freighting business appears to be the only one which paid dividends. Had they confined their efforts to that and been reimbursed for their losses in 1857, the story probably would have been different . . . The day Russell decided to organize the Leavenworth & Pike’s Peak Express Company was a day of doom. That organization and its greater successor did as much to bankrupt the partners as the failure of the government to reimburse them for their losses in 1857.”

Settle and Settle, Empire on Wheels, p. 85

Mile 930: Red Buttes Station
Red Buttes Crossing/Bessemer Bend (south of Casper) is one of the places where travelers forded the North Platte River— then 300 yards wide—for the last time and started the push toward the Sweetwater River. This crossing was used mostly in the early years of the emigration. After 1847, ferries were available between Casper and Glenrock (Deer Creek). The Red Buttes Pony Express station and an Overland Stage station also were located in this vicinity. Wayside exhibits at this BLM site tell the story. While visiting the crossing, look toward the east to see the Red Buttes, the noted emigrant-era landmark that gave the crossing its name.

[NB. This station os near Bessemer Bend, off hwy 220. The XP Bikepacking Route sticks to Emigrnt Trail/Poison Spider road a few miles to the west.]

National Park Service, Auto Tour Route Interpretive Guide–Wyoming, p. 51

Utah Gets News of Coming War
“On July 24, 1857, the Saints held their annual celebration of Pioneers’ Day at the head of Big Cottonwood Canyon, some twenty-five miles southeast of Salt Lake City and 10,000 feet above sea level. . . . Suddenly four travel-worn men, one of whom had ridden the long road from Eastern Kansas, rushed upon the scene with the information that a new governor, with a large military escort, was on his way to establish Gentile rule over Utah. . . .the grimmy couriers, it would seem, had played the part of Pheidippides before the battle of Marathon. . . .

Whatever warning the Saints may have had, the fact remains that after seven turbulent years relations between the Territory and the nation seemed about to dissolve in civil war.”

Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850-1859, p. 60-61

Waiting to Emigrate
“[Emigrants] had time to be married, to be born, or to die while they waited in camp for the grass to sprout upon the prairie. This was absolutely vital, for, until it was high enough to provide feed for the animals, only those horse and mule teams carrying grain dared to start the journey. . . .

Little as they liked the delay, it was sometimes a good thing. For, unless the emigrant was the provident type who had brought his own teams, he must get them from among the contumacious animals presented for his inspection at the markets of Independence; and in nine cases out of ten, both he and the newly acquired livestock were in for trouble.

Half-broken or, in many instances, totally wild steers and mules were calmly sold to men who might never in their lives have driven anything more dangerous than a buggy mare. . . .

John E. Brown wrote that, after he had found pairs that would not start a fight on sight, it was next to impossible to get four that would tolerate each other. In which case the leaders (having the advantage of position) kicked the wheelers clear out of the harness.”

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 5-6

Mile 321: Dogtown
“In the trail days there was a utilitarian, if ugly, settlement at this junction [of the Nebraska City Road with the Oregon Trail] bearing the vulgar title ‘Dogtown.’ As late as 1865, it was the first town west of Marysville, Kansas, a journey of nearly a hundred fifty miles. It is likely that the name originated in the ‘town’ of ‘village’ of prairie dogs nearby. There were several prairie-dog settlements settlements along the Platte, each of some acres in extent, looking, so the emigrants fancied, like an immense field of sweet potato hills. The dumpy little creatures barked hysterically at the first wagons of each season, but grew more philosophical as the steady processions flowed by them.”

[NB. There appears (on Google Street View) a very small historical marker. It is off the Pony Express Bikepacking Route, a few hundred feet down Lowell Road. to reach it, continue south on Lowell Road past the turn off to Skeeter Creek Road, just before Mile 321]

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 82-83

Mile 2098: Strawberry, CA
“[The hostelry at Strawberry] belonged to a man named Berry who sold straw under the name of hay and received the unflattering sobriquet old Straw Berry.”

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 449

Mile 1735 – 1830: Desert Stations
Posted on the Pony Express National Trail Facebook page:

“You may not be able to get out on the Pony Express, so we will bring it to you! Read along to take a virtual visit to five historic station sites across 53 miles.

https://www.nps.gov/poex/learn/historyculture/upload/Rugged-Men-Rigorous-Rides-508.pdf

(Photo/NPS/Exhibit from Garden Pass/Click the link for an accessible pdf version of the full exhibit).”

Comments give more information about access to the mining area where Sulphur Springs Station is located. Note that this station is off the Pony Express Bikepacking Route if you take the detour at Mile 1735 to restock at Eureka.

Posted on the Pony Express National Trail Facebook page (9/1/2020)

Wild Sage
“The most abundant plant in the Great Basin is the artemisia, or wild sage, and as it is seen almost everywhere in the valleys and on the mountains, it gives its peculiar bronze color to the general face of nature. Sometimes this all-prevailing color is modified by the more vivid green of the Sarcohatus vcrmlcularis, or greasewood; sometimes by the yellowish light-green of the Lynogris, or rabbit-bush, both of which are found interspersed not infrequently among the artemisia and on the mountains, not infrequently by the dark color of the scrub cedar, and occasionally of the pine and balsam. This plant, the artemisia, I have seen covering probably as much as nine-tenths of the whole country intervening the east base of the Rocky Mountains (longitude 104°) and the east base of the Sierra Nevada (longitude 119° 40′), or over a breadth of more than 800 miles, beyond winch, east or west, it does not grow.”

James Simpson, Report on Explorations Across the Great Basin of the Territory of Utah, p. 30

Troublous Times
“Another, with the prefix ‘Dutch,’ was ‘Charley’ — surname, as usual, unknown —who owned a claim in Kansas, but who joined us when we were short of men when passing his farm. In some of our troublous times, and we had plenty of them, he would doubly curse the day he joined us, and cry like a Banshee for the wife and baby he had left on the shore of the Big Blue.”

Thaddeus S. Kenderdine, A California Tramp and Later Footprints, p. 46

Chimney Rock
“Massive in scale, each monument towers hundreds of feet above the floor of the North Platte Valley. Each is made of stacked layers of sandstone, siltstone, mudstone, and volcanic ash. Differential erosion of these layers-some soft, some hard-gives each monolith a distinct shape. Courthouse Rock and Castle Rock are blocky and rectangular, reminiscent of colossal buildings. Chimney Rock looks like an upside-down funnel. Its lower section consists of soft strata that erode into slopes, whicle the upper chimney section is composed of sandstone tough enough to stand as a vertical column.

The local Sioux knew what they saw in the towering phallus of Chimney Rock. They called it Elk Penis. This was too graphic for most white sensibilities, even those of the rough fur traders who, in the 1830s, were among the earliest whites to report on the rock.”

Keith Heyer Meldahl, Hard Road West, p. 59-60

Mile 957: Greasewood Creek
“Greasewood Creek was a welcome sight, a rapid ten-foot stream, midway of the twenty-mile stretch, where the oxen sunk their muzzles deep and drank as they crossed. After a slow five miles more the alkali lakes came into view—paper-flat deposits of a pure fiery-white soda that ate the soles from the shoes of the luckless herder who must go among them after cattle. The biggest one was called Saleratus Lake. here the cooks replenished their supply of cooking soda and sometimes encountered wagons from the Mormon colony at Salt Lake shoveling it up for home consumption.”

[N.B. This area is now near Steamboat Lake, off to the right of the Pony Express Bikepacking Route at Mile 964. More info about Saleratus Lakes is here.]

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 206

First Mail from California
“On the 1st day of May, 1851, Mr. Chorpenning left Sacramento City in charge of the first United States mail that ever crossed the country between the States and the Pacific. On the morning of the 5th the party left Johnston’s Ranch, six miles east of Placerville, which was the last white man’s habitation in California, and found no settlement whatever from there to Salt Lake, a distance of over 700 miles.”

Henry H. Clifford (comp.), Mail Service, Settlement of the Country, and the Indian Depredations, p. 1

The Great Migration of '46
“The “Great Migration” of the histories is variously the first big push toward Oregon in 1843 or the more populous one of ’45. The phrase is rightly used in that, as the texts say, those years made Oregon American soil no matter what might be said in Congress or Downing Street. Yet the migration of ’46 was the decisive one – this was the year of decision – and though [Francis ] Parkman failed to understand it, he was right in calling it great.”

Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision, 1846, p. 119

Delivering Mail Over the Sierra Nevada
“Also in late 1858, Chorpenning attempted to dispel the prevalent attitude among congressmen and the postmaster general that scheduled service was impossible over the Sierra Nevada in winter. Accordingly, he negotiated a $2,000 contract with John A. ‘Snowshoe’ Thompson to maintain the road through the Genoa-Placerville passes. A longtime associate of Chorpenning, Thompson had carried mail to Carson Valley between 1854 and 1858. In 1858-59, he used snowplows and sleighs to conduct regular weekly crossings of the Sierra Nevada. When storms closed the passes to sleighs, ski couriers carried the mail across the mountains. To the surprise and disappointment of Chorpenning’s rivals, the Sierra Nevada posed no insurmountable obstacle during a particularly miserable winter.”

John M. Townley, "Stalking Horse for the Pony Express: The Chorpenning Mail Contracts between California and Utah, 1851-1860", Arizona and the West, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Autumn, 1982), p. 246

A Downgrade, a Flying Coach
“And it was comfort in those succeeding days to sit up and contemplate the majestic panorama of mountains and valleys spread out below us and eat ham and hard boiled while our spiritual natures revelled alternately in rainbows, thunderstorms, and peerless sunsets. Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and after these a pipe—an old, rank, delicious pipe—ham and eggs and scenery, a ‘down grade,’ a flying coach, a fragrant pipe and a contented heart—these make happiness. It is what all the ages have struggled for.”

Mark Twain, Roughing It, p. 140-141

C.O.C. & P.P.Ex.Co.
“In February, 1860, the legislature of Kansas granted a charter to the ‘Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express Company.’ This newly formed company absorbed the ‘L. & P.P Ex.,'[Leavenworth and Pike’s Peak Express, owned by Jones, Russell and Company] which had been operating its line to Denver during the preceding year, and thus also obtained the United States mail contract for service to Utah. Soon the George Chorpenning contract for service upon the route from Salt Lake City to Placerville, California, was annulled for alleged failures and a new contract made with William H. Russell for a semi-monthly ‘star’ service. This gave ‘C.O.C. & P.P.Ex.Co.’control of the entire mail service over the central route to the Pacific Coast. . . .

Russell was chosen as president, and B.F. Ficklin, general road agent.”

LeRoy Hafen, The Overland Mail: 1849–1869, p. 156-157

Slow Mail Service to California
Newsgathering in California at this time was purely a haphazard affair and nearly all the news that was printed was of a local nature. The two papers were altogether dependent on the uncertain arrivals of naval vessels, sailing ships, or emigrants coming overland for the small amount of news received from the eastern states or from Europe. An occasional ship from the Sandwich Islands, Australia, or China brought some news of the Pacific area. News from the eastern states was often six months old when it reached California. The treaty of peace between the United States and Mexico was signed in February, 1848, but news dispatches announcing this important event, doubly important to California, were not published in the California papers until August of that year.

John Denton Carter, "Before the Telegraph: The News Service of the San Francisco Bulletin, 1855-1861," Pacific Historical Review 11, No. 3 (Sep., 1942): 301

Postmaster Brown and Southern Politicians
With the passage of this act, the matter went to Postmaster General Aaron V. Brown. Brown was a Tennesseean sympathetic with Buchanan’s policies, a leader in the councils of the Democrats, and a not unlikely aspirant for party leadership in the campaign of I860. He called Senators Rusk and Gwin into conference, consulted with the leaders of the Administration; and by April, 1857, rumors reported that he was set upon having a southern route.

Curtis Nettles, "The Overland Mail Issue During the 1850s," The Missouri Historical Review, XVIII, no. 4 (1924), 525

Name of the Pony Express Company
Another error that has gained wide acceptance is that there was a company called the Pony Express company organized for the purpose of founding and operating that institution. Technically and legally the company which organized and managed the Pony Express was the Central Overland California & Pike’s Peak Express Co., which was incorporated, financed, and mostly owned by the members of the firm of Russell, Majors & Waddell. There never was an organization called “The Pony Express Company,” although the name was sometimes loosely used in referring to the express company.

Settle and Settle, "The Early Careers of William Bradford Waddell and William Hepburn Russell: Frontier Capitalists," Kansas Historical Quarterly Vol. 26, No.4, Winter 1960, p. 374

Midpoint Between the Missouri River and Fort Laramie
“Fort Kearny was the true beginning of the Great Platte River Road, for it was here that various trail strands joined to become one grand highway for the western migrations. . . . Fort Kearny was recognized as the port of call of the Nebraska Coast, the end of the shakedown cruise across the prairie and the beginning of the voyage across the perilous ocean of the Great Plains, a place to pause and reflect, to recuperate, to reorganize, to get your bearings. For the fainthearted it was a good opportunity to change their minds, make a 180-degree turn, and go back where they came from before they became committed to California and later, somewhere out in the Great American Desert, reached the point of no return. . . .

Fort Kearny and the head of Grand Island were nearly synonymous in terms of general location. They were both reckoned at midpoint between St. Joe (the number one jumping-off point on the Missouri River) and Fort Laramie, at a distance of some 600 miles plus. As to the merits of the fort’s location, many elements were considered other than the equidistance from the Missouri River to Fort Laramie, the relative proximity of the 100th meridian (the theoretical dividing line between prairie and plains), or the quantity of timber on Grand Island.

Merrill J. Mattes, The Great Platte River Road, p. 193-194

Steers Make the Best Oxen
Bulls can be trained to pull a wagon, but steers (that is, castrated males) are preferred, largely because they grow larger and stronger. . . .

“Because he has longer legs and he’s taller, an ox can travel much faster than a bull. Also,” Ford continues, “even though the bull may have a big burst of energy, like for fighting—because of its testosterone—, a steer would have more total muscle. So although a bull could easily kill any steer [in a fight], in working, the steer will have enduring power that lasts all day long, whereas the bull’s energy quickly burns up, and then he’s completely depleted.”

Dixon Ford and Lee Kreutzer, "Oxen: Engines of the Emigration," Overland Journal, V. 33. No. 1 (2015), p. 6

Ferry Delay in Sacramento
From the Elwood Free Press, January 12, 1861. Fr. Kearny, Jan. 9—

The Pony Express passed about 11 last night. San Francisco, Dec. 26, 3:40 P.M.—The Pony Express, with St. Louis dates, telegraphed to Ft. Kearney on the 10th, arrived at Sacramento on Sun-day 23d, where it was detained twenty-four hours waiting for a steamer to take it to San Francisco. There being no Sunday boat. The Pony is delayed at Sacramento from one to two days, whenever it arrives there on Saturday, after two o’clock, P.M. The Express time table ought to be arranged so that the Pony will always arrive at Sacramento between Monday morning and Friday evening.

"The Pony Express Rides Again," The Kansas Historical Quarterly, Winter 1959: Volume 25, Issue 4, p. 384

Mormon Tavern
“. . . there were as many as two dozen inns or taverns maintained by Mormons in El Dorado County and surrounding areas. Porter Rockwell himself maintained three of them in 1849-50. The most famous of the inns was known as the Mormon Tavern, situated on the Placerville road, about twenty miles west of Hangtown (Placerville). It was the frequent meeting place of Howard Egan, Porter Rockwell (who went under the alias of Brown), Charles C. Rich, and Amasa M. Lyman. Captain Asahel A. Lathrop was the proprietor. A captain of ten in 1847, it was he who had been the spiritual leader of the relief train to the southern settlements in the winter of 1847-48, returning to Utah with cattle and supplies.”

J. Kenneth Davies, "Mormons and California Gold," Journal of Mormon History, Vol. 7 (1980), p. 95

Burton on French Canadians
“They are a queer lot, these French Canadians, who have ‘located’ themselves in the Far West. Travelers who have hunted with them speak highly of them as a patient, submissive, and obedient race, inured to privations, and gifted with the reckless abandon—no despicable quality in prairie traveling—of the old Gascon adventurer; armed and ever vigilant, hardy, handy, and hearty children of Nature, combining with the sagacity and the instinctive qualities all the superstitions of the Indians; enduring as mountain goats; satisfied with a diet of wild meat, happiest when it could be followed by a cup of strong milkless coffee, a ‘chasse cafe’ and a ‘brule-gueule;’ invariably and contagiously merry; generous as courageous; handsome, active, and athletic; sashed, knived, and dressed in buckskin, to the envy of every Indian ‘brave,’ and the admiration of every Indian belle, upon whom, if the adventurer’s heart had not fallen into the snares of the more attractive half-breed, he would spend what remained of his $10 a month, after coffee, alcohol, and tobacco had been extravagantly paid for, in presents of the gaudiest trash.

Such is the voyageur of books: I can only speak of him as I found him, a lazy dog, somewhat shy and proud, much addicted to loafing and to keeping cabarets, because, as the old phrase is, the cabarets keep him in idleness too. Probably his good qualities lie below the surface: those who hide a farthing rush-light under a bushel can hardly expect us, in this railway age, to take the trouble of finding it. I will answer, however, for the fact, that the bad points are painfully prominent.”

Richard Burton, The City of Saints, p. 152

Shandidran
“Though we all rose up early, packed, and were ready to proceed, there was an unusual vis inerlice on the part of the driver: Indians were about; the mules, of course, had bolted; but that did not suffice as explanation. Presently the ‘wonder leaked out:’ our companions were transferred from their comfortable vehicle to a real ‘shandridan,’ a Rocky-Mountain bone-setter. They were civil enough to the exceedingly drunken youth a runaway New Yorker who did us the honor of driving us . . .”

[Note: Shandrydan, n. A jocosely depreciative name for a vehicle. [Ireland]

Richard Burton, The City of Saints, p. 131

Bullboats
“Crude rafts and hollowed-out cottonwoods were not suitable for commercial loads. The fur traders first attempted a modification of the circular Indian bullboat. This was an ingenious contrivance, resembling an enormous oval basket yp to twenty-five feet in length. The framework was composed of long and pliable poles from green aspen or willow. This was covered with dressed buffalo hides sewn together and then soaked. The shrinkage produced a tight covering, the seams of which were made water-tight by a mixture of buffalo fat and ashes. This resulted in a craft of extreme buoyancy which could transport up to three tons without displacing more than ten inches of water. The bullboat could be quickly and easily manufactured, but it would as easily be wrecked by snags and hidden bars in shallow water, and in deeper water would readily capsize.”

Merrill J. Mattes, The Great Platte River Road, p. 247-248

First Pony Arrives in Sacramento
For all the celebration, there were only eight letters for Sacramento, two for the Daily Union, one for Governor John G. Downey. But that hardly mattered to the crowds in front of the telegraph office that spring afternoon. . . .

The San Francisco Herald described the citizens as “electrified” by the arrival of the Pony Express, which had brought twenty-five letters across the continent to recipients in the bay city.

Christopher Corbett, Orphans Preferred, p. 58-59

Making a Robe From a Hide
Women’s work and extremely hard work. A fresh buffalo hide might weigh up to eighty pounds and all the processes of tanning were done manually. How did a squaw make a robe of a fresh hide? First she pegged it out on the ground, hair side down, and scraped off the flesh, sinew, and integument with a ‘graining’ tool of curved bone in which an iron blade had been seated. Then she rubbed the flesh side with warm water and some greasy substance, the brains plus such other fats as her tutor or her medicine had prescribed. This had to be worked into the hide with a smooth stone or something similar, a laborious process, after which the hide lay in the sun, shrinking a good deal, while the grease penetrated. The next step was to soften the hide in water and then bring it back to natural size and make it flexible by twisting and wringing and pulling it – a two-squaw job that lasted many hours. This is as much treatment as the trade robe received and for trade robes it was done as roughly and hastily as possible.

If the skin was to be dehaired an intervening step took place here: it was soaked in a stream and possibly treated with ashes till the hair loosened and could easily be scraped off. In any event it was worked with the hands and the flesh side was scraped with a rough stone or toothed iron blade to make it flexible. As it dried it bleached graywhite. The final step was the hardest. A rawhide rope was stretched at an angle and the hide was sawed back and forth across it endlessly. The squaw used her whole weight and preferably got a friend to trade work with her.

All skins received approximately the same treatment though with certain specific differences. Most of those used for clothing and nearly all the finer ones, for whatever use they might be destined, were given a thorough smoking over slow fires. A well-smoked skin was waterresistant dnd would dry soft. The beautiful cream-colored and white garments seen in museums had not been smoked; they were bleached by various means and had been whitened with various earths.

Bernard De Voto, Across the Wide Missouri, p. 434, n. 5

Spread of the Cattle Kingdom on the Plains
“In this way the cattle kingdom spread from Texas and utilized the Plains area, which would otherwise have lain idle and useless. Abilene offered the market; the market offered inducement to Northern money; Texas furnished the base stock, the original supply, and a method of handling cattle on horseback; the Plains offered free grass. From these conditions and from these elements emerged the range and ranch cattle industry, perhaps the most unique and distinctive institution that America has produced. This spread of the range cattle industry over the Great Plains is the final step in the creation of the cattle kingdom.

The first step was made when the Spaniards and Mexicans established their ranches in the Nueces country of southern Texas, where natural conditions produced a hardy breed of cattle that could grow wild ; the second step occurred when the Texans took over these herds and learned to handle them in the only way they could have been handled – on horse-back; the third step was taken when the cattle were driven northward to market ; the fourth came when a permanent depot was set up at Abilene which enabled trail-driving to become standardized; the fifth took place when the overflow from the trail went west to the free grass of the Great Plains. . . .

The purpose here is to set forth the processes by which civilization came about on the Great Plains. We are well aware that the Texans did not take the first cattle to the northern Plains; the Spaniards, of course, took the first. The Mormons, the Oregon Trailers, the Santa Fe Traders. the Forty-niners, and perhaps others took live stock. But all these took cows, not cattle: domestic stock, not range stock. There were survivals of the old Spanish ranching system in California and in New Mexico. But the process by which the Great Plains were stocked with cattle, by which ranches were set up wherever there was grass, much or little, was essentially as described. All the exceptions may be admitted, are admitted, but the essentials of the story remain the same.

The following, from the Nimmo Report, pp. 95-96, is an account that one commonly finds of how people learned the value of the Northern range. People inferred from the presence of buffalo that the northern range would be suitable for cattle; but the first practical demonstration of the fattening effects of Northern grasses came in the winter of 1864-1865, when E. S. Newman, who was conducting a train of supplies overland to Camp Douglas, was snowed up on the Laramie Plains. He made a winter camp and turned the oxen out to die. Spring found them not only alive, but in much better condition than when turned loose to starve and feed the wolves. This accidental discovery led to the purchase of cattle and the beginning of cattle-raising on the ranges of the Northwest.”

Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains, p. 224 and note 1

Removal of Winter Quarters
“When Brigham Young returned from Utah in October after successfully establishing Salt Lake City, he realized that most of the emigrants would be able to move on in 1848. A half-way station would still be needed for those yet to come, but perhaps it would lessen difficulties if they placed it on a legal basis by removing it to the Potawatomi lands [east of the Mississippi]. Thus, the High Council decided in January, 1848, to order the abandonment of Winter Quarters. Citing the heavy losses from Indian depredations as well as other reasons, their leaders told Saints remaining west of the Missouri either to go ahead to Utah in 1848 or to move back across the river. The new forwarding station became known as Kanesville and proved to be the site of present-jay Council Bluffs, Iowa.”

Robert A. Trennert, Jr., "The Conflict Over Winter Quarters, 1846-1848," p. 395-96

Type of Mail Carried
“It is assumed by many that the mail carried by the Pony Express was comprised of letters from ordinary people to their friends and loved ones. That is not accurate. That’s not to say that it never happened, it is just that it was generally too expensive for most people. When it began, rates were $10.00 per ounce or $5.00 for a half ounce or less. For that reason, even business communications were generally short. Later, rates were lowered to $2.00 per ounce and $1.00 for a half ounce or less, but they were still expensive for ordinary people . . . The charge for letters sent by sea or by stage cost much less, only ten cents per half ounce, the cost of the stamp.”

William E. Hill, The Pony Express: Yesterday and Today, p. 19

Mile 777: Bitter Cottonwood Creek
“The next important stopping point, according to the diaries, was the Bitter Cottonwood Creek. Maps located it in Wendover, Wyoming, a railroad stop . . . Many miles to the left, Laramie Peak loomed high—the most famous single mountain on the trail. . . .

The name Bitter Cottonwood came, they say, from the narrow-leaved cottonwoods of bitter taste along the banks for the clear, pretty stream. . . . Camping was good, but the fast horse and mule outfits went on to Horseshoe Creek where the feed was better.”

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 178-179

Yoking Oxen
“Our cattle were soon driven into corral for us to yoke.

Our train crew of a wagon boss, by the name of Chatham Rennick-a big, six foot two inch man, an assistant wagon boss, twenty-six teamsters, and two extra hands, malring thirty men in all. But we had ten extra men to help us get the train started.

We went into the corral with three lasso ropes to catch our cattle and fasten them to a wagon wheel to put their yokes on, as they were so wild it was the only way we could get them yoked. We would then chain this one to a wheel till we got another and so on till each team was yoked. Then to get them hitched to a wagon tongue was another big job, but at two o’clock in the afternoon we succeeded in getting them all hitched on and started to break corral, and a lively time we had. Now the fun began, not for the teamsters, but for the lookers on. It was life work for us to keep our wagons right side up. Twentysix teams of nearly all wild cattle going in every direction -three hundred and twelve head of crazy steers pitching and bellowing and trying to get loose or get away fr:om the wagon, and teamsters working for dear life to herd them and keep from upsetting or breaking their wagons; and every. now and then a wagon upsetting, tongues breaking, and teams getting loose on the prairie.

It kept every extra man on the jump to keep the cattle moving in the right direction.

Fourteen men on horseback and twenty-six teamsters had a lively experience that afternoon and evening, and finally, at nine o’clock that night had succeeded in getting nine wagons two miles from starting point and getting the cattle loose from the wagons in a demoralized condition. Some of the teams had one or two steers loose from the yoke, and the others were dragging the yokes. Everything was in confusion.”

William Clark, "A Trip Across the Plains in 1857," Iowa Journal of History and Politics, 20 (1922), p. 167

Mountain Fever
“And as [the emigrants] got to thinner air they encountered a new malady, a prostrating seizure of nausea and violent headaches, frequently complicated by still another kind of dysentery. Bryant, who was stricken with it, attributed it to excessive drinking of milk from cows which had been made unhealthy by overwork and had drunk alkali water and eaten noxious weeds. But it was really “mountain fever,” a process of adjustment to diminished oxygen which most people repeat today when they go to high altitudes.”

Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision, 1846, p. 161

Mile 841-878: La Bonte to Box Elder Station
“[We] headed for the succession of creeks which the pioneers had crossed in the next three days’ journey.

The first was Wagonhound [near Mile 844]. Few knew the name, but none ever forgot the creek, and it could always be identified by description, for it was red. The soil and the rock were almost audibly red, from the burnt hue of Mexican pottery to the clear vivd tone of a madrone trunk. . . . One woman was impressed by the lurid color and the general look of drastic upheaval that she painfully crawled to the top of one of the ‘mountains of red stone’ and inscribed upon it, ‘Remember me in mercy O Lord.’ . . .

A stream just beyond Grindstone Butte, modernly called Bed Tick Creek, was apparently nameless to the emigrants; but it furnished water and a little much-needed grass. Next came La Prelle, the first large stream after Le Bonte Creek, boasting a natural bridge of rock.

After La Prelle came Little and then Big Box Elder. . . .

Through all the years it was a great moment for the throngs of emigrants as they struggled over the last elevation [near Box Elder Creek]. Behind them, low ridge after low ridge, in serried order, marched the Black Hills. Ahead, the Platte twisted through the lowland, gleaming silvery on the curves: a strange river, blurred gray and untrustworthy . . .”

[N.B. There were Pony Express stations at La Prelle and Box Elder. Both sites, however, are off the Pony Express Bikepacking route]

Irene D. Paden, The Wake of the Prairie Schooner, p. 185-191

Fort Kearny
“The idea behind Fort Kearny had its genesis in the 1844 report of the Secretary of War, recommending the construction of a chain of military posts from the Missouri to the Rockies to protect the Oregon migration. An act of Congress in 1846 authorized such posts and the creation of an Oregon Battalion., the Regiment of Mounted Volunteers. This led to the encampment at Table Creek [on the Missouri River] which soon proved to be a gross error in geographic judgment, and, on June 1, 1847, the War Department directed that an alternate military station be established ‘near Grand Island where the road to California encounters the Platte River.’ . . .

By May 1 Table Creek was abandoned, and by June all officers and men of the Missouri Volunteers had arrived at the ‘Head of Grand Island’ to erecy the ‘1st military station on the route to Oregon.'”

Merrill J. Mattes, The Great Platte River Road, p. 168-169

Cost of Pony Express Mail
The firm’s high rates for carrying a half-ounce letter-initially $5 (perhaps $75 today), later $1, attest to the demand for the service, but its revenues couldn’t begin to cover the $700,ooo start-up costs. Everything depended on the Pony’s success in winning the government’s overland mail contract.

Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, p. 131

First Premier of All Western Gunmen
“While [Slade] was a controversial figure in the early West, nobody can discount his contribution to the development of our country—in the transportation of passengers and supplies by the Overland stage coaches and freights lines, his efforts on behalf of national communications by Pony Express and telegraph, his rigorous suppression of outlaw activity on the main traveled highway to the West. He was the first premier of all western gunmen.”

John B. McClernan, Slade's Wells Fargo Colt, p. 7

Winter Quarters
“For two years during their exodus from Illinois to the Salt Lake Valley, the Mormons occupied a way-station known generally as Winter Quarters. . . .

“At the time of the Mormon exodus, the federal government was attempting to protect the tribes living in the Missouri Valley from the degrading effects of American expansion, which was just then assuming major significance on the plains. These so-called border tribes inhabited both sides of the Missouri River and were in a delicate position, being located between the expanding settlements to the east and the powerful Plains Indians to the west. On the east bank of the Missouri River near Council Bluffs in western Iowa Territory, resided such tribes as the Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa, who had been moved there from Michigan and Illinois in 1837. West of the river, in unorganized country, lived the Oto, Omaha, and Missouri. For the most part these tribes were destitute and on the verge of extinction. Few in number, they were constantly being raided by the Sioux and other hostile tribes and were defrauded by unscrupulous traders and whiskey sellers. . . .

“A number of federal laws existed for the protection of these tribes. Of major significance was the Indian Intercourse Act of June 30, 1834, which was passed in conjunction with the removal policy of the 1830’s. These laws created an Indian barrier by defining the unorganized territory west of the Mississippi as “Indian Country,” where whites were not permitted without passports establishing the length of their stay. . . .

“The Monnons, forced to leave their homes in Nauvoo, Illinois, set out in February, 1846, for a new Zion somewhere beyond the Rocky Mountains. Considering the destitute condition of many of the emigrants, a mass exodus in anyone season was manifestly impossible. By the early summer it .became increasingly clear to Brigham Young and the Mormon leadership that the Saints must stop somewhere along the way so that the large group could winter and be resupplied. . . .

“Being wary of other emigrants, many of whom were the hated Missourians who had previously evicted them, the Mormons had chosen to stay north of the established trails. This meant they penetrated previously unspoiled Indian lands where whites were forbidden.”

Robert A. Trennert, Jr., "The Conflict Over Winter Quarters, 1846-1848," p. 381-384

Platte River
“The 1st of August found us among a range of sand hills which announced our approach to the valley of the Platte. These were a succession of knolls and ridges from thirty to sixty feet high. Amid their defiles our wheels sunk deep in the sand, and we frequently doubled teams in order to get through. From these we came to the broad, level bottom of the river, which was marked by numerous wooded islands. . . .

“Our route was about a mile from the shore, which we were unable to approach nearer on account of numerous ‘sloos,’ as the ‘Pikers’ [Missourians] call marshy creeks, which extended from the river.”

Thaddeus S. Kenderdine, A California Tramp and Later Footprints, p. 22, 24

Grey-backs
It is a notorious fact that many of the overland stage drivers and stock tenders, between three and four decades ago, were inhabited by a species of vermin known as pediculus vestimenti, but on the plains more vulgarly called “graybacks.” Some of the boys at times were fairly alive with them. It is not at all surprising, however, for they slept from year to year on ticks filled with hay—they called it “prairie feathers”—and their blankets were seldom washed from one year’s end to another. Some of the stage company’s employees didn’t indulge in a bath for several months at a time, especially during the winter season, when the weather was way down below the freezing-point and even the most plain and simple conveniences for a bath were greatly lacking.

While living at Latham that summer during the civil war, an excellent opportunity was from time to time afforded me to become familiar with a few things I had never before dreamed of. The boys employed on the stage line, I soon learned, had a way of disposing of the graybacks when they became so numerous that it was a serious question as to who should remain master of the situation. Not more than 800 yards to the south of the station were quite a number of uncommonly large ant-hills or mounds,

of circular form. They were at least six inches high, and some of them were fully six or eight feet across. The mounds appeared in shape very much like a pressed-tin milk-pan, bottom side up. The soil was mostly coarse sand and gravel, which the ants had thrown up into their nicely built mounds. The surrounding vegetation consisted of a luxuriant growth of cacti and scanty tufts of bunch- or buffalo-grass. The ants themselves, in size, were from one-fourth to three-fourths of an inch in length. Some of them could nearly always be seen reconnoiter- ing outside the hills—probably deployed as skirmishers—but they lived inside. In color they were a dark brown. . . .

During the hot weather of midsummer, when the vermin were rapidly multiplying, it was the custom of the boys at the station to take their underclothing and blankets in the morning, spread them out on the ant-hills, and get them late in the afternoon, minus the last grayback. This was the way they did their washing. They found it an excellent substitute for making the music of a John Chinaman on the wash-board. For a time, at least, after the “washing days,” they could enjoy some rest. But in a few weeks it would become necessary to repeat the operation of a general clean-out by placing their garments and blankets at the disposal of the ants. Nearly every stage-driver, stock tender, and bull-whacker along the South Platte infested with this kind of vermin, during the days of overland staging and freighting, well re¬ members the valuable services of these ants. Mammoth ant-hills, upward of a third of a century ago, were common in the South Platte valley in sight of the Rockies.

Root and Connelly, Overland Stage to California, 338-340

Russell Starts New Companies Instead of Paying Debts
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 would ever know. The year 1857 began auspiciously. By the time it ended, 14 entire trains, including 1,906 oxen, which had hauled supplies to Utah for Gen. Albert S. Johnston’s army were destroyed. This disaster cost Russell, Majors & Waddell $230,208.20. Additional cost for agents and teamsters who had to spend the winter in Utah amounted to $35,167.15 making a total of $265,375.35. Russell prepared a claim against the United States, which included $228,378.26 extra compensation for trans-porting supplies to Utah over and above that for which their con-tract called. The total amount of the claim was $493,772.61. It was presented to congress in February, 1860, but none of it was ever paid. All the financial troubles Russell, Majors & Waddell encountered from 1857 on had their roots in the losses in Utah and the failure of the government to reimburse them.

Russell made many mistakes in his career, but the one which proved fatal in the end was that instead of paying the firm’s debts he used whatever funds were available to launch new and profitless enterprises. Chief among these were the Leavenworth & Pike’s Peak Express Co., the Central Overland California & Pike’s Peak Express Co., Miller, Russell & Co., and the Pony Express. In fact the only concern which made a profit after 1855 was the freighting firm of Russell, Majors & Waddell. It not only more than paid its own way, but also financed the undertakings which proved to be nothing more than liabilities. Waddell and Majors saw the folly of Russell’s policy and protested again and again, but he never aban-doned it. Being inextricably bound to him by business ties, and moved by a misguided sense of loyalty, they followed him in a course that could only lead to ruin.

Settle and Settle, "The Early Careers of William Bradford Waddell and William Hepburn Russell: Frontier Capitalists," Kansas Historical Quarterly Vol. 26, No.4, Winter 1960, p. 378

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.” She added that he encountered the same troubles all the other emigrants experienced when, “He got his cattle in a mud hole and had a fine time getting them out.” Another diarist in the train wrote later that, “The darkies had a dance.”

Todd Guenther, “‘Could These Bones Be From a Negro?’” Overland Journal 19, no. 2 (Summer 2001), 46

Clothing of Four Bears
But actually Four Bears [Mandan chief] had more iron in him than that. When he felt the fever come upon him he dressed in his most ceremonious garments. (Shirt of mountain sheepskin, quilled, bound with ermine skins, fringed with enemy scalps; deerskin leggings to the hip, quilled and fringed; quilled moccasins; warbonnet (from the Sioux); grizzlyclaw necklace; parfleche shield with cover of skunk fur; bow of horn backed with sinew (from the Nez Perces), arrow case of cougar skin; tobacco case of otter, catlinite pipe with skins of woodpeckers; medicine sack of beaver; lance and war club. And the robe which Catlin himself had reproduced:

Bernard De Voto, Across the Wide Missouri, p. 282

Dogs on the Trail
“The ordinary [emigrant] party was accompanied by a number of dogs. Some of these were pets, and others were valuable for hunting and herding and keeping watch at night. But in addition to these well-trained animals there were the worthless curs, fighting, yapping, and snapping, pestering the cattle and horses by day, and keeping people awake at night with senseless barking and howling. Dogs were often the cause of quarrels among the people, and one company tried to outlaw dogs entirely, decreeing that they should be shot.”

George R. Stewart, The California Trail, p. 118

Stagecoach Drivers
“Shortly after the Captain Reassumed Command of the Post, he and I were invited to the stage station, one day, for dinner. There was a long table with about ten on each side. They were the drivers of the stage line, about as rough and jolly a lot of men as I ever saw. They were talking about the Indian scare, and the probabilities of an Indian outbreak, and how General P. Edward Connor was coming through from Salt Lake to take charge. And the whole dinner was a loud and uproarious occasion. The profanity was pyrotechnic.”

Eugene Ware, Indian Wars of 1864>/em>, p. 397

War Department's Sale of Arms at Cost
“Considering the heavy armament favored by overlanders—fostered in part by the War Department’s enticing 1849 offer to sell pistols, rifles, and ammunition at cost to California and Oregon emigrants—it was not surprising that a great many gunshot victims made their way to the fort hospitals. . . .

According to Texas senator Thomas S. Rusk, the rationale for the 1849 congressional authorization of $50,000 for the sale of weapons at cost was that westbound emigrants should not go forth without adequate ‘means of defence.’ . . . The cut-rate prices for rifles, muskets, carbines, pistols, and ammunition remained in effect during 1850.”

John D. Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, p. 229 and 412

Overland Stagecoach Mornings
“We resumed undress uniform, climbed a-top of the flying coach, dangled our legs over the side, shouted occasionally at our frantic mules, merely to see them lay their ears back and scamper faster, tied our hats on to keep our hair from blowing away, and leveled an outlook over the world-wide carpet about us for things new and strange to gaze at. Even at this day it thrills me through and through to think of the life, the gladness and the wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood dance in my veins on those fine overland mornings!”

Mark Twain, Roughing It, p. 49

Low Rate for Newspapers
It was not a coincidence that Postmaster General Franklin waited until 1758, after he had made his fortune, to order that all the newspapers the post riders agreed to carry could travel in the mail for the same uniformly low rate. This egalitarian change encouraged the fledgling field of journalism, made it more competitive, and motivated ambitious publishers to expand their readership by offering, along with the still dominant foreign news, a less provincial, more broadly American perspective that transcended colonial boundaries. Few newspapers traveled all the way from Boston to Baltimore, but by the early 1760s, the New-York Mercury could claim readers in Connecticut, New Jersey, and even Rhode Island as well as its home colony.

Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, p. 21

Rate of Communication in 1846
“The vote of June 12 was to instruct the President to accept 49°. Three days later Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Pakenham signed the convention that settled the Oregon question forever …. At this point it is wholesome to recall once more the rates of communication, since they governed the management of armies as well as the tidings of peace. The convention was signed on June 15. At once an express left Washington to notify the Oregonians that they were American citizens after all and need not, as some of them were at that moment proposing to do, commit a Bear Flag maneuver against the Hudson’s Bay Company. It went to Vera Cruz and followed in Gillespie’s tracks across enemy soil to Mazatlan. The first boat out was bound to China by way of the Sandwich Islands, and at Honolulu the dispatch was put on board the bark Fawn, which crossed the bar at the mouth of the Columbia on November 12. Five months after the signing of the convention, the Fawn‘s supercargo was rowed to shore with the great news. He was nine days behind unofficial dispatches from Honolulu on the Toulon.

Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision, 1846, p. 230-231

Government Strategies in the West
“And so the issue was drawn: a series of permanent posts from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean or periodic campaigns along the trails to impress and, when necessary, chastise the Indians. . . .

Ultimately, governmental authorities resorted to a number of strategies, often simultaneously, in an attempt to neutralize the Indian threat to overland travel: treaties were negotiated, presents distributed, reservations established, awe-inspiring and/or punitive military expeditions dispatched, roving patrols instituted, military escorts provided. But initially, most persons concerned with this problem shared [the] outlook that a series of military forts was the best approach.”

John D. Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across, p. 202-205

Lot Smith and Simpson's Hollow
Very shortly, but farther west on the trail, the Mormon captain Lot Smith met an unguarded supply train, confiscated all its freight, and turned it back toward Fort Laramie. That same evening, with only twenty-four men, Smith stopped two other trains totaling seventy-four wagons and burned them down to the irons. The animals he took, the drivers he started back on the trail. They might have died, but fortunately made it through. Even if they hadn’t, Lot Smith would probably have remained the mythic hero, the cross between Robin Hood and Judas Maccabeus, that his people immediately made him into. With only a small band of riders, he stopped the United States Army in its own milling footprints. Caught at the edge of winter without supplies, unable to get any adequate information on Mormon fortifications or strength, Colonel Alexander tried to take his command through to Fon Hall, but ran into a terrible blizzard that drove him back to the ruins of Fon Bridger. That was where he was when Col. Albert Sydney Johnston came out to take over the command.

Wallace Stegner, The Gathering of Zion, p 281

75 Ponies
“It took Seventy-five ponies to make the first trip from Missouri to California. The riders of these ponies had ‘shoved a continent behind their hooves,’ and many people recognized this important fact. The crowds cheered ‘Long live the Pony!’ till their throats were sore. When the speeches ended, the bonfires were extinguished, the bells stopped ringing, and the last waltzes were danced, it remained to be seen whether the Pony Express would be a triumph or a failure.”

Anthony Godfrey, Historic Research Study Pony Express National Historic Trail, p. 56

Star Service
In 1845, they imposed a stricter, performance-based classification system on the railroads’ compensation and also established the Star Route service to make carriers’ contracts in remote areas more competitive. The work of getting the rural mail from one post office to another had traditionally been given to local stagecoach proprietors, who could charge the government for one or more horses, a wagon or coach, and a driver. Henceforth, the four-year contracts would be awarded to the lowest bidders, who might need only a mule, a sled, or a canoe to get the job done with “celerity, certainty, and security”—criteria soon abbreviated to the three asterisks that gave the Star Route service its name.

Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, p. 87

Majors on the Platte River Road
Alexander Majors of the firm of Russell, Majors & Waddell termed the Fort Kearny route the best natural road on the continent and believed it the best in the world.

Root and Hickman, "Pike's Peak express Companies–Part III," Kansas Historical Quarterly 13, no. 8, 1945, 490

Platte Water
“The water could be improved a bit by letting the mud settle out in a pail. ”Water poor white with clay of which the Platte and the Mo. [Missouri] are alike,” Ameila Hadley remarked. “But by taking a pail full, and by putting in a little alum, it will settle in a short time.

Another trick for water along the Platte was to dig a hole a few feet deep near the river and let clean groundwater seep into it. Springs gave the best water of all.”

Keith Heyer Meldahl, Hard Road West, p. 35

Windmills
In the eastern p0rtion of the United States the old-fashioned dug well was common to every home that did not have access to a living spring. It was from eight to thirty feet deep and was curbed with stone or brick or perhaps was without curbing. Water might be drawn from it “hand over hand” but usually it was drawn by means of a pulley suspended over the well by a heavy crossbeam attached to upright timbers. . . .

West of the ninety-eighth meridian comparatively tew such wells are found. The water lies too deep and the soil is too hard. The wells are sunk by drill, a hole six inches in diameter and anywhere from thirty to three hundred feet deep, and walled by sheet-iron casing. The bucket, also of metal, is nearly four feet long and three inches in diameter and is fitted with a float valve in the bottom to admit the water. If anyone ever looked on the water in such a well, he did it by use of a reflecting mirror. Ordinarily the bucket furnishes the only proof of its existence, and in actual practice that proof sometimes fails. Such were the typical wells of the East and the West. In the East they were handmade with pick and shovel; in the West they were bored by itinerant well-drillers, who moved their machines about from place to place as they plied their trade. . . .

It followed from the nature of the wells in the West, particularly their depth, that men had to devise new ways of raising the water to the surface. In the beginning great hope was nourished for the prospect of artesian wells, which were found in certain favored localities in Kansas, Texas, and elsewhere. The excitement over artesian wells ran high for a time, and bonuses were offered for every such well found. Extensive boring revealed that the possibilities of water from such a source were very limited, and men then turned to ground water. Here they were confronted with great depth on the one hand and a slow delivery on the other. It was a task to raise water from fifty to two hundred feet by hand, an almost impossible task where cattle were to be watered. Furthermore, because of the small capacity of the well it was desirable to raise the water as fast as it was available and at all hours. . . .

The windmill was adopted, adapted, and developed until it met all these requirements most admirably. It could be made at a cost ranging from $1.50 up, depending on whether it were home-made or shop-made; it would deliver a small amount of water day and night as long as the wind was blowing. Within a short time after its introduction the windmill became the unmistakable and universal sign of human habitation throughout the Great Plains area. As before stated, it was the windmill that made it possible for the land to be fenced in small areas and for the stockmen to cut their ranges up into pastures.”

Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains, p. 334-336

American Desert
“We had now [at the forks pf the Platte] entered upon the outskirts of the American wilderness, which has not one feature in common with the deserts of the Old World. In Arabia and Africa there is majesty in its monotony: those awful wastes so brightly sunburnished that the air above them appears by contrast black; one vast and burning floor, variegated only by the mirage-reek, with nothing below the firmament to relieve or correct the eye. Here it is a brown smooth space, insensibly curving out of sight, wholly wanting ‘second distance,’ and scarcely suggesting the idea of immensity; we seem, in fact, to be traveling for twenty miles over a convex, treeless hill-top.”

Richard Burton, The City of Saints, p. 63-64

Oxen and the Prairie Schooner
“In behalf of these hardy, versatile men who risked fortune and endured hardship along the Santa Fe trail [starting in 1821], it should be noted that they were the ones who developed the technique of prairie travel. They learned how to organize wagon trains and handle them to the best advantage upon the road. These men also adopted oxen in place of mules and horses, after oxen had been introduced by Major Bennett Riley in 1829, and they developed the prairie schooner.”

Settle and Settle, Empire on Wheels, p. 3