An ongoing list of books about the Pony Express Trail, Bikepacking, etc. I’ll update the list as I get through each.

Slade’s Wells Fargo Colt

John B. McClernan, Slade's Wells Fargo Colt (Historical Notes) This is a short, wonderful book. Ostensibly, it is about one collector's attempt to authenticate an antique New Navy Colt as…

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The Year of Decision

Bernard DeVoto, The Year of Decision: 1846 (1942) This book took a long time to read. It's very well written—I mean, DeVoto is pretty much the Dean of western historical…

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Saddles and Spurs

Mary Lund Settle and Raymond W. Settle, Saddles and Spurs (1955) Saddles and Spurs is one of the seminal books on the Pony Express. Every later work I've read references…

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The Wagonmasters

Henry Pickering Walker, The Wagonmasters (1966) This book is subtitled "High Plains Freighting from the Earliest Days of the Santa Fe Trail to 1880." It is a fairly thorough account of…

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The Mormon Conflict

Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict: 1850–1859 (1960) I came across this book while reading Jess Unruh's The Plains Across. The Mormon Conflict is somewhat tangential to the Pony Express.…

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The California Trail

George R. Stewart, The California Trail (McGraw Hill, 1962) This book details the story of the California Trail from 1841 to 1849. Each chapter is a year-by-year survey of the…

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The Overland Mail: 1849-1869

LeRoy Hafen, The Overland Mail: 1849-1869 (Originally published 1926) Hafen's book, which grew out of his doctoral dissertation, is the pioneering work on overland mail in the trans-Mississippi west. This…

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Wagon Roads West

W. Turentine Jackson, Wagon Roads West: A Study of Federal Surveys and Construction in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1846–1869 (University of California Press, 1952) This book is a meticulous, exhaustive study…

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The Plains Across

John D. Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60 (Univ. of Illinois, 1979) This book grew out of Unruh's doctoral dissertation, apparently ten years…

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